Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

memories

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And, oh, hi, i also have a life. I think this week was one that was ripe for all sorts of essay-length posts from me regarding what i mentioned in Monday’s mammoth post, but then Tuesday happened.

In 1996 i was 14, and i had just created my first website when TWA800 crashed. For the entire summer the footer of my painstakingly hand-coded splash page bore the visage of Mr. Benjamin, a favourite teacher of mine who had died on the flight.

I remember my reaction very clearly… how i was unable to tear myself away from Good Morning America that day before heading out to camp even though i didn’t know yet; how my mother was silent when she picked me up all the way until Broad Street; how the bottom dropped out of my stomach when i heard; how loosing someone who i didn’t even think about every day had a huger impact on my entire life than i ever could have imagined. I took a day off from camp so that i could go to our too-empty high school to sit with friends who understood how i felt, and when i got back the next day everyone had heard. It felt like they were all at once telling my how sorry they were and asking me through our van window how i was feeling and treating me like i was some fragile thing in a china shop that you are always afraid to brush up against because you don’t want to have to pay for it.

I don’t think i had ever known anyone else who had died of something that wasn’t related to age, and i wasn’t braced for the emotions that would result. Or for the consolations. I was utterly wrecked by both, but i kept it churning inside of my stomach because i didn’t know i was allowed to let it out. I thought that just knowing someone who died and was mentioned on teevee was not enough for me to have the right to be sad in front of anyone but people who shared my own position in the matter because my grief was so different than what everyone kept expecting.

Flight 800 is the first “Do you remember where you were when you heard…” that i had in my life, and it just so happened that i had a personal connection to it. For other people in my generation that event might have been the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, or Oklahoma City, or Columbine, or Princess Diana … there was no single across-the-board bookmark in our memory. Until now.

The funny thing about nationally (and internationally) televised tragedies is that we all feel like we have a right to react to them no matter how large, small, close, or far they may be. Everyone certainly does have a right to their personal feelings on anything that goes on in America, but with any other national event our collective obsession with being involved in the investigative process is only dwarfed in its tastelessness by our insistence that we be involved in the mourning process. Of course, this event is different in scale, scope, and national ramifications. But, after i got over my attempts to ascertain what was going on i stood back and realized that i have almost definitely not lost anyone i know… and i realized that at this point in time there is no place for my emotional or personal reaction to the tragedy that has befallen us here or anywhere else.

I remember how people thought they were being comforting when they offered their thoughts and prayers to me when really they just made me feel more fragile than i already was. This is not my tragedy the way it is for people who lost friends and family, or even for people whose cities were permanently altered. I can’t ignore the awful politics inherent to this situation, or that some people i know suddenly feel the need to discriminate again people with a different skin color or accent of their own.

What i can leave out of my reactions, although certainly not ignore, is my emotional and visceral reaction to Tuesday. If you are gushing about Tuesday, or if you are delighting in watching the investigation continually unfold on the news every night, i want you to take a strong look at what your interest is. Over the years i have learned to separate my emotions from my voyeurism because i don’t think it is my right to want to grieve on the behalf of anyone else, or to hear news that doesn’t pertain to me.

Yes, i am a Journalism student who hates the nightly news… every invasive investigative informational minute of it. There is something to be said for staying abreast of the current state of the rescue efforts in New York and in Washington, and on stories about the victims and their families. However, I think it is safe to say that the majority of America is partially or wholly ignorant of the motives behind the horror we’ve all been a witness to, and i very much hope that most of my readership is mature enough to focus on educating themselves before wallowing in the network’s excessive coverage.


