Maybe one of the saddest songs I've ever written, about that dead feeling I was harboring near the end of my time as a member of the local Nazarene Church I had been attending since I graduated High School. I had long since given up on God and his people, having been recently betrayed by both people I considered to be like family, and a man I looked up to as a mentor over a matter so petty, I can't honestly believe they cared about it, so much. I've been in many churches in my life, and each one of them has their own set of politics and their own number of hypocritical assholes who go to sully the name of the God they claim to represent, but I honestly cannot remember a church so dominated by its parishioners' politics as the Nazarene Church I attended in Warren.

On top of this, I found myself kind of just going along with a lot of these church activities that I honestly didn't believe in, at all. The kicker being a part of a Pro-Life protest in Warren in the fall of 2001, even ending up on the evening news spouting off some BS line I was basically taught by the church as a "go-to" line one should say when confronted by the press - essentially, that you know of someone who's had an abortion and regretted it, because it does happen. The problem is, few of us actually know of these women personally, and yet, we're taught to just go to this excuse, anyway, because we still know "of" this person, therefore, it's not technically a lie... even though it absolutely is. So here I am, on the evening news, passing off this talking point as if it were an actual truth, supporting a cause I didn't even really believe in because abortion is, in fact, NOT MURDER. A woman does not forfeit her rights just because she gets pregnant, and she doesn't owe it to anyone to carry and give birth to a child that she neither wants nor has the means to take care of. If anything, the Pro-Life movement should be spending more time promoting contraception and adoption instead of protesting abortion, but, of course, because they're fucking hypocrites with no sense of logic whatsoever. they actually condemn the use of contraception entirely and only pay lip service to the idea of adoption if they ever bother to mention it, at all.

So, here I am, at the end of 2001, about to move out of Warren for Vienna, and reaching the end of my rope with the Nazarene Church, its insane politics, and the indifferent nature of God himself towards any sort of PR concerning what people will and will not do in his name. I've spent the last year fighting for my spot on the church's Praise Team because a small minority of folks felt the drums (which I played) were "too loud", finding myself betrayed by people I called family and a mentor I trusted all because of the fact that I was good friends with one of the girls in the Youth Group, and she might have been falling in love with me... it certainly broke her heart to know that I was taking the advice of the aforementioned mentor to put some distance between us, which only made the situation even worse. And on top of all of that, I found myself becoming a person I couldn't stand, participating in activities that went against my core beliefs in a shallow attempt to reconcile myself with the moral demands of an indifferent God who seemed to enjoy watching me be in pain.

This song is basically the culmination of those last few months of 2001, watching the world lose its mind over 9/11, watching the so-called "people of God" go full hypocrite over petty, meaningless things, and coming to the conclusion that I might just feel better letting all of this shit go, walking away from the church and God altogether, and moving on with my life.