Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

krisis

Krisis has been creating Crushing Krisis since 2000, writing songs since 1996, and reading comics since 1991. He is a Customer Success and Digital Brand Strategy executive, serial organizer, parent, and feminist, among other things. Based in Philly through 2017, he now resides in Wellington, NZ.

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There are eight elevators in our elevator bay, each dutifully shuttling us corporate lemmings up and down between floors twenty-three and forty-four all the day long. I learned quickly to orient myself to their ding as they reach my floor, one for up and two for down. Four months of this, and it was only this morning that i realized that the dings are out of tune to each other; some ever so slightly but some a sour quarter step. I stood for a minute, humming one ding while waiting for the next, only to be greeted by two simultaneous elevators arriving to prove my point.

Afterwards, i found myself in the empty elevator wondering, Does anyone else realize that they’re out of tune? Is there someone we could call to have that fixed? Could they tune them to a chromatic chord? Is there someone out there whose knows all about this thing, this tiny detail that i have suddenly become so transfixed by as an escape from my dreary morning?

It’s either this, or sniffing markers.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/07/105819465762646589/

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Some things about my office.

I cannot bring myself to trust fat, bearded woman. I don’t know what it is; they’re shifty. They’re always changing their answers, backtracking, being contrary just to avoid a solution. I’ve very carefully studied my reactions to these potential carnies, and I can safely say that their weight or facial hair alone does not change my evaluation of their behavior. All of those chubby, hairy parts combine to create a greater, harder to like, whole. Every one I have ever met has been the same: belligerent, defensive, and stubbly.

When I arrived at the muffin basket today, there were blue-dotted pastries as for as the eye could see. All blueberry. I have eaten two blueberry muffins so far, and I may go back for a third before they put out the lunch spread.

My fellow intern and I have been chosen to present about our internship experience in front of the president of our rather large organization, who seems to be a figure of nearly mythic proportions if my co-workers are to be trusted. The two of us beat out over twenty other interns for this distinction; I thought my boss was going to cry when I told her we were selected.

The funny thing is, ever since my introduction to the “Season of Achievement” program I have been consciously eschewing all contact with it. It’s an intern ghetto, coddling where it should be inspiring, with HR people pulling us away from our actual work in shockingly long four hour blocks in order to act as a motley crew of corporate orientation leaders to our group of exceedingly inquisitive, capable (and increasingly jaded) college students.

Either the force of my personality shone through so brightly at the only workshop I ever attended that they have been craving more ever since, or my fellow intern has been impressing the hell out of them every week while I’ve been deliberately scheduling meetings with Medical Directors to make sure I never have to show up.

In other news, two weeks ago i drank a really large latte and became convinced that if I deferred senior year in favor of taking a bus up to Buffalo to camp out on Righteous Babe Record’s front step that they would eventually be forced to give me a job, but then i realized that OH MY GOD, I really want to get college over and done with.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/07/105776358824404144/

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What is it with me today? I am awake, but soft and blurry around the edges, of my vision and of my voice. People keep asking me if I’m sick or what I have been yelling about, and I tell them that it was just a fun weekend spent alternatingly drunk and in the back of a Camaro, but I don’t think that’s really where my voice went.

They haven’t ever heard my voice, my real voice, how I would speak if I dropped the pretense and the humor and spoke from the gut instead of just from the inside of my mouth. I slip it in sometimes, in a conversation about our mailing boards or a redesign, dropping down to my real register halfway through the sentence to see if it makes them flinch.

It doesn’t.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/07/105768807790145752/

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I sit on the end of our row, adjacent to three women from the next department. At first their chatter seemed inexorable, endless, and inconsequential, but now I see that it is what allows them to be here, to somehow reconcile whatever they care about to the reality of sitting in front of their alarmingly lo-fi DOS-like interface.

