Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

permitted to learn

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As I alluded to in my New Year’s Day post, I have indeed travelled one step closer to possessing a Driver’s License. I am presently the proud bearer of a Pennsylvania Learner’s Permit.

(Actually, I’ve borne it for half a month now and still haven’t sat behind the wheel, but there has been snow on the ground for a third of that, and I spent some time in a state where I don’t have permission to wield a motor vehical. But, I digress. Maybe this week.)

I’ve had a Learner’s Permit before, as the kind man behind the counter at the DMV reminded me as he waived my “New Permit” fee. I was a little surprised that we haven’t reached some statute of limitations on that information, like maybe it would be kept on some moldy punch card in a box at the bottom of a shelf in some state-appointed information warehouse, all-but-forgotten.

But, no, he could see it right on his computer. My half-a-life ago Learner’s Permit, obtained in the same place, maybe on the same dingy little touch screen testing station at the end of the row.

I remember as an early teen I was obsessed with the idea of driving. I wanted my license badly, and all of the freedom and mobility that came with it. I would even have my own car – a boon most of my friends couldn’t boast; we had my grandfather’s boxy old Ford Taurus idly waiting for me to claim while he wilted away in a hospice.

I passed the permit test. I was fine at the actual driving, except for the occasional tangle with a corner in a tight turn. I just could not, for the life of me, park.

In my hazy recollection, that was the primary reason I didn’t take the test – I simply couldn’t park. Spacial relations is my eternal week spot, from geometry to packing a moving truck, and parking a car was like an awful pop quiz of exactly that. I had a lingering dread of time spent circling our block again and again in search of an open spot, and then being unable to pull swiftly backwards into one before another car could snap it up.

(You have to understand that, living in South and Southwest Philly, a significant amount of my life to that point has been spent searching for legal parking or monitoring our illegal parking lest we be ticketed.)

It was too much spacially-oriented pressure for me. Also, maybe I came to the realization that driving equalled more responsibility than freedom, and I erred for the path of the most freedom. After all, we lived in the middle of Philadelphia. Unless I wanted to make frequent trips to the mall, which – why? I was content to ride shotgun, occasionally reclining in the back seat with my guitar to score a car trip.

All of that flashed across my brain when I settled at the battered test screen a few weeks ago. It was the first test of any meaning I had encountered in over half a decade. Can you believe I was nervous about failing? I read and re-read the driving manual I-don’t-know how many times. I took the self-quiz over and over, writing a sentence about any question I got wrong.

I got a 100%, of course.

I trundled back through the sub-freezing wind to the trolley station in Darby, watching the landmarks of my teenage life slide by in my peripheral vision. I lingered at the station out of habit. It used to mark the outer bounds of my known world, the streets behind obscured like white spots on a map – there be monsters – up until the mall.

I slid my headphones on and cued up The Suburbs, beginning the long, frozen, uphill hike through three townships back to our house. A different direction, an older me.

Now, I reflected, driving means more freedom than responsibility.

abdominal revolt

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This morning my body is in revolt, and it’s all Jillian Michaels’ fault.

I have never been an exerciser. High school gym class jumping jacks and 8-minute buns? Sure. But cardio? Circuit training? No sir.

At the old house I at least had walking. We were three miles on the dot from my office, and as soon as Spring was sprung I’d power walk at least one way a few times a week. If I got on a fitness kick or SEPTA went on strike I’d do the entire six in one day, sometimes pretending to jog for a few minutes in the middle.

I hate jogging.

The new house is seven miles away from the office, and I don’t forsee myself making that walk quite as frequently. Or, you know, ever. I’m in a nice neighborhood for jogging, but I really, really hate jogging.

So now I’m an exerciser. Out of necessity, really, because I don’t think guitar playing counts as enough cardio for me to maintain my boyish figure. I naively thought that – with the natural reflexes of a trained assassin and the freakish untrained flexibility of Spider-Man – I would be able to jump right into P90X.

Yeah, about that. My co-workers told me that there was a pre-test on the P90X website to gauge your level of fitness. I took it.

