Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

all points of the compass

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Yesterday I took one of those personality type assessments that you frequently take at work, and for once I thought it told me something useful.

The assessment suggested our personalities are divided between four predominant focuses – clearing obstacles in the present, having a vision of the future state, caring about people and their skills, and collecting and analyzing data.

Some people were clearly one thing. I was sitting next to a warrior, who only cared about crossing things off his list, and across from a nurturer, who only cared about the people around her.

Unsurprisingly, I do not have a singular focus.

However, I was the only person in a room of two dozen who was primarily focused on the next steps. I’m a planner. I want to know how present actions will be reflected in the future.

I wasn’t only that. Right behind it was my path-clearing tendency – I consider what we can do now to get to those next steps, as well as my analysis-OCD –  gathering information and data to get to those next steps.

You’ll notice a missing element: people. It turns out, in this particular rubric I’m supposedly not too concerned with others.

If there was any doubt in my mind about the validity of that assessment, you don’t have to look much farther than Arcati Crisis rehearsal. I’m always pushing to learn more songs so we can play longer sets, record video to add to our web content, add more harmony to make our songs more complex, or any number of other things that will transform us. I am fixated on the future state.

I want to get those things done, and I have my data to support why we’re doing them (in the form of song binders, spreadsheets, rehearsal videos, etc).

What I don’t do is ask, “Are you having fun?” It just doesn’t come into the equation for me. I’m having fun if the song sounded good. When the songs don’t sound good I’m not having fun. If that happened all the time I wouldn’t show up. I assume that about everyone else.  And – whether they share my dogmatic future-focus or not – it’s true.

This week, the songs sounded great. I think we were all pretty happy.

It’s not that I don’t care about others. It’s that I assume that being on a team indicates interest, and the best thing I can do to keep you interested is to always be moving towards the next step in our evolution – which means doing great work in the present.

For being a band-leader, I think my personality fits me to a tee.

drive into infinity

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I feel like I spent more time in the car this weekend than being a person.

That was always part of my resistance against having a car, and then against driving one. I remember as a kid all the interminable trips to places not even worth going to spend money we might not have had, and then the constant orbiting the block for a parking spot when we returned.

I remember thinking, valuable years of my life are being spent, and swearing inwardly I wouldn’t be the same way as an adult.

Yet there I was, driving to a barbecue in NJ, driving blinding around NJ trying to find our show, driving back from our show, driving through blinding rain with the idiot light on to see bro’s show in NJ, driving through subsequent flooding to get back home.

My reasoning to myself earlier this year was, you’re tithing your time in exchange for being interesting. No hunting for parking spots, anyhow, since we have our teeny garage. Plus, more seeing friends, playing shows, and getting to bro faster. All the things I claimed I wanted and valued.

This weekend wasn’t a chore – it was a proof of concept. It was good. But I don’t want to spend a tenth of my life riding around in a car.

Or, at least, I really need to get that iPod dock installed.

i love it, it’s perfect, now change

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As I gave Gina and Jake my third “we only have to change this one thing” note on a song last night, I wondered if they were starting to hate me.

I’m always the one giving the most notes in rehearsal, whether it be with AC or Filmstar, so wondering if people hate me isn’t unique just to rehearsing with AC.

Why do I do it? It’s not that I have the best ears – Gina and E are much better than I am. It’s also not that I’m the one not making mistakes – I make plenty, sometimes the most! And, I love getting notes – I’d be happy to get some.

So why am I the one Simon Cowelling at the end of every song?

Mostly, because someone has to do it. That’s not to say that every song requires a critique, but they at least all require a moment of consideration before moving on or else rehearsal turns into going through the motions. If you hear things to tweak while rehearsing and don’t tweak them then you might hear the same thing against next time.

Tweaks aren’t always bad things. Jake plays a lot of high, melodic bass lines in counterpoint to my rhythm guitar work and my backing vocals. Last night I realized this was my “problem” on “Real End” – our parts totally matched, but after years of playing with Gina I wasn’t used to the new harmony they created. The fix is simply us both playing our parts with confidence so they’re distinct from each other.

