Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
by krisis
Okay, now this is starting to feel a little bit like college. 30 hours left to do all this cramming in! No preamble tonight – straight to the Ps.
Foremost of Ps is Lane @ Pink Elephants. I read Lane loooong ago, before you knew what a blog was! And now she lives in Australia! And created the much beloved, addiction-begetting NaBloPoMo Randomizer! More exclamation points follow: ! ! ! ! [Read more…] about NaBloPoMo Round-Up #10: The Mercifully Interesting Ps & Rs
by krisis
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.)
by krisis
I originally had intentions of doing M and S tonight, but the Ms really took the fight out of me. It was all I could do to squeeze in Os as originally scheduled and still write a normal post before midnight.
In honor of the nine-thousand and fifty-two mommy blogs i read in the Ms, i actually performed some baking, because i have finally convinced myself that the cookie dough is tastier baked* than raw.
* where baked does not equal microwaved into a smoking heap
Let the games begin. [Read more…] about NaBloPoMo Round-Up #9: M Defeats, O Redeems
by krisis
Trio – the original singer-songwriter web session – returns for its fifth season featuring my own DIY music. This season each trio of songs will have a loose topic to connect them, which I will discuss between songs.
A sample of what I had to say in this Trio…
Standing
It’s about both a negative and a positive aspect of friendship … leaning. This mutual leaning society that you have with your friends. Which is a good thing – that’s what friends are for. But it’s about the event where one person stands more freely than the other. You have one leaner – one Tower of Pisa in the relationship, and one Eiffel Tower – and the back and forth that creates.
Martyr
Sometimes when you are a third party really looking at a problem that your friend is having and you’re not involved in that problem it’s hard to gauge how much of a problem it really is. You have no way of knowing. They’re your filter. You don’t have any other reality other than their reality. … We all climb on a cross every so often, and this song is about telling one of your friends to get the fuck down. … It’s not that I don’t like you, it’s that I don’t believe in your problems.
Until You Awake
I had become friends with somebody through Rabi, and that person had an unfortunate incident with her health, and they actually were into a coma. … Things were not looking good for her. … I have really been blessed in my life by not only my own good health, but the good health of everyone around me, and I didn’t know how to react to this young, vibrant person who maybe would never get to hear one of my songs. So I sat down one night and wrote “Until You Awake”I remember that I sent it to her boyfriend and he played it for her in the hospital and shortly thereafter she woke up. … I still play it because it represents the power that ever-tenuous-connection across the internet can have over you, and over your songs.
You can download this Trio, or listen to a previous Trio:
by krisis
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.)