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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The week that i moved into my first apartment was also the only week i’ve ever owned a cell phone. Actually, it was on loan from Drexel as part of my employment as a peer leader. Only two and a half years later and all that i can remember is working long days in our tiny cloistered room in The Armory, after which i would take a short but exhilarating walk back to my new home. Short to the tune of seven blocks, but exhilarating because it carried me off of the Drexel campus map and onto poorly lit residential streets that were known to host such threats as maliciously drunk frat-boys and the very occasional mugger.

In the beginning i would get so tense walking home from work that i would nervously finger the nine key on my company phone, as i had it set to speed dial the police. At the time i was new to the feeling of my own keys in my hand, and could not help but finger them constantly while my other hand readied for action, especially when i turned up the always-dark thirty-sixth street from Powelton. And, though I always tell prospective students that i’ve never been harassed or mugged for a reason i have the distinct feeling that neither my shiny new keys and tightly-clutched phone were that reason.

Walking down Walnut street tonight with Elise’s cell phone in my hand recalled the experience for just a moment, blogged-about but forgotten in the interim. Of course, now i am thrust into what actually qualifies as West Philadelphia rather than blocks of expensive double homes, and i am now typically as oblivious to any potential dangers the streets hold in store for me as i was trigger-happy on the nine button back in the day.

Oddly, i felt strangely alone out on the street — somehow totally out of place, as if i was being blue-screened onto a city block from the safety of a comfortably heated studio. As if a digital jaws or T-rex could snap me up as i rounded a corner, represented by your common Philly street thug. Or, you know, an actual screen-monster approximately as threatening.

Tonight was literally the first time i had a cell phone in my personal possession for more than a minute or two since those tense walks home in 2000; Elise had given me hers so i could call her to consult on Ben & Jerry’s flavors, but as the neon sign of the convenience store disappeared behind the slope of Walnut street i found the phone at my ear. Elise just a speed dial button away; I wouldn’t call her just because i was afraid, though. No, of course not.

What i would do, though, is have an embarrassingly loud one-sided conversation about themes of materialism and submissiveness in Moulin Rouge as they relate to modern feminism. Not exactly guaranteed to scare away muggers, but i suppose i was hoping to portray that any startled girly screams in the middle of such a heated debate would be construed as distress calls rather than me conceding that Nicole’s tuberculosis had nothing to do with damning her character as soon as she became more than a high class hussy.

But, really, i hated that movie.

When i finally reached my own corner the phone was still pressed to my ear with Elise only a hot key away, and i felt confident enough to finally relax my death grip on her tiny Motorola. However, it was then that i saw it.

A cat — my first assumption; fair, i think. It wasn’t as big as Elise’s dreadnought-sized house felines, but not unreasonable for a feisty-but-underfed outdoor tom. Upon a second glance i saw that the tail wasn’t right… not high and wagging like a cat’s. Not even right for being a bit damp and put out. In fact, more like outrightly straight, and tapered near the end. Not especially fluffy.

As i got closer the silhouette of its face began to resolve so that i could make out out not an adorable button of a kitty nose, but a snout. Yes, definitely a snout. At this point i upgraded my estimate from stray to opossum, although i had no guesses as to what an opossum would be doing wandering around on Walnut street at this time of year. Or any time of year.

At this juncture i idly pressed the call button on the cell so as to share my speculation with Elise. I had only gotten halfway into what i’m sure was a very clever introductory sentence about the migratory patterns of opossum when my quarry turned to face me and i discovered that it was not a cat, opossum, or even a deformed pan-handler. No, none of the above, not by any stretch of my overstimulated and sleep-deprived imagination.

Indeed, it was a rat. A rat that had grown so large that even seeing it full on i was tempted to believe it was a mutated house cat. Let me put that into perspective for you: big enough that it cannot be obscured by a single car tire; too menacing to beat to death with a flip-flop; large enough that it immediately evoked a fire-swamp joke after i was done screaming like a little girl at the top of my lungs at one thirty in the morning in the middle of a deserted West Philadelphia street.

I’m not sure if that scared away the muggers or attracted them.

The ROUS continued to stare me down while Elise casually dismissed my peril — i took her hanging up on me as an implicit refusal to rush down the stairs to arm me with a burning torch, large steak knife, or can of disinfectant lysol.

There we stood: girly boy desperately clutching a cell phone and two pints of Ben & Jerry’s and rodent … rodent and girly boy desperately clutching a cell phone and two pints of Ben & Jerry’s and rodent. After a bone-chilling minute where i thought i would be forced to lob a pint of Coffee Heath Bar Crunch at the thing’s head, it nobly retreated to the barely sufficient cover of an Accord tire so that i could breathless dart past it. My keys now added to the list of precious cargo clutched tightly to my chest, i was more urgently tense during those fleeting moments of escape than i ever was three years ago on the front stoop of my apartment building.

