Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

florida

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Yes, so, now my emotional life rests on the whims of a four year old, which honestly makes me feel a hell of a lot safer than when it rested on the whims of any number of nineteen and twenty year olds. But, this is just a symptom of my newfound adoration of young children. There’s this question on theSpark.com’s mating test that asks “Aren’t babies special?,” with the obvious intention of trying to suss out whether or not you are interested in having children any time soon. I always answered no, but this week i was thinking about it and i suddenly wanted to get online and change my answer to yes. I think it’s an age thing – i spent the entire week with three women aged roughly 75 who are slightly erratic and senile but also very funny, warm, and engaging. At the same time, tonight the only person who was missing from my family dinner was my paternal grandmother, who is in hospice care and not even 70.

My mother has a 26 year lead on me, so when i’m 40 she’ll be a venerable 66. She had the good fortune of having me while she was young and also forming a career for herself, so she now gets to watch me grow to be an adult as well as working at something she somewhat enjoys. All of my tiny cousins were born to aunts in their 40’s … when Audrey is my age her mother will be on the other side of 60 (and i’ll be 38… dear lord, let me find the fountain of youth before then…). How old will she be when Audrey has her own children?

I’m obviously biased by having such a young mother and father (it’s his 50th birthday today), but in my reflections on when i want to consider children in my own life a very certain and relatively small window of time is developing. I obviously would want to be out of college and securely in a job, but i’d want to have children while i was still young enough in body and heart to truly enjoy the experience and still have a life afterwards. That leaves a span of years that’s something like 26 – 35, which in today’s society (and recently in my family) is relatively young. But, what’s a boy to do? I might not be done living my own individual life by then, but do i really want to be in a retirement home when my kids graduate from college?

These are the thoughts that run through my head when i’m trapped in a condo in Florida at 4am with nothing to eat other than a bag of mini Twix bars and nothing to do except watch teevee or dream. These dreams are almost nightmares in a way, not because they’re frightening in and of themselves, but because they make me realize just how small the span of life really is. I somehow expect myself to mature into a lover and father in the next decade and a half… doesn’t that mean that i need to start dating eventually? Or, that i should start experiencing the things i want to do now rather than assuming i’ll get to them later?

Or maybe i should just start packing benadryl with me when i go on vacation so i’m not left with the time to ponder this sort of stuff. Either that or bring my guitar next time…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2000/12/1763273/

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That’s the longest period of time i ever spent away from a computer. My brain aches for all the little blog-able things i experienced in Florida that went to waste. Since you asked, Florida was horrid and dull and i’m never ever going back. When the below freezing air hit me as i stepped off the plane in Philly i practically let out a war whoop (to which my grandmother replied “Yeah, it is very cold”).

https://crushingkrisis.com/2000/12/1755732/

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She stared with these awful cow eyes, huge and nearly rimmed with tears welling up out of the dread obese depths of her neck. She didn’t seem to be able to breathe – not at all.

She kept looking up and fidgeting with that tiny air-vent as if it actually blows anything more than the most nothing little ebb down at you which just fades away four inches from the vent which is surely above your head (cow-like or otherwise).

All through the flight she alternately fidgeted and rested her huge cow-like face against the window. I could see the Philly skyscrapers peeking through the wisps of her bovine hair for a second before she reached up (yes, again) to fiddle with her air vent.

It was aimed at me the whole time, but i didn’t have the heart to tell her. Smoothest flight ever. We landed to PJ Harvey screaming “Kamikaze!” at the shrillest top of her lungs.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2000/12/1755675/

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The sky is a sort of pinkish blue. It’s funny how the fade from one to the other occurs; once i was trying to paint a tiny inch or two of horizon onto an acrylic piece i was working on for art class and it just wound up as this sloppy red-white-and-blue mess. But the sky right now … defies the color spectrum to define it. It isn’t so much violet in the middle as much as the last strands of pink are reaching upwards to entangle themselves with the trailing fingers of the blue.

Obscuring my open sky view is the chunky concrete side of a row home. I can see the evening sky through a break in the the row of houses where one house had been years ago. The empty space is defined by the utterly flat wall of the neighboring home on which you can see the faint outlines of rooms and stairs. Construction amazes me; sure, its not especially hard to build up a single house from the ground up, but to then go back into its empty frame to install electricity and water and heat and everything of the sort amazes me. They built a new dormitory on 32nd street over the summer, and i watched it grow from the ground up until my friends moved into it the day before classes began. Even after having watching it wind its way up i still don’t really understand how it was possible… there’s a building there where once there wasn’t one.

Scale really amazes me. The same way the building of a dormitory seems staggering in comparison to a single row-home that no long exists, distance awes me. I can walk the width of the entire city in a day, and in a car i could drive nearly across the entire state of Pennsylvania. There’s a girl who came to Drexel this fall from Los Angeles, and the space between here and her home is hard for me to grasp. Sure, it’s all tucked safely within the boundaries of the United States, but coming from L.A to Philadelphia to go to school is nearly the same as coming from England. That space … i can’t measure it realistically in footsteps or city blocks or even miles. The idea of a mile loses its coherence when presented in such quantity. Is it just 2000 times farther away than the coffee shop is from me? Maybe, but does that help me to understand it any better? Distance is measured more easily in what comes inbetween: Pennsylvania Dutchland, and Chicago, and endless fields of grain, and mountainous states with less population than Philadelphia, and the San Andreas Fault. Or, maybe i’ve got my geography mixed up.

In about 24 hours i’m boarding a plane to Florida. The distance isn’t as great, but it’s still a bit stunning … i’ll be passing over friends in at least three different states that i’ve never even been to on my way there. It’s a three hour flight, yet it takes six hours to drive from my destination to DisneyWorld in Orlando. I used to have to use mnemonic device to remember if it was Disney Land and World. It’s funny what will stick out in your memory after years of relative obscurity.

I haven’t been in the air since i was in 8th grade. Since then… well, i’m obviously pretty different. I don’t know how airplanes make me feel anymore; before they were a joy and the turbulence was better than any rollercoaster i’d find in Florida. Now rollercoasters make me a little bit nervous, and i’ve known the detached fascination and horror of watching the news report the crash of a plane – knowing all along that i just lost the possibility of having hundreds of conversations i had been planning on having after the summer was over.

All of that is just the distance between me then and me now. It’s hard to really comprehend the difference six years can make in a person, whether it be in days or weeks or seconds. But, you can measure it by the landmarks left on my life. At least that way it isn’t such a daunting task. To be sure, it’s been a long while since i last took to the sky, but i’m still the same person – and i’ll be boarding a plane that’ll tear into that not-so-violet evening sky in 24 hours.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2000/12/1703027/

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I think i might kill myself while in Florida. I’ll be without my guitar (i can’t bring it on the flight as a carry-on, and as shitty as it as i still refuse to check it as luggage) and without a computer (visiting a lot of older relatives, no computers that i’m aware of [though i should bring some access numbers to *something* just in case] ). Sure, four days doesn’t sound like much, but you should’ve seen the blind panic i was in on Thanksgiving night when i got online and couldn’t access blogger. Not pretty.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2000/11/1490574/