I snapped out of the void—I came back to the real world, back to the studio with Mandy—and she had turned off the computer speakers that were playing “Be My Baby,” and she was looking at me like: Where did you just go?

And I told her about everything—the old man, the video, the national anthem—and Mandy listened to me for a minute, and then she was like: Go get your guitar.

And I was like: Okay. And I picked up my acoustic off of the little stand.

And Mandy was like: Play something.

And I was like: What do you want me to play?

And Mandy was like: We’re gonna make a new national anthem.

And I was like: Whoa. LOL.

And Mandy was like: It’s gotta be catchy, and it’s gotta be good, and it’s gotta be something that everybody can actually sing.

And I was like: Okay, I’m down.

And so I started playing a chord, and Mandy was like: Perfect.

And then she just lost her mind. LOL. We both did. Mandy and I just created like, one of the best songs I’ve ever heard, one of the best songs that’s ever existed. It’s simple, and beautiful, and the second you hear it, it’s stuck in your head forever. We were firing on all cylinders, surfing right in the middle of the pipe, totally in the zone. If we really wanted to, we could probably get all the signatures we needed and all the votes and pass a law that replaces the old one and makes it official, but I think we both realized as we were singing it that we didn’t really care if anyone else in the world ever heard it.

And I wanted to see how the song would sound if a normal person was singing it—like, I wanted to hear how it would sound if it weren’t being done by these next-level, otherworldly pop megastars—and so I entered the void. I found old-man me just hanging around in the nothingness, and I taught him all the notes. And when I heard how it sounded coming out of his mouth, I almost cried, because it actually sounded better. It was actually like I wasn’t even able to do the song justice with my voice as it is now. I had written the song for him.

And I guess Mandy must’ve been doing the same thing, because pretty soon, I could hear Future Mandy in there too. She showed up with her gray hair and her professor clothes, and she sounded just like Mandy, but her voice was so much richer, so much deeper, so much more full of life.

And pretty soon, Mandy herself showed up, and it was the four of us in the void: me, and Mandy, and Future Mandy the professor, and Future me the naked, saggy, tatted old man. And we were all just singing our hearts out, four normal people who didn’t exist.

The funny thing about a book like this is that by the time you’re reading it, you’ll probably already know more about my life than I do. Just because I stop writing, that doesn’t mean the gears stop turning. I’ll still be me. You can still count on the fact that whenever I do anything, someone is gonna write about it somewhere. Once, I was arrested in Idaho for having weed on my tour bus, and the news was playing on the TV in the police station, and they interrupted this really serious reporter—she was talking about a protest in Pittsburgh over this black guy who got shot by the cops—and they cut her off mid-sentence and said: We’re sorry, but we have to report on some breaking news. And they cut to a picture of the mugshot I had just taken half an hour ago and started describing the details of my arrest. So I’m not really worried about leaving anything out. If you’re curious about something, you can bet that somebody else will cover it. In a way, it’s easier to know everything about my life than it is to know nothing.