Talk Vomit

By Dan DiPiero

Somehow in the haze of 1995 I heard two songs that treated God as a woman. Or maybe one did, and the other treated a woman as God. Either way it was the most I’d thought about God in a long while, and that’s saying something for a nine-year-old in catholic school, where I’d stay through sixth grade and then get confirmed even after leaving. One sign that the confirmation process is not oriented towards the people undergoing it is that the ritual asks children (so often children) to choose names for themselves when they’re still too young to know much beyond what’s right in front of them at a given moment. When it came time for my choice I had already come to dislike the awkward way my own name fit in my mouth, and because I thought my cousin Mike was the coolest person I knew, and because I thought he was cool mostly insofar as he resembled Sean from Boy Meets World—with his straight hair parted down the middle making an impossible ideal for me and my curls—I’m sure I considered Michael at least briefly before deciding it was too obvious. Taking my cue from Buffy instead, I flipped to the end of whatever directory of saints I had been handed so I could find out what names began with “X.” Hell if I can remember which one I chose—unlike some, I later forgot about whatever boys were being told was cool in 1995.

Which is to say that despite my upbringing or maybe because of it, I spent more time falling hard for people I could never be like than I did contemplating metaphysics. Doubtless I wasn’t the only one, but then why were so many of us in church? I asked my mom once in a Subway what would happen if she went to heaven and then I did some bad shit on earth so I couldn’t go there too — How could it still be heaven, for her, if I wasn’t there? I think I was young enough to receive whatever answer she gave in good faith; but eventually, when it became clear the church responded to difficult inquiries by referencing some kind of grand mystery, I pretty much clocked out.

This is not a story about God, or at least not one so withholding. It’s a story about Joan Osborne’s nose ring, and how even though she was speculating about God hiding among strangers on a bus it was clear from how that video was shot that she was the holy one. Truly. To this day I don’t know what else might be going on in the video for “One of Us” and I don’t care to. Beside the sublime placidity of Osborne’s face singing directly into the camera, anything else is utterly immaterial. Nearly every time she appears on screen her face takes up the entire shot, ringed in gold that’s undeniably central and arresting, a totalizing vision. Concentric and resplendent circles make sacred geometry from her hoops, hidden at first by her hair, loops of a different kind. And finally, her nose ring, caught in the glare of a light that’s ever more radiant for resting above a strong red lip. There is nothing like that nose ring in the rest of the video; it is the core around which everything else rotates.

To say I had a crush on Osborne would be both under and overstating it. I don’t know if I could have told you, at nine, what a crush was. And yet like the music video itself, something in my orbit began to shift towards Osborne’s gravity, lunar and unnoticed and queer, if I’d only had the concept. If not crushes, one thing I could tell you about was obsession. And fantasy too, which is often the same thing. In the endlessness of my afternoons, what was the distance between my idolization of the Green Power Ranger and my infatuation with the Pink? Flattened out by my lack of language, both were enfolded equally into my private yearning.

These aren’t memories, really, but a series of impressions stitched together and consolidated. I can’t access the particularities of circumstance or moment beyond a sense—vague and hyper-specific at once—that these images mattered to me. Looking back at them, my question is this: what is a crush—what can a crush be—to a small boy who’s learning more each day to hide his feelings so far out of sight that not even he will be able to find them again?

Tiana Reid says, “In the end, all I want is the practice of crushing itself.” Alexandra Molotkow responds that at least “Half the time I crush, what I want—or what I want to want—is not possession, but instead a respectful and completely unilateral relationship to the idea of someone else.” Both writers find the crush compelling in part for its counterintuitive nonrelation to its object; it’s not the person at the other end of the feeling that matters but instead what the feeling does for us. If we recognize that the figure being crushed on is an unknowable fantasy in addition to a person, it’s clear that the contents of that fantasy are filled in by the one doing the crushing—the crushed upon is a projection, an image of what we want.

I am interested in what the crush reveals about the person pining for something beyond what they’ve been given. I am interested in what crushes could tell us about ourselves if we treated them as epistemologies rather than debilitating inducements. I am interested in how we bury our own passions so deeply that it requires an act of God to remind us what we once believed in. I am interested in how we teach ourselves to forget what we’ve only just discovered.

God was everywhere in 1995, or at least on the radio. “I met God this afternoon,” sings Peter Stuart in “Everything Falls Apart,” another hit single from that year. Where Osborne’s deity blended in with the crowd on a bus, Dog’s Eye View encountered them “riding on an uptown train.” Between the two, it’s starting to seem as though God privileges public transportation, aligned with working people and the idea of public services. This matters in part because—although it can be difficult to remember through the catatonia induced by social media and the nostalgia that blooms as a result—in 1995 Bill Clinton was still waging war against poor and queer and minority communities of all kinds, still prioritizing anything but the humble, everyday infrastructures through which you might encounter the divine. I’m not listening backwards because I imagine the 90s as a better moment, but because I’m always interested in what music imagines as freedom. I don’t think we were closer to heaven back then but I am compelled by the appearance of God at the top of the charts, even ephemerally, pointing towards utopia through transit that only exists in our songs. Maybe God is another name for whatever you dream about.

