It's been a long time since I wrote in here and I don't quite recall why I stopped. I still journal from time to time, but I suppose I just got busy, or didn't feel the value of writing here. Well, I return to these keys as a way to process the death of Scott Hutchison.
Scott Hutchison, lead singer of Frightened Rabbit, Mastersystem, and solo as Owl John, drowned himself in the Firth of Forth about two weeks ago. He went missing for a day or two and I thought it was kind of crazy but thought nothing substantial of it, but then I went to work and looked on my phone and saw that they found his dead body. He'd sung for years of sorrow, loneliness, and suicide, and yet it came as a truly saddening moment when I found out he was dead. I've got a lot of thoughts I want to write down but I'm not sure how to organize them.
I first heard of Frightened Rabbit when I was a teenager. I heard "The Modern Leper" through an Amazon playlist and initially heard Scott sing "He's too fucked up to care" and was off-put by the profanity and decided I wouldn't listen to that band. However, some time later, I heard a couple Frabbit songs on the tv show Chuck and decided to revisit the band. From there, Frabbit songs brought me hope, company, and a sense of camaraderie and not-aloneness that I've never felt from any other artistic medium. I've spent the majority of the past decade feeling loneliness and unrequited affection for various girls and Scott's songs made me feel like someone else knew what it was like to feel left out, unwanted, alone. Like someone knew the weight of my own romantic hopes and the even greater weight of the disappointment of not being wanted by anyone I wanted. And it wasn't just the words he sang, it was the very tone and timbre of his voice. He sang as someone who knew loneliness well. I've never heard anyone communicate loneliness in such an accurate and unvarnished way as Scott Hutchison did.
It wasn't just the sadness of Frabbit's songs that I connected to. It was the resiliency that Scott sang of that drew me close. For all the loneliness, for the all sadness and pain, Scott still clung to some hope of light breaking through the darkness. What that hope was, I do not know, as it was not true hope that can be only found in Christ. But as much as any other artist has, Scott's words always met me as a friend in need but then encouraged me to hope. He would never have known this, but his words drew me near to God despite his own atheism.
And that's the absolutely crushing part of this. Scott sang a number of songs about how he didn't believe in God and how Christianity (or at least religion) was false. Knowing what he claimed to believe, it's devastating knowing that not only will I likely never see him, he is eternally separated from God and all good. God used Scott to bring me through a lot of dark, lonely times and yet Scott never bowed his knee to the Lord. That fucking sucks.
To compound the fucking awfulness of this, all the people talking about his suicide have only talked about his "mental health." But fuck those people. Scott didn't kill himself because he had a mental issue. He didn't throw himself into the Forth because he was unhealthy. He erased his map because he reached the end of his man-made hope and he couldn't see anymore light and without Christ, there was no hope to be found. He killed himself because unlike most people, he dug deep and searched himself and others and found this existence to be broken and wanting and because he had rejected Christ, he had nothing to cling to when all failed.
I owe Scott Hutchison a great debt. His words gave me encouragement and strength when A rejected me, when C said yes and then no to me, when S told me she only saw me as a friend, when AL gave up on the relationship, when H told me she "couldn't go out with me" and then proceeded to go out with someone as equally undeserving as me, and even now as I'm forced to watch H be so much of what I desire in a wife and yet be so far from me. I do think that if God had not blessed me with the words of Scott Hutchison all these years, my varied thoughts of suicide might have been deeper and closer to actualization than I would care to think about. Hell, even my music taste and life have been shaped by Scott. Frightened Rabbit got me into other Scottish bands (The Twilight Sad, We Were Promised Jetpacks, There Will Be Fireworks, King Creosote, Biffy Clyro, Washington Irving, Glasvegas, Admiral Fallow, Broken Records) and part of my love of Scotland can be traced from Frightened Rabbit (I've got a fucking Scottish flag in my room). Someday I'll visit the Firth of Forth and say a prayer of thanksgiving for Scott Hutchison and pray for the hopeless of Scotland.
The only other time in my life that I've been as deeply affected by someone's death is when Dr. Travers died. Both men played huge roles in my growth as a young man. I believe I'll see Dr. Travers again, but I'm terribly afraid I'll never see Scott again. Damn.
I want to start writing on here again, if only in tribute to Scott because I want to speak from my heart, even if it's only on a web page that no one else will ever read. So often Scott bled through his songs so that those who listened might bleed a little less and I will be grateful for him for the rest of my life.
"I have fallen in the forest, did you hear me?"
"Let's call me a baptist, call this a drowning of the past. She is there on the shoreline throwing stones at my back"
"Won't you give me two minutes please? Just let me cover my eyes. All the hammer and scrape has been chipping away At the lustre of life"
"I wonder if they'd notice that I'm not around The loss of a lonely man never makes much of a sound" (I do notice. And in this instance, it did.)
"I have never wanted more to be your man And build a house around you. But I am just like all the rest of them, Sorry, selfish, trying to improve. I'm here, I'm here, Not heroic but I try"
"So will you come back to my corner?
Spent too long alone tonight
Would you come brighten my corner?
A lit torch to the woodpile"
"After months of grieving
Fuck the grief, I’m leaving
Will you leave with me?"
"A slipped disc in the spine of community"
"I might never catch a mouse and present it in my mouth
To make you feel you're with someone who deserves to be with you"
"This is my warmth behind the cold war
That day is what I’m living for
Forever coming home" (She's not my home, she wasn't his.)
"I can’t call you all mine anymore
I can’t call you full stop
But you know you can call me up anytime
Call me whatever the fuck you want"
"Just this drink to hold my hand, one glass of anything, anything cheap. And I'm here just because everyone else has come just to be seen."
"I'm working on drawing a straight line, And I'll draw until I get one right. It's bold and dark, girl, can't you see? I’ve done drawn a line between you and me."
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