The Healings Questionnaire, No. 2: Tim Quirk
The Healings Questionnaire, No. 2: Tim Quirk
A Q&A about death and god: "I stopped being scared of death in 1989, when I took some acid with a friend...and realized we're like light switches."
Hello and welcome to the second installment of the Healings Questionnaire, a new, recurring feature of this newsletter wherein people respond to my questions about faith, death, and related topics — the same types of questions friends and strangers asked me in the wake of my cancer diagnosis. You can read about the origin of the series here. This little Q&A about Death and God will be sent out on Sundays going forward, because duh.
This week’s contestant is Tim Quirk. To a lot of folks—specifically Gen X’ers who remember the significance of the phrase “college rock”—Tim is best known as the frontman for Too Much Joy, a band that made quite a name for itself during its ‘80s and ‘90s heyday, scoring a relative hit with their album Cereal Killers (great name), and getting arrested for testing the boundaries of our nation’s free speech laws, among other accomplishments.
To another group of folks, Tim’s a seasoned tech exec and what dweebs like me call a “thought leader” in the digital music space, which is how I first met him: Tim’s the one who hired me away from my journalism job to work at Rhapsody, one of the first music streaming services, or streaming services of any kind1. These days, Tim is still wearing both hats—occasionally reuniting Too Much Joy, touring with his band Wonderlick, and doing high-level tech stuff at a company called Zedge. I’m happy to call Tim a friend and mentor for nearly 20 years now. Here’s what he has to say about faith and death.
What happens when we die?
The exact same thing we see happen to our pets, or a skunk someone’s run over in the road, or that mosquito we squashed when it landed on our arm: our consciousness ceases to exist, and the complex molecules in our bodies begin the process of decomposing into simpler organic matter, which feeds other life. You can view that as depressing or beautiful, depending on your personality. But if you don’t believe in an afterlife for mosquitos (and I most definitely do not), I don’t see how it’s possible to believe in one for humans.
Are you afraid of death?
Not afraid, exactly (unless it’s 3 or 4am and I’m lying in the dark asking myself questions such as, “What if your consciousness actually DOES continue after your body decays, but it’s just like this, floating in the dark, being able to do nothing but THINK, forever?” in which case it absolutely fucking terrifies me).
I mean, I don’t WANT to die, and I can’t decide if the fact that I think/write/sing about it more than the average citizen seems to makes me well-adjusted or the exact opposite, but I stopped being scared of death in 1989, when I took some acid with a friend, walked through Golden Gate Park to Ocean Beach, and realized that we’re like light switches – right now we’re all flipped on, and one day we’ll each be flipped off, but we’re still light switches, you know?
I recognize that sounds stupid, but that’s the way it goes with hallucinogens: you have genuinely profound, life-changing moments of complete understanding about the nature of time and existence and the interconnectedness of all things, but that understanding is often beyond language. So when you try to verbalize those truths you knew with complete certainty later on, after your brain has reverted to its usual, puny way of functioning, you can just barely trace an outline of them with words that inevitably seem silly.
So, while I’m not exactly sanguine about my eventual demise, I do have a very strong memory that I once felt an absolutely calm acceptance of our ultimate fate, and though I can’t summon that feeling of peace at will, the memory that I once felt it has become its own kind of comfort.
Also, it helps that when my grandmother was 90 and my older brother told her he hoped he got to live as long as she had, she put her hand on his and said very seriously, “No, you don’t.”
What’s the closest you’ve come to death? What did you learn, if anything?
I don’t know how close this actually was, but I was once on a flight from SF to Chicago when we all heard a very loud WHOOMP!, and the aircraft suddenly dropped like 10,000 feet in a matter of seconds (not a nosedive; it’s just like we were flying horizontally at 35,000 feet and then suddenly we were doing the same thing at 25,000 feet, except that our stomachs took a while to catch up to the rest of our bodies), and the plane started shaking terribly, and passengers started shrieking, and we kept waiting for the captain to come on the intercom to tell us everything was OK, but he didn’t, because he was obviously too busy trying to keep the plane in the sky. And I had these thoughts in rapid succession:
I’ve had a pretty good run.
I’m going to miss Donna and Abby (my wife and daughter) terribly.
I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.
That first thought was not surprising to me (my life has objectively been very lucky and enjoyable so far!), but it was still comforting to know that’s how I responded in what might have been my final moments, rather than railing about the injustice of it all.
And that third thought seems related to your previous question: I’m not afraid of being dead; I’m afraid of knowing it’s about to happen and suffering in the moments just before it finally does. When it comes, I hope those moments of knowing are as brief as fucking possible. I want to go the way Joe Strummer did: in my sleep, hopefully completely unaware it’s even happening.
Do you believe in God? Explain.
I do not believe in God, and haven’t since I was at least 7 or 8. I have a very clear memory of realizing this: it was summer, I was at my town’s public swimming pool with my two best friends, and they were talking about what they’d learned earlier that day in Sunday school – a thing my parents did not force upon me. This thought appeared, fully formed, in my brain, and it felt like an undeniable truth: “This God stuff is obviously just a story people tell themselves, because it’s easier to think there’s a heaven than to think we’re the same as this mosquito I just killed. When I die I’ll just stop existing, and I won’t care, because I’ll be dead and won’t even know I ever wasn’t.”
