Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

elise

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I feel as though there’s something i have to tell you — i really owe it to you. It won’t be easy, but i have to. But, first you should know that when i got back home last night from Lyndzapalooza i felt as if i had bruised everything that i had: fingers, muscles, voice, brain, and heart. I was, as i put it so eloquently to Elise, “a piece of hurt.” Not that it’s any excuse for what i’m about to tell you, but i just feel as though you should have an idea of the state i’m in.

I cried at the end of Armageddon. There, i’ve said it. I cried, not only for the characters on screen, but for myself — for having so knowingly bought in to a written-by-committee tearjerker that barely aspires to B-movie status because of one thing: Bruce. Bruce Willis. The man doesn’t always make the best movies out there to be made, and he isn’t always the best actor that could be found, but you just don’t kill him. Do you understand? Don’t kill Bruce. Because, in killing him, you force him to let loose, to lose control, to unlease all of the pathos and weariness that he has built up during the shooting of countless Die Hard movies as well as the physical emotiveness he reserved while dubbing his voice into the Look Who’s Talking series. And when you let me know that for the entire population of the Earth, including those of us spending our waning hours watching this bland by-the-numbers Bay/Bruckheimer creation, the only thing that stands in the way of our imminent deaths is the noble self-sacrifice of Bruce Willis then by god maybe the end is nearer than we think, because i will be blown into a thousand pieces by errant space debris before i’ll watch Bruce sacrifice himself again to save a pansy talentless hack like Ben Affleck who draw the straw of death fair and fucking square! Do you hear me?!?! Straw of death.

Like i said, i’m not especially emotionally stable right now. Apologies. Hopefully you don’t think any less of me for it.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/05/200308389/

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My spectacular view from the 35th floor has proven itself to be no solution to today’s pervasive dreariness. A panoramic image of my city opens up just past the faux-mahogany lip of my cubicle, displaying clearly every still, gray eave and chimney from here to the nearly-obsolete Stadium (a distance that was almost infinite to me as a child, now seemingly so simply to fly across).

Honestly, the view left me longing for my lunch break; i’d much rather be inside the fog than above it.

In other news, Elise has confirmed the existence of my rooster after the debut of its new 7-7:30am time slot. Not only did Elise hear it in person today, she kindly offered to strangle it with her bare hands. At least now the crowing actually overlaps with a time that i have to wake up. Meanwhile, corroborating reports have emerged from Meg and Amanda, the former of whom lives over two blocks away.

Lindsay and I conducted a sparkling discussion on the height of cubicles as a status symbol over a health-conscious lunch of salads & Snapple. (Oh, the difference a year makes). In my first nearly coherent attempt to describe our director, i claimed she was “Like Karen from Will & Grace (except not shrill or drunk) if she was surreptitiously being made to listen to Strange Little Girls in her sleep.” Not the most succinct description, but i’ve only been working on it for five days now.

Life isn’t so bad, is it?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/04/200098268/

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I’m having trouble deciding what i feel about anything except for sitting holed up in my room protected by womb of thick walls and loud music. Yesterday on my way home from class i walked a block out my way – out of boredom, i guess. I had never been on it on foot before, just in a car passing by. The feeling was indescribable, as if i had stepped off of my front porch and onto the set of a television show (because i had never seen that block before except for through the glass of a window/screen).

I think that sometimes Elise feels bad that i don’t write so many songs anymore, as if it’s her fault. It guess it is a little bit, because i am happy and not creating stupid scenarios in my head to connect me to every person that i pass by on the street out of utter desperation to be a part of someone else’s day. It’s confusing to look at the entries in my little grey book from a year ago, while Elise was still new and confusing enough to evoke my typical lyrical ramblings. At a point not too far after that there is a disconnect, and suddenly i am not writing out of my gut anymore, from where my songs used to spring covered in bile and blood. Every time Elise gets used to me not having anything new to sing at all i surprise her, the other night with four new songs that she had never even heard a hint of before. They make me uneasy — i have trouble feeling them and so they are hard to sing.

I have thirty four weeks of college left after i complete my last co-operative learning experience this summer. I said a funny thing last night to Erika about that. I said that i wasn’t returning my mother’s phone calls because she would have to get used to not hearing from me and being worried once i left Philadelphia. I talk a lot about what i may or may not do after i graduate, everything from going abroad to going to grad school, and usually it has an air of fantasy and speculation about it. Last night, though, i said it without thinking. It felt like singing one of my old songs, half diaphragmatic support and half a punch in the gut. I don’t know where i’m going to go, or what i’m going to do, but apparently it’s not going to be here.


Or so i say. But, for as many streets there are in this city that can make me feel alien there are other cities on this planet that i’ll never see. I really ought to start working on that.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/03/90595788/

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I can’t imagine when it was, as i hardly ever watch television, but i definitely have a recollection of channel-surfing past a Richard Simmons Sweating to the Oldies advertisement and remarking to Elise that i ought to buy it. Why? Because i would be a lot more likely to dance around in my living room like an idiot then do, say, ten pushups a day.


She doubted me at the time, but had she seen the solid gold dancing i’ve got going to the Chicago soundtrack right now i think she might… erm… well, she’d say i was gay.


Right. But, what’s important is she loves me.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/02/90328381/

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She let just a dash of irony enter into it. “It’s his, you know.” As if she would keep such a well read copy of Lolita on her bookshelf entirely for the show of it. Even if i had forgotten, it was an easy path to retread: now an English major, then he was fixated on Stanley Kubrick — whose choice in novels turns her stomach in an entirely routine fashion. She’s seen most of them, courtesy of him, parts of which were presumably glimpsed from between fingers pressed over her eyes at the end of the first vignette of Jacket or at any point during the absolute horror of Clockwork (which i refuse to acknowledge as having ever been entered onto film).

I said something intelligent about him once. Kubrick, not the ex. Something about him choosing material that rendered his characters as objects… everything objectified. Lolita is exactly that, so far, and is entirely engrossing in its droll way — though i keep inserting graphic pictures for Humbert’s coy phrases. Slowly the story unfolds as the pitiful nymphophile is slipped into the world of the succulent young Lolita, and suddenly each page grips you as the narrator tries his best to stay satisfied by her charm alone. The tension is dense and sinewed as your literary mind sides with an otherwise likable narrator by force of habit while some other part of you is retching at the outcome that seems to be drawing inexorably near. What author could get so tangled up in the thread that his character drew along behind him like a clever spider that he could weave it so effectively, so that you are rooting for that old bitch of a mother to die and for those tiny sleeping pills to take their inexorable hold on the unsuspecting child sooner rather than later?


Rather than spoil the midpoint of the book for you, i’ll only foreshadow by saying that while you don’t always get what you want, sometimes getting what you thought you thought you needed is in fact not in your best interests… especially because it extinguishes any concept of want at all.

I don’t think it’s a very good book. Yet. Though, i have some hopes of escaping the especially dull clutches of the middle section any minute now. Maybe i won’t like it, though… maybe that’s why she’s dating me instead of him.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/11/85698865/