Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

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Although she has been known to veer sharply in either direction, my mother has always been just the perfect shade between crazy and inspired. I look back upon my childhood now and try to figure out what was going on on her end of things… what adult motivations were playing out behind the benevolent ‘mom’ i adored.


My mother took endless pictures of me up until i started grade school — almost enough to make up for my nearly undocumented puberty (thank the lord). Up until my parents got separated i don’t think she worked at all, and i’m sure she found herself with all sorts of odd times during the day while i napped, played, or sat through endless repetitions of The Making of Thriller. So, she sat down with rolls of film and colored paper and yarn and elmers glue and came out with these odd books… like easy-reading version of my toddling life. Peter at the Zoo. Peter at the Beach.


Construction paper shades that make up the primary colors of childhood and sentences with one subject and verb each, plus the occasional adjective. They used to live in the bottom drawer of the desk in our dining room, and every so often she would get them out and read them back to me. I suppose she would be feeling lonely, or reminiscent of when i existed without any kind of premeditation. Grade school and GI Joes make a kid grow up fast. Eventually she altogether stopped mentioning them at all, and i haven’t seen them since we moved in 1998.

I don’t know what i’m talking about. If i was four today, those books would be something like Henry’s Diary, which alternating makes me want to cry about the fact that i’m two decades old and inspires me to one day be a dad as awesome as Henry’s dad.


And a mom as awesome as my mom.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/01/8703510/

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Sometimes i have trouble warming up for voice lessons… i can’t get my mouth open wide enough to let the sounds that i want to hear come out. Today it was the same old problem of me balking away from my high notes, but Becky slowly coaxed me up to them. She understands how i am… she gives me visualizations and physicalizations because i need to latch on to something before i can do it, and she keeps on talking me through it until that flicker of recognition crosses my face. Then she knows to just let me try it.

She worked me up just like that, on “ah” vowels. Slowly but surely. Form the sound, tongue down, mouth open, space for the notes to escape, feel it come up and over, tug down to go higher… finally, she had me opening my mouth and it finally stopped feeling like screaming and started to feel like singing, and we were going up and up and the notes were coming so clear … not necessarily on-pitch, but they were coming out like rung bells. And, after a while, it seemed like we’re getting pretty high — i didn’t stop because we had got momentum going, but i was mentally trying to tag notes and place them within my range to tell where we were. Finally we got up to one that i couldn’t quite wrap around… edges of my voice were straying away from it, so we slowly worked our way down.

Afterwards, i just had to ask. What was it? I’ve hit an E solidly a few times before, so it was an F, right? Or, if i had to reach, maybe it was F#?

The F might as well have been a C, she said. F# was sung without incident. We ended on G.

After that, the fifteen-beat E at the end of “Promises, Promises” didn’t seem deadly at all. I opened up, and my voice poured out of my throat like a river flowing over its banks to fill the room.


I swallowed the silence.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/01/8701368/

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When people start asking you if you’re growing your hair out again, then it is time to get a haircut.

Working in the Admissions Office has strange perks sometimes, and one of them is that the head of the music program has to come in every so often to chat with my boss. I made sure to take advantage of every tiny break in the conversation to further my own nefarious goals. In a couple of short minutes i had found out why access to the recording studio is currently so restricted, made an appointment to talk about doing a directed study recording project (for credit! real academic credit!), and secured a spot in a songwriting class that’s going to be taught by a Grammy Winning songwriter.

Rock’n’Roll ;)

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/01/8688259/

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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/