Even though I was only 7 or 8, I already knew that this was an understanding I should probably keep to myself, out of politeness to my friends. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown more and more impatient with that dynamic. I’m not one of those irritating atheists who won’t shut up about it, but I do enjoy asking those believers I know well enough to do so without being rude what’s led them to a different point of view. Enough people I otherwise respect tell me they believe in God to convince me there must be something genetic about it, and I simply lack the faith gene (that’s a metaphor; I am not suggesting there’s an actual gene that can turn belief on or off, but I do think there’s some kind of physical/chemical difference between those who believe and those who don’t, sort of like the way some people’s pee smells when they eat asparagus and some people’s doesn’t).
The only argument in favor of some kind of God that I find even remotely, possibly interesting is how did the universe start? Not life – once you have physics and chemistry as we know them, life doesn’t seem un-impossible to achieve, given enough time and energy. But how did that physics and chemistry begin? How did we get something where there was once, presumably, nothing? How can the universe be infinite? There must be an edge, right? So what’s on the other side of THAT? These questions break my brain to the point where I usually just give up thinking about them any further.
Still, even if you find “God made it all!” a satisfying answer to questions such as those, I don’t see how you get from there to deciding that the god who did so is benevolent, or cares more about us than he does about mosquitos. All the evidence of history makes a pretty strong argument that he isn’t, and doesn’t (I say “he” because, like Ingmar Bergman, I think that if God does exist, he’s a total asshole. If I thought God were at all benevolent, I’d say “she.”)
Do you have a spiritual practice? If so, what is it? If not, why not?
Hmm, maybe I am one of those irritating atheists after all, because I find the word “spiritual” cloying. It’s not the word’s fault, I guess, it’s just that different people can use it to mean anything from, “Crystals will shrink your tumors,” to “I’m a cultural Jew, but not a religious one,” to “Meditation is good for you,” to “One time I took acid on Ocean Beach and now I’m not afraid of being dead anymore.” So, let me be a bit more precise about what I hope you’re getting at.
I think it is healthy and laudable for any human being to recognize just how tiny each of us really is in the grand sweep of the universe, but simultaneously not allow that smallness to make one think our lives are insignificant. Finding a way to be connected to our environment, and to others, and to recognize just how big and awe-inspiring everything can be when you take that perspective, is a good thing everybody would ideally be capable of, and I have watched many people take different paths trying to get there, and attempted to walk a few of them myself (I am one of those irritating atheists who will go spend time in a monastery to try to figure out what the appeal might be).
So, this might sound almost as trite as my acid-induced revelation about light switches, but music has been my only real church for as long as I can remember. Whether I’m alone with headphones on, or standing in a crowd watching the members of some group I love magically intuit where their bandmates are going, or the one on stage doing that intuiting with my own bandmates – those are the times I have most reliably achieved some kind of transcendence, however temporary.
I just wish it were as easy to capture those feelings of connectedness to something greater at 3 or 4am, lying in the dark with no music on. Because I would happily live on forever with no body, simply floating in space as a consciousness, if doing so meant those moments that usually last just 5 to 10 seconds at a concert simply became my normal resting state.
That’s a heaven I can believe in.
Give me an example of a sacred text, for you personally—a work of some kind (book, album, song, painting) that’s essential to the formation of your spiritual worldview. Explain.
This one’s easy! It’s a song (of course), but perhaps more surprisingly based on everything I’ve just said, it’s a gospel song, called, “He Got Better Things For You,” by the Memphis Sanctified Singers. I was so struck by its perfect weirdness the first time I heard it (on the CD reissue of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music) that I just put it on repeat and let it play another dozen times or more – eventually my wife walked into the living room where I was listening to ask me if everything was OK.
I told her everything is GREAT, because music like this exists in the world. I don’t believe in souls, but the singer very clearly does, and her concern for mine makes me love her as much as I love the song. “Love” is another word that can sound trite in a context like this, but I think it’s the appropriate one, here. Love simply radiates out of that performance, forcefully. I still play it regularly to remind myself there’s no single right way to figure out how your tiny jigsaw piece fits best into the universe’s unimaginably larger puzzle.
Since my wife and I are both atheists, our daughter never went to church, until she entered kindergarten and started hearing all her classmates talk about it, at which point she asked if we could go one day. My wife, who was raised Mormon, had zero interest in making that happen, but I thought I owed my daughter the chance to make up her own mind about this stuff. So I found the closest Church of God in Christ to us, since I knew the Memphis Sanctified Singers were part of COGIC – I figured, if nothing else, at least the music would be great. And it was!
I could have done without all the speaking in tongues. But the music – played with a full drum kit, electric bass and organ, and entirely improvised in time with the preacher – helped me feel as close as I think it’s possible for a brain like mine to get with all the apparently sincere believers clapping along beside us and shouting, “Hallelujah!”
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Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.
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Further Reading:
Fun fact: Right before I was diagnosed with cancer last year, I was exploring a book proposal about Rhapsody’s generally unrecognized place as THE pioneer of music streaming, predating Spotify’s arrival by several years. Back when Tim hired me, the company consisted of this cast of characters that included former fry cooks, music critics, various folks who played in bands, and at least one guy who liked to smoke crack before programming classical music metadata, all puzzling through now-common things like curated playlists, algorithmic song recommendations, artist-based radio, etc. If there are any footnote-reading book agents out there who would like to talk to me about this proposal—please reach out!