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I – Zina

I am playing a show with my cover band tonight in a bar that is just up the road from my house.

This is not an unusual event. We’ve maintained a steady flow of roughly bi-monthly shows for several years now, and with them we’ve developed a rehearsed rhythm of preparation, load-in, set-up, and breakdown.

The remarkable part of tonight is that it will be my last regular appearance alongside our brilliant drummer Zina for the foreseeable future. I’ve been in three different bands with her since 2010. I’ve reached the point that it’s fait accompli for me to assume any new song I write or learn will make its way to her sticks.

In the days before I met Zina, my guitar playing frequently lacked a tangible rhythm. You couldn’t feel the emphasized beats within my strumming. There was no pulse. At my best, I was writing syncopated song with room for more arrangement within. At my worst (much of which is still creeping around in old posts here), it sounded like I was playing in free time because I never quite complete a measure, so hurried was I to move from each chord to the next.

Zina helped me define the space in my playing – space filled with rhythm, but also space filled with silence. Now I can even find that space when I’m playing on my own.

I am not sad about the show or about Zina leaving the way I was last year when she first broached the subject of her eventual departure. I’m thrilled for her to move on to a new city and new opportunities, but that’s not the only reason I’m not despairing. I’ve learned to accept and adapt to change in this past year like never before. I know that nothing good ever lasts forever, but now I understand that some other good always follows.

In fact, compared to one, five, or ten years ago, the only aspects of my life that have remained constant throughout are playing music, being in a relationship with E, and writing here at Crushing Krisis – as I have been for the past sixteen years as of today, its anniversary. [Read more…] about happy birthday to this

I.

I have wanted to have blue hair for at least half of my life.

Not bright, electric blue, but a dark, steely, navy blue that looked like Wonder Woman’s hair back when newsprint comics didn’t print a true black, but instead built it from other colors such that you could always detect blue in the highlights.

I couldn’t exactly pinpoint why. I like blue, but not navy blue. I’m actually a bit afraid of it, to tell the truth. I don’t like how it’s deceptively almost-black. Wearing pants that might be black or might be navy blue used to make me physically itch from confusion. Yet that’s how I’ve always described this dream hair.

I described it in high school, when Gina and I tried to Manic Panic it directly onto my long brown locks and failed to even tint it. I described it in college, when I inexplicably went copper-red instead because it wouldn’t raise eyebrows on interviews as it faded. I described it when I worked for Blue Cross, joking that it was the wrong Pantone blue for me to be their mascot. Yet, even as I did so many other things I had always wanted and dreamt of, I never had that blue hair.

All of that is to say I am proud and quite giddy to be writing this post to you from beneath dark blue locks today, on the fifteenth anniversary of this blog.

II.

If I had to speculate on the origins of my blue-hair obsession, I would trace it back to being psychic, which in turn is linked to summer camp. Not to say that my psychic powers came from summer camp. They’re just related.

Let’s step back for a moment. It was circa Junior year of high school and I had a major crush on a younger girl who, in retrospect, was part of a post-punk early manic-pixie-dream-girl movement of chicks who wore black with zippers and patches and dyed their hair awesome colors and who were very briefly my type. (My actually-punk female friends at the time were blonde and wore plaid.)

I was resolved not to repeat past romantic failures in this instance (oh, youthful hubris) and was gearing up to ask said young lady on a date rather than let the feelings linger unannounced. One night I dreamt that I was riding on a school bus with her sitting behind me, and I turned around to confess my feelings only to see that her hair – previously bleached blonde and dyed in streaks, was now blue.

This was a weird dream not because of the girl or the hair but because of the school bus. I had never ridden one of those yellow-colored, vinyl-seat school busses in any context other than summer camp, and just for one summer.

Summer camp was a miserable experience for me, because it involved spending unadulterated time with other boys my own age. I mostly didn’t like other boys my own age, but mostly because they didn’t like me. That started around the seventh grade, when I was suddenly teased for not being boy enough, which was a different sort of teasing than the teasing I’d experienced for having massive beaver teeth or Spock hair. Sure, all those times I was being teased for being different, but now I was teased for not being the same.

