Don’t doubt that God has called you and equipped you to be truly excellent.
— Ted Bond, Craig’s Brother, Indie Vision Music, 2010

Altar calls weren’t billed but they were built into church shows when we were kids. To justify staffing the parking lot to prevent smoking (of any kind) and appointing a deacon or elder to the sanctuary floor to calm down or kill the inevitable mosh pit, youth pastors middled a lot of our all-ages punk and hardcore shows. Before finally seeing the Christian version of The Ramones (The Huntingtons out of Baltimore) on their Northern California leg of their late 90’s tour, a youngish man named Travis or Trevor flipflopped up to an SM58 microphone to ask if you knew who you are in the eyes of the Lord, and, on top of that, are you sure you know where you’re headed after this life?

I had to get out of the house to find some quiet this morning, so I headed to a parking lot behind the high school baseball field and track down the street from our house. I’m standing parallel with the shaky chalk line that runs from left field to home plate, trying to write or at least type on my laptop propped chest-high on my truck bed, listening to one of those church acts, a melodic punk band from my hometown called Craig’s Brother. Their epic but ultimately underplayed sophomore album, Lost at Sea, was recorded the year I graduated high school, now two decades back. In a recent email thread, three high school friends and I remind each other of the twenty years between us and Craig’s Brother’s glory days, Dogwood’s More than Conquerors, bands like Value Pack and Project 86, and the whole scene we searched out and found despite objections from our teachers and coaches at our tiny Christian school in Pacifica, California. One of the guys writes, “i think we saw [Slick Shoes] in the south bay one time and they signed an MDR [Minor Discipline Report] i got from Mr Shapiro for sleeping in his class.” It’s true. We were there. Jackson Mould slayed us with his live guitar parts on “East on Tracks” some Saturday afternoon in a blazing hot church parking lot.

Somewhere, I have my first copy of this second Craig’s Brother record. A generic CD with the track list printed in a sans serif awkwardly on its face. Almost like a hand-copied church bulletin. Months before the album was officially released from the Christian label, Tooth & Nail Records, I bought the silver disc in a white paper sleeve in the back parking lot of a Round Table Pizza in a town just north of Santa Cruz, from the singer, Ted Bond. He and I both worked at the chain pizza place, he as a driver and me making pizzas in the kitchen. I’d later follow in Ted’s footsteps in a number of ways, but the first was that I soon became a delivery driver myself.

I remember guys from whichever of the countless lineups Ted’s fronted since ’95 emerging from a dark red van after a beer or a smoke (of some kind) to headline a show at Lighthouse Christian Fellowship in Soquel Village. It was my father’s church, which had once been a single-screen porn theater until he and a few others converted it in the 80s. Even as teenagers we had a vague understanding that with Tooth & Nail, Solid State, and other alternative Christian labels, a band’s marketing and distribution hinged on their witness — before, during, and after they played. “The [church] shows were all around awkward. Bands were pressured to preach,” Ted writes in an almost 4,000-word Tumbler post from about a decade ago. Citing deep from the book of Romans, “The Punk Gospel” ranges from the band’s initial identification as “a Christian band” to the politics of punk rock, the gospel, and Jesus, whose “work on earth is as radical and punk as anything ever.” Ted continues, “[It] led to these often forced sermons where a guy with tattoos, who 30 seconds earlier had been screaming his head off, is now saying ‘If you accept Jesus into your heart and stuff then you don’t have to go to hell, bro.’” As teenagers, having an adult on a stage invite you to skate night on Wednesday but not before questioning your identity and eternal standing was the real price of admission to these shows.

Evangelist Billy Graham might be the reason for a lot of this. From town-to-town Christian bookstores to the expectations that bands should proselytize, on down to altar calls on Wednesdays when there was something with an especially good draw like a quarter pipe in the church parking lot or the chance to sledgehammer a junkyard car and autograph the dent with a Sharpie. I think the idea with the latter was that you might have a chance of killing sexual desire if given a shot to smash a Corolla already permanently curbed by rod knock. Returning to Graham, a lot of us witnessed him at work in his later years at crusades around the world. Looking back at dozens of transcripts and videos of his sermons, they don’t hinge on heaven and hell as much as I expected. As I work my way through Graham’s archives I find a few relatable or maybe surprising gems, including a long stretch when a camera catches a kid looking into the lens before turning back toward the stage to bite at his fingernails as hundreds, young and old, from Anchorage, Alaska, herd toward Billy’s platform to accept Jesus into their hearts. More substantially, maybe, Graham speaks directly to young people in nearly all of his sermons. Calls them by name. “When you’re young, you think the whole thing is in front of you. And you never realize that you may be gone tomorrow.” Young people. Young people. “Your friends will wait for you!” he exhorts “unsaved” young people night after night.

What’s not surprising is that most of his sermons are similarly shaped, pushing 4,000 words a shot, grounded in scripture, augmented by anecdotes from the communities he toured, and mixed with modernized parables that accommodated moral and political jags about the state of America and in turn the state and place of the individual in the temporal world and more crucially the eternal one. It’s like Ted’s staccato pre-chorus on “Back and Forth” when he sings: “The eyes of the world, the eyes of the church, the eyes of your peers. / The wagging of tongues, whispering shame, upon eager ears…Back and forth the orchestra plays, but neither side is tuned to the other.”

What is striking in clip after clip after clip of Graham’s crusades is the choreography. He hits his own marks and directs the traffic of pre-Christians to the altar with fiery precision. The whole production suggests that the place you end up standing on a given night, in a given amphitheater, is what determines your eternal standing with God. Take a crusade in Liverpool in 1984:

I’m going to ask you to get up out of your seat and come and stand on this matting. We don’t want to touch the grass because we have promised that we will not touch this beautiful grass. Come and stand on the matting, and you’re coming to stand there symbolically saying inwardly that you’re opening your heart to Christ. You want a new life. You want to be a new person…

I had to confirm with my dad that I did, in fact, see Mr. Graham in person in the mid- to late-nineties. That night, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, and maybe that whole tour, Christian piano man Michael W. Smith backed Graham from a black grand piano, closing with the crusader’s standard, “Just as I Am,” a song that inspired scores of nonbelievers to get up out of their seats over the years.

I pause Lost at Sea to see if I remember the almost 200-year-old hymn, choosing Alan Jackson’s cut from Precious Memories Volume II:

Just as I am, though tossed about / With many a conflict, many a doubt / Fighting and fears within without.

It’s touching as hell. And, man, can that man can sing. So tender coming from a guy so straight and tall, country wise, this Country Music Hall of Fame member I’ve stood next to here in Nashville — but still, can I be saved as I am but not necessarily accepted as such? Or, to circle it, are you saved as you are but not accepted as you were. I don’t know, but it’s impossible to say with Alan Jackson’s version or the Billy Graham meetings whether it’s the music or the message that moves so many hundreds and hundreds of thousands to file to the mat or the base of a retractable stage to commit not just to Christ but to the Evangelical church itself.

In An Evangelical Social Gospel, Tim Suttle argues that following a revival, which might really be a reaction to social change, “people stop responding…so revivalist preachers begin to manufacture a crisis for people to respond to. They began to preach more about personal sinfulness…They developed tactics like the ‘anxious bench’ and ‘altar calls’ in order to create a crisis moment for any willing individual.” Regardless of intent, tactic or no tactic, Mr. Graham was every part the consummate professional. When he was ready for the band to slide in with “Just as I Am,” he wiggled his fingers like a catcher calling for a kill pitch.

When Graham was a teenager, his father forced Billy and his sister to drink their way through a case of beer until they saw the light. It was the end of a prohibition another evangelist had given his life to, a man who inspired Graham’s trajectory and went by the name Billy Sunday. The professional-baseball-player-turned-revivalist preached to hundreds of thousands, shouting “It’s time to hit the sawdust trail” to his nightly crowds packed in large wooden churches constructed around the country specifically for Sunday’s meetings.

