The promise till the vow got broke

It goes something like this:

I was in the house when the house burned down;
I met the man with the thorny crown;
I helped him carry his cross through town;
I was in the house when the house burned down.

Or maybe like this:

Send lawyers, guns and money;
Dad, get me out of this!

No-one walked the line between stating the facts (albeit metaphorically) and self-pitying hyperbole like Mr. Zevon, and it makes sense, I suppose, that in these interesting times I should feel re-drawn to his lyrical mode.  I am doing a lot of writing, but none of it creative, and having a lot of discussion, but none of it open-ended.  I sit alongside people who have just been given notice and correspond continually with those who are in the holding pattern of waiting for their own fates to be decided.  I have lost, I think, any sense of virtue in this.  It is, to paraphrase one correspondent, profoundly coarsening for all of us, and without a doubt one of the bitterest periods of my own professional experience, even when compared to my early days on the job which were dark for different reasons, nearly ten years ago now.

You may imagine with a certain whimsy, however, the efforts to which the señor goes at home to preserve my mental health in the face of these challenges, motivated as he is by the importance of keeping the stress from crossing placental boundaries.  No cortisol for the harvestbaby!  These efforts manifest primarily as a constant process of cheerful distractions, much as one might anticipate and offset the distress of a child.  It is not too much of a challenge for him, given his naturally sanguine temperament.  A recent exchange of ours went like this:

[H-Bird, following a Nissan Micra in traffic]: What’s the deal with Nissan Micras?  Why does Bill Bailey always make jokes about them?  They look alright.

[Señor Mojito]: I don’t know, but “Nissan” sounds like a pretty wussy name, even in Japanese.  I bet the Toyota people laugh at the Nissan people in Tokyo.  It’s not as soft-sounding as “Sony”, though.

[H-Bird]: “Sony” isn’t a Japanese word.  They made it up to sound western.

[Señor Mojito]: Like turning “Kwanon” into “Canon“.

[H-Bird]: Yeah.  You know, Robin Hyde wrote about Kwanon in China.  She was comparing statues of Japanese and Chinese 観音, and then she said, “but the blood rains thick as locusts between Kwanyin and Kwannon”.  I always liked that image.

[Señor Mojito]: switches on Weezer on the stereo, turns it up as we go over the overbridge.

I don’t know where I would be without this, frankly, sensible emotional management.  Listening Henry’s Dream on high-rotate, perhaps?  We endure at work because we must, not so much for ideological reasons but because to go under would be unfair not only to the people I am trying to represent but also my own impending family.  I do marvel that the days of harsh industrial medicine from twenty years ago seem still to be played out on a smaller scale in a different century, and wonder at the configurations of choices and events that bring us here.  I had not quite expected to go through a similar version of what my father experienced in a different branch of public sector work, even as I acknowledge that what happened to him then are a furious motivation for me to try and help others now.

I’ve around five weeks to go before I take parental leave for the winter and early spring, and am both looking forward to the change in focus and wondering what will happen while I am away.  It’s a strange time to be abandoning ship, even temporarily, and I can’t say with any certainty whether there will be a job there for me when I get back.  I’m glad of the necessary narcissism, the biologically-ordained selfishness, of pregnancy and parenthood, as a way of walking a line of my own between work and home.  While I doubt I’ll be able to put any of this out of my mind fully, it’s the fact that at a point very soon I’m going to have to let it go that has made the last few months of work even possible.

Maybe it’s another lyrical non-sequitur that I need:

Grab your coat, and let’s get out of here.
You’re my witness; I’m your mutineer.