Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

work

I so did not violate any confidentiality agreements by writing this post.

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How to write this post and not get fired? It’ll be tricky.

You all know by now I work in communications for a major Philadelphia company, and I love it. I get paid to do things I would probably be doing at home by myself anyway, as frightening as that concept is.

What you might not know (because I haven’t mentioned it in about seven years) is that I had a childhood obsession with the Price Is Right. I loved the One Bid, I loved the Showcase Showdown.

But, I loved nothing more than I loved Plinko.

I was obsessed with the way the penny slid into the board and plunked back and forth and to and fro down the pegs before it finally wound up in a prize slot.

You might not understand how those two facts are connected to each other. Here’s a hint:

Right now, somewhere in Philadelphia, there is a fully functional Plinko board.

I can’t tell you why there is a Plinko board, or where the Plinko board is, because it’s … well, it might be a trade secret? Like, if I were to reveal the purpose and location of the Plinko board, the reason behind my termination would be “dissemination of trade secrets on the internet.” I think.

What I can reveal is that within the last month my co-workers’ “duties as assigned” meant they had to acquire said Plinko board, and that when I walked one of said co-workers to the parking lot today I came within one hot second of climbing onto the roof of her mini-van like a fucking ninja and riding that sucker through rush hour to the location of the Plinko board.

I have been promised photos, and possibly even a video demo, of the Plinko board in action. Yet, pester, plead, and outright beg as I might I could not obtain permission to play, touch, or even view the Plinko board at its secret location. And, after tomorrow, it will be gone, whisked away by the cruel whims of fate (and/or the decrepit liver-spotted claws of nigh unknown game show dieties).

However, though I may be barred from visiting the Plinko mecca, or enlisting you to help me gain entry to it by some nefarious means, I have taken away one important thing from this experience:

I now know that there is a life-sized, fully-functional Plinko board that can be delivered to the Philadelphia metro area.

And, I’m pretty sure I have a high enough credit limit to rent it for the weekend…

An Itch That I Could Only Scratch

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I can say with some amount of certainty based on years of life experience that I am a sound sleeper. When I’m ready for sleep, I sleep well, with the exception of ticking watches, rogue hamsters, and urban roosters.

So, when I tell you that last Sunday I awoke from a dead sleep at 2:41 a.m. because my hands were itching, you have to understand that they were really itching.

To put it in perspective, last summer a dozen of our friends attended a wedding just outside St. Louis, and we spent the night in revelry on the banks of the Mississippi, and when we returned to Philadelphia we discovered that our feet were covered with angry red bits, up to the ankle.

We never discovered what the source of the bites was, but I had 103 of them, and the heat from the itching was bad enough that I took my shoes off while riding the Broad Street Subway.

Contemplate that for a minute. And then understand when I tell you that the itching that awoke me was worse. Much, much worse.

Actually, strike my last, it wasn’t even the itching that awoke me. It was the scratching. I was scratching my hands in my sleep. That’s how bad the itching was.

The worst part about it was that there was no discernible source – not bumps, scratches, or rashes to hint at my malady. I tried a dab of aloe on one hand and an Afterbite stick on the other, to no avail.

I tried to be rational and methodical. I made a list of foods I had eaten that day. I walked downstairs to check that we were using our normal laundry detergent. I pulled the pillows off of the bed and examined them closely. I checked my head for lice.

Nothing.

I visited Web M.D., but after extensively listing my symptoms the best it could suggest was an allergic reaction (or a drug addiction).

The day before Gina and I had wandered through the city for our first photo shoot as a band, taking pictures in front of abandoned shop fronts and dessicated alleyways. Had I got a splinter from one of the boarded up windows? Had I brushed against an urban sprout of poison oak?

The itching hadn’t resolved an hour later, at which point I was soaking my hands in ice water to take the edge off. At this point I sent an urgent email to Gina and Lindsay to see if they were experiencing the same symptoms, as well a very curious email to my boss which concluded:

This is much later than I’ve ever taken Benadryl on a work night, so there is a distinct chance I will be late in the morning due to my resulting stupor.

Slam Dunk, Bitches

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Usually when I read some sort of “organizational self help” type of article I think, ahh, all things I know how to do, just nothing that can happen inside of my house. Because, while I am occupationally an organizational dervish, my home persona is not exactly the paragon of effective time and resource management.

(Maybe if I had my own production buyer a team of Sr. Designers at home things would run a little more smoothly? Oh, and an industrial printer. And a “Send Calls” button.)

In any event, I was tickled to read CNN’s Six slam-dunk time management tips article, because I engage in all six actively at work and at home.

And, then I realized that this is a signal that I’ve actually, puzzlingly, logic-defyingly become good at organization within the bounds of my own home.

I keep trying to figure out how it happened, but I can’t seem to nail it down. My big 2006 personal goal-setting was a nice boost. Being super-autonomous at my job definitely had an impact. So did helping to organize Lyndzapalooza. Of course, regular Arcati Crisis rehearsals with Gina kept me on a schedule, to which I added voice lessons. And, I totally reorganized my home office this winter, and totally re-filled my desk a few weeks ago when I bought my new mixer.

