Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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little hits (of dopamine)

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I’m an addict.

I don’t drink or do drugs. I don’t smoke or touch caffeine. My addiction is satisfaction and I will mainline anything that can produce it. That chemical feeling of being satisfied. Those little hits of dopamine in my brain.

This week it’s been games. Boring, pointless, meaningless internet games literally in a category called “idle” to indicate that they’re purely engineered for running in the background and wasting your time.

(Think Sim City when you used to leave it running overnight to gather mucho dollars and hopefully avoid an earthquake, only instead of sleeping you are watching raptly as the numbers tick ever higher.)

The urge came on Saturday night. Weekends after bedtime are usually my big opportunity to knock out huge chunks of writing on CK – and, especially for finishing new comic guides! This past Saturday I couldn’t get in the mood. Words were coming in fits and starts. Nothing satisfying.

And so, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, I loaded up Kongregate for the first time in years and started poking around for simple games to play. My drug of choice is usually tower defense, but I stumbled into idlers and my night was gone.

The games were at once awful and great for satisfaction. The numbers tick up constantly! You get to click things! If there is enough ticking and clicking, sometimes new things light up! It’s the adult equivalent of an infant playmat that lights up and makes sounds. The best of the bunch was surely Swarm Simulator, a plain text game all about exponential growth and ratios, with dozens of different numbers ticking up constantly. At least it’s math, I told myself.

Even as I was playing the games I hated myself for it. I’ve had them running all week and I keep hating it. I know they’re a crutch for getting my satisfaction elsewhere by doing things like working out or hitting the “Publish” button.

I just needed those little hits. [Read more…] about little hits (of dopamine)

hand me downs (or: an anthropological study of family recipes)

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Of my memories of my two grandmothers, both now long since passed, many are of their food.

They were both Italian and both only a few generations removed from southern Italy, but they cooked two distinct sets of recipes. Even their meatballs and gravy were entirely different from each other. My paternal grandmother made the best minestra maritata – or, “Italian Wedding Soup” – I’ve had in my life, to this day. My maternal grandmother made potato gnocchi from scratch – springy, substantial gnocchi the likes of which I’ve never since tasted again.

Some members of my father’s family can duplicate the Italian Wedding Soup, but my mother and I cannot recreate those gnocchis. We’ve both tried. Despite making them many times with my grandmother, I couldn’t possibly tell you the recipe.

There wasn’t one. She eyeballed the ingredients every time, combining them by hand right on her kitchen counter, cracking the eggs into a mound of flour. She could never settle on the most efficient process to cut and “thumb” them – that is, put the little divot in the middle. She alternated between a butter spreader, a pizza cutter, and her bare hands, never satisfied with any of the methods.

(Once I attempted to make them myself from memory right on our kitchen counter, not realizing that our countertops were not actual granite and would not withstand hundreds of passes with the pizza cutter, my tool of choice.)

(Oops!)

There is one recipe of my maternal grandmother’s I can make. “Scapels,” she called them, a sort of plain, egg crepe rolled up like cigars with sharp grated cheese inside and served under scalding hot soup. I only know how to make them because she could not eyeball the ratios of ingredients in the batter. My grandmother grew up during the Great Depression and barely had a grade school education. She wasn’t confident writing more than a few words in longhand and couldn’t easily multiply entire lists of ingredients.

I became her walking recipe card and recipe multiplier. The phone would ring. “PeEEter,” she would say in her Philadelphia accent, “it’s gram-mom.”  “I’m makin’ scapels. Eh, what is the recipe again? Three ta three ta one?”

“Three to one to one,” I would reply, exasperated, probably interrupted from reading a book.

“Right, right,” she would reply, as if she was just testing me and had known all along. “But, I wanna make a triple recipe. How many is that?”

“Times three, gram-mom. Nine eggs to three to three.”

“Awright, thanks. Love you.”

The recipe for her scapels is dead simple – 3 parts eggs to 1 part each flour and water, plus some salt, pepper, and parsley, and rolled up with Pecorino Romano cheese.

The hard part is cooking them to the right consistency. [Read more…] about hand me downs (or: an anthropological study of family recipes)

Song of the Day: “If You Harden On The Inside” by Hezekiah Jones

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This post makes me absolutely giddy with joy: I’m debuting a song by my favorite band in Philly, who I also interviewed for this post, and if you buy it all the proceeds go straight to Women’s Law Project.

The song is “If You Harden On The Inside,” the first new tune from Hezekiah Jones since after their 2016 EP Har Har Har and a track on December’s Vilomahed project curated by Michele Lynn. You can get it for as little as $1, although I encourage you to donate more!

Hezekiah Jones is the folk collective formed by and around Philly-based songwriter Raphael Cutrufello. He pulls a peculiar double-duty while fronting the band, acting the entire time as Hezekiah, with each one of the band’s rotating cast of musicians presenting themselves as another fictional member of the Jones clan.

