Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

still holding. always holding.

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I’m on hold with Sprint right now to make sure my old cell account is really cancelled so I can go on my merry way with my spiffy new android phone.

(imagine a world where we could just trust this stuff to happen)

Sprint’s hold music is always super-anonymous – very sincerely strummed acoustic guitars. Just now I got to wondering about how this music gets born.

Is there some closet rock star out there proudly strumming this little number in a coffee shop, being moved by its elementary melodic qualities, maybe prefacing with, “you can catch this tune on hold with sprint once every hour, and now we’re in talks with a major bank to get some plays with them as well”?

Or, is it some studio hack locked in his closet of equipment, churning out variations on a placating theme like arithmetic tables, thinking, “I have to suspend a second at least once every eight bars to keep the caller docile” because that’s the equivalent of painting a jail’s holding cell a pale pink?

Finally, am I the only person in the history of the universe to have this thought?

The Happinomics of Magneto

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Today on the bus an attractive, muscle-bound, black man was sitting across from E and I rocking to an unknown sort of music. He was wearing a muscle-shirt version of this Magneto t-shirt.

I turned to E and said, “That guy’s shirt is awesome.” She nodded in agreement.

Then I motioned to the man to take off his headphones.

“Your shirt is awesome.”

“You know who it is?”

“Magneto!”

“Yeah!”

We chuckled at each others fanaticism. He replaced the headphones in his ear and I went back to talking to E.

He smiled until we got off the bus.

.

Happinomics is an Ad Busters article about how small changes to the way we interact with the strangers around us can make us tangibly happier. In their example, the interaction is talking on the bus.

Weekending

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I have eleven minutes to write this post. I will just pretend I am on a bus.

Somewhere shortly before or after Albany Elise and I stopped at a rest stop that supposedly had wireless. It did not. It did, however, contain a rather dubious “Fish’n’Chips” connected to Roy Rogers.

In the future i will refrain from eating mid-state rest stop fast food shrimps.

Last night around eight we arrived at Kat & Jeremy’s home slash small farm, situated just on the rim of the sixth thirteenth biggest town in Vermont, Middlebury.

As with our last Vermont excursion, there are lots of friendly people and very little cellphone and broad-band wireless reception. Kat showed us the special spot in her house where she can take cellular calls. There was no internet at the spot.

This morning Elise and I headed into Kat’s backyard to feed her chickens. I have recently discovered that – in defiance of my general bird-despising – I somewhat adore chickens, which makes my refraining from eating them all the more sensible.

(aside: are all people that work in libraries weird? if i worked in one would it just confirm i was weird?)

After the chickens we toured Kat’s robust garden, sampled fresh snap peas and committing as much cucumber beetle genocide as possible. Each patch of plants had its own story – trials by cold soil or pests, favorite growers and runts.

I don’t consistently commit to buying local, but after this weekend I think I will have changed my mind. I’m glimpsing not only a tiny microcosm of farm economics, but also witnessing the love and attention that goes into each egg and potato.

I don’t know that “organic” really means anything special to me, but local now means a lot more.

I also played some Michael Jackson songs on Jeremy’s banjo.

Time’s up.

run ragged and happy

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This is a meandering post about life and stuff. Content that’s all focused like a laser mounted on a deadly shark may or may not resume tomorrow.

This weekend E headed up the NNJ/NYC to play a show and help with some solstice cleaning along with the sibs at her mother’s house. I wanted to tag along to see her concert and reap the sib-time, but my life was in need of some cleaning up as well.

When I woke up on Saturday I felt like my to-do list was a litany of random drudgery. Organize this, scrub that, upload stuff to here. Even as I was crossing things off it didn’t feel very big picture. Typical: artist-, writer-, marketer-me trapped under a Sisyphisian list of uncreative to-dos. The only thing keeping me sane was my Twitter pipeline to the outside world.

As the day wore on I kept feeling like I was behind the boulder until I caught a social network update from my dear musical friend Vicky Spaeth, which read:

Simplify, simplify, simplify! I think we over-complicate our lives way too much.

I read that, then took another look at my list, and realized there was a big picture. It was all “simplify.” Organizing shelves and wires so my creative space is less cluttered, so I can create. Clean out the house so I don’t have a worry of other things to do nagging me when I want to create. Upload what I’ve created to as many places as will have it, so people can actually hear it.

I finally have the simplicity that provides one big picture. I have focus. Finally everything I’m doing points in the same direction.

I look back at the 2000 me. Within a two month span I started a blog, shot digital video of myself, and was the only songwriter on the whole internet uploading a concert every week. And it all came easy. But it was over-complicated. The technology was a tangle. The life was a tangle – pulling As and paying for my first apartment and squeezing in music beside theatre.

Maybe I was on the verge of conquering the world, but it wasn’t simple. There was no picture to focus on. Which was fine – I was in college! But that’s why we grow up. And hopefully get less complicated, instead of more.

It took the weekend and the twenty-seven years before it, but I am really almost there. Almost to the point that I can just flip a switch and empty my thoughts and songs directly onto the internet without a fussy mess of wires and files and wasted time.

And be worth watching.

It feels cool and satisfying, and I’m happy – happy sweating my ass off and mopping the floor, or putting away the umpteenth load of laundry, passing out on the couch while I wait for my wife to get home. Happy without any descriptors or mitigators, because there’s a point to it.

Just happy.

the corners of my mind

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I have a habit of dozing off on the 57 bus in the afternoon on the way home from work. I don’t think it’s because I am so tired. There’s just something about the rhythm of motion and the droning of the motor humming through my body while I listen to my headphones.

The nap is only ever about ten minutes long. It’s not even a nap, really. I’ve never slept through my stop. It’s just an extended hang right on the line between awake and asleep.

I love that line, especially when traveling in that direction rather than the opposite – being tortured by an alarm clock. Heading in to sleep is different. Your brain will rationalize outside stimuli however it sees fit. The world outside of your body takes on an arbitrary – almost hallucinatory – quality.

On the bus my favorite thing to do is turn on my own music – new demos or an Arcati Crisis rehearsal – and then drift off. My brain finds things in the songs I’ve never heard before. Sometimes I have a momentary synesthesia and my own words are painted in color. Others I am enraptured by Gina narrating an epic story, only to realize I’m not listening to her towering “Brother John” but just twenty seconds of refrain of “What’ll I Say.”

Last night when my body was finally ready to settle down my brain refused to go gently into that good night. It was raining hard, a symphony of individual droplets pattering against the roof above my head, and my mind wanted to examine every one.

I hate those nights. I’ve hated them since high school, when every night brought the possibility of seeing the subsequent dawn from the wrong side.

Last night I slipped in my earbuds and suddenly “Small & Lonely and “Gone Baby Gone” were rendered in plastic yellow totems, a wry stop-motion tribute to Yellow Submarine, awash in the white noise of the storm.

It took all of four minutes to fall asleep.