Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Year 04

Happy Birthday To This

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I am not a huge birthday fan.

Yes, birthdays make a good day to sit back and say “wow, was that a year that just happened?,” but they’ve otherwise been turned into the same materialistic nonsense Hallmark holiday as all of those other holidays that I habitually ignore. By this point, my friends and limited members of my family have discerned my general distaste for typical birthday fare, and have compensated accordingly with a recent avalanche of off-kilter gifts, unusual cakes, and the now-annual beer-tasting festival.

Today marks the fourth birthday of my blog. You’d think I’d remember it, or have it marked down on my calendar, or buy myself a gift, but year after year it blindsides me just like the birthdays of my friends and aunts, all of which I typically remember just as they are upon me. I didn’t remember this one at all. Instead, I happened to be at Rabi’s, reading about this year’s Howl festival, and I was thinking about how it’s been exactly a year since I last saw Rabi, and then I looked at my posts from the New York trip and realized that it almost coincided with CrushingKrisis’s birthday, and then I realized that meant that CK’s b-day was once again upon us.

Four years is not the longest time to do something. High school only took four years, thank god. For most people, college only takes four. There are marriages that don’t last as long, and beloved children who are younger. It has been enough time, though, for over 2,500 posts, and for over four hundred thousand words.

CK’s birthday is a good point to look back across that lifetime of posts and words, but it’s also useful for gauging what can actually happen in a year. In a way, this past year’s posts represent even less of my life than they ever did before; they depict fewer moments, impulses, and sudden fixations. At the same time, these few posts reveal more – in my increasing impulse to let thoughts percolate through multiple passes of writing and editing I find a more robust view of my life as I look back over a sparser number of posts. Not as many thousands of words to depict the pictures; less polariods, more portraits.

I sometimes miss “the old” version of this page, but I know that’s it’s unrealistic to expect anything to stay the same. Television shows grow stale. Musicians evolve. Life goes on. For me to decry the state of this page, lamenting that it no longer portrays my minute-to-minute fascination with the minutia of my existence, would be ignoring the growth not of my writing, but of myself. I might still look (mostly) the same and think (mostly) the same, but each post I write has an effect on the outcome of the next one.

I have given myself the gift of four years of identity, thoughts realized and jotted down for me to re-live, re-think, and re-assess. You have given me the privilege of airing that identity, forcing me to repeat, repent, and resolve again and again in an attempt to find something truer, funnier, and realer the next time.

I want to promise you that this year will bring hundreds of interesting links, scores of engaging reads, dozens of awesome new recordings of my song. I can’t. I want to promise that I will be on the cutting edge of blogging, finding new resources and fresh writing to day daily. I won’t.

For all that I cannot promise you, I will promise you this: you will always be privy to a unique view of my life. Sometimes that is represented by a sprawling journal-like entry, sometimes by a new song, sometimes by a brief by-line to a link, and often by lengthy self-assessment, but every time it’s a topic I bring to this page, to you, because it is a key part of this identity. It’s something I’m crushing on, or that’s crushing me.

Thank You, and Happy Birthday to This.

XBF3

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As ex-boyfriends go, Elise has decent enough taste. After all, they were all her boyfriends once.

When I got home the other night, after a grueling 12-hour day at the office, I was met by Elise plus her most recent ex-boyfriend, who was visiting before he takes off for a semester in London.

Having never met this boy, he who had dated Elise for the year directly preceding our relationship, I spent my first fifteen minutes in the apartment satisfying my animalistic urge to mark my territory. I walked into all the rooms, picked up guitars, slid my fingers across my keyboard, and opened up a bunch of cabinets.

I felt like a bit of a gorilla.

It’s funny – meeting someone for the first time after having two and a half years and just one blurry snapshot to form your seemingly indelible mental image of them. He was smaller than I expected, and meeker, but quippier, and more charming. Half of me could see why they had been together in the ease of their interactions – movements around each other in the kitchen as if choreographed, subtle innuendo exchanged as if scripted.

Even as I witnessed this obvious synergy with half of myself, the other half wondered how it could have ever happened at all. After the quips had ended, their conversation seemed to drift into the room from somewhere far, far away as I sat quietly and played my guitar. Her personality seemed to expand to fill the room while his contracted into something more obscure. With all my introspection I perceive change in myself easily, but it took meeting this boy to see the changes in Elise, and that we have grown to complement each other.

