June 15th - This Year

Happy This Year day, everyone. You made it.

If the Mountain Goats are remembered for one song, it's likely to be this one. And if not this one then No Children. I don't know if that was true ten years ago, but post-pandemic this song kept so many people alive in ways that are at best partially associated with the lyrics.

Taken as just the song, this is an incredible mix of reminiscence, horror, and defiance. The trauma of being young, of tasting the solace of a better life, of returning to the worse one. It's authentic and sad and triumphant and a song in love with life even when the life is sometimes terrible.

But I can't talk about this song without talking about 2020 and onwards. At a time when people were furloughed I kept working. If anything my work became more essential as I was providing library services for the NHS and helping education staff turn all their training digital. All of it. And you can't run a library without being in a library. So at the height of the period where we weren't even allowed to be in the same room as other people I was sitting in a library on an NHS site. I was lucky, I have a decent sized house and a wife who I love a lot and a lot of hobbies that shifted to an online form fairly easily. I started playing role playing games virtually and I never stopped. But I was working with and managing people who were doing less well. I became load bearing for the mental health of others. I took time off at Christmas and came back to find that the mental health of my team had taken a catastrophic dip.

And I survived. And one of the reasons I survived was this song. I had a good manager at this point who knew I was in trouble, and I mentioned this song as one of the things keeping me sane. I made it through that year. And the next. And the next.

It doesn't get easier, but it does become a habit.