Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Year 04

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Three related paragraphs that have absolutely no bearing on anything.

I am so chirpy on the phone. “Thanks so much for your help!,” i expel with force. “You have a great holiday!” i command with enthusiasm. I suspect the clerks in guidance offices across Montgomery County hardly know what to say to me, which is apt, because i hardly know what i am saying. I imagine fielding a phone call from me is like trying to catch water from a great stone fountain in a meager paper cup … the stream steady with random variation, the force and volume too great for the vessel.

Last night i was walking down Walnut street, thinking about how everyone wants to be famous. Everybody does. Not all face-famous, of course, not all actors or politicians, but famous for something; inventing, writing, singing, designing, growing record-sized pumpkins, etc. I always thought i’d be a good famous person, because i think i understand what a public expects from someone in possession of fame. But, to be famous you must become famous, and to become famous you or your product must be recognized, and i and the three or four products that i consider to be eligible are currently incognito, embedded in our stealthy and unnoticed positions until further notice.

Sometimes i think that i will take on a character, change my carriage and manner of speaking, to see if i am somehow different than before. When i arrive in the office to find it full with dozens of perspective students, or when i step into a store i’ve never been near before. What great acting it would be, what a superb lie, to alter myself not according to a script but in every facet of my ongoing self.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/11/106986643165083879/

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We are spiders, though only showing half of our limbs to the casual viewer. Yes, we have just four to walk stairs and climb ladders with, but there are others — for social ascent, occupational strides, and hanging on to love, maybe, though they could be for anything else.

We are spiders, and we trail a single string of us, our history and opinions and experiences, and as we turn in circle upon circle we leave behind a complex web of people and places that are bound to us.

We are spiders, and things get caught in our lives. Stuck in our web, they flail madly and desperately to escape, but wind up inexorably tied to all of our people and places as they thrash, leaving our once-perfect display of natural geometry in a tangle of bent angles and broken connections.

We are spiders, and our webs are not permanent structures. They can be elaborately expanded upon, or casually discarded, leaving us with just that single string of thread to create anew.

We are spiders, spending our whole lives weaving and catching and crawling and expanding, but sometimes the old web seems in such a state of disrepair that we should take our single thread and start again, keeping some elements but eschewing the rest, leaving our old structures to decay on the branches we hung them upon.

We are spiders, and I am arachnophobic.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/10/106762895148663779/

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I see those forward-leaning boys and think of high school, of tiny boys with overfull backpacks trying desperately to counter the weight. The boys i pass here at Drexel are the same as those younger ones; though they may have left their bags behind, they have not left behind that forward slouch — now leaning into the wind of their academic challenges as if it is still tangibly forcing them backwards.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/10/106736351940989900/

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I’ve been holding on to this awful fear in the pit of my stomach for over a year now — that anytime the phone rings it’s going to be bad news about my grandmother. Maybe it’s why i hate the phone so much, how i always avoiding answering its ring and why i made sure to leave my cell phone safely ensconced within my old office building for the last two weeks … why i wasn’t surprised to finally pick it up only to hear a sequence a messages from my mother, each serving as a cold comfort as none quite claimed the worst.

I was caught, though, last night, live and on the line to my mother as she once again laid on this guilt, as if i know how to set aside my entire life and somehow make this all easier for her, or how to make my grandmom happier and not in so much pain, or how to do anything. The truth is that i don’t know, i can’t do anything, and every time my mother reminds me of how truly bad things are i see my grandmother and i convince myself that everything is okay.

I have finally been convinced now, though, that it is not okay. Sitting in the middle of the floor idly strumming my guitar and it all at once hit me that even though i made Elise promise to drive me over there tomorrow when her class is over that i missed out. I missed out on bringing Elise to meet her like i said i would, and on having her come to my college graduation, or even have her see me become successful or hold my children in some distant future. I realized all of that, and that maybe i have resisted dealing with it emotionally for all this time because i was hoping that somehow if i pushed it to the back of my mind and just kept working i would somehow make everything that she’s always dreamed for me come true.

What followed was a mess of tears and words and suddenly, two hours later, i’ve lost a box of tissues but gained a song so stupidly simple that i can’t help but keep crying as i have it on repeat because it encapsulates so very perfectly just how crushed this is leaving my life, and how much i just want to be able to have my college diploma and my successful life ready to bring with me tomorrow when i sit next to her bed, because i can’t think of anything else to give her (because she doesn’t really like songs all that much).

But, on the bright side, i’m a third of the way done my next Trio.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/10/106550775490805569/