I liked him, the ex-boyfriend, but hidden beneath our blithe conversation and my invitation for him to stay just a little longer I was ever so crushed. Crushed for snatching her away from him so quickly, and crushed that if we were ever to end I would be that boy, sitting on the same couch as her but never able to touch her again.

Two & 1/2

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New Jersey, as much as I claim to detest it, always makes me think. I think in the mall, of the impact of prominent stores and brands on suburban buying patterns. I think on the roads, of the effect of weakly distributed mass transit on social networks in teens under the legal age to drive. I think at the concert, of the development of garage bands in a vacuum of live performances by national acts.

I think in New Jersey because there is not much else for me to do. I bring up their Governor repeatedly, hoping for some intriguing revelation, but I seem to know more about the story than anyone I talk to. Just wait, I said on Friday, until more news about Cipel breaks. He was imported from Isreal. You’ll see.

In the car driving down some street I still don’t recognize, even though I’ve been there with Elise dozens of times now, these thoughts are hurtling through my head. I palm my cell phone, nervously flicking the antenna up and down. Should I make a phone post? What if these thoughts escape, evaporate, never to be heard from again? I should call, call up and talk them out, but then we are at the bakery, getting out, and I am reveling in the .75$ muffins and how we can buy a heaping breakfast of pastries for four for less than $10.

I think in the parking lot, of cost of living and if it correlates at all to population density.

There was a point in time when all I did was sit at the computer, and back then every thought I had made it onto the page. I thought about q-tips. I thought about music. I thought about love. Eventually, I got out of the house more. Saw more. Did more. Wrote less. Looking back over those weeks and months, I feel disconnected from my life, so easy to chart from those earlier, more frequent entries. I chime in about class or work, but what was I feeling? What was I thinking?

Last night I think in the living room, of what I am doing with myself, and how I will remember it.

I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

Caffinated Brain Disco

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No time to edit, just free-writing today.

They kept on feeding me coffee, even though they know what a bad idea it is. Caffeine hits me in pulses, strobes, contractions of my brain, spasmically birthing new thoughts. Like cocaine through a straw, I whispered to my co-worker, the next idea strobing through my brain that I might be giving her the wrong impression.

I’ve talked about caffiene before.

Today one of my projects was going well, and I broke into the twist in the middle of the aisle, a perfect combination of Travola/Thurman slow-grace/sexual-tension (with a dash of mad watusi), singing “firing on all pistons, firing on all pistons.”

I never before realized how hard this job is, until this weekend a friend of Elise’s asked me what I do, and when I told her she made a little “oh” with her mouth and asked – “Are you on the good side or the evil side?” And, it just made me think, god, all we do all day is try to make our communications come out on the good side, arguing with senior management and tweaking every sentence until I think my head will explode from the twenty drafts and two reams of paper I have gone through in the past week.

Sometimes I think everyone should have Elise’s friend ask them that question once a year. Are you a good witch, or a bad witch? Which one are you? Are you being good to yourself and evil to everyone else? The reverse? The inverse?

Sometimes I wonder if we make our own futures through the process of elimination, discarding the best fantasies we have because they might offset that good/evil balance too much.

Sometimes I close my eyes and see myself, lids as mirrors, and sometimes I see nothing.

Sometimes I really have to fucking pee after I drink so much coffee.

Disuse, Misuse, and Abuse

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Lindsay and I sat at her high kitchen table, comparing calluses. Hers, she said, had faded from disuse. “But,” she sighed, “I guess you wouldn’t know about that.”

I don’t, and was shocked to hear that Anthony, a particular six-string-slinging idol of mine, had similary forsaken his instrument for the better part of a year.

What is it about stupid me, who can’t reproduce four distinct lines of underneath harmony after a month of practice, who still can’t play the solo in “Say It Ain’t So” even with my spiffy new guitar, who has the least performance experience out of everyone who touched one of the five guitars we had with us on Sunday, that keeps me plucking and strumming away, while others with more talent have set their habits aside? Why do I care so much about something I’m not particularly good at doing? And, why don’t I have more new Trios to show for it?

In other news, my name is 796, “intuitive” edges “crushing” by 198, and “crisis” is only a hair more common than “conflict.” Not that there’s anything intuitive about any of these conflicts. All I know is, at the point tipsy is only electrolytes away from shogun blondes, we need to do something…