For some of Sunday’s greatest offerings, I recommend the following flight from his flagship sermon, “Get on the Water Wagon”:

What difference does it make whether a man guzzles beer standing at a bar or sitting down at a table, who sold to a preacher, or a high school girl, has the same effect as when it’s sold to an automobile thief or a horse thief…Oh, America didn’t need repeal, she needed repentance! She didn’t need wrong, she needed righteousness! We don’t need Jags, we need Jesus! We don’t need more grog, we need more God!

Though maybe it’s best to chalk it up to Ted’s “Back and forth the orchestra plays, but neither side is tuned to the other.”

“These practices began to shape the American folk theology of sin,” Suttle continues about altar calls and chases with maybe what’s at the heart of all this. “It became completely individualistic.”

The 10-dollar CD Ted sold me in that parking lot in Scotts Valley was his masterpiece. He wasn’t offering the disc as some bro-deal preview of his work. It was a fuck-you bootleg, a way of surviving. I remember he had a family and likely the man just needed cash. I recall a daughter in Ted’s mix too, and maybe she was the reason the album was finally deemed finished, but I don’t know. Like any great book or piece of art about the ocean, Lost at Sea took time, all the back and forth, treading water. But writing is like that, isn’t it? You circle the thing until it hopefully reads easier than it was written or plays and sounds inevitable the way it is. That, or you run out of time or money or will.

As the ten songs continue to crash along, I think, man, some of these have aged better than all the various members of the band or its listeners — all us youth group kids whose altar call salvation stuck or sunk over the years. I think of HG Fest (Holy Ghost Fest) and the calls to action on stage from bands and pastors. I remember sweating through two shirts one afternoon there in Pasa Robles, longing to kiss the girlfriend of the singer in a band called Burnt Sienna, and maybe that’s actually a better description of the color of Craig’s Brother’s van, but I’ll keep going, it doesn’t matter.

Billy Sunday’s own kids didn’t stick to their father’s old sawdust trail. Sounds like they lost their way, drank hard, and I think all of them passed away before their father. Billy Graham’s son, Franklin Graham, is another matter altogether. I mean for one, the guy backed Brett Kavanaugh and the two men made both God and beer look bad on top of all the hate they backed.

I’m trying to draw some lines here, and now here is a brewery recently converted into a pizza place that still serves beer. I’m trying to chalk the field that is my life, you might say, even if those lines are later blown away, but it isn’t easy to draw the boundaries you have to play between.

In the end, it was a photo of Craig Brother’s interim drummer Juice Cabrera flipping off the camera, accidentally loaded onto the band’s site, that got their albums dropped from The Family Bookstore, an institution like Tower Records meets Barnes and Noble for saved folks. They didn’t just sling CDs from faith-based artists and softcore Steven King-type books by Christians like the rapture-horror Left Behind series. The Family Bookstore, and other similar chains, defined (and maybe deafened) a big, influential brand of faith. They were the gatekeepers of what we read and listened to and told we were cool to celebrate. For Craig’s Brother, no Family Bookstore meant no distribution, and in turn, no label to support for Lost at Sea or their 1998 debut, Homecoming.

Half the group in the email thread about Pacifica and the mostly Christian punk scene is nostalgic for those days, that music and time. I didn’t know I was until one of the guys says he isn’t. Nostalgia is derived from a combination of “algos,” Greek for pain and grief, and “nostos,” for homecoming. It’s disease-like, nostalgia is — least by definition. It’s a cancer that causes you to avoid the one thing that would cure you — moving on, leaving. Maybe that’s part of why it’s troubling we keep calling heaven “home” and why a hero has to leave their hometown to become one.

I remember my Santa Cruz bandmates and I harmonizing to Homecoming to and from our own band practices, coming out of the Santa Cruz mountains, Ted Bond howling what a lot of us were feeling before we knew we were thinking it, as we tempted death by seeing how long we could barrel down Empire Grade with the headlights off.

Who am I?
What am I for?
I wait for answers from the sky, the only audience I find
But no comfort finds my ears just silent mocking
And I know I was created but I just can’t figure out why

And now I’m searching out my own identity
Something down inside telling me that I’m like no one else but me
But as of yet I still don’t know
Who is this guy that I am and for his life what does he have to show?
Who am I?
What am I for?

When I was a writing instructor (a delivery man of a different sort) I suggested that good endings are surprising but inevitable. And that’s true of Ted. Today, he’s answered the call to the pulpit at a Methodist church in a Santa Cruz mountain town. It’s odd but fitting hearing a voice that defined punk for a lot of us (with his music and when he actually defined the genre on the Bad Christian Podcast as what he witnessed when the drummer of Propagandhi stuck a drumstick up his ass) look down at a laptop and request the Sunday morning prelude from an older white woman named Marina or something close to that. He seems happy there, and on stage again he looks at home again. One recent Sunday, wearing a blue oxford button-up after a run of flannels from his Craig’s Brother days, Ted leaned over a laptop before eventually finagling a Bob Marley lyric video to play off YouTube and project onto a screen to illustrate his message on the Lord’s prayer.

Back at home, I watch fireflies light up along our lawn as I slowly collect my things to head back inside. I think of Saul transformed into Paul and Ted turned “lay speaker,” as identified on the church’s site, plus both Billies from William, and potentially wasted lives to nightly glory. There was a time after I quit playing baseball to play music and then quit that after about fifteen years to go to graduate school, where I thought I was ready to play novelist and wrote something along the lines of, “Stars and scars, they’re only a single letter apart.” I was trying to describe a feeling some character has after pushing out of a corner store in Pacifica after a fist fight to drink PBR and watch the last of the New Year’s Eve fireworks lighting up over the Pacific Ocean. It’s subtle and maybe sacred, the difference between making it and not. For a lot of us, whether it’s a stage or a field, as a pastor, player, or singer, life’s about staying on the right side of the blinding lights no matter what that means, costs, or if it pays.

Luke Wiget lives in Nashville. His work has appeared in Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Green Mountains Review, BOMB, The Rumpus, and as always, and more. You can find Luke on Twitter.

Lena Valencia’s writing has appeared in Epiphany, Joyland, BOMB, the anthology Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and in 2019 she was awarded an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. She received her MFA in fiction from The New School. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, she now lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is the director of educational programming and managing editor of the literary magazine One Story.

Did Billy Graham Ruin Punk Shows for Christian Kids? was originally published in drDOCTOR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Now once upon a time I was a Christian
I didn’t know I didn’t need to know
When the sky speaks I’m going to listen
And when it’s pissin’ I’ll just figure I’m alone

— Jeff Tweedy, “Let’s Go Rain”

I’m told that the Devil must be beating his wife somewhere in the clouds above this new brewery up in Madison, Tennessee.

Outside, the rain rips through shaking summer light. Inside, I’m admiring a glowing beer in my hand before dropping my laptop and a copy of Richard Rohr’s new book, The Universal Christ, on a pew-turned-brewery-bench and joining these four guys from a neighborhood church I attended last Easter when my father was in town from California.

Yeah, the Devil’s beating his wife, one of the guys recites. That’s what we said growing up. When the rain’s like this and it’s this sunny, they say the Devil’s beating his wife.

It’s kind of a two-for-one, I say, misogynistic and theologically confusing. But hell, I think, Christians love a good turn of phrase. For decades aphorisms and alliterative self-help lessons helped me sin less or at least sin less severely.

Of course y’all would have to sit here, I say to Shane, their bearded and tattooed pastor, the good-and-easy-man-to-talk-to I used to find at Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge on Sundays evenings, spacing out over a happy-hour-two-for-one-special, plugging country songs into Dee’s holy jukebox.

