It’s hard to talk about my dad, you know, because there’s obviously a lot of anger on my part, and like, I still kind of hate the guy, but also, I feel a certain level of responsibility for what happened. At a certain point, I decided that like, I was just gonna cut him out entirely and let him rot away on his own, because, like, he kept harming my life and my mom’s life in his craziness, and I was just sort of like: This isn’t my problem to deal with anymore. I’m not gonna let him drag me and my mom and my life and my music down with him in this spiral, because we’ve got too many places to go, and like, yeah, I was an asshole, yeah, I could’ve handled things better, but I tried to make things right, and he didn’t even give it a chance, so like, fuck that guy.

But now, I don’t know. There’s a part of me that feels like if I had done a bit more, or like, if I had tried a bit harder, I could’ve prevented what happened, or like, I could’ve maybe even brought him back into my life, you know, and just changed the story entirely. I guess that’s the thing about life: We never really know what’s gonna happen until it happens, and once it happens, it’s too late to do anything about it.

The first I heard from my dad after he dropped off the face of the earth was when he started his blog. After I told him about my mom and Bob, he stopped responding to me and he changed his phone number, and he started this blog that he would post to every once in a while, which was like, I guess just his general thoughts about the world. Like, at first it was kind of weird because he was sort of doing like, general music and pop culture reviews and op-ed pieces. No one really knew why he was doing it, but he just sort of positioned himself as like, a “pop culture commentator,” I guess because he was thinking like: Maybe someone will pay me for this? Maybe I can have a second career as someone who does this kind of thing? And I’m guessing like, he read some article about all these teenagers who were starting fashion blogs and music blogs and then getting hired by these big media conglomerates to be staff writers, and so he thought, like: People already kind of know who I am, I’m already kind of a public figure. Why don’t I give this a whirl? But, you know, the writing just wasn’t that good. I mean, first of all, he had already kind of blown his credibility, and like, no one was really interested in taking him seriously as a commentator, and second of all, like, the writing itself was just bad. Like, you could never really figure out what his opinion was, and it was always just sort of like—I mean, in retrospect, it was the beginning of him losing his mind—but the writing was always a little disjointed and like, bad in that way that only crazy people’s writing can be bad. There was this one article about Heartache/Heartbreak where he was just like, comparing Mandy to an alligator the whole time, and it was like: What the fuck are you talking about, you know? It was really weird.