Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

sleep

by

My life has circled me back around to September. Back to my pre-Boston daily drudgery of depression. Really, what was the hospital other than an anti-Boston?: a place i have known as a part of my daily map for years, a place where my mother holds sway over everything i encountered, a place where i was left utterly disconnected from all that i am used to, and a place where i was utterly alone. Just as i was finally beginning to feel purpose and motivation, now i’m just as suddenly stuck. I feel like i don’t know anyone, or maybe that no one knows me. Or, maybe that no one knows it. One by one everything is ceasing to matter to me: theatre, class, friends, guitar. They are the slivers that slip through, and i can’t infer anything with what i’m left with. Not anything at all.

At twenty i should have a motivation, or a love, or a desire. Right now all i want is to have that sleepy black back from Friday, like an eclipse on anything else that might catch my attention. I am twenty, and i know how to get A’s; that’s all anyone ever bothered to teach me. In fact, i don’t even know how to care about them. I studied endlessly for today’s two final quizzes and felt absolutely nothing when i passed them each without much hesitation. I got my paper back with a B+ and it felt like a failure, but it wasn’t because of the B+.

Two decades and i don’t think one damn thing matters to me. My songs echo hollowly inside my head just like me voice did in the theatre tonight; i can’t seem to pick up my guitar.

I am going to sleep; tomorrow there are more motions to go through.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7656291/

by

I’m wondering if i was really ready to leave. The Hospital. High School. The Womb. I am at once an intellectual being of savvy motivation and a blubbering mess — a mess of white noise and disorientation. Talking doesn’t seem to be working. I open my mouth and words come out like twisting kudzu vines, intent on covering over my tone, intent, and meaning. My words twist themselves in fumbling green shoots spreading out from me, at once repelling and rooting me where i stand.

My associations are tangled. My mother is floating on the periphery of my life again, wheedling her way in as best as she can down my through, into my stomach, twisting my insides into hard knots that do not come undone. But i am tugging, pulling my guts this way and that hoping that something will give. No one makes sense. I can’t explain my weekend to anyone in anything but stuttering halting words. They all blankly tell me: “We were so worried.”

We. Not anyone in specific, really.

Plenty of people were worried sick about me the whole time, but i wasn’t … wasn’t worried about me, or about them, or about anything. Everyone who said that all blended into each other today. Not one of them were specific. That same wall that i thought was keeping me away from my city is suddenly all around me. I am in an aquarium tapping on the glass. Or maybe not. Maybe i’m finally outside, or maybe i was always outside. Every conversation i slide into i am separate from… the smart one, the sheltered one, the childish one, the one going absolutely fucking nowhere as fast as he can.

I want to find a way to be as numb as i feel, but there is nothing like it that i know. Except — on Friday i was coming back up from a haze of Diprovan sleep, and it was a perfect numb; i have slivers of seconds cupped in my memory while others have slid from them like mercury. Last night i wanted to feel that obscurity, that disconnected. If all you have are a scattering of pieces, you can put it back together any way you’d like.

I could actually pretend to be somewhere where i wanted to be.

Today i woke up and was back here, with my vision fuzzed and my balance a smear and several shades off of my normal self. Class was a blur, like the roadside seen from a car window. I spent five minutes of class just sitting in a bathroom stall trying to figure it out. I hung on to my perfect score in Theory class, and it didn’t feel right. I hemmed and hawed over auditioning and i did and it didn’t even seem to matter.

It was like i wasn’t even on the stage.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7655997/

by

I am in my green lawn chair, but my systems are shutting down for bed regardless of my physical location. First the vision started to fuzz, which lead to my discovery that my mouth was no longer in operation. Next to go were my legs, which quivered and quavered on my way to the bathroom to much that i was afraid i’d be discovered upen daybreak wrapped around the porcelain god in a defeated slumber. Back in my room my stomach gave out, which left me feeling somewhere between full and hungry … which is to say i feel like i am missing a chunk of insides, and the signals that that sends are decidedly mixed. Finally, my neck altogether stopped necking, which leaves my head lolling on the back of my funky green lawn chair, trying to offer my eyes a viable vantage point upon the screen. As for the eyes, i suspect that they’re the next to go; right now all i can see is the white of the screen, and everything around/behind it is a swirling vortex of blackness.

It is sleep; i am asleep except for glowing white box of blogger and clickity clack hands and even they are starting to go, hitting delete as much as they are finding the right things to say. It would seem that (whoops, eyes are shut now, this should be fun) all systems are ready for a recharge save for one: my brain. Leave it to old wrinkly to be racing at a time like this, when everything else is in a decided mutiny against it’s slavedriving will. (Head seems to be sliding off of the back of the chair, perhaps in an attempt to spill brain onto floor through ear. Doesn’t seem to be working).