I slide into the long pew that spans our table and two or three others on down the line along the front wall of the taproom, and I take a drink and it’s as good as I remember it is. Hazy and beautiful. Bold. Philosophical. Bubbles rise up through the flagship IPA that smells like dirt and flowers after a storm and all I wish I could do is escape my 9-to-always-after-5 life and be reborn as a copywriter — but this time for indie beer spots like Yazoo. I’d ride my bicycle in during quiet afternoons, write some, taste some, nap on the banks of the Cumberland to wake up and sketch poems about Nashville’s snaking green river, Moses and Mexico, trying to unwind my thoughts about God, our greatest work in translation.

Shane worries the roof on his church a few miles south isn’t going to hold. It’s only a matter of time before it gives.

That thing leaks even when it isn’t raining, one of the guys jokes about the building just a few blocks from my house.

You can’t shut it off, can you? I ask Shane, knowing how easy it is for pastors to worry without ceasing. I know how a pastor thinks, or think I do, having grown up the son of one whose own church flooded annually and then some. I remember waist-high water in the food pantry basement after weeks of rain that my dad and I bucketed out, just the two of us for hours.

There are three good spots — consistent places that leak, Shane says.

Fluorescent light floods the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him. I take a drink and set my glass down among the others. One and a half beers between the four of them, maybe. Three good spots, I repeat to myself and think how good and bad are probably both just bad. Maybe you’re doing too good a job there, I say to Shane. No good deed, that sort of thing.

It’s overtaken the view now, the neon rain. It beats and beats the metal roof. This storm and all its got is as loud and commanding as a wave crashing over and holding you down. Families file in one-by-one. I drink and try to listen. One of the guys shares this image of his kids bounding onto their back deck with outstretched arms to the summer rain. He’ll see their footprints on up the stairs after and know.

Earlier today, I tried to explain to my own kid how it was raining cats and dogs. She understood but translated the idiom into cats and lions because of the stuffed lion in her arms that one of our dogs had eaten the black plastic eyes out of. Blind lion. Blind lion. I repeat it to myself, thinking maybe Christianity is nothing but symbols in the arms of our children and God isn’t as all-seeing as they say. I don’t know. Maybe he is, but he isn’t just the lion, he’s the prey too, and if so that means he gets it, but death has to play out before he can help us live.

Nothing to do but wait it out now. Shane and I are half-talking about the Rohr book — how God is in everything all around us — but it’s impossible over the roaring storm. More and more it feels like we’re floating off somewhere together. I eye my table in the corner and want to be alone.

Man, I say to the guys, what the hell is the Devil doing to his wife now?

Luke Wiget lives in Nashville. His work has appeared in Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Green Mountains Review, BOMB, The Rumpus, and as always, and more. You can find Luke on Twitter.

Lena Valencia’s writing has appeared in Epiphany, Joyland, BOMB, the anthology Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and in 2019 she was awarded an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. She received her MFA in fiction from The New School. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, she now lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is the director of educational programming and managing editor of the literary magazine One Story.

I Was a Christian was originally published in drDOCTOR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I coast into the gas station and park my bicycle against the trash can by the door, set my helmet on the lid, and wipe my face off and mask up before going inside. They don’t cover their mouths in here but they keep the chitchat to a minimum and are kind enough to give me two tall cans for five dollars even. Plus, the blend of cigarette and incense smoke brings me back to Bed-Stuy, to the Brooklyn bodegas that sustained my wife and I those few years in New York. I smile and tell the owner thanks, but I don’t need a bag, and I push back into the heavy heat to secure my New Belgium IPAs to the bike rack and continue on through East Nashville. On down Porter. On through an entrance to the Shelby greenway and left at a path that loops from our street to the Cumberland river and back.

This is about the only reason I can find to get out of the house alone these days. But it isn’t bad biking through the neighborhood we landed in after leaving a rough street in an okay town just north of here, where somehow we bought our first house just months before our daughter was born about four years ago. This time, we wanted to be closer to the greenway, my wife and I told each other and our families out in California. And one day, when the pandemic lifts, there are coffee and beer spots within walking distance, not to mention a street lined with streetlights, better schools, friends or a chance at some, and perhaps most profoundly, two bathrooms, a miracle second only to our daughter herself. When my wife or I finally earn a shower and our kid needs to go, the other can keep that space and time sacred, the way God intended. For me, that holy half hour is a cold beer or two and a couple innings of baseball or quarter or two of basketball streaming on the toilet seat until the water runs cold in the winter or I’ve finally cooled down during the summer.

I find my spot on the greenway, tucked in the second bend as you’re heading toward the river, rest my bike against the bench, unstrap the cans, give three quick taps to the tab of the first and the beer explodes so I gulp it down. God, to beginnings. Or to new beginnings, as people say, though I’m not sure I understand the difference. I look down the path and take a drink, hoping for the rush of the first and just as I lean into the bench to take a third to help mute the 60-plus-hour workweeks and the nonstop noise of Zoom calls and the news, plus all the tape-loop talk of our shut-in lives, two young women come pedaling up the path on a tandem bicycle, and it’s the second set of beautiful women I’ve witnessed riding tandems through the greenway in just a few days. I turn off my headphones and take a drink as the two pedal their deep green bike by me and my bench and one of them smiles and I raise my beer to smile too.

The heat starts to break as hundreds of lightning bugs blink near and far out along a soft green tree line in front of me. Faintly I hear it. Nothing as lucky, as easy, or free. It’s a prophetic, blue song floating in from nowhere in particular that reminds me of teaching high school English after a drag-out stretch as a youth pastor at my father’s church — using that first track off of Digital Ash in a Digital Urn for a lesson on sound as meaning. “This song is gay,” a kid in the second row reviewed and a few in the front agreed and another asked, what are we doing here, as if I knew. I was unhappy as hell then, and maybe I am now too. I was recently reminded of that by someone, but it was almost like an aside, like something that goes without saying or something you’d say after “not to mention.” Like, not to mention your deep unhappiness. I return to visions of that too-bright classroom and remember the knot in my gut that had grown into a fist since my first day of the teaching credential program, when rather than take it as sign to quit, I excused myself to the restroom, rinsed my face with cold water, and returned to the circular table with the other teachers-to-be.

The beer and now my hands and chest, where the can rests, all smell of bodega. Nag champa plus Newports, beer, sweat plus Swisher Sweets. I smile and breathe it in, feeling myself come back to itself — so easy, lucky, and free in a quiet place where no one knows exactly where I am. For a moment there is nothing and it is what it is. Whether some mirror-reversed mantra or a real prayer, it’s what I’ve got this summer. When I think I can’t go on, I consider nothing and it and is. Phoebe Bridgers howls it at the end of her version of the Bright Eyes song I’ve watched over and over these past months. She sways in a black jumpsuit next to an aged and pickled Oberst and her voice, it’s the moment you’ve crested an impossible hill. It’s meaningful pain. I remember the fixed gear bike ride this one afternoon with a friend I haven’t seen in too long. Chasing him along that white line striped up Highway One, never coasting there or back, up or down the Pacific Coast because of the locked back hub, but it’s okay. It’s a ride big and stupid enough you have to smile as real as Bridgers after breaking into her echoed growl at the end of “Easy/Lucky/Free” and finding Oberst out of the corner of her eye before making a smile only the camera catches.

I tap the tab of the second can and consider the two sets of Tennessee tandems rolling through the greenway. It isn’t just luck, it’s a sign to keep on — to not give up, even though that seems to be the only thing my wife and I want together these days, an end, even if it’s just an end to this haunting summer. Only thing better now is a third of each, I think and open the second can.

Luke Wiget lives in Nashville. His work has appeared in Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Green Mountains Review, BOMB, The Rumpus, and as always, and more. You can find Luke on Twitter.

