Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

Terms & Conditions

As you read Crushing Krisis, please note the following:

All content is written by me unless disclaimed otherwise.

I am the sole author of this blog, and its written content is original (unless I say it’s not). This includes songs!

If I have mistakenly excerpted a piece of your content or displayed your copyrighted image, please let me know.

The opinions expressed are my own and do not represent the positions of my current or former employers, bands, or volunteer organizations.

Self-explanatory, yes?

Posts are published at times convenient to me and my editorial calendar, and may have been published automatically without my intervention or have had their timestamps altered.

The blog may appear to be active while I am at work, asleep, or otherwise indisposed. You might even see a post that was published while I was chatting with you on the web or in person! I plan around those things, when necessary.

Comments remain the intellectual property of their authors, but may be re-published or moderated per my editorial discretion. I will provide credit to the author whenever possible.

When you leave a comment on CK your words and thoughts belong to you, but I might later excerpt them in posts, reviews, or marketing materials. Also, I occasionally need to edit comments – usually to redact personal information.

Links to external sites selling products or services may be affiliate links.

I may use special referrer links to preferred web vendors when I refer you to something you can buy so that I can benefit from your purchase. The most common example of this is my using Amazon, eBay, and iTunes affiliate links when I refer to books or music.

I’ll never link you to something that will specifically upcharge you for my own profit, but I may not be referring you to the cheapest vendor (unless I said that specifically). Profits from affiliate links help to pay for CK, which I prefer to keep ad-free.

Here’s the official, legally required version of this disclaimer:

Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to: Amazon Services LLC Associates Program (in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain), eBay Partner Network, and iTunes Affiliate Program. Note that URLs including the “geni.us” domain name are affiliate short-links.

I may blog about products, service, or other experiences that were discounted or provided at no cost due to my career or my blogging. If I review, rate, or recommend that item I will disclose my relationship. However, I may refer to the item in passing without a specific disclosure.

If I endorse something I will let you know if I received special treatment that may have affected my opinion due to my occupation or being a blogger. If I just reference it in the course of a larger story, I might not say anything.

For example, I received a free meal from a local kitchen service for my job. I wrote a specifically disclaimed piece about that for my work blog. Here, I might make this in-passing mention within a post on a different topic: “…and that time I ate an awesome free meal from [CHEF]!”

I’m not going to specifically disclaim that mention.

I may blog about promoters, artists, performers, or events who I have a personal and/or business relationship with in the capacity of organizing, marketing, booking, or performing. I am sometimes furnished free or bartered admission, participation, or products as a result of those relationships.

Posts might not include a specific disclosure unless I received special treatment explicitly so that I would blog about the experience.

I occasionally get free stuff or opportunities as a result of my daily life as a musician and active social media user. For example, sometimes I am unexpectedly waved into a local event as if I was on the guest list, a musician won’t take my money at their merch table because we are friends, or a bartender will serve me a free cranberry juice while I watch a show.

I might blog about those shows, albums, or bars! These relationships are a part of my decades of experience as a professional and as a musician, and I cannot possibly disclose them all. That would be like asking an actual famous person to name every movie they starred in that resulted in them being invited to a certain awards party – improbable, but also annoying.

Bottom line: If I am blogging positively about something it means I actually like it.

If you have questions or comments on these disclaimers please use my contact form.

get elevated

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I wrote that last post on the El.

For those of you not acquainted with Philadelphia, we have exactly two and a half brands of subway. One travels north to south. One travels east to west. One spends half its distance traveling from the center of the city to the west, and then emerges from the ground.

(I always laugh when people find the Philly subway system confusing. They’re named unambiguously and barely make a turn. Paris – now that’s confusing.)

The “El” is short for the Market Frankford Elevated Line, the east to west subway named thus because it runs along Market Street & Frankford Avenues and because after it exits the central part of its route in either direction it runs along elevated tracks. Creaky, red iron, elevated tracks that tower overhead, dripping rain that smacks as it hits your scalp.

