Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

walking

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I had a flying dream last night. All i did was fly… not the clumsy sort of treading water or the awkward running leaps from my more usual dreams, but an actual taking off and gliding through the air. It was just every-day life plus flying until 5:27 when my computer fired its warning shot of “My Sharona” to let me know i only had another 4 hours of flying left. And, so, i did.

Walnut Street unexpectedly crests into a hill between 42nd and 43rd, and when i’m walking home at night i close my eyes on the way down and ignore my legs. It’s as close to flying as it is to attempting to be mugged, but it’s all i’ve got.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7870909/

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On on empty stomach and an hour out of the hospital i somehow decided that i needed to take a walk — if for any reason then to remind myself that there is such a thing of fresh air and that most streets are longer than the distance from my hospital bed to the elevator bank. So i walked.


Comparatively, my stay in the hospital will shrink and shrink away until it is finally nothing from a distance, and i swung out each leg in a wide arc in front of the other to add to that distance as i marched down Walnut street. The distance between here and class, that i am dreading the walk of right at this instant, evaporated away and i kept walking. Charging. In my head i was at a solid jog, feeling the in out in of my breath and watching as i passed everyone around me. Honestly, i couldn’t tell you if i was jogging or not.

I got past Drexel and suddenly i found myself at the highway; it borders the Schuylkill on the west side and metro Philadelphia rises in glittering tiers on the other side. Feet planted firm on the bridge, my city looked like an artist’s rendering of itself: flat and unchanging … detailed but with no depth. I don’t know how long i stood there staring at it staring back at me before i walked towards it. I expected to come up against a translucent sort of wall where i could run my hand against the shimmering image of the city and try to press through, but before i realized it i was past it and inside the image i had observed.

Somehow it was different. I still had that flavor of hospital in me, the tiny lines of adhesive from all of the tape that held in my IVs, the ID tag on my wrist. I hadn’t thought to take it off, honestly.


Every word i said came out the way it wasn’t meant, and i’m wondering if i was really ready to leave.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7634418/

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MapQuest claims that i walked less than ten miles in yesterday’s travels from my house to the corner of 5th and South and back, but i’m not prone to believe it; even if the distance is really that relatively tiny when being roved over by four wheels, it certainly feels like twice that if you walk every step of it and take in the sights and sounds along the way.

Yesterday saw me starting off at home and slowly slipping farther and farther into the city until i was past it and had to work my way back through… first to admissions and then retreating back to the theatre, next quickly into 30th street station and then down to and around and around the same block of Chinatown looking for a good vegetarian restaurant, unintentionally down to South Street, and finally back up to Rittenhouse Square – where everything stalled out for almost two hours as my world reduced down to two people and one tiny park bench that was put there for a woman who refused to sit still.

At some point in eighth grade we were filling out some redundant “getting to know you” survey, and one of the questions prompted us to fill in our favourite physical place to be. My partner in the exercise listed locations in Paris and in London, and others in the class named other cities and states. The only place i could think to write down was Rittenhouse, which is just a city-block sized square of green dotted with an indefinitely multiplying quantity of benches. The me of six years ago couldn’t even begin to fathom something better than a tiny piece of quiet in the middle of the knotted urban mess of my city, and i’m almost a little sad to say that today it still ranks implausibly high of my favourites places in the world. The fact of the matter is that i’ve hardly ever been to another place that would compete not only for character but for context, and in my limited experience the square still has impressive rank.


I was a little surprised that Rabi had never been there before, so i aimed our trip back towards the train station so that we would pass Rittenhouse Square. As the amount of Walnut street between us and the square quickly shrank i had this mental zero-g moment where i caught myself wondering why i was even bothering: i’ve spent less than three hours of my entire life there, i manage to not think about it for months or years at a time, and typically i just walk through it on my way to a bookstore. I suppose i just wanted to show her something that was inherently plugged into my concept of Philadelphia… moreso than any certain skyscraper or piece of history.

When Rabi failed to gasp at the tiny block of neat grass and wooden benches i was hardly surprised, but somewhere along the way i think she got the point. Of course, mileage obviously varies.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5724030/

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Yesterday was walking walking walking, starting out in my apartment skittering from floor to floor and then off to the office and around the campus and then with Gina delving far into center city where i somehow managed to spend under $20 on a shopping trip for once in my life and then back to university city to walk in circles upon circles that eventually left me sweating and smiling heading back up the stairs of my apartment.

It seems like Gina and i can have one endlessly strung out conversation that will last us from the beginning of whenever we see each other all the way until when she finally has to get back to her apartment to continue with her own life rather than with our all-too-briefly shared one, and yesterday was no exception. I don’t know how we wind up talking about sushi and the existence of an afterlife and cool brands of wah-pedals and bars on South Street that got busted for selling coke all at once with hardly a pause for breath, but we definitely do.