You might disagree with everything i just said, but ultimately i think that anything else i could say couldn’t ever mean as much as my respectful silence on the matter. My thoughts are with everyone this has affected and, for now, i’m going to leave it at that.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5692813/

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This morning i woke up before nine and just laid flat cradled between my bed and the slope of the ceiling, watching sunlight and shadows do ballet on my brick wall. My thoughts were racing but my body was in no mood at all. The last two days were long and my body is sortof protesting every move and bend, and no amount of food seems like enough after just eating a piece of pizza and a pretzel and two handfuls of motrin since thursday. Collecting the last remnants of my stuff from the Matt apartment was not a joy, but afterwards i brought my mattress here so i got one of my first comfortable night’s sleep at home in a long time.

My life is at once cluttered and spacious, and so is the fourth floor of this house… a study in controlled clutter starting at the foot of my bed and spread across the entirety of the converted attic. This morning Linsday and I went with Jack to watch his sister play soccer against Drexel, and we were only really a mile up the street from where they used to live but it felt totally different. I feel like i’ve stepped outside of my life and the neighborhood has changed.

Plus, i have my own bedroom and bathroom now :)

This is sortof cheating my no-net weekend, because the old phone line is still up and everyone needed to check their email. So, i’m leaving you a cam picture, and then back off into obscurity i go.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5427546/

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I’ve never found very much of my music collection to be too implicitly sexy; sure, certain songs have their own sex appeal and others somehow took on one over the years, but what it comes down to is that i frankly don’t have a lot of albums that i would leave on while making out. Of course, for the longest time my rules of album buying went something like “there has to be a girl or an acoustic guitar, and both if i’m really going to enjoy it.” And, while this still is the most ultimate truth in my hunt for new music, it is no longer my sole critera for purchase, and it’s because of this that i feel like i own some music that’s a wee bit sexy now.

The crux of it is that the female voice doesn’t have a scandalous effect on me. Tori Amos sings some sexy songs, Elastica has one about feeling one’s back on the hood of a car, and Garbage has a web of darkly electric songs that are simply churning with sexual energy. That’s all well and good, but i’m compelled to listen to them rather than have it on the score of my lovelife. These songs are soundtrack music rather than scores… they talk about the movie but they don’t always click with the emotional content of the scenes themselves. However, today i realized that i do have the elements of the score lurking in my music collection (although theoretically half of it would come from hers), and it’s all because of the effects of a single girl.

We never kissed. Not once. Not even goodbye. Such was my relationship with Anastasia. However, what we did do a lot of was going to the movies and lying on her floor on Sunday afternoons arguing about music; she had the same sort of exception to women singers that i did to men, only really harbouring a great love for Tori Amos, Bjork, and Heather Nova. Her soft-spot was for men… and not aggressively loud alternative men, but squeaky or thoughtful or nerdy men: Soul Coughing, Ben Folds Five, Elliott Smith, Evan Dando, Get Up Kids, and a whole raft of even more indy rock guys whose albums i know on sight but not by name. And, so, we’d sit on her floor and we’d argue about why i didn’t like any of those bands and why she should really buy an Ani DiFranco album (which she eventually did, with Dilate).

Anastasia and i had a falling out near the end of Senior Year when the mess of applying to college was over and i felt as though i could actually talk to my old friends again. It was too late for my record collection, though, as a tiny kernel of the future had already taken root; on a total whim i had bought the just-released Keep it Like a Secret by one of her favourite bands, Built to Spill. I knew that i liked them a little, but i saw it and it was $13 and suddenly i needed it. But, when i got home it laid untouched on my desk in it’s perfect cellophane wrapped sitting on top of a brown bag containing its receipt. I wasn’t going to open it … it was simply symbolic of my lost relationship (and lack thereof) with Anastasia and there was no reason for me to open it let alone to buy it to begin with.

And, while i was at school the next day, my mother walked into my room for the first time in weeks, ostensibly to take out the trash, and she threw out the empty brown bag i had sitting on my desk. Afterwards it was inevitable – i could scream at my mother all i wanted to, but that album was a part of my collection as much as it was a part of hers, and i couldn’t not listen to it. So, in into the cd-changer it went.

