Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

lindsay

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I have become totally domesticated in my living with the gals. It’s not as though it bothers me, but i just feel like they’re intruding upon my messy bachelor years, or something. For example, yesterday i actually called home from work to see what they would prefer my nighttime culinary endeavor to be. So, not only did i premeditate my potential meal (based upon leftover supplies from the dinner i made on Tuesday!), but i decided that i needed to clear it with the roomies before i made the decision on my own. Sadly, I didn’t catch either of them, and seeing as i had the sneaking suspicion that one of them was highly alarmed by eggplant i refrained from shopping for the supplies i had in mind until i got a verbal “okay” from them. After a few hours of lounging on the couch when i should’ve really been doing the Business final i’m taking a break from now i was greeted by Erika, who came bearing groceries of her own! I started helping her with dinner until we realized that we were out of eggs, and so off i went (in my pajamas) to the grocery store — without a second thought.

It seems likes common courtesy or just being thoughtful roommates, but i really feel as though i’ve gone from being one of those cats that the neighbors leave food out on their porch for to being a house cat that occasionally struts around the lawn just to affirm his outdoorsyness. It’s not that it bothers me or anything, i just think it’s incredible what a difference a year makes; this time last year i was spending $60 a week on takeout food and eating a box or two of granola bars every weekend. Now i’m spending $60 a week on making dinner for the three of us, and eating leftovers all weekend.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7924253/

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I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with a reader who actually listens and responds to my Trios named Grant since i got out of the hospital, and it’s brought something about myself to light that is central to my current unhappiness. In short, i am imprecise. It isn’t because i lack attention to detail, or the intelligence or skill to see such details through, but because they require too much time and energy. Why do i like to act but not to do shows at Drexel? Because i like the thought of acting as getting on stage and portraying a character, but i don’t like doing the same lines and the same movements the same way every time.

Of course, in almost any semi-professional theatre the entire point is to assimilate the direction and be able to replay it in a consistent fashion. Last night the roomies and I went to see Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Wilma Theatre, and i was in awe of not only the acting that i saw, but the very precise physicality of the acting. The flounces, the scoffs, the deep breaths … all things that add tremendously to a performance, and all things i tend to gloss over without noticing.

I don’t pretend to be much of an actor; in fact, i quite hate it. Looking back at all of the shows that i’ve done i cannot honestly say that i enjoyed a single role that i’ve portrayed. In each occasion my happy memory is connected to the people i produced a show with rather than my performance itself. As such, i can hardly fault myself for not enjoying the intracies of acting … i simply don’t give a shit.

Where Grant comes is is my songwriting. I might claim to hate acting, but i don’t think anyone can be convinced that i dislike writing and performing my own music; in fact, most of the time it would seem to be the only thing i like to do. Grant has been listening to my songs in in his last email he posed the following question: What do i have against finger-picking? My composing is, almost as a rule, devoid of all riffing and picking unless it’s been specifically inserted. In fact, any song of mine that has acquired a set pattern of picking is by definition in a higher stage of evolution than a song without (see Under My Skin vs. Tangling, or an older Never Say Goodbye vs. its demo version).

My first response to the question was simple: i don’t like to finger-pick. It’s something i’m capable of, but if you listen to my musical influences they are not fluttery pickers — i don’t like the shimmery sound of it. However, there are a vast majority of Peter Mulvey and Ani DiFranco songs where they punch out precise riffs in the midst of their frantic strumming, and of late these riffs have been absent from my songs (examples of which can be found in Lost or Bridge). Suddenly my defense just isn’t; in the past i’ve riffed and rocked, so why don’t i do it all the time?

I don’t know where i was going with this. I don’t fingerpick; i don’t like to fingerpick. I don’t act; i don’t like to act. So, if i’m not doing the things i don’t like, why am i so miserable?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7703915/

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Sometimes i suspect that “normal” is always something that i don’t have, and that’s what makes it what it is.

I’ve been sick on and off for nearly two weeks now … nothing serious, just tiny colds and somewhat-sore throats, and today i’m headed into my Nth period of recovery … back to normal. But, this constant feeling of being slightly sick is the norm for some people. And, furthermore, once i am back to normal, something will be very odd about it.

