Zines and Other That Happened to me
1995-2000

   I think we just went through a golden age here in Pensacola.  It’s mostly over now.  Not all of it.  There still are a few diehards, but it would be a lie to say it was what it used to be.  I’m going to do the egotistic thing and try to document it a little from my own point of view.  At least since I’ve been here.
    There was a time when almost everyone I know was doing a zine.  Everyone was writing, playing music, opening spaces for bands to play, etc.  The punk rock ethic was embodied very well here in this town.
    It was really great too, because outside of Pensacola no one knew about it.  I think the only way you could have had an inkling as to what was going on was to look at MRR and see all the Pensacola addresses in the zine and record reviews.
    When I first moved here, it took a while before I found my first zine.  It was this one called The Mole.  It was a very small thing, almost all of it poetry, but at least it was something.  There were others before of course, but I moved here in 1995.  Within a few months, I found a few other ones.  Trailer Trash and Smell of Dead Fish.  I devoured both of them and later found out that the guy who did Dead Fish, Skott, was the same guy in this band that I liked called Woodenhorse.
    I used to watch them religiously.  Every time they played for a while, I was there.  They were really popular, and so was Skott. I think I was going to Sluggo’s every week for a long time.  Getting drunk with my friends and watching these incredible bands.  So many local, too, and that’s what was so exciting to me.  We had a really tight scene that treated Pensacola like it was the whole world.  It was a really exciting time to live here.
    As I was going to the shows, I would find new zines scattered over the bar.  Pop a Wheelie and It’s the Music Stupid.  I remember picking them up and bringing them home.  I think there was an article about flag burning that I liked, but they were both mostly music. That was cool, but just not me.   I liked most of the zines I saw here, but never felt that they totally spoke to me.  I guess I could have submitted articles to the “established” zines, but I’ve always been scared of rejection.  That’s when I decided to start my own.
   I came up with the name from an exceptionally suicidal Nirvana song called “Milk It.”  I called mine Milk.  Not much to it.  Like the others, most of it was music and poetry.  Which is funny and embarrassing in content as I look back.  But it was mine and I was happy with the accomplishment.
   I’d drop them off at the Sound Box and Sluggo’s and check back to see if anyone picked them up.  To my surprise, people did.  I know it wasn’t because it was good, because it wasn’t.  I guess they picked it up for the same reason I picked up The Mole.  Being free didn’t hurt it’s chances of distribution, either.
   As I kept at it, mostly writing and copying everything at this shitty job I had, I started to meet other people who wrote.  Most memorably Michelle from Trailer Trash.  I met her at this show by accident, when she happened to ask a mutual friend who did that zine called Milk.  I was around the corner when she said it and so we started talking.  I think I talked zines with her for hours and hours until the show was over.  I got her number and we talked more and more before she left town to go back to Memphis.  She was a
Pensacola expatriate and thought about moving back.  She did.  Just like everyone else who leaves Pensacola on their own.
    A lot of the advice she gave me I used and worked almost non-stop on my zine.  It took about 6 issues before I’d even put my name on my zine.  It was about that time that I
realized that there was a bigger zine up north called Milk, so I changed mine to Mylxine (Milk Zine).  I figured no one had that name.  That was also a decision that would guarantee that it would be misspelled and mispronounced from then on.  Oh well, it was unique.  Now I had to get the content unique.
    The more I worked on the zine, the more people I met in that community and the punk scene here in general.  It was fun.  I got to interview 7 Year Bitch, Red Aunts, Cub, Pansy Division, Bikini Kill, and a bunch of others that were active at the time and that I was really excited about.  I wrote all the time, mostly at work.  They were starting to get a lot more hostile to my writing career on their time so I took to shrinking the computer font down to such a small size, 4 usually as opposed to the 10 normal, so no one could see what I was writing.  I’d save it and come in early in the morning and fix all my errors from writing blindly.  I just taught me that I had to be that much more clandestine with my work.
    Michelle and I became roommates somewhere along the line and I still worked on my zine.  I started a distro and a record label.  The distro went really well for a while.  The record label was fun, but I had no money and maybe could never to hardly any of the things that I wanted to do.  I’d interview people in other record labels, like Kill Rock Stars and Candy-Ass Records and ask them for advice but in the end I think the best advice they could have given me was to get some money.  But the distro was different.  It was really fun, too.  I was distributing a few zines and records.  Most of it local I think ,or stuff that I just really loved.