It seemed so harmless at the time, just one happy springtime record in my collection of disappointed and jilted women, but the damage was done. I listened to it with my windows open, i put it on during showers, and i played it while working on my webgame. Built to Spill was like a pot slowly boiling all through my Freshman year; an album i would return to at the drop of a dime. And, suddenly, with this school year came restlessness and disposable income, and suddenly i was coming home with Ben Folds Five and Elliott Smith and even striking out on my own to find things she would like, like Deathcab for Cutie.

Today i was trolling through the used section at AKA Music and i bought, among other things, the Matador Records 10th Anniversary 3 disc set. The first song on the first record is “Stereo” by Pavement, which is a sort of innocently thumping bass groove with a nearly-spoken almost unattentive vocal that trips its way through the song unselfconsciously as it accents and squeaks and turns. And, somehow, to me the geek sound of an indy rock voice paired with at once carefully crafted and lo-fi instrumentation is a seductive sound to me.


There is a Built to Spill album called “There’s Nothing Wrong With Love,” and the cliche of the title mocks the a-typical and affecting songs therein. I remember that once we were lying on her floor talking and she told me how Ben Folds loves Built to Spill and how they both do “Twin Falls Idaho” and how the song after that on the Spill disc mentions David Bowie and at some point while i was sitting there nodding along and listening attentively my brain decided that the upward curl of an untrained mail falsetto or the persistent movement of a band with just a lead or bass guitar rather than a rhythm guitar was an attractive sound to me. Men have a way of writing about girls and sex that women obviously don’t, and while it’s not always the most artful thing in the world when compared to one of my Tori Amos cds, i understand when Ben Gibbard says things like “i hung my favorite shirt on the floorboard, wrinkled up from pulling pushing and tasting tasting” because even though the lyric is obvious, the effect the girl had on him is inherent to the lyric more than the lyric is demonstrative of it. Or,… i don’t know, maybe my brain is just forever trained to create sexual tension around Anastasia’s sort of music the same way i can get whiplash if someone walks past me smelling of Happy


The funny thing is that she’s in New York or Boston now because she got into college a year early and is this amazing artist and has all sorts of direction and i’m still sitting here in Philly listening to her sort of records as if she’s ever going to make it onto my top-five breakups list just because she’s influenced at least one song on every relationship mix tape i’ll ever make while in college. In a way she transcends my hardly populated list of heart-breaks because we never happened, so that in my memory i can keep us lying on her floor together perfect and separate forever without any tangles to comb out. So, here i am listening to Pavement and wondering if it could really underscore a perfect kiss. I wonder if, hundreds of miles away from here, the thought ever crosses her mind while she’s listening to Dilate.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5056420/

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Last night’s start stop rain versus humidity gave way to gray an drizzle today, much to my delight. So much heat all week was just piling more wear and grief onto me and onto the city with every day, and today wiped everything back down to the simple scent of cement and a breeze. With the city so cool and forgiving Hillary entertained my ambitions to get out and wander. We were on second street looking for a restaurant to preface seeing Ghost World, and somehow we wound up in Pagoda.

Pagoda occupies a place in so many simultaneous sentences in my head that i can hardly discern what order i’m supposed to write them in, so please excuse the tangle.

Pagoda is nestled in a restaurant-and-Ritz-theatre district that is Old City, so there are a lot of cobbly streets and things with “independence” in their name. In front of it there is some kind of tiny square about Ben Franklin (though it is not the Ben Franklin House, which is nearby), and in it is a tiny metal model of a historic house on a tiny podium. I saw the house all of the time, because Pagoda has just recently become Pagoda… it’s claustrophic bamboo-strewn space has experienced several incarnations in my lifetime. The restaurant to occupy the building for the longest time was Waldo’s… the same upstairs balcony with a low-flying view out the two-story front face of the building but with a marbly bar extending the entire length of the restaurant from front to back with the swingy doors to the kitchen at the end and a pinball machine tucked into the back corner.

