Ditch the Garbage!

This is the title track and the opener, and it is the rawest thing on the album by design. Every other record in this catalog had its vocabulary worked out - the floor, the costumes, the framework. Ditch the Garbage! goes back before any of that, to the moment a person knows something is wrong before they can name what is right. I don't have a name for it yet, but I know it isn't the Author. So pull this off me.

The whole song is an inventory of refusal. The bishop's permission, the council vote, the tribal handshake, the test that isn't doctrine but sounds like one, the seminary chair, the borrowed Greek metaphysics dressed in suit and tie and called the gospel, the altar-call performance, the rapture chart, the federal fiction. It is a person throwing things on the curb and setting the curb on fire - and notice the rule that governs the burning. Whatever is true survives the burn. Whatever isn't is supposed to go. That is not recklessness. That is the right confidence: truth cannot be destroyed by fire, so burn the pile and see what is left standing.

I gave this to a hard, mid-90s rock voice because that is what this stage of the journey actually sounds like - more fire than vocabulary. The bridge admits it plainly. I don't have the words for this yet. I just know the floor I'm standing on is not the one. And the final chorus dates the whole thing honestly. Twenty years from now I'll have a vocabulary. But tonight all I have is the fire, and the no is enough to start.