Yet we can’t turn away from the distance we’ve traversed. Utopia though it wasn’t, it’s true that in terms of the structure of the economy, 1995 had more in common with 1975 than it did 2015. What I mean is that in 1995, mostly, you didn’t have to agree to go into debt for the actual rest of your life if you wanted to attend university. In 1995, mostly, gigs were cheap and our attention spans were strong enough to enjoy them. Bands who broke through could tour and make a living, because even though Clinton would pass the Telecommunications Act in 1996, that shit hadn’t sunk in yet, so Ticketmaster and Clear Channel hadn’t had time to strangle the industry. The climate science was alarming, but in 1995 it was still possible to believe in a future. What I mean is that while I think we do need to be selective about what we romanticize, I also think that it’s significant that God is riding a train. There is nothing more representative of this country’s orientation towards public goods and collective responsibility than our rail network, which immigrants and enslaved people built until it covered every scrap of bare earth between the coasts and stayed that way until one very rich fascist demanded we tear it all back up again.

The song that out and out imagines God as a woman is called “Counting Blue Cars” by the band Dishwalla, another in this string of one-hit-wonders that seemed to reflect something about the shape of our dreaming. Again: our narrators are not driving, just counting cars as they venture on foot. I love rock music but I hate cars, and if that once put me at odds with some organizing mythology in the genre, at least in 1995 I had other models to choose from.

“Tell me all your thoughts on God / Cause I’m on my way to see her.” This pleading, ambivalent invitation hints at the song’s overarching narrative: to the extent that it tells a story, it’s one about a journey. Our narrator and a friend walk for the entire length of the song, asking “many questions, like children often do.” When I was nine, hearing Dishwalla blasted from tinny speakers at the public pool where footprints evaporated on concrete, I was entranced by its sympathy for the curious. The song makes God out as approachable, if you just walked long enough, and I had found myself willing. That she was a woman made the prospect infinitely more captivating. That she might actually answer your questions, beyond hope. Smarmy Pitchfork types look back and struggle to imagine what all the fuss was about, as if they aren’t getting paid to widen their own apertures.* It is worth noting that the band received death threats for talking about God that way.

Now 39, I locate my childhood bewitchment in two features: first, the song’s minor key, which I felt only subliminally for its pathos. Second and more important is the disconnect between the slowness of the guitar chords and the quicker rhythm of the drums. The guitars are spacious and ringing, declaring something and letting it settle to the earth, leaving time enough for your reaction. The drums take up the invitation by filling all the space that’s left, chattering away at a more rapid clip. And what that musical dynamic has always reminded me of is the way that a large structure like a home or a church will seem to spin very slowly relative to the ground if you zoom past on a train, two related but distinct rates of speed, off-kilter rotations hinting at a larger sense of scale.

Today I think about this on the red line, during the brief moment when it emerges from below ground to cross the Charles River, and I can glimpse from some new angle the city where I have landed. It can be clarifying to see one’s situation at a distance, which I think is the reason that Dr. Miller has me writing lists in therapy. Three stock phrases I can use to initiate small talk. Three values that I want to prioritize in the new year. Three crushes I cherished and what they disclose about the shape of my longing.

What I learned about myself in 1995 before stuffing my knowledge deep and spending the next 20 years trying to find it again—among other possibilities: That something isn’t right, somehow, because despite my friends and hobbies what characterizes the feeling of my days is a longing so imprecise but total that I will soon habituate to it without realizing, curling myself up around a hole. That the soaring ache of a distorted guitar is my quickest way to weeping. That I am starting to feel uncomfortable around most boys. That I’d rather talk about my feelings while staring into a field of dandelions than play wiffle ball again, and anyway last time Phil pulled down my shorts which I agreed was kinda funny except that everyone’s laughter seemed sharp somehow. That there is more in the world than what I’m being told to value, an inexhaustible majesty that I glimpse in music before losing it again. That to me God is a femme with a guitar. That the iconicity of Joan Osborne’s nose ring in my own life has become too monumental to be sorted into clean categories, so symbolic of a mystery unnamable that that it overflows whatever paltry containers we’ve developed language to try and sort our feelings into and therefore, in the end, rendering profoundly unclear to me whether what I was feeling was desire for her or desire to be her; and that the most accurate answer is undoubtedly both because I know now that one function of a crush is to smudge our meager efforts at clarity into a more properly human blur.

What a crush can be—among other possibilities: A secret disclosure. A tie that links accomplices. An index of values. A sensory world. A line of flight or an anchor. Everything or nothing. A clue about how to survive. A small and queer God. A divine impulse. A gift for those who haven’t closed themselves off to the unpredictable contingencies of the outside world, or who open themselves back up after learning how hollow it is to protect oneself in that way. A spell (on you). A knife at teleology’s throat. A relation of initial encounter, before anything has had time to sort itself into a coherent genre or social category, before you talk yourself out of it, that moment when all possible worlds still linger in the air but concentrated in a single point, worlds that have not yet come down to this one and therefore throb with potential. An enchantment, in other words. A train surfacing, briefly giving view to a wider world.

*In fairness, maybe they’re not. Getting paid, I mean.