Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

Now With More Undergarments…

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One of the reasons I love having a blog – especially a longstanding blog that is never revised or edited in retrospect – is the hindsight it offers.

For instance, longtime readers may recall that I used to have a webcam, and on said webcam I would routinely – even frequently – appeared in the nude. Never full frontal, mind you, but everything but. Because, apparently, that’s how I spent most of my time – nude, either pretending i was in a Playgirl spread or playing guitar.

If you are one of said longtime readers, you may also recall that I archived the highlights of said webcam in a conveniently accessible gallery, where they could be viewed by all future employers or pornographic film recruiters.

Well, you may recall it, but it certainly came as a shock to me when I clicked through an old link tonight to be met with very nearly my full monty circa 2001.

Even more shocking, in retrospect my 2001 almost-full-monty was some pretty hot stuff. Like, just now I sorta gawked at myself for a minute or two.

In case you aren’t one of said longtime readers (of which there approximately four that I can think of) I’d love for you to see the hotness that was me for yourself (as long as you are not an employer! or co-worker! or one of my hypothetical eventual children!).

Except… um… actually, I’d rather you not see it.

Let me rephrase: I’d love for you to be cognizant of the hotness that was me, but I don’t necessarily want to direct you towards a venue where you can see the hotness, especially not in a form that can be forwarded via email or posted on your favorite social networking site.

In any event, thank god for my blog, or I would have tottered into my middle age having completely forgotten that I used to lounge around the apartment in the buff, strategically placing bass guitars so that they would show only the tiniest wisp of pubic hair, and that I really ought to consider taking some of those pictures down if I ever decide to run for a political office.

i am sounding out the silence

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A few weeks ago I visited Rabi in NYC. It was an relatively ad hoc trip – I owed her a visit, and she was free for a few days. Things just fell into place.

Rabi and I are not the bloggers we once were; both of us allow our domains to fall into silence for weeks or months at a time, when the span used to be days or mere hours. One might imagine, then, that we had more to talk about than usual, having missed so much errata, minutia, and other blog-worthy details of life.

Not quite. In fact, upon my departure I had the distinct impression that we had spoken markedly less than in any previous encounter. The quantity changed, though the quality of the conversations wasn’t any more or less.

It made me think: do I speak less now, in general?

I’m quite sure that I do. At work I am almost entirely autonomous, and spend long stretches of my day quietly creating project plans or proofreading. Elise and I operate on slightly less words than we used to, if only because it takes less to communicate our meaning these days. And, I despise the phone, as ever. Yet, even in public situations – in meetings or dinners or parties – I have the perception that I’m saying a lot less than I used to.

The next question in sequence is: why? The easy answer is “circumstance,” but all of the circumstances that surround me are ones that I manufactured for myself, which leads us to a second “why.”

Do I just have less to say? Am I becoming less self-involved as I (presumably) mature? Am I growing more comfortable with myself, and in turn with the silences that surround me?

Does it mean that I’m listening more? Or, am I more introverted – less likely to expose myself to others?

Looking back into the microcosm of Rabi and I, walking in circles in the East Village and around the Seaport, I can see a little of each reason. I’m sure there are days where one dominates, and others where they are equal.

It just makes me wonder: where did all those other words go?

How To Stream Satisfaction

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I have not left the house since Friday night – since dragging my sorry self in from the humidity with guitar and amp and bookbag after what maybe would have seemed like one of the longer days of my life had I not just helped to put on a music festival last weekend.

I unapologetically turned on the central air, flopped on the couch, and that was that.

Waking up the next morning – and, in fact, all the way through the weekend until earlier this evening – I couldn’t quite tell if I was sick, or just “under the weather,” or if my body was simply mounting all possible protests at once: sore from lugging amp and guitar around the city, voice fading after a week of talking and singing, stuffy from allergies (also: I need to change the filter on the central air).


I’m being paid to help an acquaintance write and record two songs.

It’s a peculiar arrangement – even beyond the peculiarity of being paid to do something that I spend the majority of my non-working life doing for free. She has words, and melody, and even some chords, but she needs help translating them into a coherent, performable, recorded song.

