Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Year 07

What I Found In the Shade

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I’ve been saving this story all month, and editing it all night.

It’s time to live out in the world, little post. Be free.

This summer i went to a music festival and came back happy.

That’s the short of this story. The details are almost immaterial. I left a whiny grump and returned not. Sure, i’ve whined and grumped a little since then, but i can’t summon up the same intensity of either, or of meanness, as i’ve already mentioned.

I can’t say that I can pinpoint a single aspect of the experience that lead to this transformation, but there is at least one specific story emblematic enough to serve for the purposes of this post, and that also – maybe – fundamentally changed the way i think about people and life in general.

It was Friday afternoon at Bonnaroo, and it was hot.

Bonnaroo is a 80,000-person four-day music festive thrown each June in the middle of a dusty farm in Tennessee. When it gets hot at Bonnaroo your forms of recourse are (1) get soaking wet, (2) retreat to your air-conditioned vehicle, or (3) locate shade. There are few other viable options – waiting in line for the internet tent for twenty minutes of cool air and connectivity, for example – but nothing foolproof.

I was dead in the center of Centeroo, the sprawling music-venue and village-center to all Bonnaroo happenings. I was attempting to watch Ben Folds, but it was too hot and he was uncharacteristically terrible – i couldn’t hack it.

The Fountain was jammed with human flesh. The car was a deadly half-mile or more hike away, and i didn’t even have keys.

I had to find shade.

I started to wander around Centeroo, assessing my options. The edges of performance tents and out of the way trees were already monopolized by small cities of beach chairs and towels. The prime spots at my favorite café were snagged. I was starting to despair, and maybe inching towards heat-stroke.

Turning down a particularly wide avenue of vendors, i spotted a wizened old tree with a smattering of ‘Rooers relaxing underneath. It wasn’t superior real estate – it was more akin to sitting on the ground in front of a row of shops at a strip mall. But, at least it was shade.

I sat. I rehydrated and ate a granola bar. I reclined. I fanned myself with my floppy cowboy hat.

I woke up.

The waking up came as a surprise, as i had no recollection of going to sleep. I definitely recalled the reclining, and the the last thing i remembered was fanning myself with my hat.

I had fallen asleep in the middle of an outdoor hippy mall. This is exactly the thing my mother warned me about. I was probably robbed blind, stripped naked, and infected with syphilis.

I sat up with a shot, groping around me to see how many of my possessions had been stolen and sold for glass and chocolates on Shakedown street. Everything seemed to be intact (including my clothing and my dignity).

Somewhat assuaged, i reached into my pack to fish out a walkie talkie so i could re-establish communication with the team.

It was then i noticed them.

The nappers.

Around me, where before there had been a few scattered concert goers having a rest was now a gathering of ‘Rooers, alternately chatting and peacefully sleeping. Not just a handful, but an expanse, the limbs of those on the fringe practically inside some of the adjacent shopping stalls.

It was as if the wizened tree’s roots had suddenly blossomed into a gaggle of reclining hippies fending off heatstroke.

It was beautiful.

I gingerly picked myself up, careful not to disturb the woman napping next to me. Carefully tip-toeing my way out of the mass, i radioed the team.

“You would never believe what just happened….”

I’ve been raised my whole life to believe that if you leave a car unlocked a bum will pee in it, and if no bum is available someone else might do the deed just to teach you a lesson. Yet i went to a four-day music festival in the middle of a giant dusty farm and not only camped out, but took a nap in the middle of a busy thoroughfare only to awake unmolested to find that dozens of people had joined me.

Something fundamental about my outlook on life changed at Bonnaroo. No, it wasn’t just the napping. It was the sheer joy of arriving in one piece and pitching a tent, the sheer desperation of morning number three when i wanted to be airlifted back to the comfort of my own home, and the victory of Sunday night as we crossed back into Virginia. It was the resignation that, yes, i made it home improved by the experience.

My outlook was broken by Bonnaroo. I used to be No-centric, delighting in my ability to deny. Now i just want to say yes … to push myself a little farther each day, and to watch all of my friends do the same.

And that’s the story of Bonnaroo and my (so-far) never-ending positive outlook.

(I swear i really am going to write “The Complete Yuppies’ Guide To Bonnaroo” as soon as this NaBloPoMo dealy is over with. Seriously. Much wisdom will be dispensed.)

Rabbit-Totems and Purple Dragons

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Even before I had the internet I was always interested in connecting to people who I could understand on some intrinsic level.

In my pre-internet age, one of my favorite comics was Sam Kieth’s The Maxx. Many issues of The Maxx had a pen pals page tucked into the back. The idea of it thrilled me – some equal yet opposite alterna-comic fan flung far across the country could trade significant thoughts with a distant speck of me.

I whined and begged my mother for permission to write to some pen pals or, even better, to send in my information to be listed (because, surely each pen pal was reaping hundreds if not thousands of letters from eager writers such as myself).

