Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

selfy-stuff

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There is a tiny spice cookie echo at the back of my mouth, and a similarly worn in feeling of comfort in my too blue attire — locked in from hours just spent on Lindsay’s floor. My birthstone is sapphire, and blue is my comfort color; today i am all in it, with just the tiny red racing stripe of interruption down each side of my jeans.

Today was Accomplishment Day, with my brain like a slot machine that just lined up three perfect cherry red pairs of cherries, and all of my accomplishments were quarters sliding shiny out of my mouth. To wit, in Critical Reasoning we talked about the gambler’s fallacy, which would seem to indicate that just because i had a successful day today doesn’t mean i should anticipate having another one tomorrow. Of course, my brain is not quite the polished chrome model of a casino machine or the red-black-red of a roulette wheel, even if sometimes it’s wrinkles and turns would have me believe that it was as random as all of that. There is a bias towards winning in this system, because every time i do something right i am more convinced that i can do it again. Two weeks ago i got one quiz back marked with a fat red A, today i got three; i am a man convinced.

Like dawn welling up over New Jersey in the early morning sky, today in Communication Theory i realized that all of these numbers and letters on my papers won’t mean anything when i’m thirty, unless i’m still in school then. Drunken scholar Kenneth Burke informed me that it’s all about my inherent guilt-redemption cycle at nine o’clock in the evening. It felt like someone had hit the pause button on my academic life in the middle of a press screening to wonder aloud at how the writer/producer/director had just made his first (fatal) flaw. I was standing outside of myself watching my accumulate checkmarks and superlatives; i was my refrigerator door, magnets gleaming as they lay in wait for another tidy 10/10 quiz to get tacked on.

At nine thirty someone brushed up against the play button by accident, and a scant score of frames later i pirouetted down the divide between our campus and Penn’s singing at the top of my lungs: the cumulative total of red letters and accounted-for numbers and solid notes and actually getting something done, just this once. For once my day made a dent.

(Bang!)

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7109153/

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My room whooshes something awful, like an incoming thunderstorm bantering about up against the clouds. It’s the fault of the heater; our heat lives housed in Lindsay’s closet, and one of its ugly grated maws lies not a yard from the head of my bed. The mighty bellows of heat’s tin home are our shared burden here on the backside of the apartment, and each gust of preserving wind is accompanied without fail by a similar rushing and clattering of air on metal on metal on air.

It is not quite the same as the way my room breathes through the back window, that’s for certain. This is like life on a ventilator… same stale air brushing in to inflate and out to deflate, leaving me lukewarm and half alive in the meantime. That’s about right, though, because today i have only used up half of a life, as if i am carefully rationing the discarded halves and thirds into my empty bottom dresser drawer so that one day i can be larger than life itself. Half a life like clams on a half shell, and i greedily suck it down and toss it away.

Nights have all been the same lately… sick with two different kinds of pressure welling up behind my jaw and in my stomach, and then curled tight around a sheaf of pages, and then restlessly nudging my head over the top of my mattress so i can see out of my window as i fall asleep — nothing as romantic as stars or any of that, but to spy on my across that back neighbor. I would think he could catch on by now, my prying eyes digesting his slim back and swirling tattoo like prime-time teevee, but he would appear to be none the wiser; still sleeping with the light on despite shades being drawn. I can see through to his slim circumstance as long as there’s some light to guide me. Anyhow, his dog has got me made … he knows the game. I stare at the owner as he sits and listens to whatever it is whose echoes i can hear across the alley, and in exchange i sit framed by my half-sized back window in just my underwear and thrash like mad as those beady canine eyes follow the supple muscle of my right arm up down up down. We have traded… my posed voyeurism in measured doses for glances into his owner’s life, undisguised … and unrealized, as of now.

