i'd play a sad song on the harmonica if i could still breathe
I am sick. I have only been sick this bad twice since COVID times. The first was when i was traveling in Guangdong and Hunan in January 2020, when there had been a few whisperings about the "new SARS" online, but still a few weeks before people started getting really worried about it. It was the worst flu-type sickness i remember having as an adult. I was completely wiped out with a terrible throatache, headache, trouble breathing and crushing fatigue. But i didn't want to waste my meager holidays moping so did some hiking and exploring anyway.
Then COVID hit the bigtime and for a blissful 2 years i didn't even have a sniffle. Masking, distancing, it's so blatantly obvious that these simple steps reduce the transmission of disease it still boggles my mind how many people - including a lot of self-proclaimed intellectuals - disappeared down some weird hole of denialism that continues to this day.
Still, despite taking reasonable precautions, i somehow got whacked with another bad illness in Panama. Really bad throatache, running nose. Was it COVID? I don't know, it didn't seem like it, but i never got tested to be sure.
After that i spent another 2 years sniffle-free. Over here in Taiwan, people continued wearing masks in public - both inside and outside - up until sometime last year. Not because it was mandated, but because it's the polite thing to do. Young people don't, because they're cool and cosmopolitan and indestructible, but i live in a more traditional area with older people and poorer people, and so i still see masks every day, although it's now only a minority who wear them outside of clinics and pharmacies.
Last weekend, in my quest to stop being depressed, i pushed myself out to a nightclub at 11pm. At nightclubs nobody wears masks, even when they were still mandated in other public places in Taiwan. I think for young people and the rave crowd, going clubbing might have been a way to forget about the pandemic, a place where they could let go and dance and be free. I'm fine with that, actually. People should have the freedom to do risky things if that's what they want to do. And in 2024 it doesn't matter anyway because if you don't get sick at the nightclub you're gonna get sick on the subway or at the grocery store because nobody outside of 阿媽 (grannies) give a shit any more.
The club was alright. There were a lot of loud, drunken foreigners. Way more than i have ever seen at that club before. I always cringe when foreigners are being obnoxious, because it reflects poorly on everyone with my skin tone. It's a techno club, man, not a fucking brunch. You're not there to gossip, you're there to dance, right? Right? Well, the danger of going to a disco party is that some damn DJ is actually going to play disco. And sure enough, there it was. Not italo, not hi-NRG, not French house, but actual full-blown disco with real instruments and some diva singing about falling in love or whatever insipid shit disco music is usually about. And then it clicked. Oh. These aren't just loud, drunken foreigners. It's the gays! I'm surrounded by the gays!
And then i started listening to their gossip and it's "oh i don't know if this guy likes me", "yeah he's only 21 but i'm 22 so bla bla bla", "and then i said... and then he said..." and fuck my ass i am in the middle of an episode of Queer as Folk circa 2001. With the exact same music from 2001 and probably the exact same music David Mancuso was playing at Loft parties before i was even born.
I escaped upstairs. This weekend there were three floors open - the usual bar downstairs and main room on the second floor, but also a chillout room on the top floor, with pillows scattered all over the floor and ravers lolled in piles either gazing into nothing or talking their neighbor's ear off depending on drug of choice. But the funny thing is that in the upstairs room the DJ was playing much harder, faster music than the main room disco. It was Very Serious Fucking Techno, but instead of a 4-to-the-floor beat, there was either no beat at all, or hints and fragments of a breakbeat. The kind of stuff that Very Serious Fucking Techno DJs layer on top of three other records to add weird, alien, atmospheric soundscapes to their wall of sound. Without the relentless bass drums it felt sparse and hypnotic. It ruled. But because it was a chillout room, i didn't feel comfortable dancing as full-out as i wanted, so i kinda hunched myself into a ball as close to the speaker as possible and just popped and twitched like a tiny, writhing bug under glass.
It wasn't really the kind of dance therapy i needed or wanted, but i thought to myself, if i am at home, even though i could listen to better music, i couldn't listen on a Funktion-One sound system, and there's no space in my apartment, and even if i managed to make a tiny dance corner it would only annoy my neighbors, so you go out to the club you have and make do. That's why it annoys me when people go to a club and spend the whole time talking. Like, bro, if you want to talk, you can talk at home. You can literally talk anywhere. But dancing to techno? There's so few spaces where we can do that, so let us have this space for us.
After the disco DJ ended, a lot of the foreigners disappeared, but the night was still pretty gay. The next DJ was closer to what i expected from the night, which was more of a modern retro vibe, but just like the last DJ he played vinyl. By this point any time a younger DJ pulls out vinyl i know there is a very high chance they are going to suck because they are more interested in dicking around with overpriced slices of plastic than actually programming a set of good music. This one was no exception.