The woman who shares a cube wall with me talks the most of the three; the smile in her voice hide a constant crease of worry, which somehow makes me picture my grandmother in the next cube endlessly chatting. She is obsessed with controlling her son. I found it amusing, but today as she rambled on I started to see the simple misery hidden at the bottom of her creases.

Her son is headed straight for teenage years, sure to be ripe with youthful misbehavior and sexual experimentation. She talks about him with her creased voice, about how he does not want to wear the shirts she lays out, preferring t-shirts from Hot Topic and loose jeans. About how he tries to play money from her so that he can pay for the older kids to go to the movies with him, and how they in return take him to the drug store to explore the condom aisle. “Of course,” she says matter-of-factly, “he doesn’t have the slightest idea about all of that.”

She has an image in her head of how her son should be; what he should become. It is faceted in her mind, I’m sure, gleaming from every angle. But, maybe not as faceted as he would wind up doing things on his own. I’m not sure, actually, which is why I have become so obsessed with following her endless stories, and why I sometimes feel sad for them both.

If my mother had that image of me, she never revealed it. I think she had the barest of ideas, with no overarching goals or guides to my personality or morality. I never had to make the bed, always got to buy the music i wanted, and never had any restrictions placed on how much or how little time i had to devote to people other than myself. Did she mean for me to value art more than industry, and myself more than anyone else? I was left to fill in all of those details myself, never realizing that there was not an upper limit to the facets I could have because she never thought to impress them upon me. And now, sometimes, I feel as though because of it I have organized my life horizontally — only one layer deep. Not multifaceted.

Who has the better mom?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/07/105768499661166966/

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I am not a car guy, but this weekend i found myself catching my breath when I was first introduced to Ross’s gold 1967 Camaro in full daylight, its top just finishing its retreat to the back hood. We rode in the Camaro almost exclusively the entire time we were in New Hampshire. My favorite part was the looks… at gas stations and stop lights, wide eyed, covetous, keenly appraising the four of us in the car (five, after we were joined by Martha).

I had never been to New Hampshire before. The names and numbers of the highways that got us there were meaningless to me, made all the more alien by the day-early fireworks that exploded in the night all around us. The state itself was equally as foreign; different slang, different prices, a different way of driving. Vehicles on the Maine beach’s parking lot all open and empty, the Philadelphian in me feeling almost compelled to vandalize them for being so trusting.

It felt more real than Philadelphia, though, as if the commonality of an experience makes it less like reality. Like I was a trendy kid eschewing the new pop album to embrace indy critical darling, only with New Hampshire instead of something off of Barksuk records and irreverent, heathenish, treasonous wit rather than any kind of nationalistic spirit. I still wondering the same wonder: is it good because I like it, or because no one else I know does?

Friday morning I woke up at eight twenty seven, so that by the time I rubbed my eyes, stretched, and walked to the kitchen it was eight thirty. Time for work; not even alien surroundings can convince my brain that it is not time to communicate efficiently at half past eight. Saturday saw me rise at the same time, again unprovoked and exactly.

I resolved that over ninety percent of my liquid intake would be alcohol. I was that guy, the guy from the big city turning a peaceful sub-urban vacation into a bender. I was that guy, drink in hand at all times, but even while i went through the motions i knew that it wasn’t me; it felt exactly the same as playing a snooty New York writer trapped on a Pacific Island for my acting class: i knew the paces to go through, but I never felt connected to the character.

On Sunday morning, hung over and ready to head home at eight thirty on the nose, I finally felt like I understood the both of us; we were using a change in location to attempt to focus our image, but without any normal references to work from we were skewed, suddenly out of control and unlike the selves that we had grown accustomed to.

If New England can at once transform and fascinate me to such a degree, how would I react to Alabama or California, England or Denmark, India or Australia? How frightening to think that all of my weakness and confidence might stem from a place outside instead of a place inside, and that a simple change of scenery could alter or even invert it.

Not the sort of independence I had intending to be commemorating, but fitting nonetheless.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/07/105760143610820933/