Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

selfy-stuff

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Sleep has the marvelous ability to make everything make sense that i wish life would learn how to use. Sleep wrapped itself around me last night in an unrelenting grip, and i don’t even remember getting up five times to turn off my alarm, although they all obviously happened. What i do remember is a dream where the green skin of my guitar was slowly unraveling, and where i found myself in Texas drinking a bottle of blue Gatorade i found in Alison‘s house.


The subconscious is obsessed with having everything in its right place, which has to make you wonder. If all of our dreams can make so much sense, despite the incredibly disparate elements therein, then why can’t our lives do the same? Obviously we are the ones in the way, because our brains (if left to their own devices) would happily resolve all of our problems into a neat narrative that would only seem unreasonable upon examination. The trouble is that we are professional examiners of life… we specialize in nitpicking and tearing apart every moment we encounter until it is just a shredded up set of possibilities lying in a mess on the floor.

Coincidence and Deja-Vu belong to dreams; they are not feelings so much as they are plot devices, meant to steer us in the fateful direction we are somehow intended to travel.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/01/8681246/

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Six college students sitting around on a Sunday afternoon after a late brunch. You might imagine us taking part in an enlightened conversation, going outside to get some exercise, or even making plans to see a movie or go shopping.


You would be wrong. Try again. Whoops, wrong again. Here, let me just tell you what we did.

The six of use opened up a collection of Millers, WineCoolers, and CiderJacks, and whipped out the Sorry! board. Now, being an only child with a significantly less-than-average amount of friends, i apparently didn’t get to experience the entire broad horizon of board games. However, i think i can safely say that Sorry! is the meanest game i could ever inflict upon a child. It’s similar to Parcheesi in that your two main purposes are to get your piece “home,” and to fuck over everyone else. And, trust me, four slightly buzzed college students with a cheering faction of two is pretty good at fucking.


We played Sorry for two hours, during which i might have been threatened with physical removal from the game area if i didn’t “shut up and sit the hell down.” Yes, this means i won the first game and that everyone was pissed — can i help it if i am a blood-thirsty player and not a sore loser? (Apparently pointing that out directly after doing one’s victory dance is considered bragging. Did i mention that we were drinking?) After my stunning come-from-behind victory (two pieces landed home in two turns) we invented a drinking game and a turbo version.


I knew that higher education was good for something…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/01/8660256/

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(This is my first article for “Finding Your Voice in Journalism.” It’s supposed to be about something i hate. Note that i took liberties with the timeline to compress the article into the assigned length. Commentary is greatly appreciated.)

I suspect that as a rule most boys must hate shopping with their mothers. For me, shopping with mom always carried the weary, claustrophobic sensation of being trapped in a space much smaller than the boy’s department. I have always been subject to a special kind of terror: I am an only child, and with my mother as a single parent I really had no choice but to browse the racks with her in tow, thrusting patently ugly garments under my nose for examination and publicly questioning whether or not I needed to buy a larger size of underwear.

This year I found my nightmare playing itself out in two locations over my Christmas Vacation, both with their own special set of embarrassments. The first seemed simple enough; she had to make an exchange, and I wanted a pair of boot-cut jeans.

Of course, even my best laid plans go awry when shopping with mom; when I met her at the counter with my pants she proceeded to loudly lament that I was looking a wee bit chubby around the middle on Christmas morning, and that I might be wise to upgrade my accustomed waist size by an inch or two to accommodate my ever-expanding girth.

Though I neglected to refute her point about my weight-gain, as we edged closer to the cashier I reminded my mother that I had taken the same waist size in jeans since I started high school. Every single pair of jeans in my bureau were of the same dimensions as the contentious pair I was holding. They fit fine.

“That might be true,” she acknowledged, “but I won’t be the one whining when I get home to find that my jeans don’t fit well.” Never mind that I had tried them on. And, anyhow, “that’s what belts are for,” apparently, buying jeans that are too big for me to start with.

Since I was the one paying for this purchase, my opinion won out — although I found myself unconsciously sucking in my “gut” as I said hello to the girl behind the counter. As I stepped out of the store with my shopping bag in hand I breathed a mental sigh of relief: one down, one to go.

Our second spectacular shopping extravaganza took place in the discount warehouse of Syms, where I intended to find a suit jacket to wear on Co-op interviews. “I just need a jacket,” I told myself, “we’ll be in and out in a flash.”

Alas, it was not meant to be. Before I could even get my bearings amongst the overwhelming aisles of short, athletic, and double-breasted styles my mother had picked out two corduroy suit jackets that looked as though they were only making a brief stop in the store before an engagement at the Salvation Army. My solution to this problem was to brush past her to find my size, but she pursued, claiming that buying a jacket was positively wasteful when I could buy an entire suit instead.