The tracks were either very deep cuts or new releases done in an early 90s throwback style. I started going clubbing just a couple years after that sound was over, but the biggest hits still got played from time to time. The thing is, stuff like Felix - Don't You Want Me still works 30 years later because it was the best. There was a lot more drek, and i know that because i bought a bunch of it back in the day when you had to buy a whole album for one or two songs. Hey, i like uplifting piano riffs and simple drum loops as much as the next raver, but there's a point at which it becomes so formulaic that it ends up sounding exactly like what critics of techno say techno is - music composed by a computer. And that's what this stuff sounded like, as if you just put Bizarre Inc and Gat Decor and all that other Ibiza piano house into a generative AI model and asked it to make some more. And then pressed it onto vinyl so hipsters would pay through the nose.
I mean, it was fine, i suppose, but i didn't really feel anything.
So i went home. And then i went on a bike ride out to Bali on Sunday, and that was fine too.
Monday and Tuesday i worked from home waiting for the package of doom to arrive, and when it finally did... turns out i am not an ogre. The XL tank from Amazon Essentials is not quite as loose as i would like, but it's fine. I will probably buy some more because my XL talls from Old Navy are stretched to the point they're not really appropriate for work any more and they do not ship to Taiwan. I just want to get past the whole clothes drama and forget about it for another 2 years. I can't deal with the stress. It completely fucked up my life for several weeks.
Wednesday i went back to work. And it appears that Wednesday, probably, is when i got sick. Because one of my colleagues stayed home sick on Thursday, and by Friday i was a wreck. I would like to blame the foreigners who coughed and spluttered and yelled their way across the dancefloor on Saturday, but you'd think i would've felt it before then if i'd caught it at the club. So now i have a throatache, blocked nose, can't elevate my head because i haven't owned a pillow since leaving Canada almost 3 years ago, can't sleep, feel like shit, and i blame every unmasked motherfucker who sneezed their germs across the office, which is all my young colleagues because - as we previously established - young people are stupid and selfish.
I get it, i was young too once, this is just the way it is. So i will let them get me sick and i will lie here in bed, pouting. To be fair, it seems that getting sick has distracted me from being depressed, so that's something. Now i have an actual, concrete reason to feel like shit.
I have nothing interesting to say. Well that was a boring fucking entry.
Here is an actual deep cut from the early 90s better than anything i heard at the club the other night.
Sun Electric - Beauty O'Locco
Here is an excellent long read about the protests against the UK's Criminal Justice Bill and how ravers and travelers and environmentalists became strange bedfellows in the early 1990s: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/apr/20/we-went-from-naive-hippyish-protesters-to-hardcore-anarchists-the-criminal-justice-bill-protests-30-years-on It explains a lot of the context i grew up in, and i'm glad people are out there writing that story.
Then COVID hit the bigtime and for a blissful 2 years i didn't even have a sniffle. Masking, distancing, it's so blatantly obvious that these simple steps reduce the transmission of disease it still boggles my mind how many people - including a lot of self-proclaimed intellectuals - disappeared down some weird hole of denialism that continues to this day.
Still, despite taking reasonable precautions, i somehow got whacked with another bad illness in Panama. Really bad throatache, running nose. Was it COVID? I don't know, it didn't seem like it, but i never got tested to be sure.
After that i spent another 2 years sniffle-free. Over here in Taiwan, people continued wearing masks in public - both inside and outside - up until sometime last year. Not because it was mandated, but because it's the polite thing to do. Young people don't, because they're cool and cosmopolitan and indestructible, but i live in a more traditional area with older people and poorer people, and so i still see masks every day, although it's now only a minority who wear them outside of clinics and pharmacies.
Last weekend, in my quest to stop being depressed, i pushed myself out to a nightclub at 11pm. At nightclubs nobody wears masks, even when they were still mandated in other public places in Taiwan. I think for young people and the rave crowd, going clubbing might have been a way to forget about the pandemic, a place where they could let go and dance and be free. I'm fine with that, actually. People should have the freedom to do risky things if that's what they want to do. And in 2024 it doesn't matter anyway because if you don't get sick at the nightclub you're gonna get sick on the subway or at the grocery store because nobody outside of 阿媽 (grannies) give a shit any more.
The club was alright. There were a lot of loud, drunken foreigners. Way more than i have ever seen at that club before. I always cringe when foreigners are being obnoxious, because it reflects poorly on everyone with my skin tone. It's a techno club, man, not a fucking brunch. You're not there to gossip, you're there to dance, right? Right? Well, the danger of going to a disco party is that some damn DJ is actually going to play disco. And sure enough, there it was. Not italo, not hi-NRG, not French house, but actual full-blown disco with real instruments and some diva singing about falling in love or whatever insipid shit disco music is usually about. And then it clicked. Oh. These aren't just loud, drunken foreigners. It's the gays! I'm surrounded by the gays!
