stories

June 9, 2001 by krisis

(~~i’ll spell check it tomorrow, i promise. for now just wince along and enjoy~~ the only mistakes i made were proper nouns, so spell check was usless. feel free to keep wincing)

where to begin, where to begin

i think, perhaps, my mother could be turning into some sort of closeted pill popping addict. Nothing serious though… nothing a psychiatrist would provide (aside #4: could, should, whichever…). She’s down the shore right now, and i’m feeding our cat. Except for, “down the shore” definitely means something like “meeting my dealer to score some really good shit.”

Good shit being strong antibiotics, and maybe some cough syrup laced with codeine.

However, “feeding the cat” definitely only means feeding the cat.

Our household has always been known to hoard prescription medication, and my mother getting a nursing degree only made things worse. What can i say, we enjoy being well prepared. However, when i just hit the medicine cabinet for some Benadryl because i can’t even see straight enough to work the teevee remote (aside #6: yet, i can still type) i found myself wading in the midst of what has to be fifty bottles of medication. Fifty! Tiny blue pills, shiny green pills, pills that rat-a-tat-tat in their brown glass bottles, purple pills that look for the life of me a lot like Starburst. And that isn’t even counting herbal supplements. The entire counter below the cabinet is all charcoal and cell salts and et cetera.

(Aside #1: i forgot my bestest truth on my list of truths and lies. when i was five i overdosed on cell salts because i thought they tasted like vanilla. i was at my dad’s place which in my memory seems as though it was desperately hanging onto the seventies, and i opened the lid because nothing was childproofed back then and they all just slid out onto the glass table in an avalanche of melt-in-your-mouth goodness and i wondered how many i could fit under my tongue all at once.)

I haven’t fed the cat yet. Any minute now.

We really do live in a culture of the quick fix subscription to things: medication, magazines, cable teevee. I’m currently reading Survivor by Chuck Pal-something-Fight-Club-niuk, and it seems to be all about putting patches on things that aren’t really fixable. So far. Chuck loves to write about criminally fucked up men and the strange alluring women who motivate their plots – and he definitely could do worse. (Aside #2: Where is my strange & alluring plot motivator? All of his seem like they’re written for Helena Bonham Carter, or a very strung-out Angelina Jolie after all this Tomb Raider hype blows over. But, what am i saying, i had my plot motivator and this is my novel. Silly boy.). Survivor doesn’t beat my last solid read-through Plan B, but it has Club beat hands down. The guy is gunning to be the next Vonnegut, and how many other authors do you read that sit in puddles of their own blood and urine for fun and leisure?

Yeah, certainly not this one. Or, at least, i tend not to immortalize my tales of blood and urine by posting them to the internet. My face feels like it’s melting but that’s just my allergies, but this is so incredibly bad that i can’t even seem to focus on anything for very long and i really need that benadryl and at least my mom could hoard something fun like opium or something, but no, it’s all bladder supplements and pain relievers. Damn you, St. John’s Wort… damn you to hell.

(Aside #3: This whole aside thing is rather clumsy, but all my html purist friends complain if i make a link with a title-tag that shows my aside but then the link leads nowhere. I might have to start using the infamous footnote, because my parenthetical comments are really turning into blogs of their own. but, i digress for now…)

This house is a funny empty thing. Me and the cat, and he doesn’t seem to like me so much right now despite me being the keeper of the can opener. We have mirrors on either side of my living room and i often just have the urge to stand in the middle of the two totally naked just to see my infinite naked images stretching into eternity as the mirrors echo and echo themselves. This again goes back to the fact that i love to exhibit, but i also love to perfect, so in the end i’ll wind up just like radiohead, crafting until the product becomes obscured. Perfectionist exhibitionists all turn out narcissists ’cause they have to listen to themselves so much to get it right.

So, anyhow, the point is that i could never do an all-nude review, but i definitely should have a webcam. But, in the absence of that, i could honestly just pound my fist into the wall until it shattered (aside #5: my fist, that is) into a thousand shards and no one would ever hear or know or anything. I started to do it because it seemed like a way to pass the time, but after a while my hand started to vaguely ache and the wall seemed somewhat unfazed and the whole ordeal reminded me of when Selina would do the same thing so i stopped and want back to staring into our unassuming little medicine cabinet.

