E5: The God In You; S8: Cleaning and "Clean"

I’m making this episode in the middle of cleaning my floors — laminate, tile, dust bunnies everywhere — and I didn’t vacuum first, so everything feels a little chaotic. But honestly, that’s fine. My life is a mess and I kind of like it that way. I’m trying to get caught up on this backlog of songs and episodes I’ve been sitting on for years because I kept pretending I needed to follow some “normal podcast” schedule. I thought I had to wait until I crossed some imaginary line where enough people were listening to justify releasing more. Maybe I’ve crossed it now. Maybe not. Either way, I have too much bottled up, and my only real goal is to get it out.This song — The God in You — is one I wrote in 1994. I was about a year into AA, trying to figure out what the hell “turning my will over to God” was supposed to mean. I’d had this weird, self‑directed relationship with God since childhood: choosing church over bowling or baseball, singing Christmas songs in right field as a kind of prayer, lighting candles for friends’ families, hoping Jesus would keep the ball from coming toward me. I didn’t have theology; I had instinct.By my early twenties, everything around me was collapsing. The AIDS crisis was everywhere. Reagan hadn’t said the word. I was checking my body for Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions every morning, trying to imagine an art career while wondering if I’d start dying today. And underneath all of that was the rage of realizing how America built its myth of greatness on slavery, colonization, exploitation — insisting it was holy while standing on broken backs. I was furious, scared, overloaded, and trying to survive my own nervous system.So the idea of a God who could calm me — who could help me see the world without needing to drown it in drugs — became strangely appealing. I was reading A Course in Miracles, thinking about the Holy Spirit as “God’s eyes,” this idea that you could swap out your own vision for something gentler. That you could look at someone and see what God sees instead of what fear sees.That’s what this song is about.It’s simple.It’s direct.It’s me trying to see the god in someone else because I couldn’t see anything good in the world at the time.I obsessed over this song back then, and I’m obsessing over it now. I’m releasing it while I’m cleaning my house, rewarding myself for mopping floors by making a podcast episode. The house smells better. There’s still dog hair everywhere. There’s still too much shit lying around. But I’m alive, and life is crazy, and I don’t want a life that isn’t crazy.So here it is: The God in You.Written in 1994.Held onto for decades.Finally let out.