Lena Valencia’s writing has appeared in Epiphany, Joyland, BOMB, the anthology Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and in 2019 she was awarded an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. She received her MFA in fiction from The New School. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, she now lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is the director of educational programming and managing editor of the literary magazine One Story.

BEER CHRISTIANITY: Summertime Semiotics was originally published in drDOCTOR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When we were teenagers there weren’t two of us more unalike than Annalise and Danielle. The two existed on either side of our circle of Christian school kids and youth group friends in a foggy beach town called Pacifica. Annalise smiled when she sang or sat down to play good but predictable piano that she learned from her mother, the same way that my first chords were my father’s — G and C and later D and E-minor, a chord I nearly always strum when I first pick up any guitar. Danielle was a lot like that open minor chord compared to most of us. She had a past, as they say in the church, and found our coastal Pentecostal congregation after the fact, like she’d seen some things before God saved and commissioned her to the two-story building off Linda Mar Boulevard that we shared with the Lutherans. She attended as faithfully as any of us, but it was along with a divorced mother and a packrat stepfather whose garage was piled to the ceiling with rock-n-roll memories the Lord was slowly forgiving him for.

With most of us church kids, God came stock. It was this boring miracle, salvation was. But maybe not with Dani. Maybe she had been saved from something rather than just for something like those of us who were always told we were instruments created to be played for the Lord. I remember her now, some twenty-plus years later. She was the punk chick who helped me, the pastor’s kid, find my first and second guitars, both customized electrics from her stepfather’s endless collection, and my first distortion pedal, a Boss HYPER Metal that I have here at my feet in my office in Nashville. Today, it’s hard to imagine Dani in anything other than her patched-out Dickies jacket standing with an electric guitar hung to her knees and covered in stickers of bands that looked and sounded a lot like the Circle Jerks but sang about Jesus Christ instead of wilding out in the streets.

After recently witnessing the two of them, Danielle and Annalise, praise the bravery and vision of this Sean Feucht character, the founder of huge maskless worship services held around America during the pandemic, it’s impossible to imagine the magic it takes for two church girls so different to have merged into almost identical Evangelical Christians — one a mother, the other not, I don’t think — who back Trump and seem to believe, along with others from the California churches I used to attend, that the Democrat’s chant is nothing but a two-note song of abortion and socialism.

“Holy Spirit was ALL over it,” Annalise writes in her initial public post about the Let Us Worship gathering in Washington, D.C. “Lives are being changed. Because Jesus is the ONLY answer to life’s questions…Unborn lives saved. Marriages saved…Children living in slavery set free…”

The linked multi-camera video shows the White House dead center behind a crowded stage. The “Jesus Christ Superspreader,” as Rolling Stone called the longhaired blond after a similar stunt in Nashville, stands with his legs spread way apart in front of a worship team styled like an Urban Outfitters catalog from ten years ago. Dressed in his own merch, a Let Us Worship jacket and Let Us Worship shoes, Feucht shouts to the sea of believers with their hands in the air — calling out for miracles and calling for healing and demanding freedom from the oppression stifling the American church.

In the mid-nineties, our Pacifica youth group drove a passenger van or two down to Mexico to camp in a village outside of Tijuana. After days spent hand-mixing concrete for a foundation of a building I’m not sure anyone asked for, we spent the nights circled up around a fire. A few of the older guys would strum through the standards, “Our God is an Awesome God,” Maranatha hits like “Come Let Us Worship and Bow Down,” and others. We called these excursions across the border “missions trips.” I trust it’s the same today when you burn a week drinking Costco bottled water, showering in your flipflops, and flirting with girls wearing, for some unknown reason, bandanas around their necks. Maybe it was the thought that it could get hard to breathe if all those dirt roads kicked up at once. Around the fire you’d swear you’re going to burn your secular CDs when you get home. That year when I returned, I asked my dad, the pastor of our church and a good man you can still find serving his Bay Area community today, if I could borrow his backup guitar, the Yamaha his folks bought him when he graduated Bible college. Somehow even then I knew I’m always better when I have something in my hands.

I track along as the two chat about Feucht, and I look into the story of the failed politician and volunteer out of a Bethel church in Redding, a little city three or four hours north of Pacifica. “Instagram and Twitter is censoring Christian voices every single day,” he laments on his website. “It’s time for the Church to rise up with one voice and tell our government leaders and the rulers of big tech that we refuse to be silenced!” There are fine reasons to worship, including the power of breathing together and all that free dopamine that’s released when we sing. But I don’t think addressing your algorithm grudge is one of them.

I study the DC service and watch clips from a Nashville gathering, mostly with the sound down. And those faces — just belting it, smiling, pulled crying out of portable baptismals, photogenic as hell. It’s fresh content they’re making out of all this. And look, it’s not just that I haven’t seen so many unmasked folks outside of a MAGA rally or forgotten about the pathos of a synth drone and piano chord formula washing over a congregation as a pastor half-prays and half-prophesies. It’s the bliss they’re calling defiance in the face of what they’re calling oppression. It’s Annalise comparing the need to gather to sing “He Breaks the Heavy Yoke,” a Feucht go-to, to Black Lives Matter protests, writing, “The media sort of picked on the worship gatherings as a problem while I totally missed them saying the same thing about the riots, protests and looting that has gone on in huge numbers as well.”

I confess that naming these things “worship protests” is better branding than “crusades.” But the spirit is about the same. The way they flood in despite what a given community might actually need. To my eye this is the same thousands who crashed Public Square Park in downtown Nashville for an unpermitted and unneeded worship event back in October. Our churches can meet in person, and pastors here in town said as much while Feucht marketed his Music City event, which like the other dates around the country was an infect-and-eject one-night stand without any real investment in our community.

Earlier this week, my dog had knee surgery, so I’ve been camped in my office watching him shake through labored breath as he tries to sleep the pain and confusion off. I carry the seventy-pound pit bull outside when he needs to relieve himself and lug him back and place my hand on his back until he settles. It’s been days on end like this, so for the first time in a long time, I’ve been able to sit and consider how we grew up, how we got here.

It was a decade treading water in the three-break surf town just shy of San Francisco. Between church and private Christian school, it’s a palindromic life, like the tides. Daily lessons about sin and certainty, sex and death, our junior high and high school teachers frothed up in worry about television and San Francisco homosexuals and all forms or expressions of sexuality outside of heterosexual marriage. We roll through the Bush and Clinton years in the grayest sad spot in the Golden State with an undercurrent of fear of life and our bodies that won’t register till years later, and all the while the City is a ten-minute drive up the coast. I think of all the potential I later find in North Beach — the neon lights that line Columbus, City Lights Bookstore, the upstairs room where Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti retreated, Vesuvio Café across Kerouac alley where they drank, the patchwork of pastels off Twin Peaks. It’s all right there but we lived and dreamed like it wasn’t until we learned we could push back and some of us did. I guess the Beats had the post-war picket fences and pension plans to outrun. Our parents had free love and drugs, which they resisted like hell and overcorrected in no time. We had our chaste and pious parents. And now a new generation has big tech and has cycled around to socialism. This is an oversimplification but there’s truth in three or fewer chords. All of this is about identity and what we call this or that.

I look down at my dog, first called Aaron and renamed Hemingway, who my wife and I got in New York and has been by my side since. He’s whining that he can’t roam our neighborhood, but it’s doctor’s orders I tell him and sedate him again so he stays still enough to heal.

I ask the two how they square up the potential of Covid spreading at one of Feucht’s events.

“i don’t live in fear. You are coming from a place of logic which is great but I live by faith,” Dani writes. “Those of us who have strong immune systems should not be forced to shutdown because of the weak. I know this sounds so harsh and insensitive…. I just see things to be more black and white…if we have had church’s forced to shutdown but allow for protesting and rioting around our country seems very targeted…now that people gather in the name of the Lord to take authority in the Spirit through worship, everyone wants to be up in arms. I see this as an attack on the church.”