In one of my (many) fits of contemplating how incredibly screwed up i am, today i thought about my mother and father; not as my dysfunctional parents, but as people. My father, for all of his eccentricities, is normal. He grew up in South Philly with three sisters and parents that got divorced after he got to know and live with them both, he played sports in school, he went to a little bit of college and toured with a band and then settled into bartending rather than be a nuclear physicist or any other thing he has the massive intelligence to do.

My mother is not normal… her parents both have diagnosable mental issues, her entire family was too busy scrabbling up out of the most menial of blue collar existences to learn how to be functional, and her father had been a POW in WWII. She was an only child, and she was not allowed to have toys. In fact, her primary Barbie had been shoplifted by her mother out of a five and dime store. Barbie has empty lipstick containers for chairs and home-fashioned outfits rather than pre-packaged clothes, and to this day my mom thinks it’s amusing to point out what Barbie could use every checkbook or soup bowl for. I never really understood whether or not my grandparents were especially poor at the time: blue collar didn’t always equate to near-poverty in the sixties, and they owned their own home for years. So, i’m just not sure. As for my mother, she barely made it out of high school, never even tried to go to college, lived a few fast years of free adulthood, and got married just shy of 25.

I was sitting at the kitchen table at home today when she casually remarked that she had been nearly five years older than i am now when she got married. We were looking at a photo of her sitting in a Peter-Pan-like rig on the ceiling of the London Victory club in her white pantsuit, ready to fly across the ceiling. That was her wedding reception; held at the nightclub where the both of them worked at the time. October 20th, 1980.

I had almost any toy i wanted as a child, and i always had money and education and a love for knowledge. A lot of people i know never had some of those things even though their parents made twice as much money as i had, my own mother included. My mother and i were on welfare for years, and i still have vivid memories of the place on Woodland Avenue where we’d pick up our check and how i could never quite see up past the counter that the teller windows were set behind. I remember paying for things at the corner store with brightly colored food-stamps and wondering why they weren’t the same color as regular money. We were not poor; in fact, with both sets of grandparents obsessively looking after the well-being of their only grandchild we were better off than most of the people on our block.

These are things i never think about anymore. Despite all of them i still somehow found my way into a private grade school, and i always had a few new GI Joes to tide me over from one set of straight A’s to the next. I had what my mother considered a normal childhood … a loving and stable parent, and enough of what i wanted and needed to sustain me. I was missing things though … things she never never had the chance to miss, so she never assumed i needed them. I never had a best friend, or a hobby that wasn’t just a child’s game, or the ability to keep anything in my life straight and organized. I don’t think my mother is normal. My father definitely is, primarily because i don’t have him. It’s as much my fault as his … i had learned to dislike him by the time he had learned to really appreciate me, and it was all downhill from there. I haven’t really spoken to him at length since his birthday — last Christmas Eve.

Regardless of my incessant common cold, right now i don’t feel normal. I’m in college, i play guitar, i have friends, and i feel like i am living some outside life looking into the lives of Lindsay, Erika, and everyone else i know and love. I feel like getting straight A’s again gets me back inside. I feel like drinking puts me inside somewhere i’ve never even been before; writing songs does too. Each thing individually and in the right circumstance is enough to carry me away from this and towards that invisible thing i am striving toward, but altogether they just imprison me. It’s as though i’m trying to fit in some of the pieces of my dad’s life that i feel can root me down … living on my own, going incommunicado with family, establishing a pattern of drinking that i can snuff out later. But, the sins of the father are doing nothing for the son except for leave me trapped with hardly anything that i’m sure about being thankful for.

So, there is my yearly thanks, in a roundabout crushing way: i’m happy that i’ve gotten this far, is what i suppose i’m saying. My stuffy nose is gone, and i am almost back to what is normal for me. Except, it doesn’t feel right at all.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7357539/

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We are zeroing in on the infamous Turkey Day, and i am just barely sure of what i am not thankful for, let alone what i am. Erika and Jack are both trekking towards New England with people they really care about, and Lindsay has Kate here for the weekend to keep her company. And i am grudgingly going home, just as much to mooch groceries from my mother and do laundry for free as i am because it’s Thanksgiving. So, chalk one more up to crass commercialism and living through the eighties, because i forgot what the thanks was all about.

