Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in.

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When I am out and about as much as I have been lately – happy hours and concerts and open mics and all that – I become fussily self-involved and introverted in all of my off-hours.

I’ve never had to sustain my “on” state four or five nights a week before, and it’s definitely taking it’s toll on my personality, subsequently turning down my volume and contrast until I can adequately recharge.

This always catches people who don’t know me that well off guard – namely, my co-workers. In my corporate life there is a lazy susan of personality quizzes that spins back around every year or so, and each new set of peers are like, “really? introvert? are you sure?”

You can’t really afford to be an introvert while being an account manager, so I can understand their confusion. But, everyone else knows this about me: I need to balance personal and public, output and input. And, sometimes even when I’m the communications guru the off state can make an appearance. Word spreads pretty quickly that I am having an in-service day.

On the homefront my darling Elise is, curiously, trapped inside of the introversion – the girl in the bubble – forced to act as the shoulder-angel to complement the devil in me. To her credit, she knows the call and response pretty well now – communicate, commiserate, and castigate.

(i.e., first find out why I am fussily inwards facing, then agree whole-heartedly with why the rest of the world sucks, and then finally tell me to shut the hell up about it and lighten the fuck up.)

So, yes, we all know this about me by now, having read and re-read endless iterations of the cycle here over the years. Sometimes the ebb is measured in weeks; lately it’s more minute to minute. Round up friends to go on a bar crawl, turn off my phone the next day. Buy twenty new CDs, eschew them to write songs all weekend. Et cetera.

What we maybe didn’t know was that I have a similar web ebb (webbeb?), insomuch as when I’m all over MySpace promoting the band and Facebook keeping in touch with people and Gmail haggling with various wedding musicians, and The 61 hearing awesome new music and, oh, my job that involves keeping tabs on people in email all day … when I’m doing all of that I’m in my on state, and then I get home with the intent to blog and I am off and I’d rather just write eighteen emails to myself and work on my 20k word critical essay on Hedwig then chronicle what is what for the internet at large.

Which is, as per my wont, my excuse to say here comes a backlogged tonne of thoughts and links and mental flotsam that I need to flush out of my system so I can talk about actual timely topics like politics, and my wedding, and how my band fucking rocks.

(Which, by the by, it does, and did, just three hours ago. But, before we get to that, first the further digression…)

in which I am a smoke-filled room

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At the moment I am beat.

Yesterday I proceeded straight out of that last post into my daily exercise block, which is already starting to feel like a tough-but-feasible challenge instead of a life-or-death struggle.

With barely time for a shower and a bite to eat I public transited to a lengthy Arcati Crisis rehearsal, where we banged on Gina’s “Brother John” and my “Love Me Love Me Not” from every possible angle.

The former is now a staggering seven minutes long (twice the length of the majority of our tunes), and features me playing riffs and singing harmony that are both far outside of my normal comfort zone.

The latter is a weird amalgam of Animals-style sixties riffing and chugging Fall Out Boy alterna-rock, and is so much easier to sing with someone else doing some of the heavier lifting on guitar (even if my lifting really hasn’t changed at all). My previously hard-to-sing single bar of “detox tea” has now extended into a five measure wail during which my diaphragm is all like, “see, I told you I had a purpose other than wobbling around under your fake vibrato.”

Afterwards I ran for my life to catch two trains, the second of which I nearly boarded in-motion, to make it to Buckets for Lindsay guest-hosting the open mic. I met lots of cool new performers, and spent much of the night promoting my ass off on the behalf of our upcoming music festival, and drinking cocktails with Bill McConney, who comes off as a modern update on Nick Drake (aka, pretty great).

Over the course of the evening I played two sets, rocking my now-standard opening duo of “Icy Cold” and “Like a Virgin,” and debuting my new tentatively-titled “Not David Bowie” as well as a cover of “High and Dry.” My latter set was around 1:30 a.m. and featured me wailing “With or Without You,” which was wise to save until after the falsetto-palooza of H&D, but not wise to sing directly before “Love Me Not,” because the five-measure wail was nowhere in evidence.

Afterwards we walked back up the hill to Lindsay’s house and, for reasons unknown to me, I smoked a clove cigarette. Actually, they’re not unknown – an occasional clove when out with friends was one of my only vices in high school, and after a day of physically and vocally pushing myself it seemed like a decent way to relax.

Except, my pack-a-year clove habit is almost a decade old, and dovetailed with the height of my slothful anorexia and complete lack of vocal talents, so I really didn’t have a frame of reference about how it would feel to the new-and-improved version of physically- and vocally-active me. I woke up with my lungs feeling weird and slept-in, exactly like the unmade bed I was rising from.

The feeling didn’t do me any favors physically or vocally, as I discovered on the train and walk home. I wasn’t exactly wheezing, but I couldn’t find a good walking rhythm, and my vocals are unexpectedly squeaky in places, like a guitar string that’s not quite settled into it’s notch on the saddle (I’m sure the Bono-vocals have some bearing as that as well).

After an unexpected and delightful nap my lungs feel back to normal, and now we are about to depart to see the Curtis Symphony Orchestra at the Kimmel Center.

Sound and Vision

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On Friday night I attended the New Artists opening at Muse Gallery, a third of which was the art of one my increasingly close friends, Jennifer Vessels.

