But, you know, the irony is my dad was always sort of a PR genius. It’s crazy how creative people can get when they don’t give a fuck anymore. That’s something I think about a lot, like, when I’m creating, is just like: How can I create like I don’t give a fuck? How can I create like there’s nothing left to lose even though, like, I’ve got so much to lose, you know? Because there’s a lot of freedom in that. There’s a whole world of potential that gets opened up when you decide to create from a place of just total not caring.

Because, you know, that was my dad’s problem, right, is that it all started to mean too much to him. Like, he was just taking life so seriously. But the moment he decided he was going to kill himself, like, the moment he decided it didn’t even matter to him anymore, all of a sudden, all of this creative energy started to brew up in him, and he was able to have, like, some actually exciting ideas. Like, that sort of grungy cover he sent me was actually sort of dope. If he had proposed THAT for the next album instead of the shit he had shown me, maybe we would’ve never had any of the problems we had in the first place, because it would’ve just been like: Whoa, Dad, amazing. And the way he timed the suicide, I mean, what a work of art, you know? What perfect execution.

But I guess that’s the thing about suicide is that it’s never a particularly creative thing to do so much as it just shows a certain level of commitment. Like, what’s exciting about suicide, from an artistic point of view, isn’t so much that it’s so amazingly smart or so amazingly original, but it’s more just like: I can’t believe he went there, you know? Like, when those monks set themselves on fire, it’s not like that’s the most amazing idea in the world—it’s not as if my mind is blown that anybody thought of that—because, like, at the root of it, it’s actually kind of a deeply stupid thing to do. Like, the easiest thing in the world to do is to just blow your brains out or to set yourself on fire, but the fact that someone actually DID it, like, the depth of the commitment it takes to actually follow through on such a stupid idea, is actually kind of breathtaking, because it’s like: That’s the last thing you ever get to do. Like, for my grandpa, the last thing he got to do was crap his pants and fall asleep. And he probably didn’t even know that it was the last thing he was ever gonna do. He just did it and dozed off thinking, like: Gonna wake up again tomorrow and be in more pain and crap my pants some more! And then he just never woke up. But my dad like, got a fucking shotgun and loaded it up with shells, and, fully conscious of what he was doing, like, put the barrel in his mouth and put his finger on the trigger and blew his fucking brains out.