17th October 2013

So, yeah, it's been over a month since all this happened so I guess I'll finally write about how I met Morrissey.

One morning I read this: Morrissey will appear at Akademibokhandeln Nordstan in Goteborg (Sweden) on Thursday 17 October to sign copies of his Autobiography.

(It was absurd. Morrissey's finally written his autobiography, and the signing tour's only stop is in Göteborg, Sweden?)

So a couple of days later I was in Göteborg with my sister. We took the cheapest plane and booked the cheapest hostel. And then we were there.

The signing took place at a huge shopping mall called Nordstan. The night before there were already about 20 people queueing. The next day when we joined the line about 5 hours before Morrissey was supposed to appear, the number of people was several hundreds. Young intelligent hipsters, young cool hipsters, young non-hipsters, middle-aged hardcore fans, hippies, handicapped people, activist types, intimidatingly normal-looking people, and me and my sister.

The queue was chopped to pieces using those fences that you see in amusement parks:



It squirmed through the first floor of the shopping mall.

So, there, next to a surprisingly unnoticeable McDonald's restaurant, we waited for hours. I sat on the floor and stared at thousands of people walking by. I noticed things: that there are a lot of very tall girls in Sweden. And a lot of very short immigrant men. And that many Swedish girls wear fur, unlike Finnish girls who never wear fur. (I don't think that the fur Swedish girls wear is real, but anyway.) And that a lot of old men in Sweden wear red James Dean jackets:



Sometimes a passer-by would stop and stare at posters that said WE WELCOME MORRISSEY and then ask us 'Vem är Morris-say?' and my sister would answer, sounding surprisingly Swedish.

At one point I went for a walk in the mall. Harriet Wheeler sang in my ears (because I had earbuds in them) as I walked around in an H&M store without a cause. I was happy.

After hours of waiting, we got to take 15 steps forward. Morrissey should be there in a couple of hours. There started to be something hysterical about the situation. Everybody was holding their copies of Autobiography, leafing through the pages, imagining themselves talking to the Mozzer. A woman with a British accent appeared out of somewhere and gave us little sticky notes, what are those called, I mean these:



Are they just sticky notes? Ok.

On these notes, we were supposed to write down what we wanted Morrissey to write on our books. I didn't know what I wanted Morrissey to write on my book. So I simply wrote down Olli Brander.

And we waited. I stood there, thinking about things that I usually think about, penises and vaginas and penises entering vaginas, and the fact that if somebody's gonna make it, it's gonna be me, when suddenly I realized that I was staring at a morrissey. In fact, it was Morrissey. He was there, 15 minutes earlier than he was supposed to, alive, inside the bookshop, walking towards his signing table that had roses on it.

It was Morrissey. Just 20 metres away from me. It was Morrissey.

People were screaming. I climbed on the fence to see over the heads of screaming people. I stared at Morrissey. It really was Morrissey. His big head. His autistically kind eyes. His underbite:



And now all that happened in front of me. In 2013. Right now. It was weird. He really exists.

I was surprised at how healthy he looked. He really looked healthy, really healthy. For the past 18 months he'd seemed to be on the edge of some sort of physical breakdown. For quite a while, he'd looked like an unhappy zombie. But now that was all gone. He looked healthy and happy, which made me healthy and happy.

The line started crawling. Really, crawling. 10 minutes, one step, 15 minutes, two steps. Morrissey spent minutes talking to every single fan; the fans cried, Morrissey hugged them, Morrissey signed their books and necks and teeth and asses and everything. It was nice that apparently, he was sincerely interested in every fan he encountered, but it was strange and slightly infuriating that nobody seemed to care about the fact that there were hundreds and hundreds of people that had traveled from afar and waited for hours. At this pace, most of us would never get to meet Morrissey.

2 hours went by. The line crawled. Finally there were only just about 30 people or so ahead of us. A girl with tears on her cheeks told the people behind us that Morrissey wouldn't leave until every book was signed. No matter how long it would take, he wouldn't leave. Where did you get that information? I would have asked, but unfortunately, I don't speak.

Then, 15 minutes later, a freezingly friendly female voice filled the air. The voice said that Morrissey had stopped signing and left, but all I heard was frustrated screams. The information emptied my head and my heart and all I can remember is that I started running.

I guess I just simply ran through people's bodies, but 20 seconds later I found myself on my knees outside the bookshop, and a security guard was shoving me in the chest. Morrissey had disappeared. All I could do was curse in Finnish. A screaming punker chick threw her Autobiography at the closed glass door and I understood her completely. I would have rioted too, but I was too tired and empty.



The atmosphere was a lot more chaotic than what it seems in this video ^. There were grown men (and women) crying like the world had ended. It really felt like all hope was lost. For a moment, I almost understood tragic lunatics who spend years of their life on a Morrissey fan forum called Morrissey Solo, every day writing how Morrissey let them down, unable to let go. (The site is full of them. There is something about Morrissey that lingers. You just can't let go.)

After that, my sister and I wandered aimlessly in the night of Göteborg. "People are gonna start dropping very soon," I said repeatedly. I wasn't going to kill anybody, but saying that I was helped a little bit.

The next day on the flight back to Helsinki, having slept for maybe 2 or 3 hours, I read Autobiography here and there, and for some reason, I almost cried. Above the clouds it was sunny, and I felt strangely happy. I didn't want to murder anybody anymore.

I'd seen Morrissey, and then Morrissey had disappeared. And that was part of the magic.