The Mountain Goats – This Year

I am writing as the new year has just begun to grant its blessings on us. I am hoping that, if years really do have trends, that they go by birth cycles and not calendar cycles. Of course, we all know they don’t. Things happen as they happen, and while sometimes fate seems to crap on our heads all in one go, The day after New Year’s Eve is no different from the day before it. Still, while I can accept my 30th year being an often difficult one that has yet to end, I would hate an inauspicious new start to the year to define a whole span of time. 2014 is far too important.

My tripping over this song last month was one of those coincidences that is both chilling and warming at once. I’d always heard the Mountain Goats in terms of powerful songwriting from a plain seed. They were a group I appreciated but didn’t really know. One song doesn’t change that lack of knowledge any more than the year changing truly changes anything, I suppose, but hearing this one at least gave me a rallying cry: I will make it through this year if it kills me. Apparently I am not alone in appropriating the thought. Even in a world that gave us #FirstWorldProblems, we all go through hurt and pain at times… and sometimes we see what matters to us eviscerated.

So I dedicate this post to you guys out there who are in the middle of public and secret conflicts, who scraped through 2013 emotionally and are in desperate need of respite. While your friends are like-totally-resolving to like-lose-weight-and-stuff because they’re like-ten-pounds-too-heavy-and-stuff, let’s have this be our more meaningful equivalent. We will make it. We have to make it.

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