Glowsticking is the art of dancing with glowsticks. I wouldn’t call it an artform. I admit it looks cool from a distance and even cooler when one looks on as a casual observer in a drug-enduced stupor state of altered mind while techno music makes the ears bleed in the background.

I am a former glowsticker, a certified master Glostiksai (pronounced glow-stick-say), one who twirled the glowsticks at raves and electronica dance clubs in the early 1990s, some of the parties raging all night long! For fun. Yes I had fun doing it. I can destroy the dance floor. I can spin those glowsticks. Call me Russ Glostiksai and bow to me.

I was the best light-oriented dancer of my time, with fans from all over the club scene getting giddy upon seeing my moves. Both freehand glowsticking and glowsticking with strings was what I had mastered. I prefer freehand glowsticking yo. I never used the primitive figure-eight move followed by circle using both strong and slow lights. Hell no! I had more ellaborate moves; a swagger, a strut. My stage name was PappieMasterGlowStickster and that blessed name should strike fear and admiration in your mind if you are a true Raver because scores of young men and women of the 90’s would encircle me to watch in hazy delight as I did my thing.

I am quailfied to speak out against glowsticking. Now is the time for me to break my silence.

I helped write the Ravers Manifesto. That’s right, I soberly helped write the smutty laughable Ravers Manifesto while my co-authors were in a peyote-educed haze in 1991. I don’t do drugs. Dancing is my drug. Ravers across the globe love the manifesto and worship it and wonder who wrote it. They are perplexed by the wordage, tear off their club clothes and speculate what anonymous person penned it. I finally come clean. Finally Ravers can rejoice! 1st round of ecstasy, LSD and ketamine on me!

The Manifesto was once a reciting requirement for Ravers. When at the map point deciphering when and where the DJ will be spinning at the shanty warehouse, and upon confrontation, if one shouted: “Tell me the Raver’s Manifesto,” the Raver is supposed to stop dancing and twirling their glowsticks, turn down the technoy bass, silence the group fornication, drop their baggy pants and be bound to recite it in a passionless monologue as if they were blowing mentholated vapours into the nose, mouth and eyes of an unsuspecting recipient! Extra bonus kudos were given if they burbled bile simultaneously due to the copious drugs they were on.

“Our politics of choice is NONE!” I snort with laughter and embarrassment that I had a hand in writing that crap. “We are the MASSIVE!” Please. I take it all back.

I have veiled myself in trenches and in dirty underbrush hiding from the authorities for years, and now I have resurfaced to speak out. I’m now against the filthy glowsticking. I have seen so many horror shows in my raving days, mixing with urchins of the night and their grubby ways. I know DJs. I know vinyl-spinners. I know dancers and glowstickers and drug dealers and filthy filth. Raves are rife with gang activity, rape, robbery and drug-related offenses!

Now I mock it all. I now choose to glowstick with the real dangerous shit, like fire and flame.

Fire performance rules.