I begrudgingly agreed with her, if only because she was paying for the shopping excursion. However, in my head I knew that she was prolonging our shopping trip by adding our pre-rehearsed waist-size argument to the already complicated decision between a short and a long cut.

Sure enough, my “in and out” turned into an excruciating three hour dilemma as I was bounced from size to size, offered peculiar suits with plaid-like pinstripes, and accosted by salespersons who did nothing to detract from my mother’s own general hovering and thoughtful fashion consulting.

All in all the experience was draining. Yes, there was shouting across the store. Yes, there were heads stuck in-between dressing room curtains. Yes, there was a rendition of the aforementioned waist-size drama. By the time we made it to picking out new shoes (“Might as well!”) and having alterations made (“They’ll do it while we have lunch!”) I found my psyche located somewhere between a thundering explosion and a teary resignation.

Never mind that I came out of both situations with clothing that looks good on me. All that sticks out in my mind is my absolute terror at entering a clothing store, and the childhood urge to either throw my level-best temper tantrum or to find a circular rack of clothing to hide inside. I know that my mother cares about me, and that she’ll always love me, but that doesn’t mean she had to ask me in a stage-whisper if I had worn out my underwear yet while we were in line at Kohls.

Or maybe it does. I suppose all of that is what mom’s are for.

(Any thoughts? Remember, this is being turned in sans the context of my blog, and it’s supposed to express hatred of something and a use of a distinctive journalistic voice. Responses of any kind are welcomed.)

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/01/8504516/

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Blogging is not a daily column. I don’t even have to post everyday, as one of my readers just reminded me as i lamented my headache-induced writer’s block. I don’t have to post every day because i’m only posting for me… i’m putting up the effort, and the editing, and the $30 a month that keeps my website functional as my bank account gets inexorably smaller and smaller.

Are you starting to see where those other posts were headed? I am tired… tired of having to learn all of the foundations that lay beneath the successful artifice of art, and having to be responsible for them all on my own. I am tired of spending endless hours programming my site and weeks in the studio just for a paltry 100 copies of my demo and a thousand readers a week. I am tired just at the thought of having to create a new layout or having to mix down another demo. I don’t want to do it. I just want to play, and to write, and to have an amount of attention paid to me that has some relation to the effort that i put into my work and the quality that emerges. Even double the readers, or five times the listeners, probably wouldn’t be enough for me … because even after my in front of the scenes work is paid adequate attention i’m still stuck behind the scenes like the Wizard behind the damned curtain, sweating away as he produces such a spectacular show.


I don’t think this means anything… i’m obviously not quitting or going away. I’m just so tired… tired of having to spend a year on music courses so i could have a key to the studio that i hate, and tired of earning A’s in programming just so i can properly sort out the PHP i program the site with. Tired of having to beg to be a mere assistant stage manager when we all know i’d rather be in front of any curtain, anywhere. I just… i don’t know how i’m supposed to be heard at all, otherwise. Maybe you could call it paying my dues, or maybe it’s just my own particular burden (and not such a bad one, at that), but the charm is wearing off … what was once exciting is now my dread of quarter inch to eighth inch cable adapters, and my absolute dread of photoshop, and my remorse over spending half of my education learning how to make what i want to do work, instead of doing what i want to do.

Conclusion? Who knows… either one step closer to sending out demos, or one closer to subway busking. Two steps forward, two steps back, same old me.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/01/8396050/

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There’s a unnatural desert wind through the chill of my room every twelve minutes or so as the heater in Lindsay’s closet warms the house with its breath, and in the breeze that just passed a picture came fluttering down from my wall. I picked it up to affix it back to the wall by my door and saw that it was a picture Ross had just given me a few weeks ago – one of Laurel and I at my first Drexel party.

It was taken over two years ago.

Two years ago, and as i pressed my fingers against its shiny corners to cover up the bare rectangle of wall it had left in its wake all that i could was that life is a strange and mazelike thing. I thought about how i spent all that week decorating her house along with her roommates, namely Kate and Erika. Kate wound up moving away at the beginning of my Sophomore year, and then Laurel moved away for a while and Lindsay took her room. I moved into a different house with with Lindsay and Erika this September, and Kate just came to stay with us for the remainder of the holidays.

Two years ago, and i only wound up at their house so much in the first place because i got into the play that four of them were starring in, and i was only there decorating so often because i developing a crush on Laurel, and i only went back last year to hang out with Lindsay, which brought me back into their social circle again. And now i am friends with Laurel, and her boyfriend from back then was just in my living room, and Kate is staying here for New Years, and life doesn’t seem to do anything but endlessly coil and snake around itself anymore.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/8268451/