Once Again Falling Apart

Jackson Frank: 'Blues Run The Game' + Burning Out + Riding The Train + Sewing a Wide, Scratchy Quilt

Eight years ago, I loudly burned out on my muckraking organizing work after a disastrous election and crash-landed at a temp job where, for 12 dollars an hour, I piled papers in stacks 15 feet tall. After work, I would usually binge-drink, waste hours on mind-numbing video games, or walk through the Chicago snow to the condo of the person I was seeing at the time. We did not like each other very much. They thought I was a Communist. I thought they were a Fascist. When they learned that I was eligible for food stamps, they were so disgusted that they threatened to break up with me. Within only a few months, I had fallen from what I thought was my calling into a dead zone of listlessness where I could no longer read, write, or do many of the other things that had once brought me joy. Months of this ennui led me to think that maybe life was a scam, a dumb carnival ride that was not worth the wait, and that perhaps I should exit the queue early. I told the doctor this, and they politely told me to shut up as they gave me a vial of pretty pills to swallow. The prescription sent me further into debt. I never saw the doctor again. But still, I kept on trying. I took my medicine, focused on myself as the world drifted away, and tried not to pull an Anna Karenina at the subway station. But then: the rupture. 

I was on Chicago’s Blue Line, heading northwest out of downtown. One of the few reliable joys during this time in my life was the part of this commute where the train climbs out of the tunnel and emerges onto the elevated track. It always felt like I was levitating, or being dredged out of hell and shown a glimpse of heaven. On the day in question, as the train began to climb out of the tunnel, I looked through the car and saw the color and light from outside spreading over the passengers. I expected to feel some warmth, a tickle on my skin, or some small revelation when the light reached my seat, but then it did and I felt: nothing. It was like I was gradually fading away. I wiggled my toes, even pressed a finger against my neck, but I could not feel my skin. I felt like the human version of the famous bean sculpture downtown: surrealistically droopy, completely pointless. Whenever I had imagined myself having a breakdown, I’d pictured it as loud, furious, passionate. But this was somehow the polar opposite. It was like a giant hand was reaching into the train car and erasing me, one body part at a time. There goes my nose, my pinky, my ankle hairs, my cock. It was the complete absence of pain, pleasure, future, past. This was rock bottom, I knew: slow annihilation with no purpose or payoff, not even a compelling story to tell someone over a beer.

In the wake of my crisis, I encountered no shortage of cheery insights about how everything could get better if only I “worked on myself.” The prescriptions usually called for happy distractions, completely ignoring my dread, and buying consumer products that sent me further into debt. I tried all that. None of it worked. Then, one day, as I rode some long train ride that was taking me nowhere, my algorithm served up Jackson Frank’s “Blues Run the Game.”   

Catch a boat to England baby 
Maybe to Spain 
Wherever I have gone 
Wherever I’ve been and gone 
Wherever I have gone the blues are all the same

If I had asked a therapist for a joyful, inspiring song to listen to after my rock bottom, they probably wouldn’t have recommended this one. But this was the song that found me.

For me, Frank’s opening verse perfectly captures the dull ouroboros of depression, especially how the blues endlessly circle back and obscure the full array of feeling and color that makes life beautiful. He says yes, travel the world, make beautiful love, buy your room-service meal, but you can never fully escape the shadows of melancholia. This had once been a distressing, even debilitating, thought for me, back when I saw depression as an invasive force that had to be annihilated. But “Blues” helped me begin to reframe depression as something else entirely: a permanent fixture of my life, a fundamental part of my brain. Something inseparable from my conception of myself. Something that had to be managed with realistic expectations and humility. 

Jackson Frank is one patch in the wide, scratchy quilt that settled over me in the aftermath of my catastrophe. Jackson Frank, Albert Camus, Virginia Woolf, Van Gogh, Simone de Beauvoir — all of them were uniquely miserable, yet they confronted their miseries and asked, in their own ways, “what is to be done?” Their answer was something like: acknowledge the darkness, but choose to live beautifully in spite of it. Love people well. Create wonderful artworks. Build a future. Just try not to do the other thing. And that was what I needed to hear. 

For months, I religiously listened to Frank’s song on endless train rides and at my paper-stacking job. Somehow, the good message took hold. The blues and the greys gave way to the full color palette. Other music returned. Happy melodies, new songs. I stopped taking my magic pill and weaned myself off of “Blues.” Years passed, and I fell in love, got a new job, and moved far away. Everything was good and beautiful, like a Joni Mitchell song. I started organizing, writing, and listening to my punk protest music again; it was February 2020, and a new world was being built. And then: the turning back of the circle. Sickness, isolation, ennui. I lost my job. My money dried up. The love I had made with my partner crumbled. I stopped reading and writing. Everything good curdled and soured. I moved far away again; maybe I just needed another city, another town. 

Last November, in the middle of that move, I revisited Chicago. Things were, once again, falling apart. I was hungover almost every day. I took the train a lot, waited for the moment where the Blue Line shot out of the dark tunnel. It happened again: the light came into the train car, and I felt nothing. I reached in my pocket and took out my medicine. I needed my magic pill. I still need my Jackson Frank. ✹

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Michael Rance is a researcher and former clarinetist who unsuccessfully dabbled in cello and guitar. He also writes

Three Chairs

, a newsletter. He lives in the land of Nirvana, Heart, and KEXP.

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