Clear As Day
On a random shuffle, an Outkast verse from 1996, and the line I've been afraid to say out loud.
An hour before this, I was telling my friend Osel that reality is mind-blowing. That if anyone were truly awake — actually awake, not phone-awake, not coffee-awake, but awake — they would have their mind blown constantly. The signal is everywhere. Most people have the volume turned down. God works in mysterious ways, I said, which is the kind of thing you say when you don’t have better language for what you mean.
Then I got on the SkyTrain. I was going to meet someone for the first time. I put on shuffle. I wasn’t picking. I was just letting it run.
Outkast came on. ATLiens. A song I have heard a thousand times.
For most of my life I did not hear lyrics. I listened to music for the vibe, for the feeling under the words, for how a track moves — not for what’s being said. I have made entire mixes from songs whose lyrics I could not quote back to you. This was a known thing about me.
It stopped being true about eight years ago. Around the time I found God. Around the time I took my shahadah. Something shifted in how I heard music — not all at once, and not cleanly, because the years that followed were not clean. But starting then. Lines I had heard a thousand times started to land. Deeper meanings under the surface of songs I had been treating as background slowly became the foreground. I would catch a lyric I had heard since I was a kid and realize I had been missing the entire point of the song.
I have wondered, since then, about something I cannot resolve: did the artists know what they were writing? Did André sit down in 1996 and say to himself, I am going to write a line about how sobriety clears the signal between you and God, and one day a man on a train in Vancouver, thirty years from now, who has not yet been born into the faith he will eventually find, will read this line and understand it was written for him? Probably not. Probably he was rapping. Probably he meant something specific to his own life and not anyone else’s.
But it does not matter what he meant. The signal came through anyway. Sometimes the channel does not know it is a channel. Sometimes the artist writes the line, and only the listener — years later, in a different context, with a different need — hears what was actually being said. The transmission and the transmitter are not the same thing. Whether André intended the line for me is a question only André can answer, and even he may only see it in hindsight. The Quran came through a man who could not read. Channels do not have to understand what passes through them.
The screen was showing the lyrics. I looked down. I read them while André was rapping them. And what I read was this:
God works in mysterious ways, so when he starts The job of speaking through us, we be so sincere with this here No drugs or alcohol, so I can get the signal clear as day Put my Glock away, I got a stronger weapon
I had said God works in mysterious ways one hour earlier. To a friend. Out loud.
And then a song I did not choose, on a shuffle I did not control, on a train I was on by myself, said it back to me. And then kept going. And said the next thing. The thing I have been holding in my mouth for years and not saying.
The thing I haven’t been saying
Everyone around me is drinking. Everyone around me is doing something. I am not. I haven’t for a long time. I do not announce this and I do not bring it up and when people offer me something I find a quiet way to say no that doesn’t make it a whole conversation. I do not want to be the guy at the party who turned into a sermon. I have seen that guy. Nobody listens to that guy. The people he is trying to reach take one look at him and pull further away, because nothing makes a person defend a habit harder than being told they need to stop.
So I shut up. I have been shutting up for years.
But here is what I actually think, and I am going to write it down here because André said it for me on a train and I do not have an excuse anymore:
Alcohol and drugs are a crutch. The signal you are looking for, the thing you keep chasing through the bottle and the bag and the next thing and the next one after that — it is on the other side of the crutch. You will not get to it through the substance. You will only get to it when you put the substance down. The substance is what is between you and the thing. It is not the path to it. It is the wall.
The Quran says do not pray drunk. Do not approach prayer while you are intoxicated, until you know what you are saying. That line has been with me since I came to the faith. It is not a rule about etiquette. It is a description of physics. You cannot receive the signal cleanly through a substance that distorts the signal. That is not a moral statement. It is a technical statement. The receiver has to be clean for the broadcast to come through.
This is not me telling anyone how to live. I am still not going to say it to my friends at the party. I love them. I am not their imam. I am not their rehab. I am not their judge.
But this is a website. And what a website is for is saying the thing once, in public, in your own words, so that anyone who is ready to hear it can find it, and anyone who isn’t can scroll past without you having shoved it in their face.
So I am saying it once. Here. Where it can be found by whoever needs to find it.
Alcohol is a poison. Drugs are a poison. They are between you and the signal. The signal is real. It is coming through right now. It has been coming through the whole time. The only reason you cannot hear it is because of what you keep putting in the way.
You do not have to believe me. I have a 1996 Outkast verse on my side. He said it before I did. He said it before I was even ready to say it.
