My Absolution at Absolution Fest 2023 (with audio)
F*CK YEAH SPOOKY BEEP BOOP IN A MINOR KEY
Blackwell & I having a bedtime crack-up. We all gotta be careful, Blackwell.
Listen to Doctor BeepBoop read this piece and add some thoughts here:
Now When My Heart Beats, Heart Beats Fast
Nuovo Testamento performing “Heartbeat” on night 1 (cuts off)
In October 2023, a bunch of spooky people descended upon Crowbar in Ybor City, FL, to see an intoxicating line-up of spooky bands and beep boops at Absolution Fest 2023. I am one of those spooky people but, for me, those 3 days were music-informed life shifts; I really can’t think of a better compliment for a music festival of any kind.
By the time I arrived at Crowbar that first day of the festival. I was standing at what I fully understood to be a precipice of change, based on a series of decisions I made in the previous weeks: I was going to strike out and take a break by exploring other places. I felt like I’d healed and grown as much as I could in the living situation.
I drove from Daytona Beach to Ybor City knowing damn well this was the finish line to the 2 years prior. And the setup of the festival would be perfect.
I was super excited about the bands, but the organization of the event was perfect for me: one bar with one stage, each band simply following each other. I didn’t have to juggle stages, map my days based on which stage was outside or lose my place. I could also listen to bands I hadn’t given the same chance to in the past because they played long enough.
I was……excited…..😆
FUCK YEAH BEEP BOOPS IN A MINOR KEY, THE SONG OF MY PEOPLE.
Every musician over those three days brought incredible energy, but I didn’t have to expend all of my mine on logistics. Show up. Find a place to stand. ‘Dazzit.
On my way to Ybor that first day, I was most excited to see Priest, Light Asylum, Nuovo Testamento, Kanga, Helix, and Black Rose Burning–but I left loving them all and I will also tell you about them all in a series of pieces these musicians and organizers deserve.
Every. Single. One.
I’m sure you all know this isn’t just about the festival itself for me and never will be, but this had some levels of significance in the time my besties, Blackwell & Best, couldn’t have foreseen but felt deeply. So…….what happened that weekend?
I indulged every drop of dopamine only live music doses and sublimated the contrast into a shovel with which to bury alive the last gasp of the remaining misery that lived inside me for a decade.
Because: FUCK ,THIS. MESS. ENTIRELY.
Two Coins For the Ferryman
It’s time to leave this disguise. If you could see me through my eyes…so lay me in a finalso I can avoid the the light, in silence and blackness…forever…
—”Two Coins For the Ferryman,” Black Rose Burning
Black Rose Burning on night 2
At the end of a string of massively traumatic shifts and battles in 2022, I was faced with the difficult task of…continuing to survive. If that sounds terrible, that’s because it was. 2022 was an absolute horror the likes of which is unmatched in my circles, but I’d stayed alive and I knew everything had to change.
I spent most of my active life from 2019 - 2022 either incapacitated or, eventually, in a wheelchair–but the troubles began much earlier. I was confused about what was happening to me. Specialists of all kinds ran every test they could, looked at every inch of my body, charged me so much money that it is a huge part of my financial woes.
By March of 2022 when my former parter ditched me after saying a sentence that plays in my head still, I’d been through 4 severe treatments for suicidal ideation, been to every specialist in every medical field, lost 50% of my hair, gained 70 pounds, suffered regular panic attacks despite massive medication doses, still struggled to sleep..and I just couldn’t fix it.
I had become intensely aware that I was no longer surviving for myself. What would my death mean to the people around me? How would that damage my stepdaughters and the 4-person unit raising them? How would this devastate my father who’d already lost his son? I just couldn’t do it.
Is this what they said was love for your children? Is this the fountain of love women feel for each other when bonded in their community? Oh….this….I wasn’t expecting this and how…how do I express this now with this exhaustion and misery?
And then…..an incident with a friend and my ex triggered a descent into my own mind as disillusionment hit me like a freight train as I realized it had all been worse than I thought. But I thought of my people and just kept stumbling forward.
My life-saving Artemis had held me long enough to tell me I was seeing images of Hecate in my head. WHAT? I had never even heard of her, but every Google, every book I skimmed….it was there, so WHAT. THE. FUCK?
And then…..
What Darkened Pathway Brought Us Here?
“Please don't tell me, you think it’s too late, I'm not ready to accept this fate. The seas will rise, to reclaim the land and we'll realize we are still so small.”
–”Holy Rivers.” Empathy Test.
Only a couple of days later, I was in my psychologist’s office sobbing like every molecule in my body was vomiting. That’s when he slid a brochure across his desk in a moment that would serve as the call to my redemption.
“Doc,” he said, “ I think you should take a look at this.”
And I took it out of his hand and skimmed through it as he explained it in a way that sounded like a small Mayo clinic holistic approach that leaned heavily into psychiatric care. It was also a school and it was 20 minutes from where I lived. It was…RIGHT. THERE. Oh. My. God.
“Are you interes-”
:” I’m doing it. How fast can we move on this?” And took out my phone and began typing in the numbers and the people. I called the first person on my way out of the office like it was a 9-1-1 call.