As I consider Danielle’s shout out to binary thinking, I receive a text from my mostly estranged mother a few days later extolling my own black-and-white approach as a child — in particular a time I told my neighborhood buddy he was going to go to hell unless he repented.

Today, I understand skepticism can serve spirituality rather than suffocate it. Maybe it’s an antidote to religious thinking, as Kant puts it. “The death of dogma is the birth of morality.” The Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno defines what at the core is really about looking or reflection, writing, “Skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.” And this is to be distinguished from criticism, a word derived from something akin to dog-like or more precisely a surly, puppy-like read on your world. But all this may even be more fundamental and we just have things flipped like what Norman Mailer suggests in On God when he says, “The mark of a good society…is that you move from one set of questions to a higher level of questions. Whereas the early Christian philosophers founded their church upon the opposite conclusion. People must be given absolute certainty about life and death — particularly about death.” Maybe Jesus isn’t the answer but a way, a framework, to asking better questions. I’m rusty, but I seem to remember Jesus asking more questions than he answered.

Annalise breaks in with a breathtaking take on HIV that’s straight out of our ’90s Christian culture handbook, writing, “Stuff spreads all the time. Think about how HIV spreads through needles and homosexuality for example…A lot of people would call it high risk behavior, but I feel like they get to choose the risks they want to take in their life. It’s not my job to criticize or judge their choices.”

Earlier this year in Minneapolis George Floyd begged cops and bystanders to listen. Twenty times over the eight minutes and forty-six seconds it took for all of his choices, for his life, to be choked out, he called, “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” If you’ve seen the footage, you know that aside from a man dying on the street, the scene is casual as fuck. Onlookers’ arms akimbo, cops digging their hands into their uniforms and pockets. All this while the officer “knelt” on Mr. Floyd’s neck until he couldn’t ask for help and asphyxiated. That’s how they put it in print and on TV, that the officer “knelt” on George Floyd’s neck. That’s not the right word. Kneeling has as much to do with killing a person as Feucht’s movement has to do with bringing glory to any kind of God worth worshipping.

Less than a month after George Floyd’s death, Feucht and his people blow into Minneapolis. Staging themselves fifty-some-odd feet from a memorial where the actual community wept over the murder of another Black man at the hands of police, Feucht and company sing like their lives depend on it. They did the same in Kenosha after Jacob Blake was shot by police. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported: “Evangelical music star Sean Feucht drew over 200 mostly maskless people to downtown Kenosha on Wednesday, criticizing the recent protests and unrest in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake. A few blocks away, Blake’s uncle, Justin Blake, helped prepare a spread of sandwiches and produce in a park. He and several local Black organizers pulled together 1,000 meals to share with seniors and others in need, aiming to pay no mind to the nearby rally.”

Contrast that with a statement Feucht released this summer about Black Lives Matter, encouraging his followers to sign a pledge for what they “stand for and against.” “We can’t let our God-given empathy get hijacked by a dark movement with hidden agendas.”

The other night I played a bit of guitar for my daughter. After a decade and a half of making music and then stopping cold turkey when I moved to New York for grad school, my calluses have disappeared. I’m not a musician anymore but still own dozens of instruments tucked around my office and up in our attic. So I pick up a nylon string flea market guitar that has a broken tuning peg, which means not only are the strings mellow, but the tuning has dropped over the years as I continue to tune to the D string with the broken peg rather than to a tuner. I play her some MXPX, an offshoot of those punk lessons I was getting from Dani, and run through what I remember of the Circle of Fifths I learned in college. As I play I can see myself hitting the road with a band around 2010 and then a worship team those summers I was first deconstructing my Christian faith while being paid to play worship music like I wasn’t.

Yesterday, country music’s first Black star, Charley Pride, died of complications due to the virus. I was out with our other dog, a goofy pit bull puppy that turns into a deaf terror on a leash. A few miles into our dead run around the greenway I receive a text that Charley passed, and because of my job I jump on a string of emails and calls as our team dials in a message and video. The puppy and I make our way back okay until I have to stop to proof something. It’s there at the mouth of the greenway he remembers the leash and loses his mind. I race through the copy, knowing I’ll have to carry him back home. When I bend down, I see that it’s still there. We dig into another decade, but the name of the Ku Klux Klan’s first grand wizard is still there burned in a sign at the entrance to the section of Shelby Greenway that’s named after the Confederate general. Though it shouldn’t be, it can be easy for me to stop seeing these monuments that still exist throughout the South. You have to walk through that Nathan Bedford Forrest gate anytime you want to commune with nature or each other or God, even.

I curse at the puppy as I carry him barking down the street and consider yet another avoidable death and the last time I saw Charley Pride. It was about a year ago at an event honoring Cowboy Jack Clement that included Nashville’s own poet and prophet John Prine. Both Pride and Prine were stunning, they were great. Funny and alive and light — they were themselves. Both died this year due to Covid-19. When we lost Prine, it really hit me, what’s happening in the world and specifically our red state, this dipshit epicenter of folks who haven’t been careful and have been loud about it because of what’s blaring out of the White House. Charley’s death hits different. It punctuates a barren year, of course, but beyond that it’s a testament to how slow we are to change course, how deep and cold our hate runs for anything outside of ourselves.

Charley’s final performance was at the CMA awards here in town in November. It doesn’t take long to connect the star’s death to the maskless event or at least question whether it was part of the cause. While they acknowledged Pride with the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement award, it was otherwise an evening awash in dumb glamor, with shots of maskless blonds with winter tans catching up over white wine and confusing pumped-up performances in front of blinding lights.

“No drama, just music,” read the tagline marketing a night supposedly honoring an American artform built on singing about drama, from the everyday jags to the lifelong existential ones. The marketing also showed the CMA’s hand. That of course they’d snub John Prine who passed away this spring, not to mention Jerry Jeff Walker and Billy Joe Shaver, men replete with redemptive drama. Maybe they wouldn’t call Prine country enough or any of the three successful enough, I don’t know. But the show for show’s sake might have killed a man they were already late in celebrating, who played in the Negro Leagues because the Majors wouldn’t accept him and whose initial music was sent out without a press photo so DJs would spin his songs without knowing he was African American. Charley Pride was his name and that’s how it is spelled despite his father’s best efforts to name him Charl, only to have a clerical error on his birth certificate normalize it to Charley, and RCA Victor to not only tack “Country” to the his name but also manage to transpose Charley to Charlie on both the white label promo and black label consumer copies of his sixth single, “Does My Ring Hurt Your Finger.”

I keep along, carrying the barking dog, sweating on another gray December day, trying to just keep moving.

It was just after Prine’s death that one of Annalise’s younger brothers from Redding mocked some of the health guidelines in California and had found a few like minds in a thread on my father’s page. When I finally responded to him, I wrote about Prine’s legacy instead of this or that policy but not before a quick shot at some of the folks in the thread, sharing a Norman Mailer line I often drop when I talk to evangelicals whose thinking has calcified over the years. “Piety takes all the air out of thought.”

“You can worship in your living room,” I finally wrote to the two. “But you can’t protest the murder of Black Americans in your breakfast nook or basement.”

But it seems to skip right off them as they ride a wave of optimism or hope, they might call it, of what Trump or the Let Us Worship shows bring to our world, sharing gifs of Trump saying “YUGE” and dropping Bible verses like some of us riff Clerks or Camus or Flannery O’Connor lines. I can’t unsee dogma masking danger and calling it faith — in government or religion. It’s pharisaic, but that’s too easy. It’s violence. Praise like that in the face of other’s pain is nothing but expiration.