However, I think the real reason for my litany of notes is that my musical super power doesn’t lie in melody or blend, but in being a fan. I make music that I love to hear. Just like you would know if someone singing your favorite song at karaoke sang the wrong melody, I notice when a song doesn’t sound like itself.

I might not be able to articulate what’s wrong (though I certainly do so better than Randy “Pitchy” Jackson), but that’s why I have bandmates to help me! I simply know when something’s up.

I’m pretty sure that Gina and Jake didn’t leave my house hating me last night, just like I know we managed to make improvements on almost every songs in our repertoire.

How many of those improvements came from my notes? Possibly none, but would we have improved without the notes?

I don’t know.

Lost, not found. (or: stupidity tax) (or: NEARLY headless)

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Over the last thirty days I have racked up nearly $500 in lost stuff.

Let’s mull that over, shall we. Do you have something you want really, really badly that you could buy with an extra $500? I bet it’s a pretty major thing. A laptop? An amplifier? A new suit? A gas grill?

Do you know what I really, really want? THE STUFF I LOST. Five hundred dollars worth of it –  $500 which I now have to re-spend on things I already owned a perfectly good copy of as a sort of tax on my own stupidity.

I wasn't sure what image to lead with for a "lost and found" theme, so E suggested the Awesome Cat. I know that he isn't lost, but this is possibly my favorite photo in the long and storied history of the internet. At least now when I look back on this stupidity I can smile about it ... not because I'm at peace or anything like that. No, just because of the awesome cat.

I’d also call it a tax on my carelessness, but it’s not quite that.

Allow me to explain. The highest value items were the spare key and alarm fob to our car. They’re going to cost over half of the $500 to replace. Now, you might say, “Peter, keys are easy to lose. We’ve all done it once or twice. You carry car keys everywhere. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

Great. Okay. Sure. Tell me this: how many times have you lost your keys while standing in the middle of a field doing nothing with nothing but grass as far as the eye can see in any given direction.

Yeah, I’m way better at losing things than you are.

Last month I was the first car to park in the field at Gina’s wedding. I turned off the ignition and shut the car door. I took five steps away from the car so I could take a photograph to commemorate the first time I had ever driven on grass other than when I pull out of my driveway sideways across the lawn.

I took three more steps away from the car, and realized I hadn’t locked it. I reached into my pocket for my keychain.

It was not there.

My car in a field, about five seconds after losing my keys and about thirty seconds before realizing my keys were lost. What are the odds of that? It's like solving a murder because it was caught on camera by Google Street View.

Then I proceeded to search both the car and the field on my hands and knees in 90 degree heat, tracing carefully plotted forensic grids across the ground to make sure I was covering every inch.

After a while I became paranoid that the keychain was stuck in my clothes somewhere, so I stripped down to my underwear, pawed through my clothing, and continued my search in the nearly-nude.

About an hour later we added two more people to the search party. They were fully clothed.

We found nothing.

In eight steps I had made the key – attached to a massive, shiny keychain the size of a healthy piece of pepperoni – completely disappear. Our working theory was that some sort of vole emerged from the ground, noticed my glimmering keychain, and absconded with it to their burrow to show the family.

More to the point: I lost my keys in clear sight in broad daylight.

It’s embarrassing, but I’ve resigned myself to it – not because I lose things all the time (I don’t) or because I’m good at letting go (god knows that’s not true). No – instead, it’s because I am relentlessly deliberate and routine, and losing stuff is something that I occasionally have to do when I’m moving on with my life.

One month into driving and I have no routine connected to the car. I don’t know where to put the things in my hands when I get in. I don’t have a habit of putting my keys in my pocket when I get out. I’m not used to having two sets of keys.

Thus, the lost car keys. And cell phone battery. And house keys. And bus pass. The list goes on, but every element connects back to the car in one way or another. The car that equals running errands, seeing friends, going to concerts on rainy nights, accepting more gigs, and a hundred other good things.

I just have to pay a stupidity tax to go along with all the rewards. At least when I think of it that way the $500 bothers me slightly less.