Nothing in the world skeeves me out like the El. In fact, for several years at the old house I boycotted it entirely. However, it’s a reality of traveling to and from the new house.

The grime of it is paralyzing. The navy blue floor is encrusted with untold months of flotsam at every crack and corner. The blue seats are not plastic but a sponge-like blue fuzz that seems engineered to attract and retain dirt.

Then there are the people – the degenerate, tactless people. I have heard of and witnessed people doing things on the El that you would never witness elsewhere in public – let alone on public transit. Vandalism. Performance art. Investigations of personal hygiene. Sex acts.

The charming combination of environmental grossness and personal grossness is enhanced by the claustrophobic layout of each car. To a New Yorker – accustomed to their wide, hard-plastic benches and center-of-aisle poles – it probably seems like an amusement park ride.

A tiny, disgusting amusement park ride.

Whenever I ride a carefully tuck my limbs into my body like an Olympic diver, trying to avoid contact with something or something that will give me syphilis or leprosy.

Carefully tucked into myself, I pull out my laptop, and log in remotely to work for 29 blocks of elevation, before shutting down and doing my best to hold my breath and stay absolutely still for 10 blocks of subway.

The first thing I do every day in the office is wash my hands.

man (just me, actually) vs. nature (mostly this one bird)

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I have been waking up early almost every day at the new blue house.

Some of that awakening has been of my own volition. Other of it is due to an east-facing window.

However, largely the inspiration is avian in nature.

When we talked about owning a house in a speculative fashion, people would say the same sorts of things. “You’ll always have projects,” was a common response, and I’d never dispute it. Another common one was, “Oh, you’ll have a yard! There will be birds singing.”

No, really, people say that.

I would consistently respond, “Yes, I need to figure out how to poison them all.”

It’s not anything I have against birds, per se. I have a friend who disputes the very nature of birds. Like, “feathers, hollow bones – that shit is just unnatural.” She regards each sample of the class with guarded skepticism, as if it could be a carrier of bubonic plague or infectiously bad credit scores.

That’s not the nature of my problem. Birds are fine as a concept. I just don’t like things that make uninvited noise (other than, obviously, me). Birds fall into the same offensive category as small dogs, train tracks, and babies.

Which is an entirely other topic.

Birds know no reason. At least trains pass and babies are usually hungry or tired or want to chew on your remote control.

Why is the bird chirping? Like, this morning at 4am when the species of bird I refer to as “Digitalis Clockus” – which earned its name because its brief, repetitive, perfectly-pitched warble is louder than my digital clock, even when it is positioned across the street in a neighbor’s yard where it would be technically trespassing for me to poison it or beat it to death with a wok – began chirping, why was it chirping?

Why, gentle readers, must it not only begin to chirp, but chip that piercing, non-snoozeable-but-very-alarming chirp every morning between 4:07 am and 5:15 am? Why must its circuit carry it from our neighbor’s broad yard across the street to the towering dogwood beside my window?

I have encountered it once in close quarters, in the lower boughs of said tree. I assumed my avian foe would be approximately the size and shape of one of those totally over-the-top Hammacher Schlemmer alarm clocks that light up and vibrate and make bagels, but with wings.

Nay. It is a tiny, mottled, gray thing that I could probably fit whole in my mouth.

If I thought that it wanted to fly into my mouth I would put the poison right on my tongue, like a tiny, toxic hit of LSD, and wait patiently for my avian friend to swoop into my maw.

That would be better than waking up every day at an average time of five forty-one in the morning.

Disaster is Natural

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I have this theory about how Philadelphia is immune to disaster.

Stick with me for a minute.

No seismic activity. Relatively far away from potential tidal waves and protected from hurricanes. We’re not known for forest fires or mudslides, and despite our utter flatness occasional floods are minor. It doesn’t get too oppressively hot and the biggest challenge in our snow storms is waiting for the city to send plows. We’re relatively drought- and famine-proof, as modernized cities go, and NYC and DC are preferable targets for terrorists and rogue nuclear missiles.