(My favorite: Dow Jones.)

That little touch of mythology goes a long way to contextualizing Cutrufello’s songwriting. When you hear Hezekiah Jones’ music, you have the profound sense that a weird band of back-country geniuses have briefly descended from their cloistered home on a hill to play for you, like a roving band of thespians in Shakespeare.

(It may be a hill in an alternate timeline.)

The songs are full of piercing observations on the human condition, always tinged with optimism. There’s also a smattering of details that place them in a vaguely post-apocalyptic landscape full of endless roiling wars and the Mississippi river expanded out to a sea.

Hezekiah Jones, photographed by Lisa Schaffer.

Hezekiah Jones, photographed by Lisa Schaffer.

“If You Harden On The Inside” could easily be a handclaps-and-harmony 60s pop song if it was dressed up with a full band arrangement. Instead, a whimsical chorus of Hezekiahs sings “blah blah blah” as backing to the track, later joined by a swell of electric pianos. As the song whirrs to life with its halting rhythm it gives serious vibes of Dirty Projectors.

Cutrufello AKA Jones plays everything on this track save for drums by Daniel Bower (AKA Roy G. Biv Jones) and bass by Philip D’Agostino (AKA Pepe Jones), a Philly music scene legend and touring member of Get The Led Out.

Half your saints
Are playing video games
Or they’re out doing meth
Or too depressed to get out of bed

All these bodies
What a delicate make
If you harden on the inside
You’ll be easy to break

If someone
Gave into love
Their guard would be down
We could steal all their stuff

That is the paradox of our human fragility in three stanzas, each repeated to make sure the message sinks in. [Read more…] about Song of the Day: “If You Harden On The Inside” by Hezekiah Jones

on punching nazis

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I’ve been thinking a lot about punching Nazis.

One Nazi in specific. The one who founded the “alt-right” moniker for the modern Neo-Nazi white supremacist movement in America and who was punched in the face on live television during the inauguration events on Friday.

I have complicated thoughts on his being punched. I am a non-violent person. Sure, I love superhero comics about bashing up bad guys, but I myself have never thrown a punch and don’t intend to.

So, here is a story about the one time I almost broke another guy’s knees. [Read more…] about on punching nazis

a breath of fresh air

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I woke up this morning feeling warm and comfortable after staying up until 4am editing the last of my work from November’s “Blog of Tomorrow.”

Not like sweaty and sick warm. More like waking up with the sun beating down on you through a window warm. Except, our bedroom windows are blanketed in blackout curtains. It wasn’t the sun.

Maybe the warmth and comfort was the feeling of a job well done?

No, E informed me, it was actually the feeling of our boiler completely ceasing its communication with our thermostat overnight and deciding to heat the inside of the house to 78° Fahrenheit. It just so happens that my side of the bed is an arm’s reach away from the radiator, so I was probably considerably warmer than 78° by the time I awoke.

(For reference, with the heat off for over 12hrs right now it is a comfortably cool 66° inside while it’s more like 40° outside.)

I was alarmed by this information, but not surprised. I am not a science denier, but as far as I am concerned the thermostat is a work of sorcery. I don’t understand how a little box with mercury in it on the dining room wall (which we replaced with a digital touch screen version) could possible dictate the actions of the boiler in the basement. The internet tells me such a thing was possible as far back as the 18th century.

In response, I will again refer you to: work of sorcery.

After some tinkering and turning the boiler on and off we determined that the problem was somewhere between it and the thermostat. E had to leave for work and, as we’ve established, I am not the handy person in this relationship, so our agreed-upon strategy to avoid manually turning the boiler on and off all day was that I would let the heat pump up to a slightly too-warm level and then coast on that through the evening.

Of course, a house-wide “too warm” equates to “nearing spontaneous combustion” when standing next to a radiator working overtime.

As a result of this plan, at one point earlier today I found myself sitting in our front hall (which contains a radiator) in a t-shirt and pajama bottoms staring out of our open door while EV drew on our walk with chalk just eight feet away, bundled up for Autumn.

It only lasted for a few minutes, but it was one of those memories. There was just something about the picture compared with the inherent comedy of our heating situation.

(We also watched the second half of The Wiz today, which made EV cry and make the saddest face I’ve ever seen on a human being. More on that later, maybe.)

I swear, I did not sabotage our thermostat purely to create this analogy, but today on CK feels a lot like our front hall. On one side I have a month so full of content that it would constitute a quarter or a year depending on how you measure, and on the other side I have a vast expanse of open air.

I’m going to take a couple of days to relax and begin to cook up what comes next for CK. Rest assured, you’re safe from multiple posts a day for the time being. I’ll also be reshuffling some of the daily themes (e.g., no live streams this month, while I get some gear repaired), but before I do that I’ll be back tomorrow to finish up Issue #1 of my novel, Krisis.