This week is a two-step prompt. 

1: What's the worst cover you've ever heard of a song you love.

2. What's the worst advice you've received from someone whose advice you usually respect - or - what surprisingly good advice have you received from someone you normally wouldn't trust.

Can you work these two things into one poem?

Being a fan of a  band, or an artist, or a pop culture franchise has grown increasingly tough in the age of The internet. In addition to finding out that your heroes may have horrifically out of touch opinions, there's also the disappointment of finding out that many of the fans, who you might imagine you have things in common with, reveal a surprising prejudice. Whether it's misogynist sci-fi fans, racist comic book readers, homophobic hanggliding enthusiasts, or anti-Vegan photographers, someone is making your fandom look bad.

Address this portion of your fandom however you are inspired to address them. Consider explaining how they're impacting the thing you love.

When I was eighteen, I worked in a record store, and at a YMCA camp, and was a full-time student. I was experimenting with having a life, and thus, didn't provide myself much time for things like "hairuts" and "intelligent decision making". I was at work one day when I realized I had scheduled a date, and my hair looked like someone had covered my hair in superglue and dumped a large bucket of red fur on top of me. So I hopped over to the salon next to the store and asked the person working if she could cut it so that it was about an inch off, all the way around. After some perfectly reasonable shearing, she then took out an electric razor, I assumed to shape the hair on the back of my neck. Instead, she began to shave a one-inch line around my head. I asked her to stop and explain what was happening to my head, and she couldn't. So I re-explained what I'd wanted, and she resumed shaving a one inch line around the side of my head.

As I left, the woman behind the desk, who had clearly seen that this hairdresser wasn't really up to communicating with clients yet, asked me not to put on my hat (which I was clutching) until I was out of the parking lot.

I then went home and gave myself a crewcut. It was the shortest haircut I'd had since I was a baby. From that day forth, I was always really specific with barbers and stylists, and didn't try to do anything fancy with my hair.

When my father's wife died about ten years later, I was shaving my hair short for her funeral when the guide fell off my razor and shaved me to the skin. I saw no other option but shaving my entire head. It was winter, and very cold. I was tired from traveling to the funeral, and couldn't figure out why I was colder than usual (no hair) so I appeared more introspective than usual, which my family seemed to register as grief, but was actually just selfish contemplation.

Have you ever had a haircut that has either changed your life, or changed how other people perceived you? Was it an awesome haircut? A terrible one? Did it actually have an emotional affect on you past the day you received it?

If reincarnation is real, what would you most like to come back as? Given the life you've led, what do you think you're most likely to come back as, whether you like it or not? What do you think other people will believe you will come back as?

How about your loved ones? What will they come back as? Have they seemed to come back to you as something else already?