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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In other news: Alison compares bug spray to whiskey, as she discovers that one of her resident kitchen vermin has a higher tolerance than she does. I am mulling over which charity i’ll be singing for. Rabi saves a life and lives in a cave, but she seems to have forsaken permalinks (or not). We’re one step closer to living in an episode of X-Files. Just when i thought she was about to slip, she reaffirms my faith. I talked to another Philly blogger. Meg is either a Virgo or operates on the same set of brain waves as i do. Brendan won’t be back for over a year. And, um, i started writing a new song for the first time in a while.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/07/85252784/

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I am the sort of person that, once i have something fixed in my head, it overwhelms everything else in my life. That’s what happens when i ‘crush’, so to speak. I can safely reveal to you that this sort of attention is rarely paid to anything resembling work. When i’m at work i can become so focused on something that i’ll skip lunch breaks and leave later than expected, and i have been known to grow so engrossed in writing a paper that i forget to sleep or use the bathroom. However, the way crushing works is that it subverts other intended activities — and getting the records organized at work never crosses my mind when i’m working on a decent logic puzzle in the same way that writing a paper usually doesn’t distract me from writing a song.

Having spent all that time setting up what doesn’t usually distract me to no end, now let me (predictably) contradict myself: in the past week an official job i have has superseded everything else i could possibly be doing: working, sleeping, eating, spending time with Elise, and even getting near Blogger. The job, as it were, is to arrange Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” a cappella for eight or more women’s voices so that everything about the song – guitars, drums, harmony, et al – is represented in full by the singers.


It was not easy. In fact, looking back over the last week i would say i’ve easily spent upwards of fifteen hours on this barely three minute song with its half-octave of lead vocal notes and its five essential chords. Fifteen hours in front of my computer playing back the same collections of three and four measures back over and over as i first change a sixteenth note to an eighth note, and then from a major fourth to a major third of harmony.

Almost a solid day’s worth of arranging later and i have suddenly realized that Drexel had managed to teach me something, because i couldn’t do any of this three years ago – or even two. Possibly not even one. I haven’t mentioned it lately, but i’m currently in choir. Yes, choir. Singing in a group of over twenty people, some of whom are very highly distinguished singers who have been in such groups for well over a decade. I, by contrast, have been in such a group for going on five weeks. I start each session frazzled and rigid and end each one relieved and smiling and ready to belt out just about anything.

Conclusion? Some things do change, but the most basic of things always wind up the same.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/07/85252415/

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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/