That summer was probably when I stopped really enjoying sports. I was actually a voracious watcher of football and wrestling around that time, and I had always loved gym class. Yet, at a sports-oriented camp, I discovered there were two kinds of boys – the boys who were good at sports and then the boys who got teased for being gay. And, of that subset, I was the one who actually seemed as though I might really be gay, which made me the teased-in-chief.

With that being the experience I associated with yellow school busses, you would think I would have recognized that my blue-haired school bus dream was not a good sign but instead a terrible portent of impending failure. Yet, the next day I waited in the hall in the stairwell outside one of my dream-girl’s classes. Out she emerged, and as I wound up for my actual-life confession of teenage crushdom, I noticed her hair was blue.

“Hi,” she said, smiling, not expecting to see me there.

“Hi,” I replied. Her hair was blue. I searched my memory, trying to recall if she mentioned she would be dying her hair blue. Nothing came up.

“Your hair is blue.” I remarked. It seemed like a good sign.

“Yeah, I did it last night.” Funny, that, since I had dreamt about the blue hair the night before as well.

I did ultimately comment on my feelings in that exchange, referring to them as “non-platonic.” She agreed. I was thrilled. Yet, a week later, she was surprised when I had Gina act as my valet to deliver her roses in homeroom on Valentine’s day, later commenting, “I didn’t know what platonic meant.”

Just as she had misinterpreted me, clearly I had misinterpreted the dream.

As it turns out, she was not amongst the most significant unrequited loves of my teenage life, as displayed by my songwriting habits of the time. However, the blue hair stuck with me. Maybe that part wasn’t such a bad idea.

III.

Last week I went to summer camp for the first time in half my life – since circa the beginnings of my blue-hair urge.

It was not a weeklong hipster summer camp for Brooklynites (not that there is anything wrong with that). Instead, about a quarter of RJMetrics packed up for a weekend of sports, swimming, sun, and sleeping in cabins for no reason at all, although ostensibly the reason was team-building and camaraderie.

A lot of it was the most fun I’ve had while not playing with a band or with a baby in… I don’t know how long. A long time. And, in having that fun, I found myself doing things I’ve never done before – or, at least, had never had fun while doing before. I competently played sports, actually scoring and at one point sliding into a base (I was out). And, a gaggle of much-younger, much-fitter guys taught me how to do flips into the pool – something I’ve always wanted to know how to do.

Due to said band- and baby-having, I don’t get to do a lot of these off-hours team-building and camaraderie things. I’m missing one right now, actually. As a result, I try to do my team-building and camaraderie during my time in the office as much as I can, which means I have to figure out how to do them while working.

That recently took the form of a workgroup around selling analytics to content-based sites. I paired up with a group of people I never get to work with and dissected our favorite money-making blogs to understand how they ticked, which inevitably lead to dissecting this blog to expose those gears and guts of visitor patterns and affiliate links and conversion tracking.

I didn’t give it a second thought. Having a blog is part of who I am just like the band and the baby. I don’t hide those things, so why hide the blog? All of them are a part of what makes me a success.

Driving home on Sunday morning from my idyllic day at camp, it struck me that all the fun had to do with trust. I trust those three-dozen other people every day with my success and the success of our company. They trusted I would do my best to catch a ball. I trusted they wouldn’t make fun of my twenty back-flops into the pool on the way to a full 360 degree rotation. They trusted I wouldn’t make fun of them as they sang to my guitar playing around the campfire and that I could lead them through enough sun salutations to warm ourselves from the cold, dewy dawn that surrounded us. I trusted I could use my blog as an example for my colleagues and they trusted that I was doing something that would help them sell and service clients better, even though it seemed a little unorthodox.

All we had to do was trust each other.

IV.

This past year has been a year of everything and nothing, a constantly churning status quo. I don’t quite know how to sum it up. Maybe it’s because the things around me are changing more than I am, and so I am suddenly measuring time by my sameness rather than my difference.

Last year I had a baby and now I have a toddler. Last year I had a scrappy acoustic trio sweating out covers and this year I’m leading a full band confidently unreeling unheard tunes. Last year I wasn’t writing music, but this year I’ve got a fistful of new songs. Last year Arcati Crisis was on indefinite pause, and this year we played one of our best shows ever. Last year I had hired a core of my team, and this year I nearly tripled it. Last year E was also the director at a successful start-up, and this year she is employee #4 at an even-newer start-up and a local tech figure of some note.

