LOL.

Obviously, I’ve been keeping it under wraps from the general public, and like, so far it doesn’t seem like there’s been any leaks—I had my lawyer draw up these massive NDAs for everybody involved—but literally everyone I’ve talked to about it—my mom, Deez, my manager, Bob—all think that the project is pretty much doomed and that I’m just gonna fall on my face big-time.

But, you know, something happens when a bunch of people you love tell you not to do something one time and then you do it anyway and it turns out to be genius: The next time they tell you not to do something, like, the next time they voice their concerns, you just sort of look at them like: Welllllll …

When it comes down to it, no one else can make your decisions for you. They can give you advice, they can tell you what shit looks like from where they’re standing, but you’re the only person who’s standing in your skin, so you’re the one who’s gotta make the call. It might make some people laugh, and it might make some people upset, and it might even make some people feel like they know better than you, but if you don’t start living your own life, who will?

After that phone call with my dad, I didn’t hear from him for a while.

I think he took it really hard. I mean, I know he did, because he basically broke off contact entirely after that, and then we sort of entered into what I’ve started to think of as the “dark period” where basically, like, my dad just fully lost his mind.

Thinking about it now, all I can do is laugh, but at the time, it was obviously really scary, and the whole thing just happened so rapidly. It was just like, before what was happening with him was sad, you know, but now it seemed like there had actually been a break with reality, and that was really fucking terrifying, to be honest. I mean, the tricky thing, you know, the thing that made it especially hard, was that he wasn’t even returning my calls, so I just had to watch this all unfold from afar, and at first, it was kind of scary and like, I was really worried about him, but after a while, it just started to become annoying, you know? No one really tells you that about dealing with someone who’s losing their mind: It’s actually super-fucking-annoying most of the time, and you sort of end up hating the person. And like, yeah, okay, a part of me could recognize that this guy who was doing and saying all this crazy shit wasn’t really my dad and that like, there was actually some little demon who had hunkered down inside him and was speaking and acting through him, but the lines kind of blurred sometimes because a lot of the shit he was saying just sounded like the kind of hurtful, awful shit that my dad had always wanted to say but didn’t feel like he could.