Et cetera.

Moral? Time management is a use-or-lose sort of skill. If I was still in the state of last summer, where I pre-scheduled my entire work-day only to return to a house where my primary task was watching seven seasons of X-Files as expediently as possible, then my time management would continue to suck. If that home life is filled with things you are excited about accomplishing, the excitement eventually trickles down to grocery shopping and doing laundry.

Okay, maybe not doing laundry. I don’t think I’ll ever be efficient at that.

Dying On the Vine of My Mind

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In the elevator we all pushed our buttons, some boldly and some surreptitiously.

Mine came out the lowest. Hard to do only seven floors from the top of the building – like skating out of a round of hearts with a Jack. I shrugged off slight sneers and enjoyed the head rush of expressing past fifteen intermediate floors of the high-rise.


I do my best writing in my head while I’m in transit – in an elevator, or walking down the street – which is maybe why so little of it actually finds its way to the page.

It’s not so unusual; I write the best songs while I’m falling asleep. And, in high school I used the write the best French essays in my sleep.

Composing blogs in wakeful daylight may seem more convenient, but my two sleep-adjecent habits are easy enough to manage. For French it was just a matter of jotting it down when I awoke. For songs, if it’s a good one I wake up, walk down the hall, sing it into a microphone, and go back to bed. (And, I have finally relented and put a pad on my night table, for those occasions where the quality is more questionable).


I had disliked her immediately as she sidled up the bus shelter while taking a long, insistent drag off of her cigarette, exhaling her haze in my direction.

Then, as if sensing she was already on my bad side and had nothing left to lose, she conjured an empty coke bottle from her handbag, contemplated it for a moment (taking another lengthy pull), and then crouched down low on the curb and quite deliberately shoved the trash into the gutter.

Quite involuntarily, my face churned into a sneer; i was hardly inclined to resist.

Why can’t that be punishable by death instead of hypothetical $300 fine, I wondered. Can she really be making a positive contribution to society if she can’t walk five steps out of the bus shelter to throw that in a trash can?


Writing is another matter. I write in my head in my written narrative voice, rather than my speaking voice. It doesn’t necessarily translate to speaking, so recording my thoughts via my cell phone is often for naught – the text doesn’t hang together when I transcribe it. And, since I type three or four times faster than I write in longhand, pulling out a pad doesn’t always capture all of the dimensions of my phrase.

I create too many phrases that wither and die on the vine of my mind. I can’t tell you how many witty blogs and music reviews and media critiques I’ve lost in subways or while crossing streets.

What do real writers do? What do you do?

Life In Cartoon Motion

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A few scant weeks prior to the birth of this blog in the summer of 2000 I had been working as an Orientation Leader for Drexel, helping to guide and socialize pre-freshman during their summer campus visit.

It’s nearly impossible to be a camp counselor to people who are only a few months younger than you, and by virtue of being an Orientation Leader you are a major geek in their eyes, so the only real solution to holding their attention and respect (for me, anyhow) was sheer, irrepressible, unavoidable, kinetic energy.

I had so much of that energy built up the evening before our first group of students arrived that I absolutely could not sleep (this was before the days of Benadryl w/vodka chaser, god bless my 18-yr-old soul). I remember the absolute hopelessness of it – the clock facing my dorm bed inexorably ticking closer to our 6:15 a.m. call time.

Around five I just gave up – sleep can’t be forced. I just enjoyed the lying still in my bed, counting down the minutes.

The intersection of insomnia and excitement worked. Spectacularly. I’ve always been of the manic, excitable persuasion, but that night was the catalyst to a major transformation: my metamorphosis from excitable boy to something akin to a walking cartoon – rabidly energetic, and afraid to stop moving because I might just pass out.

(Probably a contributing factor to my broken collarbone, but that’s neither here nor there. More Germain is that it was tangentially the template for my participation in Blogathon; I would have never dared to believe I could blog and sing and record for twenty fours hours if I hadn’t going through my insomniac-energy boot camp the summer before.)

I’ve been thinking about that all day because it has been one of those days. I put in a twelve-hour shift of mixing and recording last night, and if you consider when I usually get home from work you’ll realize that subsequently I wasn’t left with too much time for sleep between the end of that endeavor and the beginning of my new work day.

I usually dread getting up and out for work with less than four hours of sleep, but today I loved my barely-two. I was up and out of the house like a catapult, remembering all of my electronic accouterments, walking rather than taking the bus, at work and in constant motion.

The only detraction is that I can’t speak anything resembling English while trying to leave a voice mail, but that’s what the “do-over” button is for.

(Except when you call outside clients and bang the do-over button and then mutter “fuck” because you realize you can’t do-over on their system, and then you realize you just muttered “fuck” in a professional voice mail and the tape is still rolling.)

Today was an exception – I don’t do sleepless nights nearly as much (or, nearly as well) as I did back then – but it’s nice to pitch one in here and there to remind myself what it’s like to be not just unwilling, but unable, to stop.