I cannot leave my body and I cannot leave it behind for others to bury. If I have been an example of how you can both burn out and fade away, I must also be an example of redemption.
“Hello, Jackie? This is J.T. Taylor….ha ha, yes, this is Dr. Taylor…thank you, I forgot about that, I think….”
I agreed to go to a detox center to get off all of my medications and to then be driven to the center to live for up to 3 months to do massive amounts of work. I did massive amounts of paperwork for every single bureaucratic thing within 2 days and then packed my bags.
I was warned that this would be hell. I was already there, anyway.
I went to my former partner’s house that day to drop off the car and say goodbye to my dog. And then… then he said a second shitty, insensitive, asshole thing that still sits with me. The car arrived.
As I stepped out of the house, I was trembling but, as I was getting into the car, I turned my head to look my ex dead in the eyes. I don’t know which of us closed the door or if it was the driver.
The driver said “Hello, what’s your name?
“Jennifer,” I said. “My name is Jennifer.”
“Well, hello, Jennifer. I just needed to make sure you’re the right person.”
“Not as of 15 minutes ago.”
The day I stepped out of the center a month and a half later, I walked out and excitedly got into the car. I told my bestie I was still technically detoxing as we drove home, but everything was green and the sun was astonishingly warm with hope and maybe some joy…and the breeze felt like life, even though I quietly knew this wasn’t over.
A few days later, I attended the Eugence Snowden birthday show to the wide-eyed shock of many as they watched me walk around, sing songs, jokingly skip, tell my old jokes, and my beloved friend, N, couldn’t believe the difference in my posture.
Monumental Move
“There is a home to call my own. There is a way to feel the Sun, high, high, high..”
—”Monumental,” Matte Blvck
Alex Gonzales of MATTE BLVCK from below, high-fiving above
I moved back to my sunny beach hometown as a last resort, but my father’s house is on the river. I woke up to the sunrise if I couldn’t sleep and it was stunningly beautiful and I began using photos as a way to motivate me to do things. Then, I started making videos around town, traveling back to stay at Blackwell’s and reconnecting with Best, started buying tickets to shows, and began to mess with my aesthetic in the absence of an opinion that was always devastating to me.
Oh. Hi. I thought you were dead, Real Me! Hey, we should hang more, for realsies. Tell me about yourself. You know what I like about you when I reach down into the mess of trauma you now understand?
I like your viciousness. I like your sins…You know me and you know that these words aren’t going to write themselves. –Visciousness., Kanga
Corporate goth. Sleek cybergoth. Vinyl. Copper red that fades to light. Back to M.A.C. Cosmetics and a veritable flood of nostalgia. Graphic eyeliner. Authentic inconsistency. Acceptance of crazy in me and my people. Tickets to shows even if I was just curious. Beep boop bands I’d missed while in my own Hades. Detoxing rage, but then licking it off my own skin. Photographing my evolution and the bands I saw. Initiating the memoir I wanted to write for 30 years. Dressing against genre because it’s memorable and IDGAF anymore if I’m liked.
I bought a ticket to Absolution Fest based on my lovely friend S’s recommendation during this haze and started perusing S’s playlists and intersecting them with Best’s playlists (link below) and looking into bands in a ton of genres and gasping at who was touring. Garbage, Metric, Interpol, Depeche Mode, Lana Del Rey, Howad Jones, Berlin, Boy George, Smashing Pumpkins, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, The Mission UK, Tegan and Sara, Psychedelic Furs, there’s more….
See Best’s Playlists on her Spotify profile. She goes by Unexplained_Lights_In_The_Sky everywhere she is. Her Spotify here. and her Instagram here!
2023 was the rest of the lesson and I scored a solid C. Fuck it, Gordon says I passed.
And then, after a series of massive challenges to my sanity, but with the continual rise as my people reaching down to help me up, the events of September 2023 Lana Del Rey show revealed that I’d healed as much as possible there and decided to take a break from Florida and go to Tennessee to go to my friend V’s retreat at Camp Wonder Wander to stay and drive into Nashville for the shows.
I reached out to V, and ,within days, I had plans. Then….I just waited for Absolution Fest to be the line I’d cross into a different life. And it was.
Arriving at Absolution Fest
I beat Blackwell & Best that day and started unpacking and choosing what to wear and settled on a simple black get-up with a Vintage early 80s glitter shrug that seemed like the then-leftover Disco age that I bought at Threads Vintage Emporium.
We took to Uber over and we hyping each other up like FUCK YEAH GOTHS AND EYELINER AND THE SONGS OF OUR PEOPLE.
We stepped into Crowbar for the first time on opening day and I looked at the stage and felt elated because it was small enough to be close to the stage, cool enough to not die in the Florida heat, the bar is accessible enough to avoid too much crowding, and a back patio where you could go to breathe.
FUCK YEAH CROWBAR
If I sound excited, that’s because I was and I can channel that feeling. *chuckles*
In the course of a year and a half, I’d gone from believing I’d never be able to get myself back and never to at least change the tone of this struggle to….b*tch, go NOW.