Some component shorts just for an instant. Capacitors drain. Chips heat up. Clock crystals fluctuate. The power supply steps in and momentarily cuts everyone off. Voltage regulators cut out to keep from underclocking chips. Relays click. Buffers clear. Power comes back, and chips wake up with a blank slate, completely unaware of what they were just working on. They start over, loading things from ROM. The music drops out for an instant and is replaced by harsh digital noise.

Seriously, there are moments where everything that I was working on, everything I was paying attention to just… vanishes and is replaced by a much older version. It’s not the same amount of work to get back there the second time around (because the brain electrically resembles an analog device), but regardless, if I were a digital amplifier I would have been returned to the manufacturer for repair long ago.

Dropouts are unacceptable in digital audio, so why do they happen in my head?