Two intrinsically linked things came out of our infinite conversation that keep echoing in my head, and those things are coping and karma. Gina and i have known each other for eight years now, and in the history of our friendship we can find many examples of events that in retrospect look totally different to us than they felt at the time. Both of us were entirely emotionally unhealthy heading into our last year of high school, though neither one of us would have admitted it to the other (or anyone else) (or ourselves) at the time. Gina had a great new boyfriend and was sure to be a lead in the play, my guitar playing skills had picked up and i was accepted into all of the AP classes i wanted … things all seemed good. Of course, looks deceive, and i was depressed about life and college and even though i was past being obsessed with my weight on a day to day basis i was entirely too thin and Gina was my best friend at the time but she had to deal with her own set of problems that i won’t even begin to enumerate here. And now we get to reflect on the situation and reveal what was going on inside at the time.

Mentioning such meager problems in my life makes me feel like a lightweight, especially considering that i came through it all not significantly worse for the wear. What keeps me wondering about the way the world operates is that at the time i would have told you that i was happy and doing well but looking back i can see through that to my life being relatively empty and hollow at the time. I don’t know how i kept from being miserable and sick and exhausted and defeated. Maybe i was all of that and i didn’t even realize it at the time (and still don’t).

This is where karma comes in. Bad things happen to good people all of the time, and visa versa. Whether or not karma exists as an actual repayment for your actions in life it is present in that your choices will alter you and your psyche for the rest of your life. Comparatively, my choices were easy and my hurdles were not high and i didn’t even think about balking at them at the time, and i think the fact that i didn’t flinch has left me as the relatively healthy person i am now – three years after the fact. What makes me really wonder about life, though, really wonder, is the people who were not ever allowed to make an easy choice and who have always been presented with hurdle after hurdle to leap. I know too many people in my life who have had to face too many challenges, and almost too many of them to believe have somehow walked through all of their fire and brimstone and still manage to smile every day; that isn’t to say that they don’t have problems and issues, but that they aren’t consumed by them all the time.

I am not an especially strong person, and my amassed karma must be equally tiny in relation to the world on the whole. I have never been extremely sick, i have two healthy parents who i have relatively open lines of communication with, i have never been financially in danger of losing my home or my possessions, and i have never been physically or emotionally threatened so much that i was unable to defend myself. But, i know people who have battled health problems for years, who have lost parents to feuds and time, who have lived on incomes stretched to the breaking point, and who have endured assaults on their physical and emotional well being on more than one occasion. What really scares me about life is that sometimes all of this is inflicted on one family… even one person, and that they are left to come through it or to fail somewhere in the middle. I know people who failed and are stuck endlessly in a feedback loop of emotional and physical trauma that they will inflict upon themselves if no one else will do it for them, but what amazes me about life is that for every one of those people i know more than one person who still believes fully in everything life has to offer them rather than inflict upon them after battling a similar set of circumstances. Everyone who has faced against a difficult set of circumstances has problems and regrets, but not every one of those people can wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night, and that power alone is something that stuns me.

What’s my point? Who knows… is there ever one, really? The point, i suppose, is that my tiny mound of shiny karma is but a pebble in the face of what some people have amassed, and that i just hope that they all get to redeem what life owes to them… and that i will get to see them enjoy every second of it; i’d gladly trade in my karma just for that.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5573008/

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I was walking down my street and it was lit up all shades of sun… twinkling past trees and bare on the cement and reflected off of polished old cars. Out on the porch next to my building someone was eating something with bay seasoning, and the sense-memory association snapped me back to once when i was crabbing with those funny little cages off the side of a pier after fifth grade and the click of their metal against the wooden dock as we set them down and watched the crabs toddle out sideways from within. I associate the smell more with live crabs than with eating them because i’ve never really eaten crabs. Plucking meat out of anything’s shell is a bit too carnivorously aggressive for me… even sliding a tail off of a shrimp is a bit distasteful. The summer after fifth grade i went on “the cruise” with the boat-club that my mother’s boyfriend belonged to… really just a whole slew of tiny personal boats chugging their way down to Maryland and then back up again over the course of a week. At the time it didn’t really occur to me what an odd little vacation it was. My mother had left me alone at my Aunt Susan’s the year before to go out on the cruise with our just found cat Googie, but i wound up (accidentally) kicking out a window in her den door and it was all quite a debacle. The first time i was ever on a boat was a few years before, and it was a house-boat with a living room and oreo cookies and a resident fluffy cat.

I fell for a girl on the cruise and every fictional character i created for an entire year afterwards was named ‘Barbara,” and i’ve never met anyone my age with that name again. When i would chase her in the water she’s just swim out until the deep end and wait until i grew tired of bobbing up and down just by bouncing off of my toes and floating a little. Other than that, all i really remember from the cruise was that it was the first time i danced in front of people and not just with my mother in my own living room. And, i quite liked it. But, somehow i contrived to be sick for the last night’s dance and missed it, i think because i knew she’d be there. The whole trip had this very fraternal atmosphere between all of the boaters and their counterparts at various marinas down the coast. I don’t think i’ll ever do anything quite like it again. Except for those silly butterflies and staying home from the dance to play with my gameboy and watch the stars… i suppose i might contrive that a time or two more in one way or another..

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/4877285/