I drop the puppy onto the driveway and walk him up to the house and head to the office to sit on the floor with the dog until he breathes easier and falls back to sleep. I look up at one of my guitars and consider the difference between a bright major chord and a dark minor one, that single-note difference between the two, how one needs the other and without an inversion here or rising up or down an octave there, it’s like standing alongside a silent shore break. Like not everything that converges must rise.

Luke Wiget lives in Nashville. His work has appeared in Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Green Mountains Review, BOMB, The Rumpus, and as always, and more. You can find Luke on Twitter.

God’s Country was originally published in drDOCTOR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I first really listened to John Prine on Thanksgiving in 2014 in a Brooklyn apartment with a group of friends. We’d cooked and drank all day — something so novel now some thirty days into shelter-in-place because of the virus that took John Prine from us. And virus aside, it’s novel because most of us have kids now — not to compare the two. A day of drinking and listening to music is all but beyond us.

We were in our early thirties, most of us. Sam, still in his twenties, had started early that day at the bookstore where he worked, pouring warm canned beers into a coffee mug he had with him when he showed up to our friend’s place. He was as buzzed as all of us but reasonably resentful from having to sling other peoples’ books in Dumbo that day. It wasn’t what we had all dreamed up in California and Texas before we moved to the East Coast, but still, there we were, in New York City.

We’d gathered for the holiday in a decent size Crown Heights apartment that our three photographer friends shared. There was a married couple, Matt and Stacey, their lifelong buddy and roommate — also named Matt — my wife and I and our dog Hemingway, Matt and Stacey’s two small dogs Brody and Oliver, and then later, Sam. Once everything was ready, we worked together to set all the dishes throughout the kitchen and on a bar in the dining room and wherever else we could find room and then we ate and talked, and it was simple and fine.

After dinner and dishes, there was nothing to complain about. We were all full and drunk, daisy-chaining one YouTube video after another on the television. We passed someone’s phone around and loaded up the YouTube queue with songs and jokes like kids. We watched and laughed. Stacey has this perfect roaring laugh that I really miss. Matt does too. For some reason, after a string of lighthearted clips, Stacey’s Matt had chosen John Prine.

One by one we went silent and settled into our drinks and pet our dogs and listened to Prine’s cut of Blaze Foley’s “Clay Pigeons.” The three-chord ballad about time and love rolls along like the bus Prine sings about.

Ride ’til the sun comes up and down around me ‘bout two or three times
Smokin’ cigarettes in the last seat
Tryin’ to hide my sorrow from the people I meet

And get along with it all
Go down where the people say “y’all”
Sing a song with a friend
Change the shape that I’m in
And get back in the game, and start playin’ again

Now, six years later, and working at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, I’ve spent more time with Prine’s music and felt his songs deeply, tragically, even before his passing, because he rode a real hard line between heartbreak and humor. To my mind he’s like Kafka if he smiled some.

The first and only time I was able to witness John play was a thirty-second soundcheck at the Museum for a later performance. After he slowly made his way down the steps and onto our little stage area, he joked and bantered and strummed a few chords of Cowboy Jack Clement’s “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” on Cowboy’s very own Gibson J-200, known as Nashville’s community guitar. It was just he and the guitar on stage and about a dozen of us sitting quietly in the empty theater.

In Brooklyn that night, we coasted along, but I got to thinking this isn’t enough. The song continued.

I’d like to stay but I might have to go to start over again
Might go back down to Texas, might go to somewhere that I’ve never been
And get up in the mornin’ and go out at night and I won’t have to go home
Get used to bein’ alone
Change the words to this song
Start singin’ again

I can’t do this forever, I thought, even though at the time it was all I wanted to do. I didn’t want to be anywhere but deep in a couch next to my friends. Even so, I thought about wanting to have a child. It was more than before. It was more than wanting to want to have a kid.

At the start of this year, we produced a video that looked back at country music and the Museum’s stories of 2019 and used Prine’s “Flashback Blues” from the 1971 self-titled album. It was perfect. It’ll always be.

Photographs show the laughs
Recorded in between the bad times
Happy sailors dancing on a sinking ship
Cloudy skies and dead fruit flies
Waving goodbye with tears in my eyes
Well, sure I made it but ya know it was as hell of a trip

From my understanding, Prine’s work was always prophetic this way. I want to let Prine’s words speak for themselves. They’re too true to explicate, especially today. From his first record on, he was specific enough to be felt in the moment but broad enough to last forever. His work is full of a timeless, psychic power that’s the result of a real and wild imagination and language magic you’d want out of your great American novelist or poet. He was both and then some, a great guitar player and a voice wholly his own on top of that.

Admittedly, it was odd coming to one of America’s greatest songwriters by way of another songwriter’s song. But it was Prine’s conviction, his honesty, I heard that night. He pushes the thing right to the edge but smiles you through it. John Prine loved his listeners.

Since 2014, our group of friends has lived that song out nearly to a T — T for Texas, T for Tennessee — with all but one of us leaving New York. Half of us are in Nashville, the other half in Austin — two sides of the same coin, recovering from and romanticizing our time in the city from our slightly bigger places in the south. Matt and Stacey and the dogs moved back to Texas and have a child. My wife and kid and I are here in Nashville. Hemingway and Sam are too. People say y’all. We say it now, too.

I re-listened to “Clay Pigeons” over and over last night and all this morning. Feed the pigeons some clay, turn the night into day. Feed the pigeons some clay, turn the night into day. It’s all we can count on right now, turning night into day. It’s our burden and blessing, a hard but loving balance Prine always seemed to strike all the while saying, we can start over again.

Luke Wiget lives in Nashville. His work has appeared in Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Green Mountains Review, BOMB, The Rumpus, and as always, and more. You can find Luke on Twitter.

Emma Delevante is an artist from Nashville, Tennessee with a heavy focus on graphic design, as well as photography.

I’ve Got the Flashback Blues was originally published in drDOCTOR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Neon Skyline is a deep night of drinking at a dive called Neon Skyline. It’s a night as a lifetime. Canned beer from a girl called Rose, a clove-smoking bartender who knows just what you need. Songs full of uncanned language about love and loss on a night spent with acquaintances you drink with all the time so you call them friends. And somewhere out there a single love — a girl called Judy — who might be back in town but none of the gang is sure. The jokes and drink orders all hang on spare arrangements and pretty and gentle production throughout the eleven-song album. Before I learn Andy Shauf is a landlocked Canadian, all I can hear is a beach towel draping the drums. They’re so muted and seventies, they sound kind of like a heartbeat in someone else’s chest.

I find my place at Yazoo Brewing Company. It’s another ’90s playlist blaring Lit and Incubus and even Ace of Base unironically here in Madison, Tennessee. I put in earbuds and listen to Skyline for maybe the fortieth time in fewer days and nights. I like what I like and I like repetition I get to choose. I sip my beer and re-read a message from a friend named Sequoia who reviews Skyline in our Instagram back-and-forth. Feel-good music about feeling bad. Not bad, I think, take a drink and listen. There’s something about Shauf’s songs that makes you question why we have to pay money to drink this way.

The sad pop reminds me of something else, too. I don’t find it till halfway through this Hopry Hazy IPA. It’s Robert Coover’s circular story about a lifetime cast out and reeled in around the simple act of going for a beer and the love and defeat that follow. It’s a near-perfect short story called “Going for a Beer.” I drink my own. My god, the bars I’ve calmed down in over the years. The goofy shit I’ve written in clean and red-lighted places. From California to New York and then Montreal one year. I found myself there, alone in a bar in Canada, on my thirtieth birthday drinking and thinking and writing some of it down. A loose group of essays followed.

Toward the end of the Coover story, the beat, no-name protagonist wanders another foggy night. Gold and brown unpoured beer and whisky waiting. His new kid just born. New, unknown women bobbing on barstools. He’s there, at the bar again, “so he has another beer, wondering where he’s supposed to live now, and realizing — it’s the bartender who so remarks while offering him another on the house — that life is short and brutal and before he knows it he’ll be dead.”

