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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It was just now that i remembered the sensation. Boxed up in the light blue front seat of the nineteen eighty-something Ford Taurus as it pulled up along side the battered parking meter closest to the corner. I hadn’t put my shoes on, and so i was out of the car on the balls of my feet and the tips of my toes nimbly sidestepping broken pavement and glass as my grandfather glowered at me from behind the windshield. I would just be a minute, though. I just needed to run inside to grab my G.I. Joes so that when we went back to his house i would have something to do other than talk to him, or my grandmother, or anyone. And, i would be fast, cringing at the coating of city grime that was slowly adhering to my heels as i neared my front steps.

My grandfather was never much of a driver that i remember – between his failing vision and his advancing bipolar disorder he wasn’t quite cut out for traffic. But, that day i somehow convinced him to start up the car and drive to my house. Children have short sight like that: one day my grandfather was lucid, happy, and amenable enough to drive me somewhere and i just wanted some toys to play with. Every time my mother mentions that he was overseas in the war or reminds me of how he lost half of his finger while doing janitorial work so that she could go to Catholic school my memory of him flickers off of the cartoonish and frightening man he was half the time, and off of the feeble thing he was in the nursing home. The image i see, ever so shortly, is the one that is framed on top of my grandmother’s television in Florida. Their wedding picture. Sometimes looking at it makes me very afraid, because they could look so absolutely happy together over fifty years ago without suspecting that any of this would happen … a war, a daughter, a sickness, and a grandson who just wanted his action figures so that he wouldn’t have to hear about any of it.

It took me a minute of thinking, but the last time i saw my father was while i was in the hospital last year. I’m not even sure he knows that i had surgery last month. The last time i saw my mother was a few weeks ago, i suppose. And i haven’t seen this little white box for eight days now.

Is time harder to measure than your heart?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/07/85235379/

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Technology conspiring against me to drown the thoughts i had been hoping to hang on to as another week of my life flashes by and fades away. What would i have told you anyway? I went to Ikea, i killed some spiders, our DSL inexplicably stopped working, we saw Justin play, we spent a day playing Mario Kart 64 and drinking Coronas. What else is there?

I find it sort of ironic that as i obtain more and more of a real life, this page becomes less and less relevant. I would’ve never imagined that it would be an inverse relationship – I suppose i just have less time to sit around with my thumbs up my ass contemplating shit and then typing it all out


Everybody says they’ll quit their weblogs. They get mad, they get bored, they get complacent, and they say they’re going to end it all. Fewer bloggers actually manage to pull the plug, but it’s been known to happen. I’ve been that person enough times that it isn’t worth trolling through the archives to find examples… mad at technology, bored with what i was saying, so complacent about the page that i didn’t care about it at all.


I’m a different person now than i was a few months ago, both for better and for worse. I am happy, but for my happiness i have forsaken the childish dreams that would lift my spirits on a dreary day. I am stable, but i have lost the ability to voice my irrationality. I am content, and so i have lost the will to tell you about anything that could make me happier. Because, this has never been about what makes me happy, or even really about how my day went. It’s about Crushing. Crushing. What has me under its thumb. What got under my skin. What i want to be pressed up against.


Dotster sent me my domain re-registration email this weekend; CK needs to be renewed next month. And, honestly, i’m having doubts about investing another $20.

Sorry; i hate this self-indulgent bullshit … it needed to be said.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/07/85215853/

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Tiny blonde girl, six or seven maybe. The mic stand was as low as it would go and she kept twisting it back and forth trying to get it even lower, her eyes crossing every time it centered in her field of vision. On every chorus her father would glance at her and nod, and she would grab the microphone and softly sigh into it – recoiling after each phrase with her hand over her mouth, giggling. Half babbling child’s nonsense but half assured harmony, after three songs she was done and she crossed her eyes at us a final time.


Every open mic i’ve ever played has been a little different from the one before it, and this was no exception. Northeast Philadelphia has an eerie quality that it lends to its residents, world worn and weary as they are, so that you can read their lives off of their faces without even needed to hear the songs they had chosen for that purpose exactly. One man, in a faded blue shirt with strong biceps and a cracked and weathered guitar channeled Tom Waits with his slow gravelly delivery, not a surprise at all. A woman, her long blonde hair trailing her and a half apologetic smile on her face, playing self-consciously narrative songs on her full size piano. A thirteen year old girl dressed like a gypsy, holding herself as though she was twice her age until she took the stage behind another piano, this time to play swirling piano compositions she meekly announced that she had “written when she was eleven.” Not so long ago for her, the MC reminded us.

Gina and I must have presented them a conundrum, not betraying our world in our faces. First Gina, shocking them as she revealed her range note by note, first tickling the very highest and then descending to a nearly bass hum as she slowly circled the most basic chords in Bb. And me, i suppose, energetically bounding up and back from the microphone with each line, sticking out my tongue when i missed my riff, and making steady eye contact with anyone who was bobbing their head along. I can’t imagine that we telegraphed our moves, our voices, our emotions as well as the regulars, because our faces just don’t have that quality. Even the tiny blonde girl in her staring cross-eyed at the microphone in front of her face told me all i needed to know before she ever opened her mouth.

I don’t know if i can go back.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/06/85206127/

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How much do you need people?



This time last year i would have said that i didn’t need them at all. Just healed from the immediate wounds of a messy breakup, totally alienated from all of my theatre friends, and actively looking to sublet over the summer rather than stay in my cramped one room apartment. In those moments, i would have told you that i hardly needed anyone except for myself.


I would have been right … at the time. At the time i was so wrapped up in my own personal mythology that i didn’t have time to relate it back to more than one or two other people. I was fine – not at my happiest, but fine. But, in the year between then and now, everything changed. People who i didn’t see more than a handful of times a month are now my most reliable friends. I hadn’t even seen the three people i am most inclined to tell my secrets to once last June. I am in love with someone who i hadn’t even contemplated at the time. And, equally inexplicably, i am happy. Really fucking happy.

The only problem is that with these people there comes responsibilities. I have to find the time to see them, I have to keep their secrets, i have be there for them. And, i cannot burn the bridges i’ve built to them as carelessly as i blazed similar paths this time last year. I’ve gained stability but at the price of disposablity, and now that i’m standing up so strongly i’m loathe to sacrifice any of the balance they’ve provided.

Bleh, some people get cigarette breaks, i get blog breaks. Back to work.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/06/85197727/