This is so different from my apartment, where all sorts of little noises creep in from room to room and from floor to ceiling. My apartment bleeds living human noises from corner to floorboard. Here i don’t have any noise with me. It’s just these clackity keys clacking away, and the cat shuffling up and down the stairs trying not to let me notice him, and silence upon silence upon silence. Where to begin?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/3990465/

June 4, 2001 by krisis

Have i beat this horse to death yet? Oh no! I think it moved! Beat it more!

#1 is true. I have had exactly one serious scrape or cut, ever, and it wasn’t even that serious. This wasn’t a trick, folks, because a broken collarbone is neither a scrape nor a cut. Once i cut open my finger on a catfood lid and it bled for about an hour, but i didn’t even need a stitch. I must’ve been fifteen or sixteen and i remember being amused when my neighbor put on latex gloves to help me bandage up my finger because it meant he assumed i actually had the chance to catch any bloodborne diseases, which was a little flattering. Later that summer he gave offered me a bass guitar and some cocaine, of which i took one.

#2 is true. I used to have a foot fetish before i understood what was supposed to be attractive about people. Um, yeah. It’s hard for something about girls to be hot when you’re five, so i think i just arbitrarily picked feet. It was actually pretty funny, because if i was hanging out with a girl with her shoes off it was entirely equal to me walking down the street now and seeing someone i know who’s totally topless and trying to have a conversation with her without making her aware of looking directly at or directly away from her chest. I think the reason everyone thought i was a bit gay when i was little is because sometimes i’d get distracted by boys with nice feet. Yeah… the weirdness knows no bounds.

#4 is true. I still fit into my first pair of jeans. My first pair of jeans were purchased in eighth grade, and i’m wearing them right now as cutoffs. There wasn’t a reason to have jeans when i wore a uniform to school every day, and seventh grade was the year of the sweatsuit. And, since i barely nudge having over a 30inch waist now, 30×30’s were massive on me six years ago. Love that trim girlish figure.

#5 is false! Before this year i had cried exactly twice since i left grade school? What utter tripe; i’m such a fucking wuss. I’ve cried on the phone to Gina, cried when we had to put my cat Keeko to sleep, and once i mustered up some rockin’ alligator-tears for a substitute we had in English class who wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom. Suckers.

#9 is true. I have never been outside of this time zone. Okay, this one is a little fudgey, but only because of my mother. As far as i ever knew, i had never been out of this time zone, having only been up to Boston and down to Florida. However, my mother informs me that Jamaica is indeed in the next time zone over from this one, and i have visited there twice, albeit very briefly. However, i’m still counting this question as true because i didn’t have a watch with me in Jamaica on either trip and my mother never saw it fit to tell me that we had lost an hour on the way down or gained one on the way up. Way to go mom. So, from now on this is false, but up until today i had no idea.

#11 is true. Until next year i will have spent a third of my life on welfare, a fifth of my life in braces, and nearly half my life without ever having a friend enter my bedroom. After my parents got separated my mother and i were on government assistance for quite some time while she bartended at night and went to nursing school during the day. I will never oppose welfare because i am a result of the welfare system gone right, and if you’d like to tell me that the goverment shouldn’t provide for people in a tough position then you’re telling me that my mother should have never gone to college and that i’m not supposed to be here either, among other things. So, there’s a real life story for you, chew on that. I had braces for four and a quarter years, and it was not fun, but my teeth are absolutely perfect now. I had exactly two friends ever enter my bedroom in the house where i lived for nearly a decade and a half, because i had no friends and even the ones i had hardly ever came to my house, let alone my bedroom. After we moved i had a ton of people who came into my bedroom, and since most of my friends were girls i think it made my mom a little nervous, but nothing steamy ever happened. I mean, why would anything steamy happen? I am the opposite of steam, yet i am not ice because then i would be cool. Contemplate that one.

#12 is true. I learned to subtract from playing Monopoly. A lot of my friends somehow contrived to learn how to read at age three or four, and i can’t imagine that, but i knew math very early. I was a kid who was into doing things, so my mom eventually resorted to Risk and Monopoly hoping to bore me to death, but it didn’t work. At all. However, being a resourceful mother, she just made it a point to teach me how to make change through playing Monopoly (and how to achieve socio-economic domination through the both combined) so that in first grade math was barely as hard as raiding the $1’s drawer. In fact, when i got tested for MG at the end of first grade they gave me this really complicated problem about babysitting and i blithely used multiplication to answer it while the tester let her mouth hang open and my mom smirked to herself. Don’t ever ask her about it, though, or she’ll brag about showing me mentally engaging flashcards rather than talk about board games.

