There’s a lot on my mind so I deemed it to be completely useless to be trying to write solely on a specific topic when I’ve been treating each of these entries as a periodic diary of sorts. I don’t do them daily because often times I feel as if my daily matters are either too boring or far too personal to end up iairing out on a public forum. If you’re a veteran of the blog you may remember these entries going along the lines of “everything hurts”, “school sux”, “can I say for certain that this is the path I want to follow?”; DNA of this can still be found today in some of my later entries, and let’s just say if you’ve stuck around for a while it’s inside of you right now heh

I intended this to originally be about music. Specifically, the sentimental value that music has suddenly obtained in my mind to the point to properly move me emotionally. In other words, sometimes I cry. But I don’t know why I cry, and I don’t know why anything would elicit such a response out of me. This is because I intentionally denied myself proper socialization now going into my twenties as a defense mechanism towards getting too attached to something or someone, and worrying myself sick over the most menial things, forgetting my own life and well being in the process. Look at where that got me

Music still has something to do with all of this though-- when you looked at the title “Technique 2” you may have been able to draw this conclusion-- because this post is actually the sequel to the album Technique by New Order. Not because of the album’s strong themes of divorce or whatever, but because it peppers the band’s typical synthpop sound with hints of extremely homosexual dance music. This is the secret behind making anything good: you have to make it a little gay. Those familiar with iair should know that something like this would be of no issue. We will now digress into talking about something else as to not make readers uncomfortable.

It’s exactly what I described however:, synthpop, and dance music (with or without gay), that ends up eliciting something in me. Throw New Wave in there while we’re at it. There of course is a litany of exceptions, but that often has to do with the “mood” of it all and the subject matter of the lyrics (A Black Country New Road song made me cry several times, and that’s the closest thing that I will ever get to understanding the mean RYM user). Can I put a finger on exactly why this is the case? Yes. It’s because I like it and there’s really not much else to it. It’s the brute of my taste and as a result it’s what I’m more gravitated towards. If I listened to hip-hop as much as I did, the same thing would be happening there. It still does, honestly (see: “Hey Mama” by Kanye West).

For the purposes of illustrating this dichotomy, lets create a simple analogy: that one song that makes you cry is someone else’s “Marvin’s Room”, and that other song that you’d take to the grave engraved in your heart is also someone else’s “Marvin’s Room”. That’s of course not to say that the song itself is bad-- especially by Drake’s standards it’s actually quite good-- but rather to illustrate that anybody with comparatively “pedestrian” tastes compared to yours can feel the same feelings as you. This is because, as much as you’d like to think otherwise, these people are as human (if not more) as you, and emotions are not mutually exclusive with palette. This is the worst news I’ve gotten all week.

I hate to speak on these things too long because I can’t shake of the feeling that it makes myself come across as a massive fucking pseud who tries to articulate nonsensical bullshit (obtained entirely through gnosis) in order to try and comprehend the extraordinarily rudimentary feelings he has. We have to talk about the music itself that made me vomit all of that out before we got to this point. I believe there to be no better song that illustrates this idea more than Jumbo by Underworld. I had talked about why exactly it appealed to me as much as it did before, but never really made it sit with me for a while. I dwelled on it a little more afterwards to better understand the psyche of the fucked up murderer iair.

It was a song I first heard maybe about 4 years ago in 2022 headed into 2023. It’s a time I look back at fondly for how “transitional” it felt in my mind, as if something changed then that effectively wiped the memories of many years before out of my head, even if it were approaching the apex of my major depressive disorder. Then I kind of understood my role at this current moment. I yearned for just about everything, love, meaningful work, and all sorts of different things in-between that would give my life the meaning I felt and that I knew I lacked for all this time. Through my myriad layers of irony and vaguely suicidal idealation I still understood that my only option was to wait and hope; my own productivity towards making the future I wanted ebbed and flowed with my ability to do my laundry at least once per month. I began to see myself in it, in a way, the more I sat with it and listened. The lyrics in Underworld’s music, if present at all, are at the least abstract and at most nonsensical. There was still a theme to get out of all of it though: connection (and the yearning of such).

When I speak of “yearning”, it’s not the kind that is just grovelling and begging for something or someone in a pile of your own tears, rather holding the expectation for that which you want, but never knowing who, what, when, and where, counting the seconds as the present seems to evaporate away. Not too long after, there came the time where I felt as if everything fell into place. By 2024 I had given myself the time I told myself to wait for and now it felt I was being rewarded for it. It never occurred to me in those moments though that things can’t always be perfect, and expecting an ideal outcome out of every stroke of luck and every miracle of chance only sets you up for disappointment and disaster. Almost 2 years later I felt like the promises I set out for myself were unceremoniously shattered. It all happens so quick; you’d forget how long you really held out up until you begin to think about it and begin to bawl like a complete bitch. Everything I wanted then just wasn’t meant to be, at least in the way I sought it out. Yet, despite it all, I’m doing it all again.

To me, this is the mental image that “Jumbo” projects, and I think of it to be a benefit of how abstract the lyrics really are. It could be about a girl, a feeling, or nothing at all-- it’s just the longing for it all. It’s how I feel, with the presupposition that I’m only making the same mistake as before, to become the same person as I was before back then and hold out for the meaning I truly desire. I think about what it entails every day, but I only figure that it’s best that I don’t try to fit a mold on it and go where my own life is taking me. It’s that which I’ve at failed before, and it’s that which I promise myself to never let happen to me or inadvertently to anyone else again. Maybe I am setting myself up for disaster, but I would never know if I didn’t feel it; exactly as I must’ve felt before then. I hope you, beautiful i_ai_r reader, will stick around to see me fall flat on my ass again.

おまけ

It’s a deeply seated insecurity of mine that I’ve morphed my entire being into becoming a “bridge” for other people to cross over. This is because of the way I posture myself as selfless and also doubles as a consequence of these feelings of attachment I slightly glossed over at the beginning of this entry. I don’t know what to do about it, because I just like being able to be great help to everyone who needs it any way I can, there’s just a part of my subconscious that tries so desperately to see it all as transactional. Work without compensation is entirely dependent on context: volunteering, piety, or slavery. When does it stop becoming noble and start becoming fruitless? This is a question that jolts through my mind regularly as a result of the fact that I never assessed my own self-worth, rather placing my most visceral belief in others, almost “synchronizing” my own emotions with them. I try my best not to worry, but I only worry because I care. If I don’t worry, then how could I care?

All and this is more is something that I don’t have the answer for. I can’t even begin with the thought otherwise. But something’s bound to happen. I’ve an extremely formative summer ahead of me. I said this to myself last year, but I was fat as shit then. Something’s going to change and I will change as a result. To what? I don’t know. But there will be some sort of resolution to at least some of that which is plaguing me, and I will certainly be better as a result. My “New Dawn Fades” just to rise once more. You feel me