Really, the closest we come to city-wide disaster is one of our sports teams winning a championship. Otherwise, short of OCD Godzilla bursting free from my chest to tramp around Center City, it’s a pretty safe place to live.

So, of course we move out of the center of the city to the fringes and within the first week there’s a tornado on our block.

Yes, day six as homeowners, tornado.

That is only vaguely an exaggeration. It wasn’t officially a tornado, and it was actually on pretty much every block adjacent to our new one while leaving us untouched.

I witnessed a portion of the storm from my office window, and it looked sufficiently deadly – I saw it blowing things clear off the gated roof of an adjacent building before my view was reduced to a foggy blackout. However, when I left, Center City looked no worse for the wear.

A huge tree on the next block, completely uprooted.

My new neighborhood was a different story. My bus stopped a mile short of our house in traffic snarled by dark traffic lights.

I disembarked and began a muggy hike back to my home. About a mile out from our house I started to see down tree branches. Then it was downed tree limbs, taking some power lines with them.

By the time I was a block away it was entire trees – trunk, roots, and all, upended ass over end to be splayed rudely across well-groomed lawns. Entire blocks of entire trees, the entire landscape denuded by mother nature.

To say I was nervous when I approached our house would be an understatement. I was obsessing over the huge tri-trunked tree that shades our patio, and how any of its trio of arms could go crashing through the roof to destroy my collection of guitars and recording equipment, now located in one conveniently destructible place.

My heart sank when I turned onto my street a block below our house, only to find it completely blocked off by the arboreal carnage.

A barricade of branches and power lines.

Having lived in the absence of disaster for nearly three decades, to me the sight was fantastical – as if my block had experienced some sort of wizarding dual, the debris glinting with hints of magic in the afternoon sun.

I navigated around it with great care, emerging on the other side to regard a pristine, untouched block stretching beyond the mess.

I raced the remaining distance to my house but, like the rest of our block, it was unmolested – no downed trees, no holes in our windows from golf-ball-sized hail. The only evidence of a storm my neighbor described as sounding “like a freight train passing by” was a dusting of shredded leaves on our lawn and our power, out.

We dodged a bullet – a house on the next block had its gutters shredded by downed trees, while a few streets over a massive branch decimated the windows of an SUV. A co-worker lost all of the power lines to his house to trees.

Us, we just lost our innocence – no longer protected from disaster by Philly’s impregnable grid of row homes, and now inclined to worry about the state of our house after every storm.

do start believin’

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A week ago I had just finished commuting home for the first time to my new house. Presently I am the merch guy for Filmstar as they split a bill with The Shondes at Tritone.

That’s the life, at the moment.

That, a seemingly unlimited amount of cardboard boxes in various states of unpack, and a steely, unflinching resolve to spend money on things like towel hooks and toilet seats. Whatever it takes.

We moved with no issue whatsoever, aside from only sleeping two hours in a 36 hour span. After all of the wacky settlement hijinks it was a bit of a letdown, where “letdown” means “totally awesome gift from serendipity.”

Things have generally been serendipitous lately, in a broad Alanis-Ironic reading of the term. I like to think it’s universe-funded payback for all the not-being-nasty I’ve done in the last year.

It’s hard. I’m nasty by nature. Or, at least, by nurture.

My high school graduation was 1/10 this big.

On Tuesday we walked into Trenton Arena, late for E’s brother’s graduation, to discover his face displayed on a jumbotron singing “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Apparently he was the only tenor confident enough to bring an appropriate amount of NJ rock to that Journey classic (by way of Glee), and so wound up singing Steve Perry lead at his own high school graduation to a half-full arena’s worth of crowd.

And now I am in an increasingly packed rock club, selling merchandise and recording video for my wife’s band while she rocks out in a rather short skirt which I heartily endorse. Later we will go back to our house, and sleep on a mattress on the floor. Tomorrow I will finish setting up my new recording studio and start playing music again.

This is the life.