I’ve mixed feelings on some of these VAPORWAVE mixes, along with Chillwave and some of the other electronic music sub-genres. They’re clever enough but often lacking (as I perceive) in imagination. This one is a little different. The samples are more instantly recognizable and identifiable and that sparks the brain in a kind of trickery. It’s a moment before the synapses pull up the correct file and there for a moment is a kind of deja vu, like remnants of a dream from the night before that never quite come back into focus. It’s different from the hauntological phenomenon of Sovietwave but close to the same vibe. This particular mix is also kind of distant and murky like it’s playing somewhere down the hall rather than in the same space as the listener.

Not sure how WESTERNDIGITAL is getting away with the copyright infringement on their name, more associated with the tech manufacturer, but that’s not my business. Wasted Digital is a… I was about to call it a banger but that isn’t really appropriate for Vaporwave. It’s a gem.

It’s been not so much a rough morning but a sluggish, difficult morning. Summer heat has never been my thing and the lack of an air conditioner hasn’t helped my cause. I don’t know why I’ve always been so stubborn about laying out the cash. There’s something annoying about paying for a 50lb. box that is really only necessary for a few weeks a year and then takes up space for the rest. I’m surely not a spendthrift but this is one hanging point that really makes no sense at all for a man that sweats like a sick mule. I feel like I’ve been rode hard and put away wet.

The dim memories that this music evokes are as close to dreams as I’ve had in the last 72 hours or so. Sleep never settled in to a degree where dreams might happen. I was agitated prior to the heatwave and that reflected in the inability to have a deeper meditative experience. Something is happening up there under the bone dome and like I said before, clarity will come or the low-level anxiety will fade on its own, For now, the lack of proper REM sleep amplifies it some. It’s productive to remember that this happens every single summer around this time. It could be the heat. It could be echoes, quite possibly, of the stresses of long ago summers. That’s always something to consider. I was always away at my aunt’s in July and while in some ways it was a relief, definitely a change from the stresses of “home-life” that also brought no end of anxiety. It was a change-up that might have been considered out of the frying pan and into the fire (one day I’ll share more about this) it broke up the day to day. Exchanging one purgatory for another and then switching back does actually lessen the impact of either/both. There was a level of threat though in summer life that didn’t exist in the gray monotony of home. Who knows how much that still echoes this far down the line? A person can always believe they’re entirely over something just because it’s lessened so much, but that doesn’t make it true. Who knows? It could just be the heat, but why then have I never addressed just the heat? Am I cheap or do I hold onto the discomfort for some reason?

I wonder if anyone who reads all this regularly is utterly bored or turned off by these endless meanderings.

Thinking back now on the idea that pleasure/joy/happiness is not the same as the removal of pain/discomfort. Do I hold onto discomfort longer than I should simply for the rush of relief that comes when I finally let go? It’s something to consider. It’s something I’ve witnessed in other people, this habit of letting pain linger simply for the blast of relief when they finally go for the solution. If I searched hard enough on my old blog, Glossophagia, I could find a transcription of a conversation with my old friend/lover/confidante Natalie in which she explained this phenomenon to me using someone else as an example. It never occurred to me that she could have as easily been talking about me but it’s hard to say. She was usually more direct and would have just come out and said it. I don’t think I do this thing, but maybe I do to a lesser degree. Maybe it’s not my usual pattern but there are blind spots where I do.

A baby will cry when it’s warm, shitty diaper is changed, not because it likes the feeling of the shitty diaper but because the change is jarring. It will only settle down when it accepts that the new feeling is much better. This new feeling will only really qualify as pleasure when the child realizes that the feeling is pleasurable outside of the context of the relief. Until then it’s just the removal of discomfort.

It is, in fact, time to move into the responsibilities of the day. It is with some reluctance that I stand up to move out of my own room in my head and into the shared space. Laughing now because is my reluctance really me being a baby and crying about having my warm, shitty diaper removed? It doesn’t matter and it doesn’t pay to overthink it, at least not right now. Definitely have to consider though to what degree if any I’ve been doing this.

Selah