So, like i said in the beginning of this strange narrative (see last post, silly), this is an experiment. Actually, my paper was the experiment, and i’m sure the results will be painful (at best). This is… it’s companion … my attempting to do something that’s usually a simple simple thing for me just to see how it turns out … of course, that’s not anything i can ascertain right now, but this should be amusing as hell to read tomorrow morning.

(The body says: ha! tomorrow morning? remember that bit about not waking up? you’re not the one who gets to decide… oh dear, i’m talking to myself, that would seem to indicate that mind has joined the fray of … um… oh, dear, i seem to be walking towards bed. uh, goodnite).

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7405911/

by

My room whooshes something awful, like an incoming thunderstorm bantering about up against the clouds. It’s the fault of the heater; our heat lives housed in Lindsay’s closet, and one of its ugly grated maws lies not a yard from the head of my bed. The mighty bellows of heat’s tin home are our shared burden here on the backside of the apartment, and each gust of preserving wind is accompanied without fail by a similar rushing and clattering of air on metal on metal on air.

It is not quite the same as the way my room breathes through the back window, that’s for certain. This is like life on a ventilator… same stale air brushing in to inflate and out to deflate, leaving me lukewarm and half alive in the meantime. That’s about right, though, because today i have only used up half of a life, as if i am carefully rationing the discarded halves and thirds into my empty bottom dresser drawer so that one day i can be larger than life itself. Half a life like clams on a half shell, and i greedily suck it down and toss it away.

Nights have all been the same lately… sick with two different kinds of pressure welling up behind my jaw and in my stomach, and then curled tight around a sheaf of pages, and then restlessly nudging my head over the top of my mattress so i can see out of my window as i fall asleep — nothing as romantic as stars or any of that, but to spy on my across that back neighbor. I would think he could catch on by now, my prying eyes digesting his slim back and swirling tattoo like prime-time teevee, but he would appear to be none the wiser; still sleeping with the light on despite shades being drawn. I can see through to his slim circumstance as long as there’s some light to guide me. Anyhow, his dog has got me made … he knows the game. I stare at the owner as he sits and listens to whatever it is whose echoes i can hear across the alley, and in exchange i sit framed by my half-sized back window in just my underwear and thrash like mad as those beady canine eyes follow the supple muscle of my right arm up down up down. We have traded… my posed voyeurism in measured doses for glances into his owner’s life, undisguised … and unrealized, as of now.

I’m not sure exactly what i’m looking for, or at; the lithe nude that hides inside those baggy pants and shabby blinds is seemly to-be-sure, but not worth the effort i put forth to capture it backwards and upside-down inside the workings of my squinting eyes. I suspect that i am looking for something other than what i have: a life on the half-shell, waiting to slither down another gaping maw. And, it does, night after night — all the life i left unused mingles with the sweaty breathing of the heater just a few scant feet from my head to leave my room a sort of dewy warm in the morning when my alarm first rings at 5:27. Heat and life, to wake me. Of course, it isn’t really 5:27 because time is my false illusion — a special effect that is all too real. But, i have disguised it, and it gets me to and from my nest of decades old blankets that obscure the sheets on my bed at least three times before i’m up and about on any given morning. Four this morning past. I don’t mind it really, because i’m up in time to pick up a piece or two of my decrepit morning routine, and the once-every-fifty-minutes blare of my alarm slices my dreams into acidic little orangey wedges that i can devour one by one, only to leave behind dreamy sucked-out citrus smiles in my wake.

I dream the same old thing every night, and i don’t know why i bother to savour it anymore. I suppose it’s just part of that latherrinserepeat of my daily half-life, my waiting to see how long it takes whatever’s at my core to degrade down to just a phosphorescent echo of the radiant glow it once put out. Lather in the day, rinse out anything i was beginning to care about in the evening, and at night sleep and repeat.


It is time, my friends, to sleep and repeat.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7081398/

by

Sometimes there is a most perfect version of a feeling, and it is shockingly round and easy to hold in your mind instead of being edgy and representative of all the things you were expecting to experience.

There is lust and then there is the perfectly shaped want that is rational and tangible… one sticky and rushed and intense but the other fluid and expanding to meet you when you are near to it, turning all of your tangents into quickly filled-in gaps. Want will press itself up against you until it is another skin on yours, and then you are consumed and it is more than just the sharp angles you thought it would be.

Right now i am the perfect kind of tired, with heavy-lidded eyes and my mind feeling just perfectly soft.

Tonight i took the train home from work with Maggie and we had pizza and lattés and wound up sitting four feet away from Andy Stochansky, who is like Douglas Adams with a guitar. Now i am in her guest room with an internet connection and a pile of new cds but i am the embodiment of the perfect curves of weariness instead of the slope of exhaustion, and the crickets have told me to turn down my music and let them lull me in their cannon chorus … vibrating like a tuning fork until i match pitch and shut out like a light.

I am hoping for a fetal sleep, round and tucked.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5796334/