Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

drive into infinity

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I feel like I spent more time in the car this weekend than being a person.

That was always part of my resistance against having a car, and then against driving one. I remember as a kid all the interminable trips to places not even worth going to spend money we might not have had, and then the constant orbiting the block for a parking spot when we returned.

I remember thinking, valuable years of my life are being spent, and swearing inwardly I wouldn’t be the same way as an adult.

Yet there I was, driving to a barbecue in NJ, driving blinding around NJ trying to find our show, driving back from our show, driving through blinding rain with the idiot light on to see bro’s show in NJ, driving through subsequent flooding to get back home.

My reasoning to myself earlier this year was, you’re tithing your time in exchange for being interesting. No hunting for parking spots, anyhow, since we have our teeny garage. Plus, more seeing friends, playing shows, and getting to bro faster. All the things I claimed I wanted and valued.

This weekend wasn’t a chore – it was a proof of concept. It was good. But I don’t want to spend a tenth of my life riding around in a car.

Or, at least, I really need to get that iPod dock installed.

i love it, it’s perfect, now change

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As I gave Gina and Jake my third “we only have to change this one thing” note on a song last night, I wondered if they were starting to hate me.

I’m always the one giving the most notes in rehearsal, whether it be with AC or Filmstar, so wondering if people hate me isn’t unique just to rehearsing with AC.

Why do I do it? It’s not that I have the best ears – Gina and E are much better than I am. It’s also not that I’m the one not making mistakes – I make plenty, sometimes the most! And, I love getting notes – I’d be happy to get some.

So why am I the one Simon Cowelling at the end of every song?

Mostly, because someone has to do it. That’s not to say that every song requires a critique, but they at least all require a moment of consideration before moving on or else rehearsal turns into going through the motions. If you hear things to tweak while rehearsing and don’t tweak them then you might hear the same thing against next time.

Tweaks aren’t always bad things. Jake plays a lot of high, melodic bass lines in counterpoint to my rhythm guitar work and my backing vocals. Last night I realized this was my “problem” on “Real End” – our parts totally matched, but after years of playing with Gina I wasn’t used to the new harmony they created. The fix is simply us both playing our parts with confidence so they’re distinct from each other.

However, I think the real reason for my litany of notes is that my musical super power doesn’t lie in melody or blend, but in being a fan. I make music that I love to hear. Just like you would know if someone singing your favorite song at karaoke sang the wrong melody, I notice when a song doesn’t sound like itself.

I might not be able to articulate what’s wrong (though I certainly do so better than Randy “Pitchy” Jackson), but that’s why I have bandmates to help me! I simply know when something’s up.

I’m pretty sure that Gina and Jake didn’t leave my house hating me last night, just like I know we managed to make improvements on almost every songs in our repertoire.

How many of those improvements came from my notes? Possibly none, but would we have improved without the notes?

I don’t know.

Lost, not found. (or: stupidity tax) (or: NEARLY headless)

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Over the last thirty days I have racked up nearly $500 in lost stuff.

Let’s mull that over, shall we. Do you have something you want really, really badly that you could buy with an extra $500? I bet it’s a pretty major thing. A laptop? An amplifier? A new suit? A gas grill?

Do you know what I really, really want? THE STUFF I LOST. Five hundred dollars worth of it –  $500 which I now have to re-spend on things I already owned a perfectly good copy of as a sort of tax on my own stupidity.

I wasn't sure what image to lead with for a "lost and found" theme, so E suggested the Awesome Cat. I know that he isn't lost, but this is possibly my favorite photo in the long and storied history of the internet. At least now when I look back on this stupidity I can smile about it ... not because I'm at peace or anything like that. No, just because of the awesome cat.

I’d also call it a tax on my carelessness, but it’s not quite that.

Allow me to explain. The highest value items were the spare key and alarm fob to our car. They’re going to cost over half of the $500 to replace. Now, you might say, “Peter, keys are easy to lose. We’ve all done it once or twice. You carry car keys everywhere. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

Great. Okay. Sure. Tell me this: how many times have you lost your keys while standing in the middle of a field doing nothing with nothing but grass as far as the eye can see in any given direction.

Yeah, I’m way better at losing things than you are.

Last month I was the first car to park in the field at Gina’s wedding. I turned off the ignition and shut the car door. I took five steps away from the car so I could take a photograph to commemorate the first time I had ever driven on grass other than when I pull out of my driveway sideways across the lawn.

I took three more steps away from the car, and realized I hadn’t locked it. I reached into my pocket for my keychain.

It was not there.

My car in a field, about five seconds after losing my keys and about thirty seconds before realizing my keys were lost. What are the odds of that? It's like solving a murder because it was caught on camera by Google Street View.

Then I proceeded to search both the car and the field on my hands and knees in 90 degree heat, tracing carefully plotted forensic grids across the ground to make sure I was covering every inch.

After a while I became paranoid that the keychain was stuck in my clothes somewhere, so I stripped down to my underwear, pawed through my clothing, and continued my search in the nearly-nude.