I was one of the first guests to arrive, and I got to experience the art of all three of the new members in a nearly empty room to the hypnotic sound of Dante on his hang drum. I had seen some of Jennifer’s work before, but smaller, and as prints – never up close, original, and with all of the beautiful texture that each of her collagraphs contain.

Each piece was labeled with title and price, and though I understand that the intent of the show is not necessarily to sell the pieces, the concept of selling a piece of physical artwork is so strange to me. I could sell one of my songs, but I would always be able to play it. Elise could sell a photograph, but it would just be a print – a single version of an original negative.

I marveled at that, lost in the detail of her lines and colors on a second walk through the gallery. How to be Jennifer, so entangled in music and light that she can contain them both on a canvas, yet able to part with a piece, never to see its texture again.

I’m not tired, I just sleep.

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I must engineer a perfect storm of daily routine in order to go to bed – or, more accurately, to fall asleep – at a reasonable hour.

I half-joke that my circadian rhythm runs long, but its pulses run short. Left to my own devices (i.e., an interpersonal “constant dark) I will tend to regulate to a roughly 26 hour day with sleep in multiples of just over three hours, and my intellectual pursuits don’t tend to peak until somewhere in hour fifteen – relatively late in a 26 hour day, and prohibitively insomniac in an actual earth day.

That natural state isn’t especially agreeable with a five-day work week. It used to be that on Sundays I’d have to beat my body into submission with a heavy dose of benadryl, which left me leaden in Monday morning meetings. Lately I’ve attempted to coordinate an intricate assemblage of coincident events – a sunrise clock, regular meals and exercise, a balance of heavy thinking and fun – distributed to the appropriate hours to leave me pleasantly drowsy somewhere prior to midnight.

The ultimate irony is that even if I get to sleep at a so-called “reasonable hour” and wake up appropriately early for a responsible business person my resulting day will be devastated – I’ll either drift off too early, or be jazzed and awake much too late. Either way, two “normal” days in a row are few and exceedingly far between in my life.

In discussing this issue recently I fielded several recommendations for Melatonin supplements.

Melatonin is a naturally occurring hormone that – amongst other roles – helps to regulate circadian rhythms. Its production is hindered by exposure to light, which means if you live in a constantly illuminated environment (i.e., offices at home and at work, stages awash in spotlight … you know, all the places I live) your bodily levels are most likely out of whack.

Curiously, its sale as a supplement is illegal in some locations, such as Germany and New Zealand. Even more curiously from a body chemistry standpoint, it’s synthesized from tryptophan (AKA, the thing about turkey that makes you sleepy), which is in turn synthesized via of serotonin (AKA, the euphoria-causing agent that LSD mimics, and that heavy use of MDMA/ecstacy depletes). Supplemental users report that heavy doses can induce vivid and/or lucid dream states.

(I went through this whole “brain chemistry of drugs” phase when I first read The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, especially the latter, because Hunter kept taking drugs I had never heard of before, let alone understood the effects of.)

Knowing all of this about Melatonin before it ever hit my tongue lent it a certain air of panacea, even if it was to be a placebic panacea. And, sure enough, every night that I’ve taken it I’ve been to bed before midnight and awake before 7:30 – yes, it’s induced multiple “normal” days in a row!

However, it has also had a certain side effect – maybe also placebic, but no less curious if that’s the case.

Though shorter, in a circadian sense, my days are definitely longer. Or, maybe just the hours.

I don’t really know how to explain it appropriately. It’s not so simple as time going by slower, or that I’m moving more quickly.

For example, today I finished my usual amount of work, and went to my usual amount of meetings, and when I sat down to pack up I realized it was 2 p.m. rather than 5 p.m.. I had arrived around my typical time, and I didn’t feel exhausted, or restless – I simply felt as if I had lived an entire workday of life already. Except, most typical workdays don’t come equipped with a spare set of three bonus hours to get a jump on the to-do list of the next day.

That isn’t the only example, either. I’ve been more productive at home, and I’ve been waking up feeling more fully rested – even hang time between slams of the alarm button feel distended. The situation is rendered all the more unusual because I am typically an innately good judge of the passage of time – Elise used to jokingly use me to reset stopped clocks because I was so on-the-mark in my elapsed-time estimates in the absence of common giveaways like television shows or church bells.

It’s quite palpable for a placebo effect, and if it isn’t one then it’s certainly difficult to quantify effectively. If my prior days were 26.5 hours long and have now been scaled down to fit into an actual day then each of my prior hours are now compressed into less than 55 minutes, which still would only have yielded a nearly imperceptible bonus of a half hour by 2 p.m., and certainly would be hardly noticeable in the eight-minute interval of my snooze button.

So, what’s the answer? Am I just well-rested, and as a result experiencing a higher quality of life? Is it completely a placebo effect, soon to be followed by incredibly lucid dreams (though, actually, I’ve always had those)? Or, is it truly some subtle form of hallucination wherein I perceive myself to be moving at a completely speed than time itself?

And, more alarmingly, if the latter is true does that mean that everyone else has been moving at this speed all along and I am just now catching up? Or was I previously moving at a normal speed within my extended day, and am now dashing to and fro with an apparent sense of urgency to all who surround me?