   In 1997, a bookstore opened up here in Pensacola called Subterranean Books.  I didn’t know the owner, but we became friends and I ended up putting my zines in his store and he sold a few books through the catalog.  I started hanging out at the bookstore a lot.  It was really close to my shit job and I’d escape at lunch and stay late and get in trouble when I got back, but I kept on doing it.  Through the bookstore, people started meeting each other and zines started popping up out of the regulars.  We’d all swap stories about how to scam the copy places and where to sell them here in town and outside.  We worked on other projects.  Community zines, split zines, we all wrote for each other.  There was a real sense of community.  I think at one time, there was like 20 zines being written here in Pensacola alone that we counted.  We all helped each other out, too.  Zines like World Domination Through Disco Dancing, Grrr, and Thread came out about that time. I was stealing copies at work for most of my friends.  We’d meet at Sluggo’s and set up a table and sell our works.  Paul from the bookstore would come too and bring some books.  We’d get drunk (except the SXEers of course).  It was a very symbiotic relationship and just a lot of fun.
    I worked on a split issue with my friend Sarah, who did a zine Ghetto Youth.  Her and I became really good friends.  In time, we helped open a space of our own called Intransit.  It took a lot out of all of us to get it up and running, but we did it.  Had a big show.  It was a benefit for Mumia Abu-Jamal that Zack and Amanda had been trying to do for some time.  We held workshops in the day, and had shows at night.  It was right next to this tattoo shop where another zine writer worked, Gabe from Beans & Franks.  He helped a bunch with the place.  Our first week went great and we were all excited about what we had.  Then our landlord, who was a deacon in a church, shut us down because he thought we were psychopaths, as a friend later told me.  We sold shirts that said “Christianity is Stupid-Give it up” and other things that maybe we should have thought more about before we did.  You don’t really have the freedom to say what ever you want.  It may mot be official censorship, just the typical American economic type.
  I, for one, was very demoralized about the whole thing.  My best friend Ruby moved back to a bad relationship in Kentucky about the same time.  Work was going really bad, too.  I was at a really low point in my life and it took a lot to get me going again.
   Eventually I started working again on my next issue.  It took forever to complete.  9 months total, but it was my biggest issue yet.  Over 100 pages, most of it written by me.  There were interviews with Slim Moon from Kill Rock Stars, Team Dresch, a tour diary that Pansy Division sent me.  I was really happy with this one.  I even liked the cover for once.  It was from a Devo insert with this guy with plastic hair standing proud and looking towards the future.  That was me (except the hair part).  I copied 30 of them off and gave almost all of them away to friends and didn’t distribute a single one of them out of town.
    I guess things got too much for me and I kind of dropped out of the whole scene.  I hung around my friends, but I felt really depressed all the time.  I was seeing a doctor and pumped up on a lot of shit that I’m still not sure if it helped me or not.  It gave me a lot of stuff to write about, though.  Problem was I just couldn’t get myself to write anything.  I let my distro go, the record label was over, and I was watching a lot of TV.
    Things started to get better, but then other things happened.  I got arrested, I nearly got fired, my roommate hated me I think, a good friend at the time was in jail, life really sucked.  People were still putting out zines though, even if I wasn’t. I hated to think that I was done with that part of my life, but I wasn’t really doing anything productive anymore.  Creative at least.
   Then, I finally was let go from work, and to my surprise with a severance check that would let me live for a little while with out working.  At my “liberation party”, my friend Eric, who did a zine called Diary of Anne Frank, had a severe asthma attack and died later that night.  That sent a lot of us into our own depressions.
   Yet, people still did zines.  Smell of Dead Fish, Buzz Neitzche, and Ghetto Youth did tributes to Eric and we all went on with our lives, but something was missing.  I think when death hits people your age it has a strong affect on a community.  I wrote the first thing that I wrote in a year that morning about Eric, and didn’t write anything again for almost a year.
   When I finally did start writing again, I was in a much more political mood.  Thanks to the bookstore, and the books with in, I started to identify as an anarchist and started writing this Anarchist paper/zine thing called Our Flag Is Black.  In time, I put together a greatest hits kind of thing of Mylxine and focused more on OFIB than anything.  I also did a bunch of traveling and that kind of thing.  Went to San Francisco, Bloomington, Gainesville, Texas, and Seattle.  And for the first time in my life, I just lived. I moved out of my old house with Michelle and moved into a small punk house, and six months later moved again into a bigger punk house. It was there that I found out just how important my friends were to my life and to my sanity.
    People had been talking recently that our zine scene was shit again and I heard talk about the golden age being over.  Many of the players in the zine scene had moved or moved on.  People had died.  People had dropped out of site.  People just followed a fad.  People bled on paper and gave their hearts away on stolen copies.  Rex (who writes the zine PTBH) and I talked about how something was gone now in our community and no one was writing anymore.  He asked my when was the last time I wrote a new issue of my zine was and if I was going to do another one.  We talked about zines and we both kind of sounded depressed after the conversation and went back to our separate houses next door.
Right then, I fixed a bowl of soup, went upstairs to my room and started writing again.  This is the product.

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