Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

high school

Could We Be Heroes

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In eighth grade I started writing the story that would eventually give me my longtime internet handle: Crisis.

It was half a high school drama and half a superhero comic, paralleling puberty with the onset of special powers that brought with them the life and death choices of adulthood.

I wrote and re-wrote the story endlessly. Sheaths of handwritten pages, endlessly revised files on my first word processor, and an infamous purple binder in which I worked in parallel on a sequel novella, allowing Gina to read it once a week in the back of Health class.

I never finished Crisis Team on paper; it mostly existed as a narrative daydreamed in slow moments of class and long waits at the bus stop. Still, I knew every beat of the story, and how they broke down across every chapter. If someone had sat me down at a keyboard for a week I could have typed it in a single unbroken string of sentences.

Then came Gen 13.

I can’t even remember why I ordered it at the time, but when I cracked the first issue I realized that Crisis was over before it was finished – Gen 13 copped my entire storyline almost beat for beat, and it did it’s job very well.

It was too late to change the core concept of my story. all I could do was rewrite and revise and hope to transcend our shared archetype to create something more distinct.


For the past year I’ve been reading breathless media coverage of Heroes, and how it is the next generation of television, way better than 4400, and a comic fan’s wet teevee dream.

I admit, I let my hopes get slightly up as details of the plot saturated the media and eventually leaked to me through magazines. The Wolverine/Cheerleader wakes up from an autopsy. The Japanese Nightcrawler learns how to use a sword.

It all sounded fascinating.

Now that we’ve Netflixed the DVDs my hopes are proven to have been in vain. I can’t detect anything beyond the mundane about the show, except for Mohinder’s hair. The best I can say for it is that it’s nice to watch so many standard comic archetypes being explored on screen. Not thrilling, or must-see. Just nice.

By contrast, Elise returned from her pre-Australia shopping trip to inform me that, so far, she loves it. She even powered through an extra four episodes while I was asleep and out at rehearsal.

I was annoyed for a moment by the disconnect; Elise and I share a perfectly tuned kismet sort of taste in sci-fi television shows from which we hardly ever deviate. The Pretender. Buffy. Alias The 4400. Battlestar Galactica.

A second later I was all caught up.

Elise is Gina in Health class, reading from my big purple binder. She can pick an X-Man out of a lineup, but she isn’t connected to the collective comics unconscious that stores all of those many standard stories – that place that Crisis and Gen 13 and Heroes draw their underlying structure.

I, unsurprisingly, am me, and in my mind Heroes is the same thing as Crisis – just a different medium spinning a familiar archetype.

Of course, you can argue that about almost any concept. Aren’t most of my songs just reconstituted versions of songs by other people? Haven’t I written this post about this feeling before?

What’s the difference?

The difference is the execution.

I kept rewriting Crisis, hoping that at some point my skillful execution would transcend my story.

I was hoping the same for Heroes, but it’s all archetype and no execution. The script is inert compared to Buffy (chosen one fights evil, fate) , the pace sluggish compared to The 4400 (people gain and struggle with powers, are discriminated against), and the acting pale in comparison to the revised Battlestar Galactica (original Battlestar Galactica crossed with Star Trek Voyager (original Battlestar Galactica)).

I was so hoping for something along the lines of that trio of shows – a done-to-death concept rendered thrilling through unusually outstanding execution. And, though Heroes has plenty of story, and plenty of network gloss, it’s that extra ingredient that’s lacking.

Pre-Autumnal Misery, or Histaminic Kryptonite

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As if trying to balance out some great karmic equation, for the duration of what has – despite containing my birthday – grown to be my favorite month of the year I am cursed with severe seasonal allergies that no medication can quite quiet.

How severe? It took not one, but two separate 24-hour prescription decongestants to open up my nasal passages for an 8-hour day of work, during which I was a dessicated zombie-husk of my normal chipper self.

I quickly discovered that if you’re a designer you do not want someone delirious and half-blind from dehydration to be your proofreader.


My allergies initially emerged one day when I was eleven. We were on a boat, near the banks of some brackish body of water in the Philadelphia area, and we passed by a bevy of reeds.

“Achoo. Ahhhh-choo. Atchu. Atshooooo.”

My convulsive sneezing was unstoppable, even after I had been brought below deck and told to breath through a damp washcloth. One of those river reeds was my histaminic kryptonite, and it had doomed me to a life full of seasonal suffering.


When I was in highschool my mother met another nurse who worked in an allergy clinic. Clearly, I was an early topic of conversation, and one night my mother arrived home to inform me that I could make hundreds of dollars if I participated in an allergy study. I would go off my normal medication for a few weeks, taking the study meds instead.

To a teenager it seemed like the easiest money possible; I begged her to sign me up.

It was then that the agony began. For a week before being screened for the study I had to forgo all allergy medications, prescription or otherwise, so that the study could get a baseline – to prove I was allergic enough to join.

