Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

memories

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So, i’m in Florida. Hi.


Florida is entirely queer is basically what i’ve decided. I feel like an endless cliche saying things like “well, in Philly…” every other sentence, but it’s honestly a entirely different culture than what i’m used to. Case and point: cars. Most of the peope i know at Drexel have their licenses, because where they live they basically need a car to get from anywear to anywhere. However, these people mostly don’t bring their cars to Philly … there’s just no point in it.


Here if you don’t have a car you’re stranded. Going to the movies last night was utterly unaccomplishable via bus. Getting to the airport would involve a pricey cab ride or a ride to an out of the way rail-station and then a pricey cab ride. Today was like the Greatest-Hits of lacking public transportation: getting to see Martha involved a lengthy car ride to the out of the way train-station, followed up by a doubly pricey cab ride down the highway. And then i got lost in Jupiter.

Well, really, this tiny development inside of Jupiter that gives one the impression that there was a Disney race in Starcraft who came to Earth to colonize our territory. It’s not exactly the town of Celebration, but’s it’s got that pastel-and-stucco, pre-fab, homogeonized-milk sortof feeling to it. Which, was even creepier when i thought the entire thing was Martha’s college, but then she informed me that it was really just one big creepy pre-fabricated expensive housing development — where you can pretend that you live in an amalgamated every-state of the USA minus anything with a population density higher than… oh, shit, what the hell do i know about population density.


But, anyway, now playtime is over and i have to do the pricey two-hours journey back to the geriatric imprisonment that is my grandmother’s condominium.

On the bright side, Martha is as obsessed with Buffy as i am, and tomorrow i’m having lunch with JillMatrix!!! Rock on!

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/8085417/

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I have been hearing the Beatles my entire life — first on the record player as a baby, and then on long trips to the shore on our cruddy Past Masters tape, and then on shiny new see-through cassettes of Abbey Road and The White Album. There are constants in my life; everyone has constants. Even the most unstable and unable people i know have things they can always turn to, or that they will always turn to.

The parking lot at Kiddie City Toy Store, and Ringo sings “Octopus’ Garden.” I am playing “Name That Beatle.” We are crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge to New Jersey and Paul and Mom and I are wailing “Oh Darling” so hard that our voice is cracking around the edges as one. We are zooming down the Atlantic City Expressway and Lennon croons out from carefully nested speakers “I’m So Tired” as i lazily stick my feet out of the window.

“I’m so tired.”

The wind dug between all of my toes as i laughed and sank my head back into the seat. The drive to WildWood was always longer on the way there than coming back. I was always so busy trying to decide if it was John and Lennon singing that half the time i missed George. George: the quiet one. My mom loves Paul with all of her teenaged heart, but on the way home she would confess to me conspiratorially that she’s always had a soft spot for Mr. Harrison. “The ugly one?,” i would ask? “With those cheekbones?” “Does he play the second guitar?”

My mother denies the existence of Middle Beatles and will glare at you icily if you mention Let It Be, so she first was eyes at George Harrison with his bowl cut and then sliding around in the midsts of his delicate guitars as his songs grew more and more central to the end records. My entire life it has been just the two of us, and just the three of them: Paul, George, and Ringo — because we didn’t have poor dead John around anymore.

At fifteen i got my guitar, and it never occurred to me to play anything by the Fab Four. The Beatles were more than the sum of their parts, and to this day i still can’t quite distill any of their songs to a single guitar and voice. But, my guitar was a door to things i had never heard before. Paul’s deft bass lines. Lennon’s funky solos. Ringo’s amazing drumming on the back half of Abbey Road. George’s stunningly simple “Something,” and Clapton adding to the throb of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” I listened to the Beatles for my entire life as a phenomenon … as if they would walk into a room and music would just happen. It wasn’t until i got to college that it occurred to me that they all brought their own distinct musical merits to the table, and that you could pick them out one by one if you listened closely. A McCartney song, but a Harrison Riff. A Lennon vocal with that twelve-string chiming in the background.

I never owned a Beatles record of my own before yesterday other than the sad red #1 that exists as a placeholder for albums i’ll eventually have to own as an adult, and for two albums i know as well as “Lucky Star” or “Still Rock and Roll to Me.” I know them: the songs, the lyrics. I never knew the music before, though. Yesterday i locked myself in an empty house, in an empty room, and i turned my headphones as high as they would go. And listened.

At twenty I heard the Beatles for the first time.

At twenty i have suddenly found myself with only two of them left. I will always remember sitting on Michella’s couch in July and seeing TWA 800 emblazoned across the screen of Good Morning America, and i will always remember sitting in admissions desperately trying to load up CNN’s website this September. And, i will always remember myself curled into a ball on that rubbery hospital bed, trailing IV tubes and sniffling back tears because i didn’t want anyone to think i was crying about me.

I wasn’t.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7656082/

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A rare occurrence… me, my mother, and my father, talking about our respective colonoscopies. My mom is wearing a Madonna-style “New York” tank top and just bribed the food services people to bring me extra jello, my dad is wearing a denim shirt from his store that says “Pete’s Gun Shop” and brought me his 1960’s boxed set of Lord of the Rings, and i’m merrily clicking away as i assure them that Everclear would be a totally appropriate clear liquid to mix with my cranberry juice.


Yeah, we’re fucked up no matter how you slice it.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7560454/

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AKA Music also has something blaring very loudly when i am shopping there. The first time i ever walked in they had Keep It Like a Secret playing much louder than i had ever heard it, and i took it as a good omen and proceeded to spend $100 dollars there. Subsequent trips have produced equally loud music and large expenditures.

