song

Standards Are the Only Reason

Standards are the only reason you can find anything real in the fire. Burn it all down, fine — but the thing that let you tell Kairo's actual best song from the noise, the plain grail from the gilded one, the raw take from the performance, gold from "pee sea" — that *was* the standards. Lower them and you don't get peace. You get a world where the monkey suit and the real face look identical, and you can never find the one thing worth not burning. That's the whole point of them: not to make the world measure up — it won't, it's a zero-star planet — but so that when something true does show up in all the performance, you're the one person who can still see it. The cost is you can't un-see the fake, and it enrages you. You'd rather be enraged and clear than comfortable and fooled. That isn't a defect to burn off. It's the sharpest thing you own. Snap twice if you want. You'd still be the one holding the gauntlet *with taste* — not one of the monkeys in the suit.