I would sit tiny in those high chairs at the bar with a can of pineapple juice over ice and a bowl of chunky round bar pretzels watching football, because i was nearly always there on a Sunday. The surroundings and everything have melted away now so much that i believe that i really didn’t know anything about the place other than the doors and the balcony and the chair and the top of the bar and the teevee. And my father behind the bar; but, he’s not something i know all that well.

Any story i could tell you about Waldo’s would just be an iteration of “and then the Eagles scored” or “and then we played pinball,” but looking back i think it was the only place i’ve ever been where i have been unequivocally happy; time has wiped away all of the pouty bored pieces of it so they are just smudged pictures around me at the bar trying to teach my dad how to play football on gameboy (“What do you mean there’s not penalties?”) or making my typical assertions (“If the Eagles lose the the Cowboys on my birthday i’m never watching a game here again, okay dad?”) or something. My last memory was from down at the end of the bar at one of those Superbowls that Denver lost, but by then we were me and my dad and his wife and i only remember it was strange being there at night on a Sunday because visitation always was over by 7pm on a Sunday so my life could get orderly again for school the next day.

Splitting time between parents was a funny thing, because weekends with my father never got very much accomplished except for stealing me away from what i was used to, and we never went anywhere because i always was back at home by sundown on a Sunday with a kiss goodbye from his rough stubble. But, i did it nonetheless, from when he lived in a tiny apartment with fish and one of the other bartenders to the wife’s adorable splitlevel house in Andora to their home in BlueBell that is anything but that to me. And, now i don’t even really call him for father’s day, because i don’t have a strong enough association with the world, but i think of him whenever i hear doo-wop on the radio because of his silly high voice that i cannot really match, or when i am distractedly ignoring the Eagles lose. Or when i see where Waldo’s used to be.

So, Hillary entertained my buried sense-associations and we ate at Pagoda and i choked back some tears. It was raining, anyhow.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5038252/

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I was walking down my street and it was lit up all shades of sun… twinkling past trees and bare on the cement and reflected off of polished old cars. Out on the porch next to my building someone was eating something with bay seasoning, and the sense-memory association snapped me back to once when i was crabbing with those funny little cages off the side of a pier after fifth grade and the click of their metal against the wooden dock as we set them down and watched the crabs toddle out sideways from within. I associate the smell more with live crabs than with eating them because i’ve never really eaten crabs. Plucking meat out of anything’s shell is a bit too carnivorously aggressive for me… even sliding a tail off of a shrimp is a bit distasteful. The summer after fifth grade i went on “the cruise” with the boat-club that my mother’s boyfriend belonged to… really just a whole slew of tiny personal boats chugging their way down to Maryland and then back up again over the course of a week. At the time it didn’t really occur to me what an odd little vacation it was. My mother had left me alone at my Aunt Susan’s the year before to go out on the cruise with our just found cat Googie, but i wound up (accidentally) kicking out a window in her den door and it was all quite a debacle. The first time i was ever on a boat was a few years before, and it was a house-boat with a living room and oreo cookies and a resident fluffy cat.

I fell for a girl on the cruise and every fictional character i created for an entire year afterwards was named ‘Barbara,” and i’ve never met anyone my age with that name again. When i would chase her in the water she’s just swim out until the deep end and wait until i grew tired of bobbing up and down just by bouncing off of my toes and floating a little. Other than that, all i really remember from the cruise was that it was the first time i danced in front of people and not just with my mother in my own living room. And, i quite liked it. But, somehow i contrived to be sick for the last night’s dance and missed it, i think because i knew she’d be there. The whole trip had this very fraternal atmosphere between all of the boaters and their counterparts at various marinas down the coast. I don’t think i’ll ever do anything quite like it again. Except for those silly butterflies and staying home from the dance to play with my gameboy and watch the stars… i suppose i might contrive that a time or two more in one way or another..

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/4877285/