Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Year 02

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Under the cover of my sacred blue checkered blanket i was wishing for wind, with my face pressed up against my square back window. My bed had been migrating towards it for over a week now; it’s a curious obsession i have, staring into my neighbor’s windows. I think i am jealous of him because i want to watch him but he does not want to watch me. Tonight my bed moved altogether, so that he could see as much of me as i can of him. I was looking to trade lives: my nights for his.


I tempt him. I play guitar in front of the window as soon as the roommates leave in the morning, half-naked, thrashing and strumming loud enough for him to hear. I flicker my string of lights on and off at night while feigning sleep to see if he looks my way. I sit, postured, on my wooden stool, glaring at my broken webpage.

At first he would slip me into sleep with his idle routine and the way he lazily cuddled with his dog, but lately he has been keeping me awake. Tonight i was lying there wishing for wind and rain because i wanted to hear the sound of it pressing in on my room, unable to enter, and i didn’t care if it would make my spying any harder. It was just past four when i got what i said i wanted, with a tiny tinkling of drops on the pane. I found myself unthinkingly focusing past them to see his yellow light and blue walls.


At five he turned over and looked right at me; i had thought he had fallen asleep with his lights on. I self-consciously flicked the lights on and stood up, suddenly naked and vulnerable in the harsh florescence of my bedroom. Maybe i don’t like the tables turned as much as i thought i would. Up out of my bed, i slid on a tee-shirt and stalked over to my kitchen stool to check my email, and he turned back over.

I’m starting to realize that no one wants you to put on a show; they just want to see what you would do if they weren’t there.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7262320/

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Atlas

(after Plath’s Edge)

The mind is sleeping.
A mighty

Giant stands in quiet surrender,
The air of spartan arrangement

Is crisp in the curves of her muscles,
Her bare

Shoulders are claiming:
We will not topple over, i know.

Two gaping spaces stretched strangley silent
Each one in

A state of crumble, emptied.
She still holds

Her torch to light the same sky
Of steely jagged mountain majesties

stiff and resisting the
winds of change, cold of winter seeping in.

Her set lips reveal nothing,
Visage fixed on endless clouds beyond.

She is weary of the weight.
Her brow furrows, green.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7259676/

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I was essentially at a loss for words, sitting at the quaint restaurant table with Lindsay and Dante trying to explain. I couldn’t figure out how i felt about New Hope… i felt like we were trapped in one of those quaint tourist trap towns and that it was like walking around in a life-sized dollhouse where nothing was real. It was more than that, though… more surreality like rose flavored ice cream that made me feel like i was in a novel somewhere other than circling around Washington’s Crossing of the Delaware.

So, we were at dinner and Lindsay decided for me that i should have brought a notebook with me, and i’m sure that i should have because i lost everything i had meant to say. I suppose i’m just so obsessed with being in a city and being metropolitan that it seems impossible to me that people live just around the corner from these shops… selling strange musical instruments and fantastical ice cream and ultra-hot salsa only to walk back home and lay down to sleep under those same stars.

Oh yeah, you could see stars. Everywhere. Our trip straddled Pennsylvania and New Jersey and we walked back and forth across a bridge whose wooden foot path was so worn that it seemed just like walking on a dirt road. We all wondered at once where the state lines were drawn… the middle of the river, or the middle of the bridge? I finally figured that they’d probably be indicated on old claimer’s maps, but then it came down to where exactly those hand-drawn maps would set the border in real life and we were back to where we started.

Other things happened too, that i can’t quite put back together into the blog they were meant to be. There was an armor store that was selling arrowheads from 200bc, and i couldn’t fathom how just anybody had the right to own something that old and have it sitting in a display case with a “please inquire” pricetag on it. I kept arguing with Lindsay that nothing could taste like a rose after we first passed the ice cream shop while still in the car, and finally she just replied: “it tastes just like it smells. You can taste anything you can smell!” And that was that until i actually bought my triple scoop and the owner made me try it first because “some people taste it and then just walk out on me.” And it tasted like… rose petals. It was flavored in that subtle way that green tea ice cream is, with the ultra-dark pastel color and the taste that slides off of your tongue while you’re trying to absorb it.

After we had walked around for a while i finally got used to the idea of everything being real, but i still can’t figure it out. It feels like it should be some tiny historical town tucked into Massachusetts because i always forget that Philadelphia is the exception to the rule of Pennsylvania and not the other way around. Everything in New Hope was vivid… all the local teenagers we saw working in the shops were like caricatures of people i know… three times as many piercings or hair twice as outrageous or poise that’s so much more postured. I realize that somehow it’s their reaction to living in a sort of suspended time where all of the shops and streets stay the same and people from outside come in to gawk, but at the same time it felt like i was looking at a catalogue of teenaged stereotypes trying to find the ones that matched my own friends.


Of course, those are all just snippets… glimpses into my surreal afternoon, because i should have bought a notebook instead of the two cds i bought. Live and learn.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/6883375/

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In Com Theory last week we touched upon Mead’s Theory of Symbolic Convergence, and one of the primary principals of it is the concept of the “Other,” which is the version of ourselves that we create based on society’s view of us. Without delving too deeply into the theory, basically when we refer to ourselves as “me” we are referring not to what we are, but what everyone else has labeled us as. And, in light of all of this, i just feel like i am in a constant power-struggle to keep “I” somewhere close to “me.” If you take that a step farther you could imply that people’s definitions of me inevitably reflect on my behaviour because i am either conforming to their expectations or trying to subvert them.


If you can’t see how fucked up it is for that to be imposed on a still-developing person for the entirety of their adolescence and young-adult life i’ll have to lend you my textbook sometime.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6486287/

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I am back in Philadelphia, complete with my newly mellowed red hair and my newly mellowed personality that i have yet to assign a color to and this newly hollow ache for the tiny slice of else i had this weekend. Normalcy and a different city and walking around and being happy — things that i can’t really necessarily apply to Drexel and Philadelphia, but i try. Today i walked into the Admissions Office and everyone fawned over my hair for a solid hour before i got to do any work. Last night i got 100% on my first test of the quarter. Baby steps on a long walk.


There is a door in the frame of my room and it feels so very different to shut it and be insulated from the rest of the apartment except for the hi frequency bleed-through from Lindsay’s room downstairs. I am cocooned in my warm-lit green and white and brick, slowly working through my stack of Boston music and making a point of looking forward to tomorrow and the next day. Because, even though i might not see a point in either of them, somewhere past there there is a day that i want to be on and i’ve got to live the inbetween to get there. That’s how getting places works; you have to endure the inbetweens.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6423711/