I have a million little things to say, tiny notes I’ve collected throughout the last 48 hours or so.

Maybe I’ll say them all briefly. Maybe I’ll try to find a connection between two or three. That’s always a goodness.

So is taking a lyric like a scripture to base a sermon on.

Come on aboard, I promise you you won’t hurt the horse
We treat him well, we feed him well
There’s lots of room for you on the bandwagon
The road may be rough, the weather may forget us

But won’t we all parade around
And sing our songs and wave our flags
A magic kingdom, greet us all hello
Greet us hello, greet us hello

That is REM, from their somewhat obscure collection of covers and oddities called Dead Letter Office. The song is just called “Bandwagon“.

People online will tell you all sorts of things about it–that it’s a sly slam at the band U2 for its preachiness about Faith, that it’s just making fun of the families that fetishize trips to Disney …

To me the perfect genius of the song is that the Bandwagon can be literally anything. Smoking pot with the cool kids as a teenager. Getting caught up in Scientology or Catholicism. Being a good citizen or patriot, so proud of your greatest country in the world and so willing to bomb that other Evil Empire over there.

It’s a satire of collectivism in any form.

These days, I’m more collective-oriented than I’ve ever been before.

But when this song was fresh and I was too, everything was about the heroism of the individual, and it was joyously easy to make fun of those yokel barn-raisers of any stripe, no matter how fine their clothes or how precise their diction.

I had no true friends and I had no family name, no colleagues or co-workers I gave one damn about, no co-religionists or comrades. Even my art was always going to be a thing I practiced completely alone, and my art was the most important thing. In theory ….

In reality the rent was just as important as the art. As must needs be, once You’ve been awakened from sleep in the park by a roving dog being “walked” off-leash by some rich collectivist asshole with a proper job to get to.

The migraine tensions between the necessary freedom to create and the necessary security of four walls defines my life to this very day, more than any other complex abstract reality.