Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

day in the life

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And, boy, let me tell you, if you ever really need to get motivated you should go hang out with your mother for a week during which you can’t go outside, can’t eat, can’t use the internet for anything other than checking email (without much replying), can’t work, and don’t have any money. Within 24 hours of your escape you’ll have taken two walks, cooked breakfast, blogged, caught up on email, set up interviews for two new jobs, and balanced your check book. Sure, all of this motivation could be connected to the fact that my other option is to sit downstairs with a roommate who is coughing her lungs out just to see if my newly reimagined throat can resist the evil lure of virii and bacteria, but that doesn’t mean i’m not enjoying the concept of being organized for the first time ever in my adult life.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/06/85160822/

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The El slipped out of its tunnel into the plainest sort of gray, getting inevitably closer to my stop. Spring Garden. The gentle rocking of the car on the tracks tends to lull me. That, and i was staring at the people. A woman in a flower print brown skirt reading a trashy looking novel (in which i could definitely make out highlighted passages); a man who looked halfway made of bronze with shiny low-gauge piercings and a cycling backpack (i felt like the reflection from his newly shaved head was staring at me); a massive wall of hairspray and blue eyeshadow crammed into shoes that were obviously not quite large enough (pinky toe was trying its best to convince the rest of the foot to let it come back to hang out for a while); a little girl with a broken foot secured within men’s extra-large gym socks and ace bandages (sitting across from her mother, holding a large manila envelope marked Extremities, and it took me a minute to figure out that it was an x-ray of a foot rather than a script of the play).

Stepping out of the train felt like stepping into the color gray: it was as though someone had taken a crayon of that color and plunged it directly into the sun. Dripping over my shoulders, working at the edges of my eyes. I stood for a moment half-in the door of the train as a man took the stairs up to the platform two at a time and wrestled his pockets for a token.

At 8:25 in the supermarket this morning a woman with a full cart of groceries let me cut in front of her in line with my Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Kix, & Orange Juice. The cashier gave my pajama bottoms and inside out t-shirt a cursory examination before i commented “all we had was milk” and she cracked a grin. The receipt paper made an odd sort of crinkle against my $1.75 in change and the flannel of my pocket as my flip-flops thwopped one-two-one-two down 44th street to my house.

The gray somehow got into my head, and my mouth and ears are just that lazy crayon mess. How, oh how, am i supposed to sing tonight?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/85035640/

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The lack of motivation i’m exhibiting today is truly astonishing. First off, i definitely lacked any drive to get out of my bed … my eventual departure from its warmth and comfort was a combination of having to use the bathroom and falling off the side of my bed. These events had no correlation to any amount of ringing and/or screaming provided by my alarm every forty-seven minutes, which meant it was already past the time i said i would show up in work to hang out (and maybe actually work). In Peter-logic, being late to something is typically an excuse to blow it off altogether, and three hours later i found myself planted in front of my computer on the twenty-seventh page of Wonder Woman images from across the web in a highly whimsical and misguided campaign to redesign the site using Golden Era Wonder Woman art. Having failing in that endeavor of misguided ambition, i decided to cruise aimlessly on Amazon, which for me has become nearly a Olympic event. From stationary i already own to a video game i have absolutely no reason to buy to reading negative reviews of a book i already definitely like based on the four or five times i’ve read it. Somewhere in there i ate a cold piece of pizza and wrote a check for our electric bill

Yes, it’s non-stop excitement here. A virtual house of fun. Excuse me while i organize my guitar picks into ROY G BIV order with subdivisions for gauge and manufacturer…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/03/75038470/

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Earlier…

Septa sometimes paints you a pretty picture, if you get far enough away from the constant hum and hustle of motors in the city. It’s their tracks that caught my attention . . . tendrils arcing out from tangled skeins of track that echo ever inward to create the swirling mess of 30th street station.

The pictures, though, it’s about the pictures.

I am in North Philadelphia, the cool not-quite-evergreen metal of a bench leaving alternating slats of cool and warm skin on the backs of my legs. I imagine that i must look silly – – all curled and cross-legged in my business attire, like a child at a party who’s tired out from playing with the adults.

Which . . . maybe i am.

Just now an older black gentleman walked down into the station, and the heels of his polished shoes rang out against the stairs like hollow wooden bells. He is in a suit so royal blue that i’m fairly convinced that it’s purple. He his with him an oddly shaped silver suitcase and a wide-brimmed hat . . . just now he was sitting on the former and adjusting the latter. For a moment he stood, lifted the case up to a ledge on the wall, carefully opened the clasps, and inside i could see the tell tale velvet that enwombs a shiny instrument . . .a saxophone, or clarinet. But, that peek was all i got, as he snapped it closed and set it back down after only the most cursory inspection.

I wanted to ask him to play . . . i would’ve given him all of my money. Here’s my train.

Funny… i meant to talk about the wooden station with it’s ancient awning, but now i’m headed back. But… i think i still managed to say what i was feeling.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/03/75000951/