I was thinking about this the other day, because in L.A., they’ll sometimes host conventions for sci-fi shit or fantasy shit, you know—like, they’ll do it at the Convention Center downtown, and it’ll be going on for a couple days—and I remember we were driving by the Convention Center one day on our way to this fashion show in Chinatown, and we saw this massive line of people with their tickets, all dressed up in their costumes waiting to get in. And you know, it was like, people were dressed as elves and wizards and battle dragons—it’s not like they picked this shit up at the store: they MADE this shit—and I was just looking at all these people thinking: You guys LOVE this. Like, this is your FAVORITE thing. And I was just thinking about how crazy it is to love something that much—to devote such a big part of your life to being part of the world of something—and then it dawned on me, like: There are people who feel this way about ME. There are people who show up to meetings and symposiums and conventions and have like, full-on roundtable discussions about ME and my work. And I’ve honestly pretended for most of my life like that part of the world doesn’t exist, but now that I’m writing this book and I’m thinking about who’s actually gonna read it, it’s like: Who ARE these people, you know? What are their lives like?

Honestly, I think part of the reason I’ve connected so much with Oddvar—like, part of the reason we’ve kept up a correspondence and become friends—is that he’s totally not what I was expecting.

First of all, he’s thirty-six years old—LOL—and second, he’s this dude who lives in Norway—or well, not technically in Norway: He lives on this island called Spitsbergen in this region called Svalbard where like, there’s this giant seed vault where they’re keeping spare copies of seeds for basically every type of plant on Earth. Oddvar’s job is to like, oversee the vault and to make sure all the seeds are being kept at the right temperature and to accept new seed deposits when they come in. I’m not kidding. That’s what he does.

I forget exactly what he told me about the whole thing, but the way he described it, it’s like: Basically, because this island is super-remote and it’s super-cold there, they’ve stored all these seeds in the middle of this icy mountain in case some sort of catastrophic event happens—you know, like in case of a nuclear war or something—and all of a sudden all of the vegetation on the planet and everything gets wiped out and they have to rebuild the ecosystem from square one. And Oddvar, the guy who basically runs this shit on the day-to-day, is OBSESSED with me! I don’t mean any disrespect when I say that—like, he’s actually a really, really cool dude—but it’s just like, aside from looking after the seeds and doing research and shit, Oddvar spends most of his time, like, being a fan of me. That’s what he DOES. And I don’t just mean that he knows all of my records by heart, or like, he has all the signed memorabilia or something like that. I mean, he DOES have all that shit, but it’s deeper than that. He’s a scholar of my life. He’s like, a student of my world. He could almost write this book better than I could.