Backbends: Priest at Absolution Fest 2023

From the "This Is A Door To Somewhere Else: Night One of Absolution Fest 2023" collection

At the end of Nuovo Testamento, I took stock for a second because I was feeling much better and somehow more alive, but that’s how I feel waist-deep in the beep boop. I also knew I had two more days of that feeling.

I was just so…….happy. I hadn’t felt that way in years….and years…

If my body had decided to wake up sexually a little more during KANGA and I felt lighter during NT, well…..Priest couldn’t have disappointed me if they tried because it wasn’t just about seeing them play—it was about feeling ready for the coming changes to my life. I knew I had a lot to think about for my future, so I knew my ghosts weren’t going anywhere, but…..maybe just for the rest of that night.

I practically dove toward the front of the crowd when it was clear Priest was about to come out because I. Waited. For. THIS. I refused to stop recording until they came out, which lead to me holding my phone up for almost three minutes. But hey, you get to enjoy it, too, now.

I had completely thrown off the stench of That Guy’s memory, even if I knew it was waiting for me on the other side of Priest’s set. But. you know…..at that time, I figured I didn’t owe anybody anything when I wasn’t all that solid on what I’d write about… if I decided to write about Absolution 2023 festival at all. I figured I’d need to talk about what was so special for me in those three days or I’d be considered too dramatic.

S had mentioned Priest earlier in 2023, but I didn’t pay the band that much mind until about 2 months prior when I’d started watching more Twitch DJs. I have zero recollection of which DJ I heard one of the songs on, but I guess I was just ready to explore, especially since their appearance was clearly a focal point for a LOT of people planning on attending.

My History in Black

But the point of 2023 was about learning to sit in the discomfort of not knowing anything about my future—not even having the illusion of knowing—and to come to realize that I spent a lot of my life exchanging the possibility of a better future for present relief. This? Knowing this is a deep well of pain because I wonder who I could have been if I’d just been given a better chance in life.

I was 48 that night in October of 2023. I turn 50 in 2025 and I’ve been asking myself what I really have to show for it—my education excluded, of course. But you know, music was always my survival when I needed a break from the written word, so essentially a break from my inner narrator. I couldn’t have known that 2024 would bring calamity, disappointment, various kinds of heartbreak, and….and…a strange emergence of even more potential within myself than I could have ever dreamed three years ago.

If your pattern is your pain, heal to reveal its cause, then choose yourself with an iron will.

I think at that point of the night, I was really just a little taken aback by the notion that I was still under lock and key when I thought that couldn’t have been still true. Like, what level of hell am I escaping and how have I been this alienated from myself?¹

I got fewer still shots than videos because it requires I pause and I didn't wanna pause.

I credit my EMDR treatment as an essential part of my recovery because you can see who you really are when you’re loosed from the chains other people gave you—and sometimes, we’re too young when this happens to know any different.

When you’re truly working on yourself at that pace and intensity, you begin feeling things and your mind does things that make you feel like you’re going a little crazy.

You’re not. You’re waking up. It’s the stuff of science fiction and conspiracy theories, but this is explainable in a context where your mind is so fixated on trying to address the wound that it forgets about the rest of you². I know I need the full spectrum of the human experience to thrive—sex, love, grief, rejection, joy, disillusionment, and whatever else there is for you.

Trying to catch Mercury when he was on the floor would have been futile if I was aiming to please someone else.

There Is No Way to Quell My Desire

I’m fairly certain I shouted “yyyyyyaaayyyyy” at some point because, for all of my talk around healing, I also accept I’m always going to have the abused child inside of me. I accept the judgement over self-alienation. I’m just….not going to hide myself for you and I choose your rejection over disrespecting what right to thrive. PERIODT.

There were moments during Priest’s set where I felt like every song fit my context, but I know the topics are things we all talk about—especially a subculture of people out here leading with our power dynamics while we get closer to naked than Puritanical American values considers appropriate for public contexts and look at people talking about “body counts” like they have three heads.

We lead with the desire we choose to acknowledge. We’re about rising from the sh*t.

I’m just saying, Priest lyrics are a pretty natural fit and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say most of the songs are relevant. I was agonizing over my past, wanting to find love in the world, finding myself a little overwhelmed by desire in the moment, and wiping sweat off my arm that was…..clearly not mine. And maybe the best moment of the entire three days was this very moment: that backbend only a handful of people saw.

This was because Mercury was literally over my head and I this required a backbend to get.

When I noticed him heading for what I think was a speaker, I had my phone pointed at him, I just kept following him as best I could until I was doing a backbend to get this video. I knew the quality wasn’t going to be there, but this is not a bad representation of what it looked like from where I stood. I was also blinking at some point because my inner narrator was shocked about what my life was becoming:

…..Whaaaaaaat am I doing right now? Is the lead of Priest sweating on me right now? Am I doing a backbend to get this? Whyyyyy do I like this?

