Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Archives for July 2003

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What is it with me today? I am awake, but soft and blurry around the edges, of my vision and of my voice. People keep asking me if I’m sick or what I have been yelling about, and I tell them that it was just a fun weekend spent alternatingly drunk and in the back of a Camaro, but I don’t think that’s really where my voice went.

They haven’t ever heard my voice, my real voice, how I would speak if I dropped the pretense and the humor and spoke from the gut instead of just from the inside of my mouth. I slip it in sometimes, in a conversation about our mailing boards or a redesign, dropping down to my real register halfway through the sentence to see if it makes them flinch.

It doesn’t.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/07/105768807790145752/

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I sit on the end of our row, adjacent to three women from the next department. At first their chatter seemed inexorable, endless, and inconsequential, but now I see that it is what allows them to be here, to somehow reconcile whatever they care about to the reality of sitting in front of their alarmingly lo-fi DOS-like interface.

The woman who shares a cube wall with me talks the most of the three; the smile in her voice hide a constant crease of worry, which somehow makes me picture my grandmother in the next cube endlessly chatting. She is obsessed with controlling her son. I found it amusing, but today as she rambled on I started to see the simple misery hidden at the bottom of her creases.

Her son is headed straight for teenage years, sure to be ripe with youthful misbehavior and sexual experimentation. She talks about him with her creased voice, about how he does not want to wear the shirts she lays out, preferring t-shirts from Hot Topic and loose jeans. About how he tries to play money from her so that he can pay for the older kids to go to the movies with him, and how they in return take him to the drug store to explore the condom aisle. “Of course,” she says matter-of-factly, “he doesn’t have the slightest idea about all of that.”

She has an image in her head of how her son should be; what he should become. It is faceted in her mind, I’m sure, gleaming from every angle. But, maybe not as faceted as he would wind up doing things on his own. I’m not sure, actually, which is why I have become so obsessed with following her endless stories, and why I sometimes feel sad for them both.

If my mother had that image of me, she never revealed it. I think she had the barest of ideas, with no overarching goals or guides to my personality or morality. I never had to make the bed, always got to buy the music i wanted, and never had any restrictions placed on how much or how little time i had to devote to people other than myself. Did she mean for me to value art more than industry, and myself more than anyone else? I was left to fill in all of those details myself, never realizing that there was not an upper limit to the facets I could have because she never thought to impress them upon me. And now, sometimes, I feel as though because of it I have organized my life horizontally — only one layer deep. Not multifaceted.

Who has the better mom?

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/07/105768499661166966/

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I am not a car guy, but this weekend i found myself catching my breath when I was first introduced to Ross’s gold 1967 Camaro in full daylight, its top just finishing its retreat to the back hood. We rode in the Camaro almost exclusively the entire time we were in New Hampshire. My favorite part was the looks… at gas stations and stop lights, wide eyed, covetous, keenly appraising the four of us in the car (five, after we were joined by Martha).

I had never been to New Hampshire before. The names and numbers of the highways that got us there were meaningless to me, made all the more alien by the day-early fireworks that exploded in the night all around us. The state itself was equally as foreign; different slang, different prices, a different way of driving. Vehicles on the Maine beach’s parking lot all open and empty, the Philadelphian in me feeling almost compelled to vandalize them for being so trusting.

It felt more real than Philadelphia, though, as if the commonality of an experience makes it less like reality. Like I was a trendy kid eschewing the new pop album to embrace indy critical darling, only with New Hampshire instead of something off of Barksuk records and irreverent, heathenish, treasonous wit rather than any kind of nationalistic spirit. I still wondering the same wonder: is it good because I like it, or because no one else I know does?

Friday morning I woke up at eight twenty seven, so that by the time I rubbed my eyes, stretched, and walked to the kitchen it was eight thirty. Time for work; not even alien surroundings can convince my brain that it is not time to communicate efficiently at half past eight. Saturday saw me rise at the same time, again unprovoked and exactly.

I resolved that over ninety percent of my liquid intake would be alcohol. I was that guy, the guy from the big city turning a peaceful sub-urban vacation into a bender. I was that guy, drink in hand at all times, but even while i went through the motions i knew that it wasn’t me; it felt exactly the same as playing a snooty New York writer trapped on a Pacific Island for my acting class: i knew the paces to go through, but I never felt connected to the character.

On Sunday morning, hung over and ready to head home at eight thirty on the nose, I finally felt like I understood the both of us; we were using a change in location to attempt to focus our image, but without any normal references to work from we were skewed, suddenly out of control and unlike the selves that we had grown accustomed to.

If New England can at once transform and fascinate me to such a degree, how would I react to Alabama or California, England or Denmark, India or Australia? How frightening to think that all of my weakness and confidence might stem from a place outside instead of a place inside, and that a simple change of scenery could alter or even invert it.

Not the sort of independence I had intending to be commemorating, but fitting nonetheless.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/07/105760143610820933/

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So, yeah, if you had been wondering why i’ve suddenly gotten all sullen and quiet, it’s because i’m working a full-time communications job from nine to five and a half time communications job every night as soon as i get home. Oh, and i’m recording 25 new songs for Blogathon. Oh, and i’m visiting Martha for the holiday weekend. Oh, and there’s that having a girlfriend thing, that takes some time to. And i vaguely recall something about a kiddie pool and plastic Solo cups filled with grilled chicken, but that was quite a few Coronas ago.

Ah, life.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/07/105716656105205317/

The 3rd Annual Blogathon!

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July 26-27, 2003 — Wake up early and stay up late with the third annual Blogathon! Founded in 2001 by Portland, Oregon resident Cat Connor, Blogathon is a revolutionary internet charity drive where sponsors pledge money based on how long they think the participants can last in an all-day, all-night, website updating marathon.

With last year’s event drawing over two hundred websites and more than $50,000 in donations, Blogathon keeps readers riveted with entries from its many writers, all of whom are raising money for their own individual charities. Entries range from the personal to the hilarious to the downright exhausted, with some people posting serialized novellas, telling a retrospective biography via photograph, or even streaming their own live radio broadcasts to garner attention and more sponsor dollars!

See blogathon.org for a guide to the action during the event. Please direct media inquiries to Peter.