(Very slightly. Ever so slightly. Like, the picture of the picture of the cat will continue to be a bigger morale booster for many years to come.)

sing

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“Do you want to sing?”

Is my answer ever not “yes”?

I’ve heard people say that your willingness to sing has a reciprocal relationship to how good you are, and that the best singers will be the first to gracefully retire from the room when the topic is broached.

On that I call bullshit, and not just because it implies that I am a crap singer.

If you love to sing, you love to sing. Gina sings her way through life. E is singing beneath her breath at all times. Whether it was yowling teen in my high school hallways or increasingly lithe rocker of today, I sing on any occasion, so why would I decline to open my mouth and emit a joyous noise when someone specifically wants to hear it?

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“Do you want to sing?”

I fielded that query at two o’clock on Saturday, and my relative skill as a vocalist aside it was a rare moment when I clearly did not want to sing.

I was in weekend bum mode, unshaven and in a t-shirt from my drawer of t-shirts that are explicitly set aside to never be seen outside of the house. The night before Gina and I had one of our longest rehearsals ever in that very living room with our new aider and abettor Jake, and we sang our voices right down to the quick until at the end my harmony on “Real End” was a mere squeak.

No, I did not want to sing.

This askance came from our little brother – not mine, actually, but E’s, except he is for all intents mine, for half his life and a third of mine. He was in our living room, moving out the next day, with his friend in tow, her first time in our grown up kids house, and if I was going to be in unimpressive weekend bum mode for her instead of lounging around the living room in rock star mode wearing nothing but sunglasses and vinyl pants drinking champagne from the bottle at least I could do some singing.

(Please note that the reality is more often than not me lounging around in low-rise jeans and drinking lemonade from a tumbler, but let’s not disabuse anyone of their glamorous illusions of your author.)

Of course I said yes. Is my answer ever not “yes”?

I said yes and hollered out Weezer and Lady Gaga and sang harmony on Maroon 5 until I was singing on fumes, and I know enough about myself to know when graceful retirement is the best option, so I finally excused myself from the room to wallow in the air conditioning upstairs.

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“Do you want to sing?”

The night before E and I moved in together I wrote a song rather than pack – a song with the line, “I’m a little bit sick and tired of getting put on display,” though afterwards I quickly counter the sentiment by confessing, “I guess I shouldn’t have listed that skill on my resume.”

It’s funny how little that describes my relationship to E – we’re never putting on a show for each other’s benefit. If anything, we are the show. The line was never meant to describe us – it was more about being thrust onto the stage in every social and occupational situation because I’m the only person in a room who’s both a consummate professional and a professional ham (a skillset shared entirely by Gina – but I digress, that’s another post entirely).

Bro and I both have that skill on our resume, and it’s become a big part of our relationship to each other. I brag to people about how he got upgraded from sometimes extra to general ensemble understudy at the oldest theatre in the country. He brags to his friends about living in my recording studio. I show my friends how he can hit Freddy Mercury’s soprano A in “Under Pressure.” He shows his friends how I can sing “Love Game” with no hint of hipster irony.

Is this what siblings do – a constant gladiatorial battle that is half one-upmanship and half hero worship? I have no frame of reference, having promised at an early age to smother any suddenly appearing siblings in the cradle.

(I was an intense child.)

So I sang, because it’s on my resume, because it’s what I do. Bro sang too, and just like with E or Gina we weren’t putting a spectacle on for each other – we were simply being the spectacle that is us.

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“Do you want to sing?”

Yesterday bro moved out, bound for yet another theatre production and then his first apartment.

We never hug, not out of some unspoken bro code but because neither of us ever seem to have the urge to hug the other one when instead we can whoop and sing in harmony, but he gave me a hug before he got in the car and drove away to be the spectacle in some other show while I go on starring in my own.

I will not deny the presence of a tear in my eye as I returned to our suddenly quiet house and opened my mouth.

In the list of things E, bro, and Gina and I all have in common, at the top of that list is that even on our worst day our answer is secretly: “yes.”