Moral: Cell phones cannot protect you from everything. At least, not unless you have the speed dial for Animal Control directly between the one for your unsympathetic girlfriend and 911.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/02/90266022/

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No, i will not do my reading on Modernity, or write five-hundred words about globalization in India without ultilizing the passive voice. I will do anything but. I will read every Metafilter post, complete with comments, from the last three days. I will floss my teeth, eat ramen, and then floss my teeth again — i like to think of it as an empirical study on ramen deposits in college students. Afterwards, I will aimlessly stare off into space while intermittently checking to see if i have any new email, because i would rather do anything but school between tomorrow and September, let alone now. And, let’s not even begin to mention the nine thirty communications class where, in the last session, my professor read out of the book FOR AN HOUR after making feeble attempts to evoke discussion from his dazed classroom of crusty-eyed twenty-somethings. Let’s face facts: I cannot communicate in a classroom setting before ten-thirty. It’s the gods’ honest truth; i’ve never received an A in a collegiate course that began before ten. And, well, now that i am a surly and jaded senior, may the gods be with you if you try to teach me how to communicate, study communication, or evaluate communication at any point earlier than that.

As for that “I’m so smart, i’m going to graduate with honors and go to a spiffy grad school” riff i was on last semester, it seems to be losing ground to the “Stuff my face with wild animal abandon whenever i get bored in an attempt to gain 20% of my body-weight before finals week” initiative and the “Who needs coursework when i have the Vagina Monologues? And who needs the Vagina Monologues when i can idly fuck with my website all day!” movement.

Last night i had a dream where i had graduated from college and all i could do was sob — because i had suddenly realized how much the worth of my life increased when accompanied by a silly little piece of paper. And five years of vaguely applicable torture, sometimes occurring at times when not even torture should be inflicted on a college student. Let alone theories of communications research.

Me? Frazzled?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/01/90253010/

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In my room there are two heating vents and two windows. However, the primary heating vent and the draftiest window happen to occupy the same cubic meter of space, which has today left me with an interesting dilemma.

I can, and do, typically place a homo-sapien-sized pile of laundry in front of said window to absorb the intermittent chilling wind (yes, wind) that it produces. That same pile of laundry is also, unavoidably, sitting directly in front of the more functional of my two heating vents. I am wagering that eliminating both sources of temperature change keeps my room at a higher constant temperature than allowing them to cancel each other out. This morning i was beginning to fear not that i was wrong… not that the man-made hot air could overcome natures brutal breeze. No. That would be too easy.

Now i see that my trivial placement of soiled clothing can not protect me from the unending onslaught of cold that is this winter. If this makes any sense at all, my room is so cold right now that i think reverse evaporation is occurring… which, yes, i know is technically sortof condensation, but this is a lot more like water molecules diving out of the air and into my cappuccino mug because they too are freezing their asses off in here. There is literally an inch more liquid in the mug then there was when i went to sleep, and my previously dried tea-bag has generated its own puddle. Or, as i like to refer to it, refugee camp for displaced molecular structures.

In a similar vein, last night when most normal people went to sleep it was twenty, yes, twenty degrees warmer outside than it is right now. Earlier yesterday i was complaining that i skipped an entire week of going to work in favor of working on Vagina Monologues, but now i am starting to think that was just an excuse to be somewhere other than here — or the two mile stretch of outside that lies between here and any other place where i can get anything done. Because, well, since i don’t particularly fancy the stretch right now, here is the only place i plan to be going.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/01/90240014/

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As someone who has ostensibly spent the last three and a half years of my life studying journalism at times i have a lot to say about the current state of the American news media. Any major US news outlet is over-reporting, under-representing, over-the-top, unprofessional, and altogether useless as far as i’m concerned. However, this isn’t really the fault of the programmers — it’s the fault of the American public. You would think that consumers would reject local news that resembles an erstwhile clip of Entertainment Tonight, or that they would at least demand that Philadelphia have a single daily paper not owned and published by the Knightridder corporation. But, they don’t, and their low expectations and low-brow interests are the undeniable trend-setters of what gets covered, with sometimes shocking implications.

As such, i was initially taken by surprise to see CNN headline with an internet story. My surprise only lasted long enough, though, to realize that the lead-in to the story was rife with buzz-words, and that it primarily existed to address the intermittent but highly-annoying slow-down that began earlier this weekend. The article proclaims that “Experts called the worm the most damaging attack on the Internet in 18 months,” and it was assertion that i found most shocking of all. Plainly, it is incorrect, even without taking into account a conflicting statement made in the same artcile: “It’s not a major risk. It’s not [doing] either of the two things that are terribly damaging,” Paller said. “One is hurting people’s machines, and one is knocking things [off-line].” By contrast, the relative blip on the media radar caused by a distributed denial of service attack this fall that left nine of the thirteen major DNS root servers temporarily down for the count definitely ranks, in my opinion, as possibly the most damaging attack on the Internet. Even the CNN article admits the potential deadliness of this tactic, albiet without acknowledging the recent incident in question.

