I’m pretty sure that I’ve mentioned that I’m registered with the official Springsteen web site, and once in a while, I’ll open my e-mail box and see a note from Bruce Springsteen, and even though I know it’s really only from an automated mail-bot, it always gives me a start, and then a smile. Today, in the middle of the e-mail is this chilling paragraph:

ATTENTION BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN FANS!

We would love to hear from you! Send us your Bruce Springsteen stories and photos: show reports, pictures of your friends in the parking lot or screaming “Rosalita!”, cherished moments at Bruce concerts, songs that get you in the gut every time, how your best friend’s cousin turned you into a Springsteen fan, that kind of thing. We’ll publish our favorites on the site.

I have a million of them, and so does every other fan in the known universe. I tell them, they tell them, we all tell them. And then we post them for each other, sending millions and billions and trillions of pixels into oblivion as millions of people hit send, just to say “me too”. I loved the original Star Trek and always got the chills when anyone tried to label me a “Trekkie”. I’m not a Trekkie, I just loved the show. That level of obsession and obsession and, well, is there any other word than obsession and creepy?

I know that there are the equivalent Bruce fans out there, and they range from the idiots who think that Born in the USA is an anthem of approval, to the ones who say they are his biggest fan, but he hasn’t done anything worth listening to since X album, (usually BITUSA), to the ones who discovered him on the Kerry campaign, to the true idiots like me who haven’t missed a tour since X (usually something pathetic like 1975, ahem). But you know something? The only time I want to talk those people is when I’m standing in line to the show, and certainly not once the show starts.

What really makes me sad is that this came from the official site. Earlier in the day I had been on the ATT site, looking for ringtones for my new phone. There were Bob Dylan tones. Scary. I was afraid to look for Tom Waits. There were pages and pages of Springsteen ring tones.  Bruce may not have sold out, but he’s surely bought in.