Didn't It Rain?
for Jason Molina, loosely
I came to Jason Molina’s music in my freshman dorm room streaming an early version of an algorithm-based radio station. The station was probably based on a twee band that, even at that time, I was reluctant to own up to liking. But, what came on through my headphones wasn’t bright and jangly. It wasn’t precious. It felt muddy and sharp at the same time, and I was hooked. I loaded the Axxess and Aces album onto my ipod mini, and within a week had listened to all of Songs: Ohia’s discography several times over.
I listened while walking to class. I listened before I fell asleep. But most of all I listened when I couldn’t sleep, when I felt like crying in private away from my roommate. I’d find a dark place on an open field, which was easy find in rural Vermont, and lie on the ground where the sound could move through me with no resistance. I was eighteen. I hadn’t fallen in love yet. My sadness was pre-conditional and unromantic. Listening to his music cracked open a window into a future feeling that was already familiar.
Jason Molina died in 2013 at thirty-nine alone in his apartment from complications related to alcoholism. One particularly grim account saying that he died with a cell phone in his pocket with just his grandmother’s number in it.
Of all the music I loved when I was younger, I return to his the most. I loved his lyrics, his voice, I even loved that like many other sad guitar men whose music I listened to, he used the same chords over and over. He wrote like someone doomed to describe an unending pain in a way that almost made it beautiful enough to bear.
But beyond that, what made his music feel different than my other favorite sad-sacks like Elliott Smith or Conor Oberst, was how burdened with desire it all sounded. Molina’s gloomy midwest-gothic landscape was all cold flames interspersed with blazing lightning strikes of sensuality. When I was eighteen, all I wanted was for a lover to burry their face in my hair and tell me I “smell a little like a train, hauling lilacs through the rain.”
“The artist's life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him; on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life and on the other, a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire... there are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.”- Carl Jung from The Spirit of Man in Art and Literature
After falling in love with Molina’s music, I fell in love several times over. Mostly with artists and mostly with addicts. With lovers who wrote songs for me, or drew my portrait, who drove the length of the US and back with me. It was like I had dreamed them up and they appeared, all the lovers who filled the hole I had left open in myself. I was grateful for them to rush in.
I think I’ve loved so many addicts because, like me, it seems like they know something they wish they didn’t know. The first person I ever loved I almost lost to an opiate addiction. The second person I ever, really loved was loud, talented, intimidatingly creative, deeply emotionally wounded, and British. Naturally, he drank too much. He did everything too much. I imagine, he still does. But when I knew him, I loved his gluttony because it made me feel full.
Some things are funny in retrospect, like the night that he biked home wasted with his chain lock around his stomach and was convinced he had lost his keys down a sewer grate. I spent the whole night talking him out of using a rotary saw to cut the chain, and very likely, eviscerate himself. He woke up the next morning, naked except for the chain (obviously we had made love, to make the situation even sillier), and immediately found the missing key.
Other instances were less funny, like when he would want me to come over but would pass out before I got there, leaving me to knock at this door and call his phone over and over before giving up and going back to my place, furious.
Or even less so, like when he didn’t want me to meet up with him because a woman he had cheated on me with was out with him and his friends. They were fucked up, they were doing blow. He didn’t trust me to be chill about it, and he was right to think I wouldn’t be. Most of the time I think I’m still in love with him, and all the humiliating memories take a backseat. But sometimes I remember him, high and drunk and screaming at me through the phone that I was being a bitch and he just wanted to have a good time with his friends. I think about how I was so happy and relieved that he came over later that night and held me, that we went to our favorite diner together in the morning and he made up limericks and puns about items on the menu and about how much he loved me until I laughed and loved him back more than ever.
I don’t know if I learned anything from being with my ex. Except that I will love someone who laughs like a thunder-crack, as long as the places we’re split match up together— as long as he makes me feel full.
I’m not Sober-sober, but I don’t drink anymore. Almost four years ago, around the time that relationship was ending, I took a month long break from drinking and never went back. Not drinking anymore often feels like a secret that only other people who are not-technically-sober-but-don’t-drink can understand. (People who dabble with psychedelics etc). I can’t buy into the AA mindset. I don’t believe in god and no one can convince me that all those other options for a higher power, like the universe aren’t just euphemisms for other father-shaped gods. I respect that twelve-step groups are a life saver for some, but the thing is I don’t ever miss drinking and aside from my anxious first month away from it, I never did. When I meet someone who feels similarly it’s like we share a secret. We’ll often whisper to each other it’s incredible isn’t it? And even more softly since we’re not total marms, alcohol is poison, right?
It wasn’t one thing that made me give it up, it was a continuous constellation of things. I’d watched family members drink themselves into warped noses and wet brains. I’d fielded late-night drunk calls from my dad who had begun to use me as a kind of confessor for things he’d done when he was a cop that were starting to eat at him, but only when he was drinking. Blackouts that, at first I never had, became more and more frequent. But worst of all, I couldn’t handle the shame that came with multi-day hangovers. I’d wake up from a night out with my ex feeling like the world had cracked apart and been unconvincingly taped back together by the time the sun came up. What had I said to him? Did I instigate an argument? Which of our friends had seen me crying? Even when none of these things actually happened. I was catastrophically brittle, and I would act like it was normal.
Sometimes I worry that my not drinking anymore isn’t really about my health and wellness but more about control. I’m a single woman in my mid-thirties and a longtime grad student with very little job experience outside the service industry. Particularly in New York, I’m skirting marginal— maybe the only respectable thing I can do is be sober. If I can live like a monk then I’m not a fuck-up, maybe I’m some kind of radical ascetic.
During the years-long process of our split, my ex give me a guitar— a vintage, perfectly sized, acoustic Goya. I’m still not good at playing it, but compared to three years ago, I am better than not knowing how to play it at all. Most of the songs I’ve learned from tabs off the internet are by Jason Molina. When I hear my approximations of his sludgy but cutting chords coming from my guitar and his confrontingly fragile lyrics through my own voice, I feel like I’m playing for eighteen-year-old me lying out on a field in Vermont, telling her something she already knows.
♥️