October 3 - Done Bleeding

"I'm Leaving You" is one of the five themes that Elvis Costello said the writers of popular music have available to them, and while the majority of Mountain Goats songs fit into his fifth category ("I Believe In Something"), this is very much an "I'm leaving you" song, if "you" can be defined as a place.

This is a song about watch ending. You had a duty, it wasn't necessarily a great one, but it was yours, and then there comes the day where it isn't any more, and that might be a good thing or a bad thing or an unknown thing, but it still has that note of finality. This thing that I am doing I shall never do again. At least not in this form and in this place.

Life can be defined in a not very useful sense as a series of beds that you sleep in for the last time. Your childhood bed, your first room at university, your subsequent rooms. The first house you live in, the first place you try and make a home of your own, the first place you have to leave because of a job moving or going away. You complete your duty in places, you issue rituals of goodbye, and you leave behind a version of yourself. The Ian who lived on Pine Ridge Road in the first house he ever owned, didn't make to the UK. He's still there, haunting a place sixteen years after he left it. And I still remember the last day there, the bittersweet greenstick fracture of going and knowing that my wife couldn't come with me yet. I'm still lying on that bed with her, trying to pretend I wasn't destroyed by having to go ahead and make us what I could of a new home until she got there.

Because we finish our duty, but honestly it never ends. Nothing does.