i contain multitudes
(quotes the english major who never really enjoyed reading whitman all that much)
I’m listening to an Andy Squyres song on Patreon. It’s not available yet, but you can hear part of it on his social media.
[ETA: It’s available now! Listen here and stream the heck out of the whole EP Miracle Service.]
Here’s what you need to know: it’s about Mountain Dew Baja Blast and life and God and loss, and it’s hilarious and devastating and profound while also feeling silly, and I haven’t even listened to the whole song yet, but here I am typing…
…to the void of the Internet?
…to my “audience”?
…to myself?
Just to anyone who cares to know that, in this moment, on a Tuesday night, drinking Coca-Cola out of a can when I meant to be working or going to bed, I am moved by an Andy Squyres song and the simultaneous absurdity and magnificence of life.
Maybe it’s his gravelly voice or the dusty quality of the landscapes he describes. Maybe it’s the biblical weight and paradox layered in his lyrics. Maybe it’s the black and white serious-faced image of him on the screen as the song plays. I don’t know what it is, but Andy Squyres always makes me think of John Steinbeck.
And since I just read East of Eden, I feel like I’m finally legit dropping the name Steinbeck.
Reaching the last page left me longing for an old version of myself who discussed literature in old classrooms and relished writing about Chaucer in blue books.
If only I had a college class to sit in to discuss East of Eden. Or to discuss anything really.
If only, like Lee and Samuel and Adam, I could sit up late drinking coffee or Lee’s strange Chinese alcohol or—heck—a Baja Blast, and talk about life and God and Genesis and Hebrew words and whatever amount of original sin I believe in and wonder at the possibility of redemption.
That’s all I really want out of life, I think. Just songs and books and stories and thoughts and long conversations.
Like book clubs or Bible studies but neither pretentious nor shallow. Cringeworthy in their earnestness, organically springing up from the impulse to question and wonder and analyze.
This is why the heaven of my imagination has lots of campfires and porch swings, perfect places just to sit and meander through deep thoughts.
My dad’s the only person I know who would even remotely get this Andy Squyres song and not just think it’s weird. We’ll get a chance to talk about it sometime, but I’ll have to wait until my analog father can listen to it, after I buy one of the only CDs pressed of the record or burn one myself.
A week after finishing it, I still haven’t found anyone who wants to talk about East of Eden. Maybe I’ll give my dad a copy for his birthday in October and see if it takes.
It’s funny how the two of us are so different, yet I sit here knowing exactly where this part of me comes from, this part of me that I always feel like fits least naturally into my daily life, my closest relationships.
I feel the most like me here.
And this is the me I know least how to be in the world.
I sit here with my bizarre, niche songwriters and my above-average knowledge of literature and the Bible and feel like too much for normal suburban conversations.
And I am keenly, keenly aware that if I actually found myself in the academia I’m nostalgic for, I would not feel like enough there. In that world, I’m not nearly well read or deep enough, and I know it. I never was before, and I certainly am not now.
This, I realize, has always been a bit the case for me. I’m too happy and simple and safe for the artistic, intellectual, writer world I always wanted to be a part of and too melancholic and cerebral and weird ever to quite fit in the regular life I chose instead.
But, thank God for Patreon.
And strange songwriters the radio will never play and the double-edged sword of the Internet that, at its best, makes it possible for a weirdo like me to connect with songs that somehow make Mountain Dew feel like the Eucharist.
And isn’t that it? Isn’t that the multitudes this world contains? The secular and the divine, the absurd and the profound, all overlapping and spilling out over each other?
I don’t know if any of this makes sense.
I’m always trying to catch these fleeting moments when things feel clear inside me so that maybe I can remember them again when things feel murky, when life doesn’t feel charged with meaning and the Spirit like it does right now.
All because of a song named for a soda—a yeller dope, my dad would say.
Although, Baja Blast is blue I guess. Or turquoise? Teal? Something unnatural and bright and full of sugar and caffeine. Disgusting and delicious. Contradictions and multitudes. Plus an extra burst of energy to fuel the kinds of conversations you can only have when it gets past midnight.
If I started a Bible-study-slash-book-club that meets at Taco Bell too late at night, would you want to come?
You had me at “Bible-study-slash-book-club that meets at Taco Bell”
I care 🫶