See, I would never have been able to do that before 2022 because I needed a wheelchair to go to Disney. I’m not joking and I’m not blowing it out of proportion. I’d been in sensory deprivation for years and at this festival, I was still in the process of dropping weight and fixing my skin. I’m not putting myself down, here, quite the contrary—I’m saying I was in a wheelchair less than 2 years prior and that backbend was earned.

I’d have cried while taking that video for all I’d accomplished if I wasn’t so thoroughly enjoying the exaltation in the moment. I know; it sounds dramatic. But that’s because it was a dramatic change in a short period of time and I’d chosen to experience all of terrible things necessary to understand my wounds and to choose how to dress them. We’re all just choosing to dress them with a crap-ton of black clothes and blacker eyeliner.

I noticed that the bands performing at that festival had to make do with a small stage, but they all managed it well. There were some moments where the band was trying to move around in the space they had, but it made Mercury’s little head toss…I dunno, cuter?

A Dark Dancer

I gotta be honest, I was so thirsty it was obnoxious, I just played it down because I could not approach a soul and nobody ever talks to ME, so that’s a recipe for nothing, I have been careful for good reasons and every time I start going against my nervous system, I have to accept that it’s not gonna cooperate.

Neuromancer was my favorite song at that time, I think, but that was because I really did need a lover. I’m quite serious. I still do, but I’ve spent so much time isolated even since the festival—and that aspect of things actually got far worse in Tennessee than they they were prior to my stay. I forgive myself for flailing around with decisions about the broad strokes of my life in a context where I just could not take another second of isolation, as it threatened to undo a lot of my progress.

But at Crowbar, in October of 2023, I really did feel like the three days were a door to someplace else, even if my life has always been excruciating and would still be thereafter……at least for a time. I liked that being so close to the stage and performers kept me enveloped by the moment. It’s not that I remember being disconnected from my problems that night, but there were enough beep boop sounds to keep attention.

I was so happy; I was literally in a great place. Thinking about those moments made the last 2 months of 2024 a great accomplishment for me again—I pulled myself together despite the massive losses of 2024.

And you know, Absolution Fest 2024 was situated riiiight in the middle of mutliple disasters in Florida and in other states affected by the same storms or similar quandaries. It was canceled in a context where I can’t complain too loudly about my lot in life while others literally pick up the pieces of their homes.

I’m fairly certain I’ll be leaving Florida again and I can’t be too sure about where I’ll land in 2025. It’s ok, I still have a lot of work to do. I still had a lot of work to do that night, as the memory I’d been so consumed in earlier in the night made its return.

Blackwell and I decided to laugh and come down from the night, which is when I made the video a lot of people saw that I wasn’t expecting them to care.

I suppose you know WHY the night was “interesting” and why 2 AM is the morning, but it’s also not because you haven’t slept and, after a jokey moment on my phone, set it down and remembered some of things he said to me, shouting in my ear at some ungodly hour on a sidewalk in an apartment complex in Florida.

I remembered a man nearly 9 years older and 5 times my strength with his hands tangled in my hair while barely legal me of 110 pounds tried to remember where she was and at what hour and….what to tell her police officer father that wouldn’t get this man k*lled.

“What makes you think you can do this, you f*cking B*ITCH?! HUH?!!?”

I don’t know if I cried that night after Blackwell went to bed, but I know I laid there just trying to take it all in, from that night decades prior through grad school and a wheelchair in the most desperate moment of my life—controversially worse than the night I ate dirt because the illness and isolation went on for years—to laughter and music and backbends.

Life….it leaves us speechless at times.

I guess it’s still going on, but I know how I overcome, now, and those aren’t things I can give up and expect to survive. And I don’t think a bunch of awesome beep boop people have it wrong when they put it in all of their “music to f*ck to” playlists. It’s just that these things all existing in the same pot makes this a problematic stew.

But oh, how I wanted to keep surviving…and that felt new. I haven’t had too many genuinely happy moments, but I knew I had 2 more days to plan out what I was going to do in Tennessee, which was only a week away.

“Oh boy,” I was thinking as I closed my eyes that night…..”I’m a fcken disaster.”

Next up: Night two kicks off and I’m tiiired.

1. I know the answer to that, but I can’t stress enough how intense the shock to your reality is when this starts happening. If you’ve ever gone through EMDR, you know that parts of your mind and nervous system do a strange thing where you feel like you’ve cracked open.

2. I’ll need poetry to express that sensation, so I’ll leave that up for conversation and not try to answer that call here.