All those things changed, but it’s hard to tell if I have. If I did, it was in a much more incremental way. I’m the same shape and weight, the same voice and temperament. I didn’t change many opinions or buy many new clothes. Despite nearly slicing my thumb-tip off a few weeks ago, I don’t even have any new scars to report.

Maybe it would be easier to tell the difference if I was writing more, but maybe I’m not writing more because things seem so the same. I suppose the only way to know would be to write about it.

I should probably do that.

V.

Today I almost cried in a hair salon.

To be fair, I cry a lot of places for a lot of reasons – becoming a parent just exacerbated that. But when I hugged my long-time stylist goodbye today with tears in the corners of my eyes it was because she helped me perfectly realize a dream that had stuck with me for over 17 years. It was a complete shock to look in the mirror and see that blue I imagined sitting on my head, perfectly realized.

That blue-hair urge is only slightly older than this blog, seventeen to its fifteen, but where my three week process of changing my hair still feels sudden, Crushing Krisis is anything but. It’s like a fossil record of myself, full of dated thoughts and opinions in each era, crystalized in HTML to be excavated and revisited later. If it wasn’t for this record, maybe I wouldn’t understand how much I’ve changed except for those big, blue-haired milestones.

I’ve been wrestling with trusting other people even longer than with the blue or the blog, and tracing the story of the blue back to its proverbial roots made me realize just where that trust began to elude me. It was at that point where everyone stopped being just kids and started being boys and girls, jocks or geeks, straight or gay. That continued through playing my own songs, always ready to wince away a heckling comment.

It doesn’t make any sense that performance anxiety or avoiding sports or not wanting to hang out with other men could stem back to those formative moments just like it’s hard to believe my wanting blue hair somehow emerged from that marble stairwell, but those are my best two guesses and thanks to one psychic dream they’ve been inexorably connected all of this time in the back of my mind.

This week feels like a sort of kismet in that way, wherein I resolved the camp issues and then my long held hair wishes, and also stayed in a cabin full of a dozen other dudes without feeling out of place for a second, all right in time for the day of the year that I retrospect the most. It’s clear that I’ve changed a lot in the past year despite some semblance of status quo, and not just by the virtue of it ending with me scoring points or dying my hair blue.

I feel like I’ve just put a final piece of punctuation on a long-unfinished sentence – one that’s been playing out here for years. It’s a lot about trust but also about just doing what you know will make you happy when you are sure it can’t hurt anyone – only help.

So here I am, instructing my future self: when you look back at this sort of epiphany and want to know how it feels to get here, do not think of the way your whole body has ached for days or the dye burning your scalp. Instead, consider that second after my feet left the diving board dozens of times and how I shut my eyes and just spun, unmoored from gravity and rotating, spinning free, knowing I would hit the water in a moment but also knowing that was not the point at all. The point is the journey, the spinning, the trying to orient myself the right way, and all the rest is just what results. That’s why I kept diving, even after I stopped landing on my back and got the flip right. It wasn’t about getting the flip right. It was about what happened on the way.

Tomorrow when I wake up I might feel the same, but I will have this blue hair to show me I am different. Yet, blue or not, no day is ever the same and that’s why I keep waking up and doing it again. Sometimes I am the change and sometimes the change is all around me, and no matter what I spin through it again, trying to orient myself.

Thank you for being a part of that change and part of what stays the same. Thank you, and happy birthday to this.

The Collector

I cannot remember the first thing I collected with the studied intent of completion.

I think that is because the collecting was being done for me before I can recall. Both of my parents bought every record from their favorite artists. My mother documented our adventures in homemade photo storybooks. I had a complete collection of He-Man toys. Collecting is just what you did.

Why have only one record, or memory, or toy, when they are meant to be strung together with magnificent context?

That urge stuck with me past my childhood years. In fact, it was the urge to obsessively collect all of my words into one place that lead me to create this blog, fourteen years ago today.

The Limits

When I was a child, the main limiting factor in my quest for completion was resource availability. I knew who all the GI Joes were, but old lines were impossible to find and even newer ones yielded rare figures. Later, I wrote up a wishlist of every comic issue I wanted, but even after researching how to mail-order my missing issues my budget was the limiting factor. I also wanted to see every episode of X-Files, but I could never catch re-runs of Season 1 even when the show went into syndication.

