And Mandy came by, and we sat in the chairs, and she didn’t even tell me what our tattoos meant until after the ink was settling in. I didn’t even ask. She just gave the template to Optimus, and he did the tats on both of us, and then when he was done, Mandy looked at me, and she said: Love & Justice.

And I was like: Dope.

And then a few days later, my skin was still healing as I got on the plane with Chris and Trick and we took off for the start of the Roses and Mud tour.

And everybody knows how that went.

LOL.

I guess we might as well get into it.

At first, you know, it seemed like we were off to a good start. The press and the excitement and all of the love and exposure we were getting for the album was pretty cool, and Chris was really enjoying it, you know, like, he was sort of happy to have a chance to feel what that was like again: to be on top of the world again, not as some twenty-one-year-old from Portland, but as a fully grown man with a family and a home and some perspective on everything. And, at first, like, he was just really grateful for the opportunity to be playing new music again and to be caught up in the energy and the excitement of having made something that people were responding to.

I remember at one of the early shows, Chris was just so surprised by how nice everything was, you know? He was so surprised by, like, how well everybody took care of themselves. Like, I remember before one of our big early shows—I think we were playing some festival in the UK—we were backstage, and Chris was just looking around at everybody, and he was like: NO ONE is high. Like, it hadn’t even occurred to me that that was weird, but Chris was looking around at all of these people with like, their coconut waters and their yoga mats and like, their vegan quinoa bowls, and he was just like: How the fuck can this be a music festival? And I looked around a bit, and I saw the Pizza Boyz, and I was like: What about those guys? Those guys are blazed as hell. And Chris was like: Yeah, those people are stoned, but nobody’s HIGH. Nobody’s off the fucking ground. Twenty years ago, this place would’ve looked like a war zone.