This really has been the best way to start a new year. I have spent my day off from work watching every piece of footage on the Reunion - Retrospective DVD released from Panic Records. It has been incredible to even come close to reliving those moments again. For all those that missed out on that show, the DVD should still be exciting and interesting to you. For those that went, I'm sure that they will be able to fondly remember the best punk show they ever saw.

I am busy at work trying to finish my zine in time for release as soon as I can pay for printing... probably the first paycheck I get, I will take it to the printers.

Hardcore Punk Rock has really made my life something I am proud of. I think that if it weren't for the friendships, the connections, and the ideas that developed because of my interaction with this phenomena, I would have been a completely different person, probably one that is not even alive anymore.

Watching the video footage makes me want to start a band all over again. Just as Timm McIntosh says in the Retrospective section of the DVD, "TRIAL was my first love.... I'll never get over it", I feel the same way about Goldenspike Hardcore. I love the 801 kids, all of them, from the Steamers crew to the crazy kids I suffered with and survived drugs with, to the kids that inspired me to take the vow and take on the edge. "Zutah" was what I once called the assorted folks I knew, spanning from junior high to the Cunninghams and beyond. I felt that we were the exotic, rare creatures, locked down, landlocked, halfway between graveyards and junkyards. Words can never be enough, but I try to put them in ink for us, for me, and for the world to see that we ever lived at all. Lived, like LIVING.

You know who you are, and all of you were my first love, and I'll never get over it.