It takes me a long time to move myself anywhere, or to feel as though I am entitled to do so. The fractious daylight processionals which occur between the sea and the sky - bifurcating down the street where I live - are entirely lost on me. I am bleeding and trapped within an amygdalic swamp, and in a fit of frenzy reckoning with a bizarre monk-like patch I have razored into the back of my head, scratching at the skin in a style of strange trepanation. It is fine - I believe idly - the subsumption of independence into another myriad outlet for caffeine consumption and social capital accrued upon the axis of attractiveness which governs the world now. It doesn’t become me to be sad, or rather to have any emotive response to much, when largely too I am priced out of the accrual of physical paraphernalia. And despite which I do not agonise for anything to cheapen itself to the fray. So much this is to say I agonise like a billy-goat smelling uterine secretions from the other side of the fence about whether I should even go to the secrecy-shrouded climactic plateau. I am - after all - unworthy of emotion.

I am underneath my own stomach staring upwards as Addy arrives, as I have lost the ability to be by myself in social settings now that I have learnt what it means not to be. I am waiting to feel a modicum of normalcy within the pierce of a loud noise. But as we learn, alongside all others, that we will become pirates aboard a Straighjacket Nation practice run, it becomes obvious that nothing other than that could occur. The woman beside me is revolted by the energy of a raised fist, and thus like a child I double-down in hopes she will leave my side, or at the very least her eyes from my snarling paroxysm of a face. Straightjacket have a sound that couples itself well with menstruation, naturalistic and simple, yet transformative in it’s occurrence towards that of a ‘sky religion’ as Paglia would have it, although she is Catholic so it’s much her fault as any that the sky religions no longer get to revel openly in their pagan fortitude. I am wearing a jacket with (G)nostic (I)diosyncracy (S)onic (M)ilitant traipsed crudely across the back with paint marker, and believe the water supply could do with a poisoning. Perhaps I will shoot down a plane.

I am sitting with Addy in the beer garden of the bar I go to when I’m all out of ideas. We are both quite drunk, and on an upwards trajectory to get worse.

I do not watch The Green Child. As good as I am faithful it was, the last thing I want right now is anything approaching Arthur Russell. What I want is a knife wound.

It has been far too long between Romansy sets, and thus far too long between their appearances in this magazine, but not too long to remember that I met Coco initially in the same socially incapacitated way that I meet everyone, which is just going into rooms and looking up at the ceiling until someone asks me a question like “do you like metal?” and I garble out some stupid answer and then become immediately mortified that I opened my mouth, so yes, I feel now that it may be my purview, drunk as I am, to feel sad. Romansy is the tortured soundtrack to the final level of Hyper Demon, the game I played while my laptop gasped for air to the point of complete mania around the time I almost firebombed one of my closest friendships. I keep glancing over at Jah, who is doing some bizarre Soulja-Boy-esque dance to the shuddering drums. It is rather beautiful in here, the way it feels beautiful to vomit on a bender, angelic to break into a warehouse, idyllic to narrowly avoid a roadside breath-test. Masterful hooliganism, immortalised with the destruction of the set and the ascendancy of a housemade edit of 2Unlimited. I adore a person dancing and I am enamoured with every single one of us in the Bell City Black Lodge. Our bodies in movement a love-letter to a demonic struggle towards the light.

My memory is loose mostly, and any activated emotion turns a recollection into a sound akin to a stove-top kettle’s scream. What I come away with, however, are bruises that glow like the Sistine Chapel, a proto-religious particle acceleration whirring in the bloodstream below. One of the few bands to really fight their way out of my teenage years, SJN sound, for me and many others, like home. For us, Power It Up and its ilk are almost a shorthand now. A simplified articulation of a sensation we never had elsewhere. Addy and I, to the best of our abilities, are hounds snapping at the heels of Dan’s lyrics. At a certain moment Al grasps onto my arm for dear life, a routine marked into our lives by the band. Jah slams into me with all the decorum of a wall and I hit the outstretched arms of those behind me like an errant bouquet at a carny wedding. No religion, no raw hate (as above, Camille Paglia, I’m in your fucking WALLS). I wonder often, and hound everyone, about whether there’s a point to this genre anymore, or if I am simply lusting after a dead idol like teenage girls with Kurt Cobain posters on their walls who feel they alone could have fixed him if they’d only been given the chance. But I don’t feel like that when I’m in it. When I am sweating, and I can feel two packets of smokes wrenching at my throat as I yell back, when I bust the terror of life during wartime open with a sniper rifle. I don’t need to say what Straightjacket Nation sound like, they’ve been around for only little short than my whole lifespan, and if you really gave a fuck about this thing you say you do you’d look it up. Cross yourself and hope they remain on the streaming service you begrudgingly pay for despite sharing that one infographic on your story about the pay dividends. I’m no better than you mate, I'm loads worse. But what I believe deserves articulation more than most is that right here and right now, we yell back. We get yelled at, and we yell back, and if you’ve never yelled back, then that’s all you have ever wanted. I have no time for social graces. I am scared of everyone. If you are who you claim then king it down here with me dog cunt or fuck off.