As I began this blog in 2000, the only limiting factor was my interest. I had all the technical resources and time I could want for, and my other major hobby of songwriting was a natural complement to the content here. The only element that could be in short supply was the will to write.

I never run out of a will for the things I love to do. I think that is the secret of being a good collector, actually – the delight in the effort and chase. It is that delight that made me a good blogger, but also a great bandmate and professional. I would organize all the songs and make all the lead-sheets and know the harmony like the back of my hand. I would reach Inbox 0 and have notes on every project and measure my efficiency every week.

And so I did for many years of happiness and continued improvement in my two chosen careers.

Now, a little over a year into this experiment of raising a small human being, there is no question that the main limiting factors to anything in my life are not will or delight, but space and time. I want to be at Inbox 0, but there are sometimes more emails than minutes I have to read them. I own every issue of X-Men ever published, but I’ve run out of places to put them and I have to sneak them a handful at a time before bed or on my commute. I have every X-Files episode on DVD (well, all of the Mulder seasons, anyway), but when will I watch them again? I barely have the 42 minutes to spare in any given day. What used to take weeks or months to enjoy could now stretch on for years.

I have thousands of songs in my collection, but if I try to listen to them all when will I write, learn, and perform my own music? Even if I gave up performing and focused on recording my music for posterity, I’m out of recording space on a tremendously huge set of hard drives. Plus, when would I fine time to grind away at the perfect track for hours at a time?

I have a blog to collect every fleeting memory and opinion with a veritable unlimited amount of space to fill, but when will I set the words down?

If I am a collector because I yearn to complete every collection, what happens when I realize I cannot have it all every time, forever? Who am I, and what have I spent all of these years doing with my life?

What’s Lost

I can remember the first time I lost something irretrievably.

I was four years old, at the beach with my father, wading out into the water until it reached my waist. I brought my favorite toy – Wonder Woman – with me and had her tied to the string of my swimming trunks. As the water ebbed and flowed around my tiny body, her arms caught the current and she drifted out from my body for a moment before sinking, inexorably, never to surface again.

I later received another Wonder Woman – the first of many – but the lesson was not lost on me. Don’t be capricious with what you’ve collected. Don’t risk.

I was a forgetful teenager, so I lost a lot of other things. Pencil cases, keys, and calculators. But, never anything too important – a thing I collected. Never a GI Joe or a comic book. Only twice the lyrics to songs. Never a friend I meant to keep.

If there is is a second disappointing truth I’ve learned in the past year, it is that I cannot always control the things I lose, no matter how much care I take. Moments left unrecorded are forgotten. Instruments are worn and can break down irreparably. Teams of colleagues splinter and move on. Friends depart.

The Mystery

Every day I debate if I am trying to raise another collector. It helps that one of EV6’s nicknames is “chaos baby,'” and that she enjoys knocking things over and spreading them out much better than amassing them in a neat pile.

Earlier this year a friend gave EV6 a trio of adorably wobbly wheeled dinosaurs, and I noticed on the back of one of their packages there was a fourth. Of course, you can imagine that I immediately set out on an online search for the wayward member of the quartet. After five minutes I looked down to see EV6 mashing one of their heads into her mouth. She’s perfectly happy with three, I thought. The fourth could remain a mystery.

When you’ve spent your whole life being a collector the mystery is both your inspiration and antithesis. You thrill in tracking down a missing piece, but its absence seems to detract from the parts of the puzzle you’ve completed. So you strive to eliminate the mystery, brighten all the corners, place every piece – only to find that your completed collection sans the mystery isn’t as satisfying as it was with one last thing to strive for.

I’m trying to learn to appreciate the mystery. It’s still hard for me to not go back for an episode of a show I dozed off while watching, or to avoid picking up an awful back-catalog album from a now-mature musician.

However, I have come to accept that this blog isn’t complete. It never was. Each year I spend this day highlighting my favorite posts, but also the memories that went by the wayside – now disappearing through a haze of recollection like that tiny plastic superhero into the waters of New Jersey.

