Steal This Song

Lately this space has been a little too much of my own and not enough of others’ stories, and definately not enough meaning. I’ll let you judge for yourself on beauty.

So let me start again, again, with this little bit of old-timey religion for you. Athiests and fundamentalists, go away.

Sometimes you archive because your current homepage data is approaching 100K, other times you archive because you just had a really messed up few days and you just want to put it all behind you.

And on said blog, which was fast becoming but now definately is both your life’s yardstick–your personal history–and your shrink all in one, little things like archiving a few days of blah can start to mean a lot.

So on days like this, what was a design flaw in SWM is actually a nice thing. Let’s just put all that on the shelf and start with a new piece of paper. Throw that notebook on the pile, grab a new one, maybe a different color this time.

From now on we archive based on our manic-depressive cycles. Ha ha. Just kidding. I think.

Lately this space has been a little too much of my own and not enough of others’ stories, and definately not enough meaning. I’ll let you judge for yourself on beauty.

So let me start again, again, with this little bit of old-timey religion for you. Athiests and fundamentalists, go away.


First, the praise and worship portion of our service. Now you might say to me, “But pastor Dan, praise and worship music sucks!” And I would say back to you, “Yes, it is true, most, if not all praise and worship music sucks. But, dear flock, it is not the idea of doing quote-unquote praise and worship”–and at this point I would make the little quote signs with my first two fingers as I said “praise and worship”–“with music that is in error. Oh no! I have even heard, my dear faithful, that Delirious, ‘that worship band,’ is quite popular with the kids these days. It is not that–it is that this music reeks of dishonesty, as if some repetitive words and a catchy pop melody should reduce us to a slobbering mess of repentant tears and then to the super-duper happy-healed-victorous consumer (Christian stuff only, of course) we were always supposed to be–all in the span of one 3.5 minute song (with an extra 5 minutes of repeated choruses, of course).”

That is what I would say. So now we will praise the Lord with the newest supa-supa-lo-fi tune from The Daniel Wayne Miller Worship Project, Gospel Song.[^1]

Now for prayer, we have invited Rabbi Joplin. He’s going to lead us in a prayer for The Future That Was.

Finally, as it should be in every service, we finish with the sermon. Here I invite the “other” “pastor Dan” (and oh we all chuckle to ourselves that “our church” has two, yes two, isn’t that funny?) to the podium (isn’t it a nice podium, so big and modern-looking?).

He’s prepared some words for Lent, yesterday being the first day of this season:

…i like Lent–more than Advent at least. Lent is a season of dark destinies in battle; of something more that all the while inhabits the play of surfaces. Lent walks with a cadence that is undoubtedly human: that fully invested way of the bloody human that inhabits the awakened self-immolation that is wholeheartedness…that gnawing expanse that is the stuff of whispered tales and quiet resolve…the stuff of identity, passion and hope in the wake of the domination that makes one’s journey forever a multi-generational affair…the passing on of ways that will inhabit the fingers of a people yet to be…

…for those who have forgotten, here is the situation: we emerge from unknowing with no sense of an identity prior to our vaginal entry into this experience of carbon-based life in space and time. tacitly self-referential we become ever more nuanced as we make and are made in the intersubjective tangle that is all that we can be until we are enfolded into the unknowing of death with no sense for an identity beyond the silver cord’s severance.

we are always already within this tale inscribed in the flesh of our being. it is only here that we are able to tell stories of what was before and what will come after. only here that we speak of what the self-referential now and the you/non-you dichotomy mean. the now is the space for meaning.

mean something today.


And with that, I decide to skip the roudy reprise by the band and let us all quietly stream out from this place. May we all be more resolved to do just that. I am, and for at least this cycle of life, however long it shall be, you will see me sink deeper into the artistry, further into meaning and farther away from saying how exactly it is supposed to be, at least on this public street corner.


Gospel Song

I love you for all thing things we know and all the things we don’t know nothin’ about
And I put up with all the shit down here as we work it all, work it all out
And we act all confused and scared all the time but it’s only when we’ve lost the count
Cuz yer comin’ through in the end with your eternal super-saver discount

I love you, some cheesy line here
It’s ok it ain’t clear
I just need to spit it out
There’s nothing to scream, scream and shout
Over. ‘Cuz it ain’t
And I am no, I am no saint
And so I buy you another drink
and say what a gift it is to think

Yeahy-yeahy-yeah…

There are those that claim you can kill in his name
There are those that think you can’t spill your seed in the sink
There are those with social success that they call being blessed
But I just think that the main thing is the main thing is the…

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