#16 is true. is true. I was the worst reader in my first grade class. Even though i was a tremendously good student, and could spell well, and had very high listening comprehension, i couldn’t ever put it all together and read. There’s one infamous story i have about those giant reading charts with the pictures next to the vocabulary words. One day i got this word that made absolutely no sense to me and the picture seems to look a lot like Toucan Sam with a drippy nose and i just stared and stared at it until finally one of my classmates shouted out “it’s ‘water’!” Coulda fooled me. That summer i read my first book (a children’s version of Dracula … can you see how i got so fucked up? This is like the “how did Peter get so fucked up” game) Somehow by the end of second grade i was in the top reading group in the class, and in third grade i was reading books for eighth graders. And everyone lived happily ever after. The end.

#21 is true. I refused to wear anything coloured navy to the point of a temper tantrum until it became one of my school colors last year. It looked much too much like black and it always was trying to trick me into buying it, and if my mom handed me that even looked a little like navy i would go into full-out only-child tantrum mode until the piece of clothing was back on the rack. If you were ever wondering, that’s why “touch” has the following line: “there’s no place to touch you, skin sweet with navy blue, but it’s so close to black though.” Damn those hot indy-rock girls and their navy tee-shirts. Actually, it turns out i look really good in navy; who knew?

#22 is true. is true. Both girls i’ve ever asked out on a date wound up kissing my best friends. Another fudged one; it’s actually all three girls i’ve ever asked out on a date. Juliana was the first, and she wound up dating Justin. (Evil) Kate (daughter of a local news anchor) was second (see “Falling Down“), and she wound up being slutty with the now-disavowed Lucas. Jesse with blue hair was the last one (see “Afterglow“), and she had her first hook-up with Andrea. Anastasia never hooked up with any of my best friends; she just neglected to acknowledge my romantic existance so i never asked her out. Lots of songs about that…

And that, my friends, is more than you should ever have to hear about my life in a single week. Goodnight.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/3916597/

June 2, 2001 by krisis

Revised list: 9 true, 1 false.

I have had exactly one serious scrape or cut, ever, and it wasn’t even that serious.
I used to have a foot fetish before i understood what was supposed to be attractive about people.
True: In my life i have consumed under 1 gallon combined of beer and/or cola.
I still fit into my first pair of jeans.
Before this year i had cried exactly twice since i left grade school.
True: I haven’t shared a residence with more than one person at a time since i was 4.
True: I was the reigning math word-problem champion in our Christian School League for two years running.
True: I have never eaten a cut of steak other than filet mignon when i was little, because my mom liked it.
I have never been outside of this time zone.
False! ~~For the duration of highschool i claimed i had my first and only kiss to that point playing spin the bottle in 7th grade to avoid further romantic scrutiny.~~
Until next year i will have spent a third of my life on welfare, a fifth of my life in braces, and nearly half my life without ever having a friend enter my bedroom.
I learned to subtract from playing Monopoly.
False! ~~After my 5th birthday I have had a birthday party every even-numbered year of my life, until this year broke the streak.~~
True: I briefly organized my 200+ cd spines to make a color spectrum, but the stress of having both black, grey and white Tori Amos cds made me give it up.
True: Up until i stopped knowing what i wanted to be, i wanted to be a veterinarian.
I was the worst reader in my first grade class.
True: A girl kissed me aproximately 3 years, 2 months, and 2 hours after when i originally asked a girl if she’d kiss me.
True: The first time i was ever on stage i didn’t want to be there, and i forgot all of the words.
True: In fifth grade i was the only student who decided to drop music class in favor of private (non-musical) study.
True: I haven’t thrown up since 7th grade save for one nasty experience with Aftershock.
I refused to wear anything coloured navy to the point of a temper tantrum until it became one of my school colors last year.
Both girls i’ve ever asked out on a date wound up kissing my best friends.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/3900342/

June 2, 2001 by krisis

Okay, here’s some quickies.

#6 is true. I haven’t shared a residence with more than one person at a time since i was 4. My parents separated when i was four, and since i’ve gotten to college i’ve only had one roommate at a time. This streak looks as though it will be broken next year, since we’re looking at 4-bedroom houses.