I was flatly rejected. Repeatedly. Because, as far as my mother was concerned, it was the goal of the entire population of America to seduce me into acquiescing to a quiet, tidy kidnapping. Who knew what kind of lunatic was lying in wait for impressionable young comic fans such as myself to engage them in witty adolescent banter, only to suss out the likeliest kidnappees and stealthily infiltrate their homes in the night.

I shortly and unsuccessfully agitated for a P.O. Box, and that was that.

(Why didn’t I just send in the damn letter with telling her? Who knows. That is how good of a kid i was.)


When I first started Crushing Krisis one of my favorite things was to not only find and link to a new blog, but to get into a longterm habit of reciprocal linking – carrying on a sort of turn-based dialog in a series of blog posts meant not just for each other, but for our entire audience(s). In a way it was like a comic-book crossover.

Sadly, in most cases only my side of the chat still exists – six years of blogging yields quite an attrition rate. Of my virtual pen pals even the most venerable and permanent-seeming blogs I exchanged links with are gone. All but one.

Wockerjabby was a strange creature – six years ago just a clean layout emblazoned with a purple dragon, talking about college and exercise and veganism and astrophysics. Rabi, pronounced just like “Robby” (cotton on?) was… a girl? A girl named Rabi living just a few miles from my apartment? An awesome, intelligent, health-conscious, blogging girl name Rabi going to college around the corner from my favorite malll?

I was hooked from minute-one. And, just a few hours later, Rabi noticed my link and wrote me a nice email. And (nearly causing me to have a heart-attack in excitement) linked back.

Afterwards i started a (somewhat embarrassing, in retrospect) linking campaign professing my blog-love, and Rabi continued to reciprocate, carrying on merry conversations via email all the while.

If the story plateaued there – two bloggers trading links for six years – it wouldn’t be too remarkable.

It didn’t.

We decided to meet – Rabi was the first internet person i ever met. In the middle of a field, actually. Well, at a train station, and briefly in a grocery store, but predominantly in the middle of a field, where I sang songs and she read poetry.

We continued through Blogathonning and late night IM conversations discussing “Peter’s-Head Romantic Gravitational Units,” and a lengthy walk through night-time Philly, and somehow wound up flying together and then road-tripping together to Boston for concerts, followed by multiple iterations of walking the breadth of NYC and Philadelphia, eventually coming-of-age and enjoying martinis in both locations.

All of that from one link, six years ago yesterday. Not only a best internet friend, but a best friend.

Ever since Rabi’s link has always appeared on my link list. And, six years later, CK is still on hers.

It’s hard – still hard, even with blogs and MySpace – to thwart the natural tendency of our social circles towards homogeneity. Your friends will always have something in common with you, because if you have nothing in common the spark of friendship never catches, and a year later you’re left wondering why someone is still on your friends list. Because of the limits of the physical world, usually many of our friends wind up having the same things in common with us.

The allure of The Maxx pen pals and, later, the internet, is the offer of hundreds of different tangential contacts – small intersections of interest. The long tail of meeting people, the joy of which is following that connection to find even more connections.

In Rabi I have found the unique overlap of blogging, of loving music, of eating strange vegetarian foods, of remaining dedicated – even obsessed – with staying vibrant and real.

Probably way cooler than anyone i could have met from The Maxx.


(ps: Rabi, your Trio got usurped because i don’t know how to play two of the songs yet. Consider this your Trio IOU to be redeemed when i have more than a day to learn three songs.)

Trio: Season Five, Suite #7!

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Trio – the original singer-songwriter web session – typically features original songs, but for the third in a special trio of trios I am covering some of the songs that have influenced me and my songwriting. The first two influences Trios featured childhood and teenage influences.

You can download the entire Trio, or start from a past suite of original songs:

See the rest of this post for chords to all three songs. [Read more…] about Trio: Season Five, Suite #7!

Trio: Season Five, Suite #5!

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Trio: Season Five, Suite #5:
Influences (Pt. 1 of 3): Childhood
Like a Virgin (Madonna)
In My Life (Beatles)
Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie)

Trio – the original singer-songwriter web session – typically features original songs, but for the first in a special trio of trios I am covering some of the songs that have influenced me and my songwriting.

You can download the entire Trio, or start from a past suite of original songs:

See the rest of this post for chords to all three songs. [Read more…] about Trio: Season Five, Suite #5!

I Slept On Top of the Sheets…

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Having introduced the trinity of my love, my mother, and my best friend, my cast of characters now widens considerably (though it stays predominantly female).

There are former crushes, drinking buddies, and college roommates left to touch upon. However, there is one past character who – even if she doesn’t come up too often these days in blog or in life – had a major impact on your humble singer/songwriter.

She is known as the Queen of Darkness. QoD for short. [Read more…] about I Slept On Top of the Sheets…