And then i started listening to their gossip and it's "oh i don't know if this guy likes me", "yeah he's only 21 but i'm 22 so bla bla bla", "and then i said... and then he said..." and fuck my ass i am in the middle of an episode of Queer as Folk circa 2001. With the exact same music from 2001 and probably the exact same music David Mancuso was playing at Loft parties before i was even born.
I escaped upstairs. This weekend there were three floors open - the usual bar downstairs and main room on the second floor, but also a chillout room on the top floor, with pillows scattered all over the floor and ravers lolled in piles either gazing into nothing or talking their neighbor's ear off depending on drug of choice. But the funny thing is that in the upstairs room the DJ was playing much harder, faster music than the main room disco. It was Very Serious Fucking Techno, but instead of a 4-to-the-floor beat, there was either no beat at all, or hints and fragments of a breakbeat. The kind of stuff that Very Serious Fucking Techno DJs layer on top of three other records to add weird, alien, atmospheric soundscapes to their wall of sound. Without the relentless bass drums it felt sparse and hypnotic. It ruled. But because it was a chillout room, i didn't feel comfortable dancing as full-out as i wanted, so i kinda hunched myself into a ball as close to the speaker as possible and just popped and twitched like a tiny, writhing bug under glass.
It wasn't really the kind of dance therapy i needed or wanted, but i thought to myself, if i am at home, even though i could listen to better music, i couldn't listen on a Funktion-One sound system, and there's no space in my apartment, and even if i managed to make a tiny dance corner it would only annoy my neighbors, so you go out to the club you have and make do. That's why it annoys me when people go to a club and spend the whole time talking. Like, bro, if you want to talk, you can talk at home. You can literally talk anywhere. But dancing to techno? There's so few spaces where we can do that, so let us have this space for us.
After the disco DJ ended, a lot of the foreigners disappeared, but the night was still pretty gay. The next DJ was closer to what i expected from the night, which was more of a modern retro vibe, but just like the last DJ he played vinyl. By this point any time a younger DJ pulls out vinyl i know there is a very high chance they are going to suck because they are more interested in dicking around with overpriced slices of plastic than actually programming a set of good music. This one was no exception.
The tracks were either very deep cuts or new releases done in an early 90s throwback style. I started going clubbing just a couple years after that sound was over, but the biggest hits still got played from time to time. The thing is, stuff like Felix - Don't You Want Me still works 30 years later because it was the best. There was a lot more drek, and i know that because i bought a bunch of it back in the day when you had to buy a whole album for one or two songs. Hey, i like uplifting piano riffs and simple drum loops as much as the next raver, but there's a point at which it becomes so formulaic that it ends up sounding exactly like what critics of techno say techno is - music composed by a computer. And that's what this stuff sounded like, as if you just put Bizarre Inc and Gat Decor and all that other Ibiza piano house into a generative AI model and asked it to make some more. And then pressed it onto vinyl so hipsters would pay through the nose.
I mean, it was fine, i suppose, but i didn't really feel anything.
So i went home. And then i went on a bike ride out to Bali on Sunday, and that was fine too.
Monday and Tuesday i worked from home waiting for the package of doom to arrive, and when it finally did... turns out i am not an ogre. The XL tank from Amazon Essentials is not quite as loose as i would like, but it's fine. I will probably buy some more because my XL talls from Old Navy are stretched to the point they're not really appropriate for work any more and they do not ship to Taiwan. I just want to get past the whole clothes drama and forget about it for another 2 years. I can't deal with the stress. It completely fucked up my life for several weeks.
Wednesday i went back to work. And it appears that Wednesday, probably, is when i got sick. Because one of my colleagues stayed home sick on Thursday, and by Friday i was a wreck. I would like to blame the foreigners who coughed and spluttered and yelled their way across the dancefloor on Saturday, but you'd think i would've felt it before then if i'd caught it at the club. So now i have a throatache, blocked nose, can't elevate my head because i haven't owned a pillow since leaving Canada almost 3 years ago, can't sleep, feel like shit, and i blame every unmasked motherfucker who sneezed their germs across the office, which is all my young colleagues because - as we previously established - young people are stupid and selfish.
I get it, i was young too once, this is just the way it is. So i will let them get me sick and i will lie here in bed, pouting. To be fair, it seems that getting sick has distracted me from being depressed, so that's something. Now i have an actual, concrete reason to feel like shit.
I have nothing interesting to say. Well that was a boring fucking entry.
Here is an actual deep cut from the early 90s better than anything i heard at the club the other night.
Click to viewSun Electric - Beauty O'Locco
Here is an excellent long read about the protests against the UK's Criminal Justice Bill and how ravers and travelers and environmentalists became strange bedfellows in the early 1990s: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/apr/20/we-went-from-naive-hippyish-protesters-to-hardcore-anarchists-the-criminal-justice-bill-protests-30-years-on It explains a lot of the context i grew up in, and i'm glad people are out there writing that story.