#27—Left hand. This is a thorny rose growing out of a pile of shit. We haven’t gotten to the Roses and Mud tour yet, so I won’t say too much here, but let’s just say: I really deserved a tattoo after that one.

The seed vault was pretty dope.

It wasn’t really much to look at—it was just like, rows and rows of boxes that, like, maybe contained the future of humanity—but it was still kind of amazing to see how everything worked.

The entrance is actually pretty cool-looking—when you approach it, there’s this big triangular thing jutting out from the side of the mountain with, like, this glass skylight that looks totally futuristic and amazing—but then once you get inside, the whole thing just feels like you’re in a Costco or an Ikea or something.

Oddvar showed me the seeds he named after me. He couldn’t really take them out of their package—they were vacuum packed for storage—but I could see them through the plastic, and they definitely looked like seeds. LOL. I guess there’s not really much more to say about that.

I was totally right about the guys having the time of their lives, by the way. We got there, and immediately, Oddvar was like: Gentlemen, there’s a foosball table upstairs and there are a few snowmobiles in the garage if you would like to use them. And before he could even get the words out of his mouth, Patrick and Curt and Mo were just off to the fucking races to see who would get first dibs. They were practically clambering over each other.

Oddvar showed me around a bit and talked about some of the experiments he was working on—I didn’t understand a lot of it, but I still appreciated that he was trying to explain it all to me—and then we sat down in this little office area that had a heater and a coffee machine, and we started talking about the book.

One of his big notes was about Bob.

The publishers have been telling me that I should try and distance myself as much as possible from Bob in the book—you know, they think it might hurt sales for me to be associated with him—but Oddvar had pretty much the opposite note. He was basically like: It might be interesting for people to hear about Bob from my perspective—to hear from me which parts of Bob’s writings I’ve come to find so useful—especially since like, Bob’s written a lot of shit, and people might just assume that I find it all equally meaningful because of the relationship we have.

And I guess I usually kind of avoid that stuff. Not necessarily because I don’t want to talk about it—like, anyone who knows me at all will tell you: If you wanna talk about Bob Winstock, I’m game to throw down whenever—but I guess I’ve avoided talking about it publicly because, like, first of all, I don’t want to sound like Bob’s spokesman—like, I don’t want people to mistake my interpretation of his writings for his intention or whatever—and second of all, like, I just don’t really believe in stepping out of my lane. I’m not an academic. I’m not a public intellectual. At the end of the day, I make songs and I sing songs, and like, yeah, I’m one hundred percent all for challenging myself and expanding the scope of what I can do—I mean, that’s why I’m trying to make this video game, you know, or like, even this book—but I’m also a firm believer in not trying to overstep my boundaries too much. Like, yeah, I like to do crazy projects every once in a while and push myself and push my limits, but I’ve just seen so many people—like, because they have success in one field or like, because people love them for this one thing they do—start thinking that they can do ANYTHING. Like, all of a sudden, they think that they can go around speaking at conferences and being ambassadors for shit that, like, people actually devote their whole lives to, and so they just end up looking like assholes.