And I guess all I’d like to say to everybody is I’m sorry. I’m sorry you never really asked for me. I’m sorry I forced my way in. I know you’re just trying to live your own life without having to live mine too.

When I started all this, I would tell myself that I was just a kid trying hard to reach out to people, just a guy from St. James trying to touch the whole world. And, in a way, that’s true, but it doesn’t change the fact that I knew. I always knew what I was doing. Even when I was just starting out with my dad, I knew that we were trying to pull off an invasion. We wanted to muscle our way into the bloodstream, sneak ourselves into the soil, infect as many bodies as we could. And we didn’t really care about the violence, we weren’t going to stop until the mission was complete.

And now here we are. Here I am living inside you. And I hope you can forgive me.

Maybe it’d be really healthy for everybody to just think of me as a character for a while. Even if you know it’s a lie, even if the illusion will be broken in a week or a day or a minute, maybe it’d be really good to imagine that I’m no bigger or smaller than anything else you’d ever read in a book.

Maybe then you could close the cover on me and put me away on your shelf.

Maybe then you could move on to the next story.

Maybe then we could all be free.

The day that Mandy and I created our new national anthem, we didn’t end up kissing or anything.

We actually just ended up watching all our old videos online—we kind of fell into this internet hole where we kept pulling up different music videos and live performances that we’d done over the years. We went through Be My Baby and Heartache/Heartbreak and Roses and Mud and Mobilize, and every video we watched, we just found it so hilarious. We were teasing each other every time one of us would do a stupid dance move, and we were losing our shit at all the outfits we used to wear, and after a while, everybody else from the barbecue started wondering where we were and came to look for us, and they found us down in my studio watching all that shit, and pretty soon, we were all gathered around watching the videos, and it was like we were flipping through a family photo album or something, you know? It was actually really nice.

Later that night, after everyone went home, I ended up going online and posting all those tracks I made with my dad way back in the day—all those covers we recorded at the radio station in St. James. I didn’t have the rights or anything, so I just threw them all up on my website for free. I didn’t even think twice about it. I even included that crazy cover my dad sent me a few days before he killed himself.