I hear Elliot Smith in Shauf. The symbiotic arrangements that happen when one person plays all the parts. You can also hear a lot of care and a little bit of guilt. The kind one has about being. I wonder if Shauf grew up as I did — Christian school and youth group on a loop — finding music that tunneled him out by way of going into himself. David Bazan, Sufjan Stevens, Nick Drake — they all come to mind. I reach out to the thirty-three year old on Instagram, in part to avoid reviewing his record and mostly to see if he’s read Coover.

Nothing. Not even that checkmark that means read. I email his publicist, sharing my little angle. Who are Shauf’s favorite writers, has he read Coover, and a few other writing-related questions. I hold on to my Hemingway quote about concrete details, where he says: “[I was] searching for the unnoticed things that made emotions, such as the way an outfielder tossed his glove without looking back to where it fell, the squeak of resin on canvas under a fighter’s flat-soled gym shoes, the gray color of Jack Blackburn’s skin.” The publicist says Andy is too busy at the moment. Then he and his band play Kimmel. I get it. I tell her cheers to everything going on and move on.

It’s a shame, though. In songs like “Clove Cigarettes” Shauf throws out a green plastic table and “those green plastic chairs.” He sings about green plastic furniture until it means something, until emotion is made. Maybe like Kurt Vile offers in “One Trick Ponies,” Shauf’s also got a soft spot for repetition.

Some weeks back Sam Farahmand and I attended a reading here in Nashville. There’s a whole story there — maybe — with us rushing off for a six-pack when we see there’s only a small box of red wine in the foyer, and the woman working the register at the gas station riffs with us about the meme on a lighter Sam buys that appropriately reads This Guy Needs a Beer, and then we’re back at the reading shivering in the grass while our friend reads from his novel. It’s not really that anything happened, at least anything that used to happen when we used to go to readings in New York.

After, we get to talking with a circle of writers who had showed up. What makes an essay collection a collection? one of them asked. They’re collected. But they’re all so different — the subjects, I mean, another says.

I’d just read an essay by Henry Miller, “My Life as an Echo,” where Miller writes about himself even though he knows what they’ll say: What can there possibly be left to say about yourself, Hank? But it’s more about writing himself out of the essay. Exhausting himself in a process of becoming nobody over time. At the reading, with the other writers, I’m tired and way up in my head and say something about writing the same essay over and over again. Getting better, refining the thing, etcetera, etcetera. I don’t know how to square up my love and hate for repetition — how it makes real life mundane or how sometimes it feels holy.

I head to the bar for another beer and think of this Nashville bartender called Ruby. Dark-haired and stormy. She came to town to make music and ended at a handful of spots — Crying Wolf and Duke’s, maybe one of the breweries, too, at some point. Ruby. God. Always in cut off band tees, impossible to read. Opens and pours them like life depends on it. Beautiful, it surely goes without saying. She’s mad but smiling when she won’t give you the WiFi password until she trusts you not to abuse it. Tonight, here at Yazoo, it’s Ben. He pours me a lager I finish standing, talking to him some, thinking that maybe repetition is one way we get after redemption down here. I ask for my check, and like normal, one of mine is on the house. I close out and head home.

Luke Wiget lives in Nashville. His work has appeared in Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Green Mountains Review, BOMB, The Rumpus, and as always, and more. You can find Luke on Twitter.

Going for a Beer was originally published in drDOCTOR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Everybody’s gotta live / Everybody’s going to die / Everybody gonna try to have a good, good time/ I think you know the reason why.”

— Mac Miller • Circles

¹² And in that day did the Lord God of hosts call to weeping, and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth: ¹³ And behold joy and gladness, slaying oxen, and killing sheep, eating flesh, and drinking wine: let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die.

— Isaiah 22 • KJV

Last week the mailman at work stopped by my desk to tell me he’s read all the books on his shelves and seen about all there is to see on YouTube. So the other night, he found himself in Isaiah and it’s all there — the poetry, the blood and guts and heart of near everything. The country and soul records he’s studied and played on as a session musician over the decades. All the Joyce and Prine, Faulkner and Bukowski (fellow mailmen, Prine included) and songwriters like Tom Russell, who made Hotwalker, a record with Bukowski and Lenny Bruce voiceovers on top of Woody Guthrie-inspired singing and the reverb streets of 1960s Los Angeles. I imagine he’s including all of that here, in a way. He’s thought about life and music and books his whole life, it sounds like when you get to talk to him. He saw Dylan at Newport and his rendering is electric. I’ll never forget it. He told me once he doesn’t much care for the Beach Boys. “They’re too safe,” he says. “But Haggard, he’s dangerous.”

So I listen when he’s up to talk, and I continued to think about the prophetic Old Testament book last week while looping Mac Miller’s new posthumous record, Circles, between meetings and driving back and forth to work and writing lines in my head but never putting anything real down in the way of a blurb a friend asked me to write during the holidays. The thing’s roiling…punk…Nashville calling…poems about the self, the self all about poems, etc, etc, etc. Here comes another city, another self. Etc, again.

But Circles.

Circles is sadness with swagger. It’s the magic of unexpected but obvious endings.

Circles is a road record, where instead of cinematic sunsets and sprawling interstates, it’s the inner state of a young man’s racing mind.

Circles is about the ecstatic moment. You can witness it on the “Good News” music video when Miller plays air piano at the end. It makes you wonder if, like a motor, a heart roars until the end, kicking into fifth when it’s dying to die rather than living to.

Circles is a joke disguised as drama. I’m not trying to be cryptic. I’m trying to say what the album feels like, and comparing music to other music feels lazy and maybe mean and probably pointless. Comparing falls way short of comprising.

Circles is a chapbook with its own measured lexicon. The solitary blue, all the references to driving and cars and loose or missing screws, the mind and body breaking down, paint fading. I remember Richard Hugo defending something like thirty-plus instances of “gray” in a book of poems — all the stones, the gray eyes and skies, skin tones, fish. In the end, Hugo says something like, he’d rather master a small batch than drown in a pile of language he can’t call his own.

Circles is easy to enjoy because it sounds like Miller and producer Jon Brion left live-in space in the album for a listener. All of it is sung and spoken through his teeth. Chilled-out epilogue songs about sanity and lack and death and love — a saintly deep blue album of tension between fast-forward dream wisdom and desire. Then, crucially, Miller’s no-rush delivery. A listener can’t help but hear his untimely death. Those foreshadowing, ecclesiastical questions backed with near-perfect arrangements and instrumentation by Brion: producer to the saddest queens and kings — Elliott Smith, Fiona Apple, Frank Ocean, Brad Mehldau, to name a few. If you haven’t seen Brion and Mehldau back Elliot Smith on piano, harmonium, and guitar on the short-lived “The Jon Brion Show,” quit this and check that out. Smith and Brion sip pints and joke awkwardly in front of strings of sagging Christmas lights. It’s beautiful.

Circles is good, is what I’m trying to say, if you’re still here, and maybe that’s just enough.

After work, sitting in this beat-to-hell but dead-quiet pizza place that serves cheap canned beer and smells like a leaky trunk, I think how it seems like one’s ego is less involved when you say, What do I love, or, like Miller, Do I love?

So I listen over and over and I laugh and ache over lines like: “I’m way too young to be getting old,” with the singer wanting to look though he can’t see. Maybe sadness is easier to stomach. Maybe sadness is a kind of invitation.

I drink my Pabst and listen to Circles while Maury Povich preaches about life and love on a small plastic television in the corner of the pizza place.

