A Cold and Very Broken Hallelujah
creative writing post (#43)
Context: this post is a writing experiment in poetic narrative nonfiction in essay form.
That means: it’s partly a bit of practice, akin to how I sometimes pick an object and try to do a 3D rendering with pencil. And it’s partly my trying to figure out what I am feeling. The “object” in this case is my idiosyncratic experience of driving home in December: what I see, what it makes me think about. I’m trying to capture it in writing, if I can, so that it’s recognizable or relatable, at least a little, for a naive reader, and simultaneously figure out what I’m feeling—all I know for sure is that it’s intense, and it hurts. But it hurts in an unfamiliar way.
All quotes in italics are song lyrics, which are identified in footnotes.
Content Warning: this contains references to suicide, depression, child abuse, trauma, Hunter Biden, etc. It’s a tough time of year, so take care of yourself with regard to what you choose to put in your mind. Including my ramblings.
I: The Arch in Archetype and the Axe in Property Taxes
“And to Christ, a cross.
And to me, a chair.
I will sit and earn the ransom from up here.”1
I live in deeply rural Vermont, which means my shortest drive home is thirty minutes, even in summer. In winter, driving through snow can take twice that long.
I nearly always discipline myself to just think while I drive home. Long stretches on curvy, two-lane roads reveal Vermont’s idyllic beauty in all its seasonal variety.
Each drive feels like being immersed in a master painter’s finest work: the watercolors of autumn give way to monochromatic winter studies, which transform into the dreamy pastels of spring and the lush oils of summer.
When it’s snowing and I need a confidence boost—I’m far from sure of myself, as a winter driver—I’ll put on my Trans-Siberian Orchestra Christmas playlist and sing along.
But mostly, I just think.
Driving these roads, with their unbroken stretches of beauty and solitude, reminds me that meaning doesn’t just appear—it has to be created, brought into existence through effort and intention.
Is beauty still beauty if humans fail to notice it?
Meaning and the responsibility of finding it: maybe that’s why my favorite part of the drive is passing houses lit up from within.
Out here, where cars are rare and curtains are often an afterthought, it’s easy to glimpse the lives inside.
I see families laughing, hugging, playing, cooking, and sharing meals. Conflict is rare, or at least harder to detect from the road. Mostly, these houses radiate warmth, happiness, and love.
They aren’t just houses. They’re homes.
Homes are places where it’s okay to mess up, to fail, to get sick, to be imperfect.
They’re spaces where people are loved simply for being, not for being helpful, useful, interesting, or otherwise having a utility function. That’s what makes them so profoundly hopeful, so achingly beautiful to me.
I think about these homes as I pass, and though my face stays frozen from the cold, my heart smiles.
That smile fades when I remember one of America’s harshest ironies: we never really own our homes.
I will own a house someday, largely because this Substack is letting me pay off my student loans ahead of schedule.
I will, I hope, successfully make it into a home for myself.
But it will never really be fully mine. If I fail, for any reason, to pay the confiscatory property taxes demanded by the state of Vermont, they will come and take possession of their house.
It will always be as much their house as mine, which is both a “first world problem” and a moral violation of the highest order.
That’s one of the inherent contradictions to being American: everything is like that. Your government is doing its best to strip you of your dignity, and you must react to this without forgetting that you are luckier than all but a minuscule fraction of a minuscule fraction of humans who have ever lived.
You must reconcile these extremes and lead a balanced life anyway.
II: Hunter Biden and My Time-Traveling Assassin
“She looks up at the building, says she’s thinking of jumping.
She says she’s tired of life — she must be tired of something.”2
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that feels almost noble, as though being tired of something profound might justify the weight of it all.
But that’s not what this is about.
Sometimes, on these drives, I imagine a different life for myself: that of a time-traveling assassin. It’s ridiculous, I know, but there’s a strange comfort in pretending I could excise moments in history like tumors.
Rural Vermont would be an ideal place for a time-traveling assassin to hide out. New Englanders have perfected the art of leaving each other alone — not out of rudeness, but because they understand solitude.
There are historical inflection points, those hinge moments when if a key player had died just before doing something significant, good or bad, everything might have changed.
Life is a complex system, and these scenarios, while fun to imagine, are impossible to fully grok. The ripple effects stretch too far and twist too wildly for us to see where they would end.
I never let myself imagine assassinating individual humans for their personal sins, no matter how egregious. It’s always the historical figures — the ones who wielded their power to shape cultures and nations — that I consider.
Why?
Because anger is my most ferocious demon, always clawing at the edges of my resolve. I don’t need to feed it. It feeds itself plenty as it is.
I’ve erected a wall — a PTSD wall — in my soul for what I’m about to describe.
It’s an odd thing, to sense your anger without feeling it, like knowing a storm is building but never seeing the clouds. I only know it’s there the way I once knew I had an ovarian cyst: not by its presence, but by the rupture.
For this, though, I’ve made damn sure it will never rupture.
That’s the only reason I can talk about it. If I didn’t have that wall, I’d choke on my own fury.
I’m too angry, but most of you aren’t angry enough. That’s the irony — my anger is so overwhelming it cancels itself out, leaving me oddly calm.
But yours? Yours should be blazing.
The dirty laundry of the Biden family is so voluminous that keeping track of every detail would be exhausting — even for someone glued to their screen, steeped in every news cycle.
