It’s hard to know what you mean when you say punk. So, I want to talk about hardcore. There’s hardcore and then there’s hardcore.

I only go to hardcore shows in the summer.

I’ve gone to hardcore shows in the winter.

But the one hardcore—the hot sweat and foul smell, black leather, too many tattoos, beer cans thrown through the sky leaking along their arch. Dirt clods kicked up, kissing tendrils, crab walks, a general demand to take up space.

The other hardcore craves heat in the dark. Ecstatic dance. Intense movement, driving kicks.

At Capacity was hardcore, but in an expansive way. People like Kavari are post-hardcore. DJ Manny is hardcore, maybe a third hardcore where intensity and sensousity intermingle. Endless hardcore. Is the third a post? A deferral. Something new or the re-intensification of the same?

Explosive color, lots of skin, sweaty, sexy, but intensely interior, insular. When you’re really dancing, lost inside, simultaneously so outside in an expressive sub that connects everyone. This was the (post-)hardcore of Kavari and Manny–they’re creating connectivity through bass.

The automatic doors at the Bushwick Art Center are jammed. It produced a loud, plastic grinding sound, repetitive and immediate. Then someone said Trump had been shot.

The two hardcores are both hot and sweaty, but there’s different fluids and molecules moving through the crowds. Different aggressions.

The thing about hardcore is that it will never die.

It doesn’t care if you like it (except when it does).

Perfectly useless.

I’m going to all these raves. I’m thinking about fireworks from years ago. I’m remembering the antagonism of 2020’s endless fireworks, or maybe just the sense that everyone was outside. I went to the rave alone and sat in the cloud of dust, in the chewed out grass in front of Fort Tilden. I wandered through the same sandy pathways. I knew them from the past. I felt the echo of our love.

I feel like people are attracted to the apocalypticism of raves. There’s the impending sense that war defines the future of the country. That the intensification of gay/queer/trans fuckery is a momentary blip. Maybe a Weimar feeling.

(But my cynicism does not constrict my life)

(But my fear of the future does not deny who I will become)

Sitting above the treeline, I hear the birds zigzagging, spinning, tweeting–all at once. The knock of kicks in the concrete hallway beneath. I found the rash shuttle. Ocean waves. I feel so alive and so in love with the city. Chatter drifts up from the field where cars sit, one truck has beach chairs in its bed. People kissed against the concrete wall, twinks fell into each other. 5:37, I breathe in the beach air.

A good argument must be beautiful.

Fishermen stretch down the beach. 9 ravers sit, chat, and play with the sand. Someone remarks, “This is exactly what I want to be doing with my life. My heart is so happy.” I see the endangered sandpiper running along the beach. The same one we chased after. But I don’t necessarily feel sadness, more an affirmation of myself for making the strange, challenging decision to take a car out to the rave at Fort Tilden. I smell the seafoam breaking against the sand. American flag towel, camouflage crocs, an overworked star tattoo, a fucked-up raver plays in the shallow waves. The rest of the rave ambles on the sand. K said there’s probably events like this in every city in the country, but I’m not sure. To be sitting on the beach after bopping around the Glendale intersection fireworks, after loitering on Myrtle for too long, only to find a bird circumnavigating the crowd, panning its chirps in a spiral downward towards bumps, joints, cigarettes, redbull, and plastic bottles of water.

I sit by the cold waves. The wind rips across the beach. Two embrace after one took a plunge in the morning sea. To be in love and stay up all night with your lover. One of the DJs snoozes on the sand, another flops around in the breaking waves, laughing alone. “Get baptized, Jesus beach god, go in the water.”

I’ve been thinking about insanity a lot lately. On the concrete slab, overlooking the East River, the milquetoast rave in the foreground, the dregs of the hardcore show in the background, I said, “I think everyone is losing it.” H and M agreed, speculating some subsisting covid trauma was reemerging this summer. There’s a mix of fried, hyper-intensity and exhaustion. It’s in the voice of the kids nervously discussing subway surfing. In the haggard, but rabid political climate. In the heavy heat that bursts into rain.

I was at a hardcore show. I biked deeper into queens, knowing it was somewhere in Highland Park. They had a generator in the clods of dirt. People spilled into each other, the hiss of a nitrous tank in the background.

I was at a hardcore show and someone OD’d on the subwoofer. It took a while for anyone to notice. And the DJ was so loud no one knew what was going on. And there was this artifice about epilepsy. A handful of people went over to C’s. We spent a while in her room. She was playing insane music, some of it from fucking around with her turntable, some from her computer. Someone started talking about raves, whether tonight was a rave–you get a sense that a rave is beyond a party, it requires going beyond, breaking into a place, being locked into an endless rhythm, twisted off of something, but also PLUR (PEACE, LOVE, UNDERSTANDING, RESPECT). I’m on the roof, present in a field of disassociation, waiting for the sun to rise.