It’s the sixth track, “Everybody.” Miller sings:

Saw a blind man standing on the corner, baby
And he couldn’t hardly tie his shoes
Harmonica, guitar strapped around his neck
But he sure could, he sure could play the blues

I cue up the next one, “Woods,” on the way home. I cross Gallatin and there’s a man in a t-shirt struggling under the weight of a dozen plastic bags, hoofing it down Harris toward the shithole apartments at the end of our block. He is the blues. Miller asks: “Do I, do I, do I love? / Can I, can I, can I, can I, get enough?” It’s haunting, this chorus. Maybe it’s mostly the kind of person who doubts they can love who can actually do it. And enough is the real ghost. If you’ve ever wanted to drown yourself in something most people take in doses, you know about enough — the idea, the looping notion, the emptiness of it.

When I picture Mac Miller I see his eyebrows pinned up. It’s the quickest way to hide our emotions. Try it.

“I need someone to save me before I drive myself crazy,” he sings on “I Can See.” I’m parked in my truck in my driveway thinking: Again, more driving. Again the body as vehicle rather than a destination. I don’t know how Miller treated his exactly, but I think I understand what he was driving at. That heady jowl sound. Wondering if he can love. Revved up. Gassed. Revved up. Heading home.

On occasion the mailman is asked to drive work people around Nashville to meetings and tours and so on. The other day a few folks piled into his work ride as he starts it and hits play on the CD player and the book of Isaiah rushes into the van. “I’m not religious,” he tells me as he’s updating me on his time with Isaiah. I know where he stands with church and religion. And I’ve told him how I grew up. My dad’s a minister, or he was. It’s a dangerous little book. And it’s not embarrassing. It’s real — maybe too real for some Tuesday of some work week in another new decade. But there’s danger in nearly all forms of caring or trying. I hear it or at least the potential for it in the half-sung, made-in-the-booth poetry of Miller’s new Circles. Try it. We have to address something every once in a while, and I think you know the reason why.

Luke Wiget lives in Nashville. His work has appeared in Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Green Mountains Review, BOMB, The Rumpus, and as always, and more. You can find Luke on Twitter.

Driving in Circles was originally published in drDOCTOR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was stocking groceries at the Chelsea Whole Foods Market finding how fast my head turned on me during drag-out shifts where you’re dragging garbanzo beans forward on a shelf, facing the labels, to have those same cans drop in some dude’s Strand tote only to have to do it all over again a few minutes later.

No headphones on the sales floor, the shifties tell us. So no podcasts or punk records (read: AFI or Good Riddance, I’m not that cool). No cut-offs in the summer, either, like in the California Whole Foods. And no beanies in the winter, even if I’m loading a cooler with kombucha. I’m told by a shift leader who resembles one of the Manning brothers, Peyton or Eli, that it isn’t cultural for me like it is with some of the others, so I can’t wear a knit cap unless I’m breaking down pallets on the loading dock in the snow. And most everyone, they’re too terrified to talk to each other to help with the time we have stacked on top of whatever station the shifty chose to showcase his version of edgy or ironic or classic.

One night this white woman walks around the endcap and calls out. Can I tell her where she can find the fajita bread?

I pull a line of garbanzos forward, spin the front can around. It’s perfect.

Fajita bread? she calls again, slower. Where is it?

Fajita bread? I say.

Fah-hee-tah buh-read, she says.

Maybe it’s my bruised memory marbling this section of my life. I’ve just started a writing program in Greenwich Village after quitting a teaching job in California and playing music and touring the country to move to New York City to try to hump it into my thirties — to try something new. But this older woman, she seems to think I’m dim or more dim than I think I am. She says it again and maybe again. She’s becoming angry, disgusted even.

I’m stock still, depressed again. My dad’s been asking if I can pray when I’m feeling bad this way — try to find the good, violet part of the void rather than the violent, self-hating portion. (Read: half-thoughts on Buddhism mingling with fading evangelicalism — the former is residue from Kerouac, who I learn this same year in the writing classes and talking to people at the bar after the writing classes I shouldn’t care about and it kind of sticks, that he’s no bueno, until I take a workshop with Joyce Johnson, the woman Kerouac was dating when On the Road was published and she’s so cool and wise. She asks us to read Visions of Gerard, the most flickering and painful of Kerouac’s Duluoz books and the saddest novel I’ve ever studied closely. Johnson had taken time to come to conclusions about their past, and time, it’s on her side, not Kerouac’s. But in the last session she shares that maybe it was all the head injuries from football that made Jack act so evil toward the end of his life. She thanks us for being there and we leave and immediately I regret not asking her to sign my copy of her book: Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir.)

I start toward the woman, dressed a lot like Kerouac, I guess, or better yet, a guy about to be in debt for the next two decades — Redwing boots, Pendleton shirt, Levi’s. The woman (I try to recall) in Patagonia pastels, a little overweight, which is rare in Chelsea, where every few days Katie Holmes jogs down from her apartment upstairs, Lululemon head-to-toe, Suri and a bodyguard in tow as she shops produce alongside the mostly sculpted, tan, gay men.

I hook my hands on my apron and encourage the woman to follow. We pass the dry grains and dry beans, the quinoa, and goddamn that superfood is a source of holy meltdowns the year I’m there. We might not have your brand till Wednesday, I apologize again and again. We can’t hardly keep up with demand, and then there’s a Times piece and a Guardian article and subsequent NPR rebuttal about the perfect grain replacement and the people who grow it. After each story, a procession of guilty and redeemed Midtown men commend each other for feeling a catch in their guts for consuming something harvested and then sold by people who can’t afford to eat it themselves.

The woman and I turn a corner and pass the tortilla chips and in front of us the glorious half-aisle set of every kind of tortilla under the sun. Corn, flower, wheat, sprouted wheat, brown rice, gluten-free, locally made, imported — all red, brown, yellow, black bean and white corn tortillas, all such a precious sight. Heaven, after all, is unleavened.

And, God, we need choices. She’s digesting hers.

And I think I understand. I’ve gotten eggy about food. On tour in 2010, a street fight breaks out in an off-brand Kroger in Alabama or Mississippi between me and one of my best friends, the drummer. And it’s over three dollars of something one of us threw into our shared cart. We ruin days rolling through a couple states, agonizing over grocery shopping together, over some bottle of brown mustard or dill pickles or something or other because I’m homesick and he’s sick of me saying so and we both want what we want to eat.

Tortillas, I say, to the woman and wave my hand in front of the silver and white case.

Yes, fajita bread, she says and reaches for her brand.

I last until another weeklong inventory. It’s what finally breaks me down, that dead quiet and (actual) bean counting followed by weighing tons of beef and pork on a scale in the back. And I’m shaky to begin with. A week or two before inventory I convince myself a cyst in my groin is a hernia and a shifty punts me and a clipboard of paperwork to an urgent care around the corner where I’m weighed and then a rushed, Midtown doctor tell me, essentially, Man up, man.

There’s one redeeming bit of dragging soggy boxes of meat in and out of the walk-in freezer. It gives me time to get through Sentimental Education for a class. Unhappy, soaked in blood and guts, I listen to a story about the same. It’s a Flaubert novel a Brooklyn bookseller later tells me is so Williamsburg it isn’t funny. Choose any given night at The Levee, he says about the small, two-for-one hook-up spot by the river. And it’s perfect. All of it. The blood crystals forming on my jeans, his synopsis, the disciplinary write-up I sign because management claims I misweighed the beef, the hernia scare, old white women, and as always, and more. I’m not complaining here, I don’t think. I’m just shopping some ideas — talking about my life — and this is my brand.

The Weight originally appeared in Dinner Bell, an alternative (weird) food writing publication, available to order in print HERE.

Luke Wiget lives in Nashville. His work has appeared in Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Green Mountains Review, BOMB, The Rumpus, and as always, and more. You can find Luke on Twitter.

Kat Bawden is a photographer and visual artist in Los Angeles.

The Weight was originally published in drDOCTOR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.