THE AIR IN the Mission tonight is warm enough to swim in, but the windows won't open, and the apartment feels like the furniture is on fire in another room. Sleater-Kinney's new album is playing too loud through my headphones. Something else is wrong, though I'm not sure it matters what, since in a few weeks, or maybe by the time I finish this column, I'll know all the words and not be able to remember why Corin Tucker's vocal flip-out on the title track made me cringe.

Outside it's California. There are rats falling out of the palm trees in Dolores Park. People are sitting in ones and twos on the hillside slowly drinking beer in the dark. There are guitars at suitable intervals. Earlier tonight I walked over turtles and dragonflies stenciled on the sidewalk, and the street was filled with silent packs of bicycles, and it felt something like what, at 14, I imagined my life would be like when I got here.

The thing is, most of the windows have been painted shut so many times that all our pounding on them does is wake up the baby downstairs. We said we would get our lives together after Ladyfest, but instead I'm getting out of town, going to a place in Michigan where you're not allowed to say, whisper under your breath, pantomime, or even think about the word "woman" unless you spell it with a "y" or an "o." Plus, if you're a woman who came out of Mom with outie sex organs, you'll be pitching your tent across the road at Camp Trans, no matter how you spell it. I'm nervous. Mostly about getting heatstroke, being exposed to music that gives me goose bumps of embarrassment, being exposed to music I like against my better judgment, being judged for attending the festival, being judged for visiting Camp Trans, being too old, too young, too cynical, or too irritated and depressed by narrow channels of discussion. Also about bug bites. Still, I've never been to the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and I'm looking forward to seeing both sides of the road from a closer vantage point than e-mail lists and other forms of dialogue 2,000 miles away – if only it weren't for those naughty encephalitis-causing skeeters they keep talking about on the evening news.

So I'm staring at paint, and Carrie Brownstein's showing off her biceps on the back cover of One Beat, which makes me think of power chords. Many unplanned months of no Sleater-Kinney have passed, and I've forgotten how accomplished they are at fucking with rock and roll. The album is packed full of the past year in America. On "Step Aside," Tucker sings an anthem to her bandmates, calling them out to knock on her door and get her going and keep her feeling anything at all. The neighborhood's asleep, the table and chairs in the next room have burned down to ashes, and I feel ready to dance, or make some kind of public scene.

I'm worried I won't be allowed to wear bug-repellent at Michigan. I'm worried One Beat will be our only friend on Greyhound, that I'll walk off the bus with nerves shredded by the sound of Corin Tucker, agitated and furious. At four in the morning I take refuge in Half-Seas-Over, who use keyboards, guitars, a drum machine, and tons of good old-fashioned aerobic spirit to ridicule girls with maracas, threaten our lives, make absurdist metal, and yell about their art collection, the one they told the Ladyfest crowd at Mission High School they had to sell in order to get out here from Louisville, Ky. As a festival organizer, I felt bad, but they were a kick, and it seems a shame to dwell on the fact that they might now be surviving on toothpaste and roadkill in order to finish their tour. I listen to their five-and-a-half song EP on Stop and Rewind and imagine them playing in someone's basement along Interstate 80, playing in a dark sweaty box with a P.A., a gang of half-drunk kids dancing a few inches away.