I’m not sure exactly what i’m looking for, or at; the lithe nude that hides inside those baggy pants and shabby blinds is seemly to-be-sure, but not worth the effort i put forth to capture it backwards and upside-down inside the workings of my squinting eyes. I suspect that i am looking for something other than what i have: a life on the half-shell, waiting to slither down another gaping maw. And, it does, night after night — all the life i left unused mingles with the sweaty breathing of the heater just a few scant feet from my head to leave my room a sort of dewy warm in the morning when my alarm first rings at 5:27. Heat and life, to wake me. Of course, it isn’t really 5:27 because time is my false illusion — a special effect that is all too real. But, i have disguised it, and it gets me to and from my nest of decades old blankets that obscure the sheets on my bed at least three times before i’m up and about on any given morning. Four this morning past. I don’t mind it really, because i’m up in time to pick up a piece or two of my decrepit morning routine, and the once-every-fifty-minutes blare of my alarm slices my dreams into acidic little orangey wedges that i can devour one by one, only to leave behind dreamy sucked-out citrus smiles in my wake.

I dream the same old thing every night, and i don’t know why i bother to savour it anymore. I suppose it’s just part of that latherrinserepeat of my daily half-life, my waiting to see how long it takes whatever’s at my core to degrade down to just a phosphorescent echo of the radiant glow it once put out. Lather in the day, rinse out anything i was beginning to care about in the evening, and at night sleep and repeat.


It is time, my friends, to sleep and repeat.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7081398/

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I feel like… i don’t know, Third Rock From the Sun? Do you remember at the very beginning of the show when the four of them didn’t understand anything at all? … Taking coats at parties, kissing, slapping, cheerleaders, and breasts? Lately when i go back and look at the archives i just feel like a visitor in the shape of me trying to emulate the behavior i’m supposed to be representing. Is that circular enough for you? The change happened somewhere around when co-op began, because you can tell the difference between the computer being a constant companion and just something to stare at in-between doing things. And then i started doing a few things and talking about them, instead of just talking about not doing anything. And now i do things all the time and have nothing to talk about afterwards.

What’s so interesting about my life, really? Obviously i do things… last night i went to the movies, i can talk about that. I walked to the movie theatre, which is three blocks from my house. In the lobby Laurel was waiting for me (along with her roommate and Jeff (as if i went on a date with Laurel and didn’t mention it (obviously i only mention Laurel because you know who she is at this point))). She asked if i had gotten my haircut and i responded “Not for almost a month.” We saw Monsters INC, which involved a lot of giggling. Afterwards i bought some sushi and talked about X-Men with Erika, who was reading Carrie.

So, there’s two main theories of journaling that i can discern. The one is that obviously my night was pretty freakin’ boring when it comes to reading about it, so i should either talk about something else or learn to do more interesting things. The other is that it doesn’t matter what i’m doing, just so long as i put my own spin on it people will care about reading. I’m not sure which of the two i subscribe to, but my first journaling connection online was the ever-present Gus, who resides wholly in the second school of thought. Gus basically just writes one post a day, each and every single day, and he weaves it all together so that you’re not only interested in what he has to say, but you honestly want to know what he’s doing with himself. Frankly, Gus is one of the only people who employs this technique who i enjoy, the others being Alison and Meg, though they use their narrative voice a little more pervasively.



The way last year had been going for me, i just merrily trolled along with my own script of things to say and would talk about parties and things if and when i went to them because they were typically unusual and exciting. But, at this point, going to a party is like “wow, another party. i wonder who’ll hook up tonight?”, and afterwards i’m always tearing out my hair thinking “how can i tell an interesting story about that lapdance…?” So, now i have a daily existence and i suppose my big question is whether i’m supposed to talk about it, or me, or some other nebulous thing — because back in the day i was talking about my life, but it was a lack of a life, so it was just me talk about me.

Wow, now i’m dizzy. Tell you what… you sit and stare at the screen for an hour thinking about what i’ll write next, and i’ll go get some ice cream. Cool? Cool.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/6976582/

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That’s (read the last post first, silly) the encapsulated story of my life… find out about something, fall in love with it, remove it from any sort of social context, and then watch it wither and die on its lonesome. That’s how all of my crushes work too… find someone i adore, remove them from their life to insert them into mine via the insides of my head, and then watch the actuality of us wither and die because i’ve separated it out from the social soil it was once rooted in.

I never had sleep overs. I never had to share my toys or play with a second person. I never permanently traded or anted up anything to anyone in my entire life. I never learned that the whole point of having a life of my own was to share it with anyone else, and so in highschool i marched home every day to dutifully ignore my homework and read my email while other people hung out and messed around and dated and did drugs for the first time; i was my own intensive after-school program. Eventually the internet grew into its own social structure so much that i was discarding friends who i couldn’t keep up with via IM and starting to have online-only acquaintances who i looked forward to talking to. And, eventually, this happened.

