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Today, I have the nerve-racking honor of presenting to you my new EP, Ephemeral. I like to think I am known by my friends and acquaintances as one who speaks his mind and presents himself as an open book to all regardless of any stigmas or pressures not to do so—and also as an overall promoter of free thought, of truth, and of authenticity. To that end, I tend to win some people’s approval and many others’ disdain. I don’t expect this six song collection to be any different.

“Taylor used to sing about mean girls. Now, she’s become one.” Seventeen Magazine posted an online article on Saturday saying just that. The article made an argument I am hearing and reading over and over from literally hundreds of people that says Taylor Swift, with the release of her new single, has basically become a mean, petty, and querulous person who no longer deserves any of the respect she may once have had. But has she really walked that far away from what she has always stood for or represented?

Well, I’ve done it again. The first was an encouragement to live in the same way as the One who created me, the second a reminder of my identity as His adopted son and fellow heir to His infinite domain, and the third comes as both a reminder and an encouragement.

A year and a half ago or more, I began to write a poem filled with a grand collection of ironies to display the struggle of loneliness in a world of hundreds of friends. It is entitled Alone Together and remains unfinished and unreleased until I can find at last the perfect arrangement of words for the final verse, which may very well never happen. In this poem, however, resides one line that I feel compelled to make public now that I have come to a certain realization.

“I’d rather hear a thousand ‘fucks’ than one insincere ‘Jesus.’” We, as Christians, focus too much on the words we do and don’t say. We grow up being taught that cussing is sinful—that somehow random arrangements of letters are an abomination.

On Friday, August 30th, just two days after my eighteenth birthday, I rode my bike to the Tippecanoe Mall, window-shopped for an hour or so, and eventually purchased a couple new pairs of jeans from Hot Topic. This trip to the mall, however, was not a planned event; I was there only to kill time until Sacred Apple Tattoo—a mere mile away—opened for business.