And Oddvar was telling me that it happens all the time. Like, apparently, because of all the shit that’s been going on in the Middle East, a few of the seed vaults over there have been completely destroyed. Like, they’ve been bombed to shit by the U.S. or fucking pillaged and burned to the ground by one of those crazy militant groups. And so the Svalbard vault has to back them up. Some of those plants are so rare even that like, the Svalbard vault is the only place in the world now where they even exist anymore, you know? Without the Doomsday Vault, those plants would’ve just been gone forever—wiped off the face of the earth.

Anyway, I’m gonna try to get some shut-eye for the rest of the flight—I want to be totally fresh and rested for when we get there—but before I close my eyes, I just wanted to catalogue this one tat on the diagram before I forget: the first tat I got after my dad died. I was just reminded of it because of all the shit I was talking about earlier.

I was obviously super-conscious of the fact that like, whatever I got at that point was gonna be majorly significant, you know? Like, the timing just made it so that whatever I ended up getting was gonna have a lot of heaviness attached to it, a lot of weight, and so I wanted to do everything I could to counteract that. Like, I knew that the worst thing I could do would be to wait, like, a couple months or whatever until I found the “right thing” to put on my body, and so literally a week after he died, like, only a few days after we put him in the ground, I just went to see Optimus, and I was like: Yo, what’s a tat that I’m always talking about getting but that we haven’t gotten around to? And Optimus thought for a second, and he was like: What about the map of St. James? And I was like: Dope. Perfect. And then he tatted it on the back of my left thigh.

It’s #63 on the diagram.

The funeral was pretty low-key.

There weren’t that many people there. I mean, you know, there were a few people who felt like they had to come—people who had been working for me for a while like my road manager, Bobby, and my manager, Shari, and some of the record label guys—but at that point, there weren’t that many people left who actually gave a shit about my dad or his life. A few of his band mates from the early days were there—guys like Greg and Daniel and Harry who were all part of the grunge scene in St. James—but that was pretty much it in terms of “friends.” His dad, my grandpa, was already dead, and his mom was already in a nursing home.

Honestly, there were more paparazzi than guests, so the whole thing had this very weird vibe around it. It felt like everybody who was actually there to bury my dad was doing some sort of performance art piece and the cameras were just there to document it. Like, obviously, the photographers had to keep a certain distance, but we could still hear the cameras clicking from over the fence, and every once in a while, we’d see the flash, so it really felt like we were actors on a film shoot and the paparazzi were the crew.