#8 is true. I have never eaten a cut of steak other than filet mignon when i was little, because my mom liked it. I’ve had all sorts of processed steak and beef products, but to this point i’ve never had a piece of a cut of steak (and i never liked filet mignon either).

#19 is true. In fifth grade i was the only student who decided to drop music class in favor of private (non-musical) study. After the aforementioned Christmas show, we were all given the option to quit music class to do work during that period; this was the music teacher’s way of telling us that we should definitely keep playing an instrument. Of course, i quit without a second thought, and since i had straight A’s anyway i usually just helped Ms. Mann grade tests while everyone else was in music class. Subsequently, i was forced to teach myself to read music from the from the choirgirl hotel book at the beginning of my Senior year.

However, #10 is false! This statement is an utter and total fabrication: for the duration of highschool i claimed i had my first and only kiss to that point playing spin the bottle in 7th grade to avoid further romantic scrutiny. I’ve never even watched anyone play spin the bottle, let alone participated, and i was pretty vocal about having never been kissed all throughout highschool (probably one of the reasons no one wanted to date me… since i was almost proud of not dating anyone up to that point). I made it a point not to talk about my romantic inexperience when i arrived at Drexel, and thus i had to tell my first kiss that she was my first kiss, at which point we kissed again. So… obviously i was only supposed to gab about my romantic inexperience when i stood to directly gain pity-kisses from it (which is not to say i wasn’t offered pity kisses in high school … i was offered them left and right. However, there’s a difference between a pity kiss and kissing someone for real and then having a pity kiss.)

That leaves the requisite 9 truths and a lie. Any guesses?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/3900280/

June 2, 2001 by krisis

#18 is true. The first time i was ever on stage i didn’t want to be there, and i forgot all of the words. Okay… this one is a little fudgy, but it holds up. I had obviously been on stage before this experience, whether it be to accept my treasured Christian leauge math awards (i obviously intend to bring that Christmas shows. However, that’s not where it gets fudgy; the first two times i was a featured performer on a stage was playing my recorder in fifth grade, and narrating a part of a play in fifth grade. Both events had to have happened in fifth grade because i associate them with the same teacher, and they both had to have happened at the Christmas show because the only other show was the Sping show and that was done by the middle school that year. So, i’m going on the basic assumption that the narration occurred before the recorder playing, but either way this works out because i definitely remember not wanting to play the recorder and not knowing what i was playing while i was onstage.
up once a day now), or to stand way in the background of the chorus in silly school

Anyway, there was some narration in the Christmas play about babies and mangers and love that needed to be read by someone, and anyone even remotely interested in having a part in the show had already been merrily drafted. So, the teacher in charge of casting decided that it was futile to poll the ranks of students for a reluctant actor for such an important piece of the show, but to instead draft the best reader in entire grade school. Which, happily enough, was me. However, i thought the whole Christmas show concept was incredibly silly, as we tended to do essentially the same “god is god, materialism is bad, praise the baby jesus” schtick every year, and i stubbornly refused to take the part. And, then, mysteriously, i was somehow cajoled to do it (i’m sure they preyed upon my ego, as that had to be the only way they could have convinced me).

What no one deigned to mention to me before i agreed to be in the play was that i wasn’t exactly narrating – in that i was calmly reading from a text as a narrator would – instead i was supposed to memorize the whole thing and then spit it back out convincingly while staring into the audience with a smile plastered onto my face.

I honestly tried to memorize and smile and all of that, but it wasn’t in the stars. I was terrible at memorizing things (bible verses were my dreaded nemesis), i didn’t like to be put up in front of that many people to perform (or for any other reason (other than awards, obviously)), and i had absolutely zero projection skills (i was still relatively meek, probably due to my beaver-sized buck teeth). So, when it came time for the show i was ushered out onto the stage protesting that i needed the book to read from even though they had already conceeded that i could have a microphone. So, when it came time for my moment in the spotlight (literally, right as the spotlight hit me) i gave the teacher who was on-book in the first row a combined look of imminent dread and fear, and she raced to the stage and handed me the book, and i wound up reading the narration into the microphone perfectly. The end.

(Ironically, memorization, getting up in front of people, and projection are now three of my most useful traits. I’m not sure if wound up being so performance oriented as a response to this particular incident or not, but i do always remember being vaguely jealous of the people who auditioned for parts in grade school. Also, there are lots of hints about the other truths and lies in this entry, but some of them are slightly misleading.)

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/3899712/