Before i go on, let me ask: do you know what that means? In case you don’t: Websites don’t really live at the addresses you are used to typing in for them; this one doesn’t really exist at a place named “crushingkrisis.com.” In reality, web-pages exist soley as a set of IP numbers … think of them as PO Box’s that have been set up to forward to your (more meaningful) full street address. DNS servers are what does the forwarding, linking those numbers to names like amazon.com, cnn.com, and whitehouse.gov. And, while there are many local servers around the world that maintain this address information, all of it originates from root servers — the ones that were attacked.

Based on that oversimplified explanation, it should be plain to see how the internet might slowly disintegrate into nothingness if a few more servers had been crippled, or if they had been damaged in a more permanent fashion. Even though sites would technically still work via their IP address, many sites (most blogs included) reference their links and images in such a fashion that they would be rendered useless without a domain name at their source. However, though “[t]his may have been the largest attack on the core of the Internet, it didn’t affect actual users” (Maguire, Newsfactor.com). This, as opposed to an extremely evident slowdown that left many pages totally unavailable this weekend, meant that its coverage was minimal at best

Can you imagine what would happen if the internet broke? Not just your own site, and not just every site you read, use to schedule classes, check email with, or do banking on. No. The whole thing. It would be a catastrophe! John U. S. Doe would find himself utterly helpless at work all day without being able to refer to stocks, research, or company intranets. Jane Americana Doe would be lost without her regular nightcap of Yahoo News. In short, the public should have been really, really, really freaked out by the 2002 attack, as well as this attack and what is implied by them both.

My local news outlets largely did not cover the attack last year. By rights, it should have been the most important story… certainly more significant than impending precipitation or a sports game. Instead i found out about it in class where, unsuprisingly, no one even understood its significance. This attack obviously got picked up by CNN because it affected business and, in an unusually potent turn, disabled some thirteen thousand ATMs. Meanwhile any garden variety email-communicable virus, which i have never once even approached catching in seven years of blithe internet usage, is cause for alarm and coverage. Why? Because it primarily affects the lowest common denominator. That’s what it all comes down.

You may not be able to tell if the chicken or the egg came first — the point is that they both need each other to exist. The same goes for the relative irrelevance of the news and the increasing idiocy of the American public — especially on issues of politics and technology. Individual news organizations should make a change by covering what’s important, and not what’s expected. You should make a change by giving a shit about what they’re telling you. And not telling you.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/01/90238287/

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Such a strange feeling to be actively blogging again, reading and writing and interacting again. After two nights of messages from Rannie @ Photojunkie, the other other day i received a hello from Dave @ Acerbia. And, before i go on, need to emphasize that you really ought to click that link, if only for an example of how shwanky a blog layout can actually be, which entirely ignores the hilarious writing that you are bound to encounter. But, i digress. After having fairly meaningful conversations with them both, i am both shocked and delighted at how downright enthusiastic they are about my linking to them despite the fact that they are both nominated for Bloggies and being linked by nearly hundreds of other pages right now. That’s not what i’m here to talk about, though.

Early in our conversation Dave asked me the surprisingly succinct question, “What do all the music links have to do with crushing?” I was more than a little shocked by it, at first. Back in the day i think it would have been obvious… the sobbing and moaning about my life in the middle of the page had a direct connection to the sobbing and moaning about my life in that week’s trio … it was a direct one to one relationship. However, here in 2003 faced with that question staring at me from a gapingly white instant message window, i found myself drawing a blank.

I can’t exactly claim that music is my life, but it has always been a big part of it. I have always been a music consumer, ever since i would perform my choreographed floor exercise routine to “I’ll Tumble For You” as a child. However, it was my guitar that made it a part of my life; my ability to recreate a song anywhere and at any time via my own body. Soon that wasn’t enough for me, though, and i began writing my own songs. At first they were halting and barely melodic, relying solely on the the chords that i knew and a few that i dared to make up. Eventually, though, i had played enough songs by other people to begin to know how to get the right sounds out of myself, and that is when my songwriting truely began.

This website is obviously a living document of writing — it’s past exists in perpetuity while it’s future begins anew with each post. In its existence i have deleted only a scant handful of stray musings, and significant alterations are only ever the result of tightening my own editorial screws than any censorial hindsight. Soon after its inception, it also began a living recording of my music… flubbed starts, bad strums, and occasional shining moments … things that i remember hearing at the time more than i remember doing them.

My ability to travel back in my personal timeline via this page’s archives is magical to me — especially tracking my songs’ evolution via the song archive. Listening to the spectrum of sounds between my original conception and my current interpretation often provides a surprising peek at what my original intentions were and how i have neatly disposed of them. My choice of “World In My Hand” to open this week’s Trio was as much a nod to this as anything… this weekend i listened to its history, everything from my original by barely audible singing on its original recorded rendition to the flubbed versions from this weekend. The song itself is old, and it has barely changed… even less, perhaps, than any other song i’ve ever written. It has always been frenetic, challenging to play, and hard to remember. But, even when a song doesn’t change with time, i still do.

So, to belatedly answer Dave’s question, all the music links are an attempt to more fully record my transformation into something more than i was before. The fact that anyone ever stops by and checks in on my progress along the way is still shocking to me, and i continue to be eternally gratefully for each second spent on the task.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/01/390238127/