The music is always especially loud in the back by the used section because one of the waist-high speakers is located right next to used soundtracks. That’s about where Rabi had gotten in her browsing, while i had drifted over to where ‘Y’ and ‘I’ face each other — alternately looking for Hum and Neil Young’s Decades. I was saying something, and then she was saying something, and then the music turned off and i found that we were standing in the middle of a record store screaming something at each other from across and aisle in a (suddenly not-so-) futile attempt to be heard over non-existent blaring music.

“Rabi, we’re shouting!”


It only felt a little like Clue, but everyone was watching us and we were yelling something stupid about records and it was hilarious. I left with an Ivy record, a Tori single that i quite enjoy, classic NIN from $4, and a Bright Eyes EP at a Rabi approved price. Rabi left with stuff i didn’t even vaguely recognize the name of. Otherwise, there was a lot of walking, kvetching about lemonade, talking about crushes and of ears, and giggling. Oh, and the couple on the bench next to ours at Rittenhouse did a lot of making out. All in all, it was a wonderful evening.

The trees were lit up with colored balls that we spotted from blocks away, and as we spoke my gaze kept wandering away from our wooden bench and out into the forest of glowing spheres. I can’t believe i’ve only met her four times. I can’t believe it’s been an entire year.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7380399/

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Sometimes i suspect that “normal” is always something that i don’t have, and that’s what makes it what it is.

I’ve been sick on and off for nearly two weeks now … nothing serious, just tiny colds and somewhat-sore throats, and today i’m headed into my Nth period of recovery … back to normal. But, this constant feeling of being slightly sick is the norm for some people. And, furthermore, once i am back to normal, something will be very odd about it.

In one of my (many) fits of contemplating how incredibly screwed up i am, today i thought about my mother and father; not as my dysfunctional parents, but as people. My father, for all of his eccentricities, is normal. He grew up in South Philly with three sisters and parents that got divorced after he got to know and live with them both, he played sports in school, he went to a little bit of college and toured with a band and then settled into bartending rather than be a nuclear physicist or any other thing he has the massive intelligence to do.

My mother is not normal… her parents both have diagnosable mental issues, her entire family was too busy scrabbling up out of the most menial of blue collar existences to learn how to be functional, and her father had been a POW in WWII. She was an only child, and she was not allowed to have toys. In fact, her primary Barbie had been shoplifted by her mother out of a five and dime store. Barbie has empty lipstick containers for chairs and home-fashioned outfits rather than pre-packaged clothes, and to this day my mom thinks it’s amusing to point out what Barbie could use every checkbook or soup bowl for. I never really understood whether or not my grandparents were especially poor at the time: blue collar didn’t always equate to near-poverty in the sixties, and they owned their own home for years. So, i’m just not sure. As for my mother, she barely made it out of high school, never even tried to go to college, lived a few fast years of free adulthood, and got married just shy of 25.

I was sitting at the kitchen table at home today when she casually remarked that she had been nearly five years older than i am now when she got married. We were looking at a photo of her sitting in a Peter-Pan-like rig on the ceiling of the London Victory club in her white pantsuit, ready to fly across the ceiling. That was her wedding reception; held at the nightclub where the both of them worked at the time. October 20th, 1980.

I had almost any toy i wanted as a child, and i always had money and education and a love for knowledge. A lot of people i know never had some of those things even though their parents made twice as much money as i had, my own mother included. My mother and i were on welfare for years, and i still have vivid memories of the place on Woodland Avenue where we’d pick up our check and how i could never quite see up past the counter that the teller windows were set behind. I remember paying for things at the corner store with brightly colored food-stamps and wondering why they weren’t the same color as regular money. We were not poor; in fact, with both sets of grandparents obsessively looking after the well-being of their only grandchild we were better off than most of the people on our block.

These are things i never think about anymore. Despite all of them i still somehow found my way into a private grade school, and i always had a few new GI Joes to tide me over from one set of straight A’s to the next. I had what my mother considered a normal childhood … a loving and stable parent, and enough of what i wanted and needed to sustain me. I was missing things though … things she never never had the chance to miss, so she never assumed i needed them. I never had a best friend, or a hobby that wasn’t just a child’s game, or the ability to keep anything in my life straight and organized. I don’t think my mother is normal. My father definitely is, primarily because i don’t have him. It’s as much my fault as his … i had learned to dislike him by the time he had learned to really appreciate me, and it was all downhill from there. I haven’t really spoken to him at length since his birthday — last Christmas Eve.

Regardless of my incessant common cold, right now i don’t feel normal. I’m in college, i play guitar, i have friends, and i feel like i am living some outside life looking into the lives of Lindsay, Erika, and everyone else i know and love. I feel like getting straight A’s again gets me back inside. I feel like drinking puts me inside somewhere i’ve never even been before; writing songs does too. Each thing individually and in the right circumstance is enough to carry me away from this and towards that invisible thing i am striving toward, but altogether they just imprison me. It’s as though i’m trying to fit in some of the pieces of my dad’s life that i feel can root me down … living on my own, going incommunicado with family, establishing a pattern of drinking that i can snuff out later. But, the sins of the father are doing nothing for the son except for leave me trapped with hardly anything that i’m sure about being thankful for.

So, there is my yearly thanks, in a roundabout crushing way: i’m happy that i’ve gotten this far, is what i suppose i’m saying. My stuffy nose is gone, and i am almost back to what is normal for me. Except, it doesn’t feel right at all.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7357539/