On her first song we completely clicked, suggesting the same exact chords to each other, minus our personal flourishes. The exception is a single, recurring section where she hears the accompaniment as happy and major, whereas I just feel it as minor and unresolved. She sees where I am coming from, but she doesn’t hear the song that way.

She’s the (paying) client, so I’m doing it her way, but it hurts a little – the song is losing a layer of nuance that only I will ever know. It’s a peculiar direction to head in, given I’ve spent the last year or two mercilessly deconstructing my own writing, trying to eliminate all of the nonsense whims to drill down to the perfect song underneath.


I’ve been reflecting on how my threshold for wasting money seems to be pushing in two opposite directions, leaving a vast middle ground of amounts to waste.

On one hand, I won’t even spend $.99 on a song I like on iTunes, whereas in the past I used to buy albums just based on cover art. On the other, a $400 piece of furniture or recording equipment is a necessary evil, whereas three years ago it took months of prodding to get me to buy my first brand-new electric guitar for that amount.

Is that normal? As we grow up are we all at once more willing to nickle and dime and more willing to throw money at seemingly inevitable larger purchases? It seems like the sort of thing I couldn’t understand as a child, but I feel like I live an entire life that I wouldn’t be able to understand as a child, so the finer points are getting harder to discern.


Last night I watched Battlestar Galactica on the floor of my room/office, head propped up by cardboard box because i was too sore/sick to wander downstairs to find a pillow. It was thing infinity-n on my list of things to do, but I did it anyway.

What is more modern-day than being able to download exactly the thing you have a whim to watch at 3am on Monday morning?


Do you remember when blogging was about recording that instant gratification? Now we have Facebook status and MySpace walls to record the instant – the offhand comment, the spurious wish – while our blogs sit in silence, waiting to catch a thought that is more fully formed.


Lying on my floor somewhere around 4:37 a.m. I thought, fuck that. If my modern adult life says I can stay up all night watching television on my floor because I am too impatient for the DVD to arrive in September, then I’m allowed to blog about whatever damn errata I want to.

It’s not the errata that is alluring and readable, in the same way that watching that one episode doesn’t mean that I am modern and adult. It’s that watching that episode was any of a thousand possibilities of things I could be doing at 4:37 a.m. – a range expanding from sleep to flying to Kansas City just to get drunk.


It’s that enough amassed errata is defining – maybe even arresting – but the only way to find that out is to collect it all in one place, instead of squandering it on everyone else’s internet page.

So Much To Say

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I need to re-hook-up phone posting, because at the pace of my life right now the only chance I have to sneak in a comment here is via phone. There’s been gardening, weddings, new furniture, American Idol, walking home every day, run-ins with old directors, people asking me to compose music, work photo-shoots across the damn city, and all manner of other things to distract me from blogging.

All of which would be a lot more interesting if I would write about it at length, but that would take up a commensurate amount of time.

Blahg.

Until I get my act together to make a decent post, you can hold yourselves over with my interview with Andrea Nardello, conducted for Lyndzapalooza!

Over and out.

The Illusion Of Aging

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I don’t think I actually age – I present an illusion of growing older and, eventually, my body mirrors my behavior with the simulacra of age.

I’m in decent shape, yet when I’m at work bend down to fetch a fallen paper clip below my desk I am in the habit of letting out a little groan. I never thought I needed the groan – it seemed like the thing to do when squatting half-sideways to reach under my desk.

Today as we walked in the door I reached down to pick up the mail and groaned, and I don’t even think I meant to. It just happened as I bent down.

Sometimes I feel like that’s the story of my life: acting old and then growing into it, blithely discarding youth without realizing its value.

When we traveled to Jamaica I refused to play with the other kids – I had packed a suitcase full of books, I informed the children’s director, and had no intent on nosing about, wasting my vacation meeting other children.

I was nine.

I feel the same way now, quick to invite myself into conversation with older co-workers, nodding along because I get all their jokes about old teevee shows, and going on about our Retro Party and all the Doo Wop music I grew up with.

In the eighties.

I’m worried that one night I will walk through the door and be fifty, suddenly wondering where all those lithe, childish years got off to.