But this isn’t hidden. It’s public knowledge, if you look past the mainstream media and dig into sources willing to critique a Democratic elder statesman without flinching.
President Biden’s granddaughter, Natalie, was ten years old when her father, Beau, died. By all accounts, he was a wonderful father — the kind who made his daughter feel safe and deeply loved.
I cannot imagine the internal experience of being a ten-year-old girl whose father loves her, but I understand that experience from the lack of it.
I cannot imagine what it’s like to be a ten-year-old girl whose father loves her, but I understand the shape of that loss. I know it intimately — not from having it, but from the void where it should have been.
Ten-year-old girls stand on the fragile edge of childhood and adolescence, mere months away from a storm of hormones and an onslaught of new emotions they can’t yet understand.
Many of these bewildering, often frightening new experiences revolve around the world of men — a world that can feel both alluring and dangerous.
Ten might be the worst possible age for a girl to lose her daddy. She’s old enough to realize just how little she knows about the things he could explain, but too young to face the world without him.
I’ve written before about how pedophiles groom their victims — the evil precision with which they target children starved for love, exploiting that unmet need to manipulate them into submission.
Worse still, into the illusion that they weren’t manipulated at all — that what happened was their choice, their fault, their burden to carry.
Only one thing could possibly be more evil.
For a little girl whose daddy is gone — dead, buried, and never, ever, ever, ever, ever coming back — to be groomed by the one man left who should protect her: her uncle.
To be preyed upon by the one man who could answer her questions the way her daddy would have. Because he, too, was there, and he knows all the stories.
Only Natalie knows what her uncle did or didn’t do to her when she was as vulnerable as a human being can be. I certainly don’t know.
What we do know: even in the depths of grief and addiction, Natalie’s mother was concerned enough about Hunter’s “inappropriate” behavior to involve a therapist and, however imperfectly, try to protect her daughter.
Hunter Biden’s pardon covers every crime he may have committed starting a year before his niece’s daddy died.
III: Horny To Worship
“Take me to church; I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies…good God, let me give you my life!”3
Worship has always been transactional: devotion for safety, obedience for love. It’s an act of surrender, yes, but also one of brazen, visceral longing. It’s a bargain you make with your body, your breath, your very self.
The idea that “humans are built for worship” annoys me—mostly because it feels true. Worship is baked into our flesh, like hunger or sex. We were built to tremble before something, to moan out gratitude or need. The real question isn’t if we’ll worship but what.
I wish that wasn’t true. But it is.
Worship loves company. It thrives in churches, where bodies sway and voices rise as one, where intimacy grows thick and heady under stained glass and candlelight.
Lean in, children, while Auntie MathNerd tells you a secret. Ready?
Community is the cover story; the real pull is that primal high.
Organized religion has blood on its hands, and it keeps washing them in holy water. Fundamentalist Islam, fundamentalist Christianity—different flags, same carnage. One sings hymns, the other calls to prayer, but both have left a multitude of raped and beaten children bruised, broken, and begging for deliverance.
I grew up in a church that marinated in “praise and worship” for two sweaty hours every Sunday. The praise felt fake, a neon sign flashing “Look how holy we are!” But the worship? That was raw, needy, and intimate—especially the songs that turned God into a father who’d hold you while you broke.
My favorite was “Take Me Away.” It was the first time I realized just how wrecked my hearing already was, but I didn’t care. The song promised a peace so lush and all-encompassing I’d have traded the rest of my hearing—every last note, whisper, and breath—for even a fleeting taste of being found acceptable.
I never did. The experience of the song was never mine, not for one minute.
As a kid, I assumed it was my fault. Unworthy. Dirty. Too flawed to touch even the hem of the divine.
As an adult, I came to rationally recognize the nonexistence of gods. But that lens of unworthiness stayed fused to my bones.
Even without a deity, some fragment of my soul still aches for shekinah glory.
Worship is transcendence through submission, an ecstatic collapse into smallness. It’s the breathtaking realization that you’re nothing but a speck—and that the speck matters anyway.
There are other experiences of collective transcendence. (Concerts come to mind.) But churches specialize in the performance of transcendence, and that’s where the trouble starts. People in groups, being all….peopley. In groups.
Still, the impulse to worship claws its way up from my depths. It’s visceral, unrelenting, a hunger I resisted naming for years, not wanting to acknowledge it or own it.
But that’s what it is.
It’s most powerful in New England autumn, when the world around me is a watercolor painted by a master.
But it’s not just autumn. Worship sneaks into music, into art, into the fierce pride I feel when someone I love lights up the world with something extraordinary. That pride burns like reverence—a helpless, holy awe at the miracle of another person’s greatness.
The rest of part III, and parts IV through VII, follow after the paywall.
Titles: IV: I am Not An Onion in Hightop Chuck Taylors, V: The Smell of Blood and Lilac Carpet Powder, VI: Confrontation Between the Fragments, and VII: Tattoo of A Forest Green Question Mark.
This post is part of my creative writing series, wherein I take risks, post photo essays, review Woke books to mock them viciously, post writing experiments, and tell personal stories. Paid subscribers have access to this series in full, not just the occasional ones I don’t paywall, as well as my series on How to Not Suck at Math. They can also leave comments when they’re turned on (weekends for now; weekday comments will return when I’m more settled into my new job).