New Year’s Eve 2013. Midnight. Looking back, I can still see me and Johanna shouting out our goodbyes to the old year across the dark fields with a “Good riddance” and hoping for a better year to come. “It can hardly be worse than the this one.” Less than two weeks later, I am that pile on the kitchen floor, sobbing between my teeth because the pain in my back is beyond anything I’ve ever felt. Johanna stays at home with our sleeping kids while Léo is driving me to the hospital. We have no idea that I’m to spend months there. 2014 is here.
Let it be known (and it is, to those who know me) that hate does not come easily for me. It’s just not how I’m dispositioned. It would be easy for me to hate 2014, to hate the months in the hospital, to hate flesh eating bacteria. That’s what people expect me to do – it would be understandable. But the truth is, I can’t. Not even in the midst of it, I could. Sure, it was hard, it was hell in so many ways, but it was real and it was important. Memorable. It was Life, going about as usual, simply happening to people. This happened to me. Not out of aggression or spite. It’s Nature. In that respect, I find it easier to hate littering. That’s just pointless and mean.
Yes, 2014 thrusted upon me and my family a stormy ocean to swim across, and the swim in itself was in-deed pure hell, but… what could we do? So we swam, we struggled on, and we eventually drifted ashore, totally drained. It’s simply not in my system to turn over in the sand at that point and yell “I hate you!” at the huge and heaving ocean. I guess, in survival mode, the entire situation is somehow both friend and foe. Something that shares your experience. It was a year that sent shock waves through our family existence, and we still live with both positive and negative con-sequences of that year. Because of it, I’m still selling music equipment to pay our bills, I still have physical pains, and me and my family still have those months under our skin. But it also taught us a lot. And hey, every backflip I’ve done is a consequence of that year.
Actually, this entire album is a direct consequence of that year.
Let’s go to New Year’s Eve 2014. It’s midnight. Me and Johanna are raising our glasses and I tell the year, in its last fleeting breaths, that it was a worthy foe, and that we respect it.