I failed the pre-test, y’all. That’s the first time I’ve failed a test since AP Calculus. Apparently my untrained reflexes and flexibility were nill, and god help me if I had to elevate my heart rate. My physical skill amounted to being able to walk any distance at a constant speed of 5MPH, and that was it.

Basically, I had the physical fitness of a pack mule.

Now I am exercising several times a week with Jillian Michaels, which is a whole post unto itself. Let’s just say I had no idea who she was, but I liked the sound of getting “shredded.” Thanks to Jillian’s undying support and fierce, carnivorous smile that tells me that she preys on the weak once the cameras stop rolling, my aspirations have grown beyond managing the size of my supple bottom to perhaps one day being worthy and able enough to make it through the P90X gauntlet. And what if… what if I had actual abs? Like, abdominal muscles you can see through my skin. You know, like Brad Pitt in Fight Club?

I was repeating that abdominal mantra to get to sleep last night, because my abs were trying to declare their secession from the rest of my body. I did my longest Jillian workout DVD yesterday, and about halfway through my abdominal section decided it had enough of the circuit training, the added resistance, and being a “strong core” for my legs and arms.

My “powering through” the rest of the workout only worsened the tensions between my abs and I. Despite ample stretching, an hour later I felt like Jillian Michaels was walking up to me and kicking me in the stomach about once every twenty seconds.

I described my agony to E, seeking comfort. “Is this what cramps are like,” I moaned pathetically?

That was a tactical error.

She scoffed. “Like having cramps?! Are you curled up in a ball on the ground, crying? Does it feel like something is trying to tear itself out of your stomach for days on end?”

“Um…” I considered bringing up the whole abdominal secession issue, but it seemed imprudent.

“Then, no, it is not like cramps.”

I went to sleep, abs still throbbing with phantom Jillian kicks, on the back of a new mantra:

“No, it is not like cramps.”

the future is here; where is my jetpack?

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I am writing this post from 2011, which feels like it ought to be the future, even if it is really just the present.

I remember being a kid and charting out the major milestones of my life. Not things that were going to happen, like when I’d get married, but certain thresholds. When I’d graduate high school, when I’d be half as old as my parents. And, from there I remember thinking, I’ll be 30 in 2011.

And we’re here!

I don’t make resolutions – at least, not for the new year. Why should 1/1 be any different from 4/5 or 6/6 or any other day of the year?

I don’t make any promises to myself, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have goals. I have a hugely complex spreadsheet of goals that I grade each year, like my own personal annual report, but I also have a very simple, overarching trio of goals I set forth here seven years ago today: know what I’m spending, what I’m eating, and how I’m using my time.

I feel like that got away from me a little in 2010 with the annual report-grading, house-buying, bass-playing, comic-collecting, gig-headlining, soundtrack-writing, novel-authoring, learner’s permit-getting(!), and other related madness.

I’m excited for 2011 because all of those things all already in place. The house is bought. The bands are rocking. The graphic novel bookcase is established. My recording gear isn’t in the same physical space as my suit jackets and my home office.

I am writing this post from the future, and it is filled with opportunity.

National something something Month

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This is the fifth year I’ve claimed to participate in National Blog Posting Month AKA NaBloPoMo, and the third time I’ve failed at it.

In 2007 when I failed I got engaged. In 2009 I failed less spectacularly, but wrote an EP of new songs I’ve been playing ever since.

This year I wrote another EP of songs!

Oh, and as of 3:30 a.m. this morning, AN ENTIRE FRIGGING BOOK.

Behold this dancing monkey as he informs you that I wrote a frigging novel.

Yes, if you’ve been keeping up with the tiny graphic on the sidebar or my endless authorial ramblings on the Twitters, you would know that I’ve been hard at daily work on a novel for National Novel Writing Month AKA NaNoWriMo, which charges you with penning 50,000 words of fictional first draft in 30 days – 1,667 a day.