I can’t really decide which is the magic card: this page, or this life. On one hand, i pour my heart and soul and free time for no kind of compensation into something that not more than a couple of hundred people see on any given day. On the other hand, i have this wonderful spark of existence that i am mostly busy keeping to myself… emotions and voice and song that i’m bored with from all the times i’ve sat through them, but that amaze other people.

Either way, i figure i am still living the life of an only child… i create my own personal fantasy where the sharing is always one-sided and shun any interruptions of it. In that respect, this page mirrors my life. The things i say are the toys that i have earmarked so carefully to be touched by other children in the sandbox while i keep Jinx and my Nightmare card secreted deep in the pockets of my memory. I am spoilt and selfish, but i do not learn. You’d think i’d know better by now than to be selfish, and i might have figured out that i like going to parties better than i like sitting and staring at the blank white box of blogger, but i apparently haven’t caught on that i have to be a real person-shaped-person here if i expect to be treated as such by an audience…. blah. sleep needs to happen now. i’ll continue this tomorrow… ! in fact…:

to be continued…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/6906529/

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Every time i see my mother she has a plastic bag for me, without fail. It always contains a potpourri potentially exploding with tissues, snack bars, cds, mail i’m still receiving at home, household items i probably won’t ever make practical use of, and any special requests i had from home. On Friday when i slid into the back seat of our car while in mid-sentence of bitching about the length of my day and not quite remembering how to tie a tie and not really being able to do anything spectacular with my hair i noticed that the normally expected plastic bag had two familiar long boxes in it, and that’s when i remember that i had asked my mother to bring my Magic Cards with her.

As a frame of reference for this you should know about my first and last experience with Magic. The latter was in Boston where Rabi‘s brother had a deck of 7th Edition cards and i played him in two games at the kitchen table while Rabi idly surfed the internet The former was at my first year as counselor in training at the good day camp, where i watched one of my camper’s older brothers play his friend in what had to be Unlimited edition. So, now that i’ve established those two floating points in space, let’s look at what’s within.

Going from seventh grade to eight grade i really didn’t have very much of anything in my life. I wasn’t especially tight with anyone from Masterman yet, and i only had Monica left over from grade school; i had no life after i got back from camp every day. That was way before I had a website, let alone a computer, and I’m honestly not sure what I did with my free time. My only hobby at that point was … um… i want to say that it was some RPG on Super Nintendo, but i think it might have actually been masturbation. We’ll just let that one lie. Anyhow, point being that Magic excited me… it was like keeping my entire army of GI Joes on tiny shufflable cards and being able to wage war against other people’s collections. I made haste in pestering my mom to buy me some cards as soon as 3rd edition saw wide release, and by Christmas of 8th grade i really did have my veritable personal army which soon included two nearly infallible decks.

The thing about infallible armies is that, no matter how infallible you claim them to be, you’ve eventually got to pit them against another army to see whether they’ll fail or not. And, being the introvert that i was, i wasn’t exactly heading out to comic shops to play other people on gaming nights. My foes were just classmates who randomly got hooked on the game, and they played by all sorts of non-conforming rules on slimy lunch-tables that my cards wouldn’t be caught dead on. So, i just kept buying cards in a vacuum, without any practical use for them. I finally stopped at Ice Age and 4th Edition, because i felt like nothing i really wanted or needed was coming out anymore. The cards went into boxes, the boxes went onto my bookshelf, and with mostly no interruption that’s where they stayed for the entirety of highschool.

And now they’re back, spread out on my floor in a fabulous array of five colors and the names of Anson Maddocks and Melissa Benson calling me back to a hobby meant for multiple partners that I somehow made just as self-contained as masturbation. As a spectacular example of an only child, I suppose that everything I did was like social masturbation, and so now all I’ve really got going for me is that I’m really good at interacting with myself and that hardly anyone else does it the way I can do it.

But, anyway, all I meant to say is that I’ve been playing Magic all night, and that I have to remember to send some cards to Rabi’s brother later this week.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/6905888/