About an hour later we added two more people to the search party. They were fully clothed.

We found nothing.

In eight steps I had made the key – attached to a massive, shiny keychain the size of a healthy piece of pepperoni – completely disappear. Our working theory was that some sort of vole emerged from the ground, noticed my glimmering keychain, and absconded with it to their burrow to show the family.

More to the point: I lost my keys in clear sight in broad daylight.

It’s embarrassing, but I’ve resigned myself to it – not because I lose things all the time (I don’t) or because I’m good at letting go (god knows that’s not true). No – instead, it’s because I am relentlessly deliberate and routine, and losing stuff is something that I occasionally have to do when I’m moving on with my life.

One month into driving and I have no routine connected to the car. I don’t know where to put the things in my hands when I get in. I don’t have a habit of putting my keys in my pocket when I get out. I’m not used to having two sets of keys.

Thus, the lost car keys. And cell phone battery. And house keys. And bus pass. The list goes on, but every element connects back to the car in one way or another. The car that equals running errands, seeing friends, going to concerts on rainy nights, accepting more gigs, and a hundred other good things.

I just have to pay a stupidity tax to go along with all the rewards. At least when I think of it that way the $500 bothers me slightly less.

(Very slightly. Ever so slightly. Like, the picture of the picture of the cat will continue to be a bigger morale booster for many years to come.)

sing

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“Do you want to sing?”

Is my answer ever not “yes”?

I’ve heard people say that your willingness to sing has a reciprocal relationship to how good you are, and that the best singers will be the first to gracefully retire from the room when the topic is broached.

On that I call bullshit, and not just because it implies that I am a crap singer.

If you love to sing, you love to sing. Gina sings her way through life. E is singing beneath her breath at all times. Whether it was yowling teen in my high school hallways or increasingly lithe rocker of today, I sing on any occasion, so why would I decline to open my mouth and emit a joyous noise when someone specifically wants to hear it?

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“Do you want to sing?”

I fielded that query at two o’clock on Saturday, and my relative skill as a vocalist aside it was a rare moment when I clearly did not want to sing.

I was in weekend bum mode, unshaven and in a t-shirt from my drawer of t-shirts that are explicitly set aside to never be seen outside of the house. The night before Gina and I had one of our longest rehearsals ever in that very living room with our new aider and abettor Jake, and we sang our voices right down to the quick until at the end my harmony on “Real End” was a mere squeak.

No, I did not want to sing.

This askance came from our little brother – not mine, actually, but E’s, except he is for all intents mine, for half his life and a third of mine. He was in our living room, moving out the next day, with his friend in tow, her first time in our grown up kids house, and if I was going to be in unimpressive weekend bum mode for her instead of lounging around the living room in rock star mode wearing nothing but sunglasses and vinyl pants drinking champagne from the bottle at least I could do some singing.

(Please note that the reality is more often than not me lounging around in low-rise jeans and drinking lemonade from a tumbler, but let’s not disabuse anyone of their glamorous illusions of your author.)

Of course I said yes. Is my answer ever not “yes”?

I said yes and hollered out Weezer and Lady Gaga and sang harmony on Maroon 5 until I was singing on fumes, and I know enough about myself to know when graceful retirement is the best option, so I finally excused myself from the room to wallow in the air conditioning upstairs.

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“Do you want to sing?”

The night before E and I moved in together I wrote a song rather than pack – a song with the line, “I’m a little bit sick and tired of getting put on display,” though afterwards I quickly counter the sentiment by confessing, “I guess I shouldn’t have listed that skill on my resume.”

It’s funny how little that describes my relationship to E – we’re never putting on a show for each other’s benefit. If anything, we are the show. The line was never meant to describe us – it was more about being thrust onto the stage in every social and occupational situation because I’m the only person in a room who’s both a consummate professional and a professional ham (a skillset shared entirely by Gina – but I digress, that’s another post entirely).

Bro and I both have that skill on our resume, and it’s become a big part of our relationship to each other. I brag to people about how he got upgraded from sometimes extra to general ensemble understudy at the oldest theatre in the country. He brags to his friends about living in my recording studio. I show my friends how he can hit Freddy Mercury’s soprano A in “Under Pressure.” He shows his friends how I can sing “Love Game” with no hint of hipster irony.

Is this what siblings do – a constant gladiatorial battle that is half one-upmanship and half hero worship? I have no frame of reference, having promised at an early age to smother any suddenly appearing siblings in the cradle.

(I was an intense child.)

So I sang, because it’s on my resume, because it’s what I do. Bro sang too, and just like with E or Gina we weren’t putting a spectacle on for each other – we were simply being the spectacle that is us.

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“Do you want to sing?”

Yesterday bro moved out, bound for yet another theatre production and then his first apartment.

We never hug, not out of some unspoken bro code but because neither of us ever seem to have the urge to hug the other one when instead we can whoop and sing in harmony, but he gave me a hug before he got in the car and drove away to be the spectacle in some other show while I go on starring in my own.