I am not saying this from the outside
I want to be clear about something, because the version of this essay where the sober guy explains sobriety to people who drink is a version I would not believe if I were reading it. That guy has no standing. That guy has never been inside the thing he is describing. That guy is wrong about how it feels, because he has never felt it, and you can tell.
I am not that guy.
I never really enjoyed drinking. That part is true. But I smoked weed daily, heavily, for about fifteen years. Not casually. Not at parties. Every day. The kind of relationship with a substance where you don’t remember what your baseline is anymore because you have not been at your baseline in over a decade. The kind where it stops being a thing you do and starts being a thing you are.
I know exactly what it feels like to need it to fall asleep. To need it to be social. To need it to come down from being social. To need it to write, to need it to listen to music, to need it to enjoy music, which is one of the lies it tells you the loudest. I know what it feels like to think you are fine, you are functioning, you are creative, you are spiritual even — especially spiritual — and to be wrong about all of it, and to not know you are wrong, because the thing that would tell you that you are wrong is the same thing you have been blocking for fifteen years.
I put it down eventually, but not when I came to the faith. That is the part I want to tell honestly, because the clean version of this story — I found God and the substance fell away — is a lie, and I am not interested in the clean version. The clean version is what people want sobriety stories to sound like. The real version is messier and more useful.
I came to the faith and kept smoking. The faith was the most powerful thing that had ever happened to me. The connection was so strong it was almost too much to hold. And I was still smoking every day, because addiction does not care what you have just found. Addiction is older than your epiphany. Addiction was there first and it does not move out because a new tenant showed up.
What happened next is the part I have not told many people.
I was smoking black market THC vape pens. They were new on the market. Nobody knew yet what was in them. We found out later — vitamin E acetate, pesticides, heavy metals, additives that should never have entered a human lung. They were poisoning people across the continent. The CDC eventually tracked thousands of hospitalizations. People died. The news caught up to it months after my body already had.
The combination of an overwhelming spiritual opening and a contaminated substance in my lungs every day put me into a drug-induced psychosis. I was hospitalized. And here is the part that tells you what addiction actually is, because I am not going to soften this: I smuggled the vapes into the hospital. The thing that put me there, I kept using while I was there. My recovery was delayed because of it. The substance was still winning at the bottom of the deepest hole I had ever been in. The faith I had just found was not enough to stop me. Nothing was enough to stop me, for a while.
I came out of it eventually. It took longer than it should have. The story of how I came out is a longer story for another day. But I want to say this clearly, because the essay above almost told it wrong: I did not find God and put down the fog. I found God inside the fog, and the fog nearly killed me anyway, and getting out took years and a hospital bed and contaminated product almost taking me with it. The faith was real the whole time. The addiction was real the whole time. They coexisted in me longer than I wish they had.
The reason I am telling you this is because if you are reading this and you are using something, and you have also found something real — a faith, a calling, a love, a clarity — and you are telling yourself that the substance and the spiritual thing can live in you together, I am here to tell you they can. I did it. I lived that way. And the substance almost won anyway. The faith does not protect you from what you are putting in your body. The faith does not detoxify the chemicals. The faith does not stop the psychosis. The faith was in me the whole time I was in that hospital bed sneaking hits between vital checks. The faith did not save me from the substance. Stopping the substance saved me from the substance. The faith just gave me a reason to want to.
That is the only credential I have, and it is the only one that matters for this. I lived on the other side of it. I know what the wall sounds like from the inside. I know what it sounds like when it comes down. The difference is not subtle. The difference is the entire reason this website exists.
That is when the lyrics started to land. That is when songs I had played a thousand times started teaching me. That is, years later, why a line from 1996 was waiting for me on a train tonight.
What this is
This is not a Saint. André is alive and well and I hope he stays that way for a long time. He has not been canonized. He does not need to be.
This is the other thing the site is for. The transmissions. The moments when the signal is coming through so clearly that you cannot pretend it is random anymore. The moments when reality acts like it is paying attention to you, specifically, on a Sunday evening, on a train, on your way somewhere new.
I do not believe in coincidences. I have not believed in coincidences for a long time. The cost of not believing in coincidences is that you have to take them seriously when they happen. You have to write them down. You have to honor the fact that they showed up.
This is me honoring it.
The signal came through clear as day. André said so — whether he knew it or not. Channels do not always know they are channels. The line was waiting in the song for almost thirty years, for me, for tonight, for the version of me that had finally cleared enough fog to read it.
I heard him this time.