An Open Letter to Jeff Tweedy

Fan mail from some flounder

Dear Jeff Tweedy,

I love you. I love your book (#3 - World Within A Song). I love yer music. You’ve made a jukebox soundtrack very solid underscoring my Chicagoland life in the suburbs.

Your book and Caprice Classic reminded me that we cut a muffler off an Integra that was dragging down I-355 somewhere near Schaumburg years ago, using a pair of regular orange handled scissors. Cut and rip, cut and rip, bloody hands and stupid parking lot devastation. We weren’t intoxicated either. This is the old car broke resourcefulness of artists who can’t give a damn, but need a damned car and don’t deserve one. Can’t care for one. Impossible. At least we had scissors. Boy scout prepared, I say.

So, the spirit soars in you, your heart swings in it. You’ve heard polyrhythms in Scottish fire alarms and Timothy B Schmit was delivered right to your side where your covenant heart, God there, tickled you to want to say something and you didn’t, but—why can’t cool people like us go ahead and leave a word like “nonbeliever” (p. 98) off of our nametag lapel?

When I say God, I’m obviously not referring to a white bearded man in the sky waiting to smite gay and puking people for sins that aren’t sins, and I just know that if you’re creative and deep feeling, like you are, you already know about the magic and the mystery. You already have your channel open to God and you’re already moved by that holy holy holy spirit that’s moving and breathing in us. You’ve already found that all the right spirited moves you make for love and art and truth get backed up double, triple, quadruple by responsive moves of the benevolent universe.

You don’t have to know what is there to cry out to it and that’s all I’m saying, you beautiful Tweedy. You child of God. You don’t have to be sure to call yourself a nonbeliever. You could leave the door open just a crack. Just that crack you already have open because you hear music through that little crack. You already know.

The spiritual awakening all the world needs is not going to come from abusive churches, shiny Christian aliens who never say a real thing, and psychotic politicians spewing the oxymoronic hate of the Lord. It’s going to come from creative artists and swamp people who have fucked themselves over repeatedly with pot cookies and/or tequila. The children traumatized by using the CBGB’s toilet or a place of equivalent filth where God lives.

God lives everywhere and when your tomboy friend hugged you after the show, God did that. And when your Chevy Caprice was gone in the morning never to be seen again, forgiveness, God did that too. Where did the red glass heart come from? God. And I’ve turned Misunderstood up to 11 in my living room and, Tweedy, when your Chicago show starts with that song and my face is drenched in human sweat and holy tears, I know you know.

Nonbeliever is not a label that sticks to you. It’s kind of like my drummer husband trying to say “I don’t really play the drums, I just screw around with them” or me, madly scrawling, scribbling and saying “I like to write, but I’m not a writer.” Nonsense.

There’s a reason the door you closed on believing keeps refusing to stay closed. And we don’t have to proclaim affiliation or put our dressed-up butts in church pews or synagogue seats imbibing “the shared delusions of religion” (p. 99) to say I believe in God, so I spoke. You are speaking it all the time. Faith is cool like that.

The way we heal creation is by being our own inimitable God selves, living the love and releasing the truth, so 44 year old suburban mothers dance towards their husbands in incense and book-filled living rooms swinging hips to say she fell in love with the drummer another then another.

And thank you so much for that Television song and the Minutemen. I know so much and yet I know nothing. There’s so much music yet to adore and explore. Abundance.

Here we are, esoteric and picky and disdainful, but the more we sit open, turning pages on the thoughtful gift to me you set in motion –your book, you writing it—the more we receive, and so I’m keeping the gift in motion and rolling it to connected dot thoughts, to inspiration, to creation of things too, and who is grinning there open summer teeth and loving us endlessly, no matter what we did to our cars and friends and bodies? God.

God and art, two sides of the same holy penny I picked up in the parking lot on my way to lunch hour where I read more of your book and wiped my blessed fool eyes over “It might be the only time anyone has ever called me courageous to my face” (p. 135). God did that too and nonbeliever is…not a word I care to use anymore. Neither agnostic, nor atheist, nor any such ill-fitting suit of clothing we don’t wear unless we’re performing, and I don’t want to perform anymore. How about you?

I dig the art truth, recognize it, resonate it. It’s all just more clues to probing the mystery. The music is all spirit spewing and I’ll leave my door open if you do too. Everyone is on their own spiritual journey in the Church of the Future. We can talk about it, and you already are. “I think it’s important we remain open to these moments” (p. 211).

Love. God in my heart to yours, where God also lives. Love Tweedy. Love Miranda.