I found myself 10k words in the hole a day after Thanksgiving, but I was less worried about making up the missed words than I was that my natural stopping point in the story wouldn’t carry me past the 50k mark. However, last night the final chapter of my plot just kept going and going across 8+ hours of writing until I finally finished it at 4,500 words (9% of the entire book, at this first draft stage), sobbing on my couch at 2:30am with 50,227 words.

Then I plugged the whole thing into NaNoWriMo’s word counter, which counted me about 1k short. I expected that, since my counts have always been about 2% short when I use the website, but I was secretly hoping that it would resolve itself magically when I submitted my final text.

Nope.

Winner. Yep, that's my name.

Luckily, I’ve had a clear-as-a-bell vision of an epilogue for a week now, and I spent the hour deliberately dashing it off in one solid peal of writing to qualify for the official 50k mark on the site without having to make any serious expansions to the rest of the text, aside from a quick reread of the final chapter to catch obvious errors (come on, this is me, there’s no such thing as ‘no editing’).

There’s been a fair amount of polemic against NaNoWriMo, claiming it generates wasted time, false hope, and bad manuscripts. Well, sure. But, dudes, I wrote a book – actually, just a third of the entire story I want to tell, but still weighing in at roughly 243 paperback pages even in first draft.

I’ve always had the ability to write, and the intent to write, but this is still my single longest piece of actual, non-hypothetical, well-past the outline stages fictional writing by a factor of at least three (even as CK has swelled to over a million words – 20 NaNoWriMos worth of text).

So, was it a waste of time? Maybe. Isn’t everything? Why do I blog or play music? Why do people who I look down my nose at for watching television watch television every night? We all have our reasons.

What matters this weary morning is that last night I finally finished the first draft of book I’ve been conceiving and reconcieving since I was riding the 2 bus in 7th grade. Not only did I finish a first draft, I finished one of my current five big goals in life (having already taken a pass on having abs in 2010), and NaNoWriMo helped to inspire that.

So, my thoughts on National Novel Writing Month? In a word?

AWESOME.

PS: Many of you have kindly and without any regard for your own time or sanity asked to read some form of this novel. I absolutely will be posting an excerpt sometime soon, but not the entire thing as, theoretically, it is just a third of said entire thing, which means I have as many as 100k words left to write, as this was never really plotted as a standalone piece.

Of course, neither was A New Hope, so there is some precedent for this sort of thing. (Not that I’m comparing it to Star Wars.)

Fear not. The end goal is definitely to serialize the entire thing in some form here on CK, possibly as a podcast or graphic novel. (Do you like to draw, animate, and/or photograph such things? Because I don’t. So leave me a comment.)

In short, ask me again after I get more than three consecutive hours of sleep.

Best albums of 2010? Help me!

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Now re-revised(!) (as of 12/6) (through 1/1/11) to include new LPs I’ve picked up and suggestions from readers.

If you’re a big music fanatic/critic, I want/need your help in populating my list of eligible Best Albums of 2010.

Amongst the 952 projects that I took on this November, I’ve begun to think about the “Best of 2010” albums list I’m going to compile next month.

Mozella's Belle Isle was retroactively my LP of the year in 2009. Do not sleep on this album, dudes. Trust me.

I haven’t done such a thing for a long time, because I haven’t bought and listened-to enough LPs in most years to issue anything like a definitive list. Last year when December rolled around I checked out all of the year-end lists and was shocked that I hadn’t even heard of most of the discs past the top few.

As a result, some of the 2009 albums I played into the ground this year I didn’t even hear until January of 2010 – namely, discs by MoZella, St. Vincent, A Fine Frenzy, and Thao with the Get Down Stay Down. I’m still finding 2009 favorites – the past few weeks I can’t turn off the K’Naan record.

This year I really think it’s going to happen, because I’ve been making a point of cruising New Release lists at least once a month for highlights. That said, I need your help in catching the LPs I’ve missed so far.

First, we have my list of eligible albums already owned or heard – numbering 78 over a hundred more than 175. I already know I have some heavy favorites in this group, as well as some clunkers. [Read more…] about Best albums of 2010? Help me!