The best thing I can do here is the same as the best thing I can due with my tiny ball of chaos: be honest. Be honest about what I do write, and about what doesn’t need to be written. Be honest that I appreciate my memories and your attention to them, but that if I don’t go out and live I’ll never have stories to tell later. Be honest that it hurts to lose things, but you’ve never truly lost a thing you’ve loved.

I love this blog and every moment I’ve spent writing it, so it will never be lost. I delight in adding to it whenever I am able because I am always willing.

Thank you for finding it and reading it for these past fourteen years.

Thank you, and happy birthday to this.

Why do you do the things you do?

This is a question I find myself asking frequently – and often out loud – as I share the house with a four-weeks-old-today baby girl. Are you crying because you are hungry, tired, or in need of diaper? Are you trying to fling yourself away from my person because you are hungry, tired, being held too tightly, or have a baby death wish. Et cetera.

It’s hard to get an answer out of her – not only due to her still-developing communication skills, because baby motivation is inscrutable. It’s very possible the thing she is doing is some involuntary bodily response she can’t control and that her shock at it happening is only causing it to happen even more, like a cat chasing its own fleeing tail.

A year or two from now the answers might be different because the needs might have evolved. She may cry because she can’t have a specific food or wants to go to sleep. She might fling herself from my person to grab something she’s interested in or to be closer to her mother. Her reasons will take into account emotional fulfillment and desire, but also the way we helped her deal with those bodily needs. If she gets picked up every time she cries, she might very well cry in order to be picked up. Later, she might cry because she can’t go to a concert she wants to see (unlikely) or fling herself away from my person because dads are uncool (equally as unlikely).What all of those reasons have in common is that they are physiological. This is the nature of a body’s hierarchy of needs, Maslow’s or otherwise. Whether it’s baby humans or baby naked mole rats, they don’t generally come out seeking self-actualization. They want to sustain their system.

That’s a whole parenting post for another time.

At some much later point, we’re us – fully-formed, fully-autonomous beings with all sorts of things we do based on a latticework of needs built upon other needs. I need to listen to music almost daily or I start to get depressed. I need to organize a row of books or else it will bother me. I need to present in front of crowds and see or hear their feedback.

Why do I do those things? I can’t tell you, exactly. They aren’t always convenient or good for me. Sometimes they surprise me, even as I am doing them, just like my baby involuntarily trying to fling herself out of my arms and down a staircase.

Among those surprises, is that I still feel the need to blog – especially on this day, thirteen years after the day when this all began on August 26, 2000.

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“We all wish something would happen.”

I have an infant daughter and a teenage blog.

If you had told the author of my infant blog that he would eventually be writing on the first teenage birthday of his blog about his infant daughter he would have laughed insanely, said he wasn’t so sure he wanted to have children, and then asked if your time traveling would lead to some sort of causality paradox.

Yet, you can easily sketch that progress across thirteen years of Crushing Krisis. Almost everything I do has changed aside from writing songs, while this particular thing has stayed exactly the same. CK remembers a time before I had been in live, a time before I had a career, a time when being in a band seemed like some faraway fantasy.

An examination of past birthday posts track this progression an increasingly celebratory tone. I’m always crowing about some experience or achievement and about how the years just keep getting better and better.

Since I don’t lie on Crushing Krisis, I’ll tell you now: this isn’t one of those posts. The past year was awesome but it was also awful.

We had a baby, but it was not easy to get there as a couple and as a team. I have a new job, but it was excruciating to leave a role I loved and a family I cared about after a decade – it was the hardest decision I’ve made in my life. I watched the best fitness of my life – the first time I was ever happy with my own body – slip away due to persistent injuries and demands on my time.

Arcati Crisis and Smash Fantastic played some of their biggest and best shows yet, but Filmstar quite suddenly stalled and recording has been a slow-going battle for Gina and I. I edited and expanded my novel with a talented group of writers only to realize I have a long ways to go in defining motivation and showing agency before I arrive at a complete work.

And, despite being the most profitable year of CK thanks to the awesome folks who use my comic book collecting guides, to my unending disappointment this year featured lowest number of new CK posts of all time. There are single days thirteen years ago where I posted as much as I did in the entirety of the past twelve months, and the negative space tells the story of my disappointment as clearly as the posts do.

It would be disingenuous and nearly delusional to call that a bad year. Look at all that amazing stuff that happened to me! I am alive, upright, and physically safe. I am fed, clothed, and gainfully employed.