I will not deny the presence of a tear in my eye as I returned to our suddenly quiet house and opened my mouth.

In the list of things E, bro, and Gina and I all have in common, at the top of that list is that even on our worst day our answer is secretly: “yes.”

how i feel

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Here’s something I don’t do too often anymore.

This is me:

In my natural habitat: my home office, posing in front of my shelves of X-Men comics.

This is how I feel:

Right now I feel wired and exhausted.

You know that not-enough-sleep plus caffeine feeling? Hell, you might operate exclusively upon that feeling on a daily basis.

That’s not normal operating procedure for me. Mostly because giving me any amount of caffeine is like giving me really good drugs from before I was born – the kind Robin Williams did routines about. That’s me on caffeine.

Instead of being high on that, I’m high on my own body. I’ve been waking up super-extra early, partially due to the obscene bird chirping action going on in our yard, but partially to go to the gym as much as possible.

(Yes. Me. Exercising and liking it. Do not be alarmed. I swear, this is still Peter typing to you. This is not Pod-Peter. Even if Pod-Peter would say that. You have to believe me. I’m real.)

Today the gym didn’t have yoga or pilates or whatever, so I picked the next most girlish class I could find:  Zumba, of all things.

Let me tell you: I was one very obvious white boy with moderate rhythm in a Zumbariffic room full of all colors of soulful, rhythmic women.

But guess what? I grew up doing Zumba – every week with my mother.

Okay, not actual Zumba. In the 80s it was called “dancing like Tina Turner,” which my mother is adept at doing. Highly, highly adept. Much more than you could ever hope to be.

I am much, much less adept at doing it, and I move my whole lower body when the women are moving just their pelvic bones, but if I can do anything it’s shaking my ass to the beat for 45 minutes straight. My mother might have not put a lot of expectations on me as child, but that was one.

I Zumba very well, thank you. Well, and with more sweat than I ever knew my body could generate in a single week.

After an intense gym day I get this hollow feeling. Not hollow like an egg shell with the egg sucked out of it. Hollow like something waiting to be full, and hoping I’ll be awake and upright long enough to do it.

Like I said, wired and exhausted.

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This past week I’ve felt fulfilled.

E and I just made it through an insane pair of months featuring three weddings of three of my best friends, two of which I was in the parties for, and one of which I co-planned and dungeon-mastered and hosted the bachelorette party of.

That’s a lot of nuptial bliss to absorb in a short amount of time. I feel like I’m living inside of one of those TV wedding shows. To make things more surreal, E is designing wedding invites and errata for even more of our friends.

Our house is the mother effing My Best Friend’s Wedding channel.

Meanwhile, I rehearsed twice a week with two rock bands on two different instruments on which I need to know about 50 collective songs, which only get notated for me if I notate them myself. We played three shows in this pair of months.

Our house is also Rock Band Central (playing of the game Rock Band notwithstanding).

Also, E and I threw a housewarming party a day after going to #140conf in NYC. And I emceed two health fairs. Oh, and there’s the matter of having the best third wheel ever as a roommate – E’s brother has been here the entire time while acting at the Walnut St.

And I got my driver’s license.

Our house is insane.

You know what? I chose it all. Friends I love and music I love and people I love. I got myself into it all at once, and I made it out. I didn’t freak out. I still was as awesome as possible every day at work. I didn’t quit anything or cancel any engagements. I only got sick for a day or two (stupid conference cold).

I chose it all. Two months of projects are over, and I’m lining up the next two months. Driving. Blogging. Recording. Top secrety secreting. And I’m going to love it all.

I like it: feeling fulfilled.

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On the whole I feel accomplished.

I’ve made many choices the past few years – to get married, buy a house, to make and break friendships, to collect thousands of X-Men comics.

To learn to drive. To get in shape.

To rock.

You know, important choices. Choices that often started off as nebulous goals.

All of my friends and co-workers know about my annual “GOALS” spreadsheet. Some have even stared into the visage of the mythical beast which, like Medusa, can turn lesser men into stone with its stringent requirements and merciless points system.

It’s less like a normal person’s goals and more like the balance sheet for a Fortune 500 company.

Most goal-setting people say when you set a goal you should visualize how your life will change when you achieve your goal. Maybe my fantasy life is already over-active, so that has never worked for me. Unless my goal is going to result in me becoming a superhero, nothing in my head is going to be particularly more exciting than the daydream I just had about dueting with Lady Gaga on “Love Game.” Not even having a six-pack of abs is as cool as either of those things.

Me, I just like having hard things to accomplish. I don’t always choose the most rational thing to accomplish, but it’s always something within my power as President and CEO of Peter to achieve.

And do you know how the Fortune 500 company of me is doing right now, as we start Q3 2011?

Really well. Highly achieving. Moving forward in all areas – work, blog, rock, and house. Achieving things I didn’t even originally set out to achieve, like (healthily) losing weight and having CK earn some money for once.

Buy some stock in me while I’m cheap.

I feel accomplished.

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This is me, and this is how I feel: happy.