Most of you have a significant portion of the eighties as part of your palette of experiences … what’s your primary Thanksgiving memory? I turned nine in 1990, so most of those precious formative years were already moving farther and farther behind me. My memory of Thanksgiving is all about my Beta Machine… countless pre-Christmas holiday special recorded on those pint-sized tapes while we were in the dining room merrily chowing down our Italian feast. The meaning of Thanksgiving to me is tied up in that silly B.C. cartoon special that i’m sure i could never quite locate on purpose amongst my nearly hundreds of beta tapes in the 3rd floor closet at home. Thanksgiving is not consumer, and it is not corporate, and it should not be intricate; thanks giving is a simple thing. There shouldn’t have to be a festival, or a parade, or even a turkey. God knows i don’t do any of the above, that’s for sure.


Tonight it’s just me in me — stuffed up and alone in my flannel pajamas with only the echoes of laughter from elsewhere in the apartment to keep me company. I’m trying to pick out what in this mess that surrounds me i’m happy about. The thing is, it can happen any day of the year, and if you put it off until tomorrow you definitely don’t have enough time set aside between the Macy’s Parade, dinner, football games, and leftovers.

Think about it.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7310539/

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My room whooshes something awful, like an incoming thunderstorm bantering about up against the clouds. It’s the fault of the heater; our heat lives housed in Lindsay’s closet, and one of its ugly grated maws lies not a yard from the head of my bed. The mighty bellows of heat’s tin home are our shared burden here on the backside of the apartment, and each gust of preserving wind is accompanied without fail by a similar rushing and clattering of air on metal on metal on air.

It is not quite the same as the way my room breathes through the back window, that’s for certain. This is like life on a ventilator… same stale air brushing in to inflate and out to deflate, leaving me lukewarm and half alive in the meantime. That’s about right, though, because today i have only used up half of a life, as if i am carefully rationing the discarded halves and thirds into my empty bottom dresser drawer so that one day i can be larger than life itself. Half a life like clams on a half shell, and i greedily suck it down and toss it away.

Nights have all been the same lately… sick with two different kinds of pressure welling up behind my jaw and in my stomach, and then curled tight around a sheaf of pages, and then restlessly nudging my head over the top of my mattress so i can see out of my window as i fall asleep — nothing as romantic as stars or any of that, but to spy on my across that back neighbor. I would think he could catch on by now, my prying eyes digesting his slim back and swirling tattoo like prime-time teevee, but he would appear to be none the wiser; still sleeping with the light on despite shades being drawn. I can see through to his slim circumstance as long as there’s some light to guide me. Anyhow, his dog has got me made … he knows the game. I stare at the owner as he sits and listens to whatever it is whose echoes i can hear across the alley, and in exchange i sit framed by my half-sized back window in just my underwear and thrash like mad as those beady canine eyes follow the supple muscle of my right arm up down up down. We have traded… my posed voyeurism in measured doses for glances into his owner’s life, undisguised … and unrealized, as of now.

I’m not sure exactly what i’m looking for, or at; the lithe nude that hides inside those baggy pants and shabby blinds is seemly to-be-sure, but not worth the effort i put forth to capture it backwards and upside-down inside the workings of my squinting eyes. I suspect that i am looking for something other than what i have: a life on the half-shell, waiting to slither down another gaping maw. And, it does, night after night — all the life i left unused mingles with the sweaty breathing of the heater just a few scant feet from my head to leave my room a sort of dewy warm in the morning when my alarm first rings at 5:27. Heat and life, to wake me. Of course, it isn’t really 5:27 because time is my false illusion — a special effect that is all too real. But, i have disguised it, and it gets me to and from my nest of decades old blankets that obscure the sheets on my bed at least three times before i’m up and about on any given morning. Four this morning past. I don’t mind it really, because i’m up in time to pick up a piece or two of my decrepit morning routine, and the once-every-fifty-minutes blare of my alarm slices my dreams into acidic little orangey wedges that i can devour one by one, only to leave behind dreamy sucked-out citrus smiles in my wake.

I dream the same old thing every night, and i don’t know why i bother to savour it anymore. I suppose it’s just part of that latherrinserepeat of my daily half-life, my waiting to see how long it takes whatever’s at my core to degrade down to just a phosphorescent echo of the radiant glow it once put out. Lather in the day, rinse out anything i was beginning to care about in the evening, and at night sleep and repeat.


It is time, my friends, to sleep and repeat.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7081398/