The Mountain Goats - autoclave live, 2008

“Autoclave” is a song concerned mainly with one single metaphor, a metaphor of such shining clarity that it makes me smile even when it makes me flinch. My heart’s an autoclave. An autoclave is a piece of equipment that sterilizes scientific tools with heat and pressure. They are pretty terrifying but they are mostly clinical, effective. My heart’s an autoclave, a thing that crushes. Your heart is meant to sterilize, your heart is constructed with scientific precision to kill everything inside of it that lives. Nothing could survive there even if it wanted to and at this point, nothing wants to. Your heart pulverizes all good feelings that get within a city block of it."