You should ask me about the most melancholic of nights at Stereo, the one where Martin disappeared and I was alone, little Marcel on the lumber dancefloor, surrounded by straight men in black t-shirts entranced not so much by the music but by the mission of the night, Rave (tm), hovering like their pushy parents, pestering them to make sure they'd do it right, it's Jeff Mills it's Ben Klock, do it right, take it all in, enter the trancefloor, thank G-d for the Facebook ads that brought us here, the $35 really was worth it.

You should ask me about these nights because they are the limit, the glas as we say in French, a bell that rings during the last moments of agony before death, the one where the folks dying tell you their secrets. Secrets like: I have felt as much sadness as joy on the dancefloor, not the aestheticized sadness of "deep" music, but plain sadness, loneliness, the shame of walking out and taking the early morning 80 up Parc. Other secrets: maybe transcendence is a lie, like the superposition of a sweet sativa Brand (tm) and the bitterness of capital markets factory-produced weed to offset the brutal reality of bullshit jobs and folks sleeping outside.

It feels like years ago that I left the death box of the insurance multinational, down by the lake where its freezing, in a last attempt to preserve some semblance of truth: I am here, they are lying, no Purpose (tm) will save us. And like this same child on the dancefloor I did what I could, looking around for something other, a reactive inversion to avoid the truth invocation of the glas; find another lie, a better one and run. I traded the 17th floor for six months in basement 1, the TM for THC, the work ethic serving as a bridge between the two. I started new lies, object of my own strategic marketing playbook: if the brand dies, make a new one. Just lie again.

I lied badly, you see the visual, busted in the middle of a lie, hand on the knobs, pupils dilated, won't fly this time, busted lying, not sure if me or the lie got busted. All that's left are traces of deception; all I hear is the detuned oscillators of Rubber playing Marcel's whine, upstairs all alone in this room, all I hear is the endlessness of In My Wires stopping time in the insurmountably lonely waiting for someone to come into my basement studio. All I hear is another failed attempt at an imagined transcendence relentlessly and strategically marketed to me over and over again.

But there was a trace of a question encrypted somewhere in the hard drive, a signature of a moment I long forgot in which, I imagine, I could have told you all about the sad nights at Stereo and the loneliness of the mist, taking away the secret and pointing the gaze, for the first time, outside: After the Haze, What?