Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

consume

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You know, there is a children’s game here. It is called “the enchanted.” Anytone who touches you enchants you. You must remain frozen until someone else comes to touch you. Then you can move again. Who can say how long it will be before someone else enchants you once more? It is a dangerous word. You are bedazzled. But you do not own yourself anymore. You belong to someone else who can be good or bad to you, who knows? … Some things are both yours and not yours; they are painfully yours because they are not yours. You understand? – Carlos Fuentes, The Old Gringo

Fuentes is translated by a woman, and they have woven an endless tangle of fathers and sons and sunbaked skin and sex upon sex. Fuentes and the woman translator brought us these sweaty tangles of blood and pulse and life and everything just through the thrust parry thrust of sex itself … sex as exposition, sex as decision, sex as power. Whoever of the two of them quite made the book into what it is… i cannot pull my head out of the tangle of shifting narratives and parenthetical thoughts and mirrors and yet another labyrinth of life mirrored across itself to create a twin garden of forking paths that is turning turning turning within itself like a season.

Sorry, i was writing blogs in class again…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/6838566/

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Six AM is when i finally slid my downward spiral to sleep in my bedroom that had so suddenly been transformed into a desolate + sultry desert by page upon page of streaming consciousness that flowed in a way that felt like, yes, this is still a novel in Spanish and we are just reading it through American eyes.

I cannot dream in Spanish, and so i slept and sunk into a language of sleepy heavy-lidded eyes and it ended again with my flying… this time as if drunk and veering into buildings and slowly being lifted up into consciousness, and do you get the idea that my dreams are like the absolute ground floor of the machinations of my imagination and that in flying i am hiding in between the lines of sleep and awake. flying under the radar of waking thought but escaping the controlling arm of my dreamstate.

Dream is our personal myth … your soul is no different from your dreams. Both are instantaneous.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/6819495/

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I’m typically a two meals a day kind of guy, at best. It’s really more like one meal and a package of pop tarts. I haven’t gone an entire week of eating what amounts to breakfast, lunch, and dinner since before the beginning of highschool. Even when i was in Boston where i was sure to eat breakfast and dinner (typically the hardest meals to get me to sit still for) i still managed to skip out on lunch each day. Sometimes i come upon unusual days of low energy and high appetite, but they are few and far between. Until last week.

Within the last week i have slowly but surely been sneaking ever-so-close to three meals a day; not the most solid three meals in the world, or the most healthy, but three distinct servings at three separate times of day. In theory i’m all for this; i have no problem spending money on food if i’m actually going to consume and enjoy it. However, there is one slight problem in this situation…

I’m pudgy. There, i said it. At first it seemed like a subtle kind of thing, and i thought that maybe that i’ve had a few beers in the past month, but all of a sudden i have this tummy and it sticks out past my waistline and magically i’m twice as hungry as i ever am. I get just as much exercise (more than last year) as usual, and it’s not as if i’m getting any taller, and my meals vary from cereal to chicken to giant salads (no pizza, no hoagies), so unless this is my body’s way of preparing for some freakin’ seasonal hibernation, i’m not a happy camper.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6764951/

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It’s admittedly been quite a long time since i’ve sat down in front of after-school children’s programming and really paid close attention, but i definitely don’t remember it being anything like what i just saw.


I had just got back from Creative Writing class with a yummy crepe in hand and i just wanted something to pay attention to while i ate, and in my random channel flipping i happened upon Transformers on FoxKids. I was never a huge transformers fan as a child, but the sheer fact that this familiar brand-name was wedged in-between various UltraRangers and MonsterMons was enough to pique my interest and so i settled back onto our couch and watched the drama unfold.

The episode was titled “The Fish Test,” the simplicity and irrelevance of which baffled me until the opening scene where a SharkBot is taking an online fish-personality test. As another character explains later, it has nothing to do with him being a Fish-Bot and everything to do with the fact that all of us cosmically represents a certain kind of fish. As if the online personality test wasn’t deep enough for the tiny-tot viewers, the entire episode was about the SharkBot attempting to show up his rival Decepticon by playing the role of informant and foil to the Transformers, with his greek-chorus of sidekicks chiming in with verbose deprecations all along the way. There was the surface level child-play, but also a lot of tightly wound jokes about sexy red sports cars, women driving SUVs, and the fact that SharkBot was labeled by the test as a jellyfish even though sharks are fish and thus have a spine.


The short commercial breaks were barely long enough to contain my laughter. Aside from the too-frantic ADD pacing of the show, the modern update on beloved toys of my youth was scathingly funny if not wholly coherent. The irony of SharkBot trying to prove to his evil master that he was worthy even made the title into a double entendre, much to my delight and pleasure.

Oh, yeah, i had a test today and i have well over a hundred pages of reading to do for various classes tomorrow (not to mention grocery shopping and laundry). Whatever… all i want to do right now is take a cab home and get my G.I.Joes.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6530968/

crossovers

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It occurs to me that while Rabi is getting to be quite analogous to a independent film star when it comes to her relation to the so-called A-List of bloggers, i am still largely in my own self-contained little universe, the upshot of which being that not nearly all of Rabi’s readers read me but a vast majority of my readers read her. As my artificially constructed midterm break with Rabi enters day three of coverage on four separate personal sites along with a myriad of group blogs and comment chains these two sorts of readers are having two different sorts of reactions. Rabi’s readers are probably just gleaning extra context on their beloved Rabi-verse via my perspective on it, but for my readers this goes a little beyond context: it’s really an all-out crossover.

For those of you who aren’t huge comic book fans, crossovers are when members of the cast of one comic book (say… Superman) are featured in the plot of a second comic (perhaps… Wonder Woman) and then the story continues in their own. This can be a one-shot deal, or it can go on and on for months at a time. The thing about crossovers is that you can’t just read one half of them; either (a) you need both halves (and in some cases, more than four or five different “halves” for each month of crossing) to have any hope of understanding the storyline or (b) you are so obsessed with your favourite characters that you cannot help but buy the crossover titles regardless of your chances of understanding the plot as a whole.

It seems to me that regular readers of mine who dabble in being a fans of Rabi must be participating in some of the above behavior right now, because god knows i’d do the same thing if any of my favourite loggers were hanging out with their peers. When i mentioned it to Rabi she understood what i meant, and we agreed that she would be Superman if i could be Wonder Woman.

That just about says it all, doesn’t it?