Yes, all of those needs are met, and maybe if I was a well-fed naked mole rat with a charming wheel to run in I would be satisfied with that. That’s not how being human works – at least, not for me. I do things because I want to do more things – bigger, better things, and I write this post every year in celebration but also to prove that things got done.

Earlier this year I couldn’t blog about our being pregnant, because it wasn’t safe to discuss yet, but I still wrote down the stories. I felt compelled to document the insane thrill and danger of each moment unfiltered by hindsight and experience in a way that I could relive later, and I read them to friends breathlessly before they found their way onto the blog.

Out to dinner at about the mid-way point of our pregnancy, my mother handed me an envelope with an spiral-bound flip-book of photos nearly as old as me, and an extremely tiny composition notebook. The photos were of a very tiny, very chubby me. The book was written in an unfamiliar scrawl.

“Your father wrote about our labor in this,” she said. “I thought you might like to read it.”

The book details her (my?) labor in far greater detail and hilarity than I mustered for any record of ours. Here is a little of what he wrote, all in tiny, slightly-italic capital letters:

This is it? E [ed note: my mother] says it is. It’s been over 12hrs now. Lynn [my godmother] and I ate but mom’s starving. We all wish something would happen.

Note: Outrageous omition [sic]! Around 5AM Lynn uttered the word outrageous and Mom promptly asked to hear “Jean Genie” (Bowie). Sorry about late entry. It’s thanks to Mom I remember at all.

I just realized I can’t fill in name slot on cover because I don’t know what your name is going to be. Now I think this may really be it. It all started around 8:30 A.M. Thursday and dragged ’til now. But I’ll put that in later on.

Well, good luck kid! I love you,

Dad

Why did he do that thing – write down his thoughts in this tiny blue book instead of just thinking them? He didn’t need to write them down. He never remembered to give them to me, although I’m sure he has some funny stories about carrying it around in his pocket.

My dad live-blogged my being born in 1981.

Maybe that’s why I do this.

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Why not be happy instead?

This evening we had three generations of the women of E’s family in our house for dinner. E’s mother and sister, E, and me holding our baby sat around the dining table enjoying a rare dinner together.

A few bites into my plate, the baby started fussing. She had just woken up and had a bottle, and I had just changed her. I was holding her comfortably in such a way that she could see many interesting things. She wasn’t even trying to dive bomb onto the floor. Yet, her fussing began its familiar bloom into tears.

We walked together into the parlor and I sat her on my knee. “Why are you so upset?” I asked her. “You’re missing dinner with all these ladies. Some of them came a long way to see you.”

She squeaked a little cry of response.

“I think you have everything you need right now,” I said to her, maybe a little apologetically – as if I was missing something obvious, “so, I think you should cheer up and we should go back to dinner.”

She gave me a puzzled little look, halfway to tears. And then, for no reason I could discern, her temper passed like the shadow of a cloud. She met my gaze, looking as ridiculous and adorable as she has looked in four entire weeks.

“Okay then,” I said, and then added, “Do you know how cute you are?”

She cooed back at me and we returned to the table to laugh and coo and make ridiculous faces and enjoy our meal.

This life is not pure science. We do what we do and need what we need not just to fulfill our biological imperatives, but because we are more than the sum of our atoms and molecules, our bones and muscles. Each one of us is a fleeting series of electrical crackles across the mottled grey surface of a brain. Some of us are happy all of the time, and some of us are never satisfied, but we can do whatever we want to do.

I don’t know why my baby suddenly cheered up, but she did. I don’t know if this year was awesome or awful or both at the same time, but I can decide to be happy about the life-altering results and try a little harder next year.

I don’t know why I blog, but it’s what I want to do. Maybe not every fifteen minutes, or even every day or week, but life just wouldn’t be the same without it. A year or two from now I will forget all of the awful and only remember the awesome, because that’s the story I chose to tell. And, maybe thirty years from now my daughter will pull it up from some digital archive and read all about how I got to be her father.

Thank you for reading – especially if it makes you happy. Thank you mom-E and dad – somehow I do this thing because of you. Thank you E and baby-E – there wouldn’t be as good a story to tell without you.

Thank you, and happy birthday to this.