I showed up at the end of the week, splotchy, stuffy, grumpy, and unable to complete a sentence without adding several sneezed punctuation marks.

I qualified with flying colors as a perfectly allergic specimen, and gladly received my study medication.

I knew that some people would receive placebos, but I assumed that – given my hyper-allergic state, I would clearly qualify to be the lab rat for the medication actually being studied.

Oh, but, through the cruel irony of pharmaceutical science and my mother’s error of omission, I hadn’t fully grasped the concept of a “double-blind study.”

I returned to the office several weeks later, splotchier, stuffier, and grumpier than I had been on my previous visit.

The nurse received me with a grin, which I returned with a doleful stare. She drew some blood, despite my convulsive sneezing, and then sat me down to survey me.

“I see here that in our last interview you said on a scale of 1 to 10 – 1 being worst and 10 being best – that your quality of life was a 3 when not taking your allergy medication. What would you say your quality of life is now, after several weeks taking our study drug?”

I glared back at her, probably sniffling.

“I’d say 2. Definitely a quality of 2.”

“Well that’s… unusual. For quality to go down. Why would you say that is?”

“Because I’m taking the placebo.”

She smiled bashfully. “Now, now, I can’t reveal what you were taking because I don’t know.”

She pronounced the last three words in an intensely cute, almost sing-songy way.

I willed myself to sneeze on her, but I chanced upon a rare sneezeless moment in my life. I settled for glaring at her in stoney silence.

“I’m going to go down a list of symptoms, and you tell me how bad they’ve been this past week – 1 being worst, and 5 being not bad at all.

“Ready? Sneezing.”

“One.”

“Congestion.”

“One.”

“Itchy eyes.”

“One.”

The survey continued, interminably, each successive question more and more antogonizing, and my answers steadily monosyllabic.”

“Okay, finally, I have an open-ended question for you. What’s an everyday activity you perform while on your normal allergy medication, and how has that activity been impacted by taking our study drug?”

“Crossing streets.”

“Hmm?”

“Crossing streets.”

“I, ahh… I see.”

We stared each other down for several long seconds.

“That’s an… an unusual activity to name. I was looking for something more like playing sports, or shopping.”

“Well,” I sniffed, “you see, I would have to cross a street to do either of those things. But I haven’t been able to cross streets unassisted for the duration of the study. Because, my average sneezing fit (currently averaging upwards of seven and half sneezes) lasts longer than the duration of a yellow light in Philadelphia, so unless I start crossing at the very beginning of a green I’ll wind up stuck in the middle of the street when the light turns red, sneezing and half-blind, until some inattentive motorist just mows me down And, don’t even get me started on South Philly stop signs.”

“I’ll just put down ‘going for walks.’ Would that be okay?”


If you’ll excuse me, I think that’s as much blog as I’m good for in my current state. I’m off to a land of cold compresses and 75mg of Benadryl washed down with some high-end vodka.

Of Undergarments

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For a significant portion of my adult-shoe-sized life I consented to own only a single sort of sock. Gray Hanes socks.

My time, I reasoned at the tender age of fifteen, was too precious to be spent sorting and matching socks.

(Of course, at the time my mother was sorting and washing socks; I only did laundry when I wanted to work out something on guitar without anyone being able to hear me.)

And, socks were a utilitarian piece of clothing – their selection hardly factored into my fashion sense. Between boot legged jeans and tight vinyl pants no one would ever know or care what color socks I wore

(Around the same time I had deemed that all of my underwear be black, which seems contrary to the whole “utilitarian piece of clothing” argument. Except, nothing spoiled a good semi-goth outfit than a tiny peek of the angelic elastic of a pair of tighty-whities. Trust me.)

My single-sock philosophy developed a chink at Drexel, where our job-interview coaches put our impending job interviews in a plain and dire light: if your interviewer caught you wearing gym socks under your dress pants they would turn you out on your ear, having already seen for themselves your greatest on-the-job weakness and deemed you unworthy. And, if Drexel caught wind of it you could be expelled.

Or something like that.

I carefully shopped around for a black sock I could stick with, eventually settling on Dockers. Generic, easily bought in packs of three or nine. The perfect complement to the gray Hanes. With only two colors, sorting was still not an issue, which I appreciated much more now that doing my laundry involved sitting in molded plastic chairs and sorting on card tables.

I’ll spare you a sock-tinged journey through the remainder of my collegiate and professional career and just cut to the chase.

Friday morning I spent ten minutes rustling through my laundry basket seeking black socks. In the literal sense my quest was fulfilled – I came away from my hunt with eight socks. Yet, practically it was unfulfilled – none of them matched. I have designer black socks, gold-toed black socks, black socks with subtle patterns, and two subtly-different sorts of black Dockers socks.

What’s the moral of this tale? I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps that all of those fussy teenaged whims usually have some sort of obstinately sound reasoning behind them, and if you don’t wind up as an entirely different person as an adult you might find yourself wishing you had never let down your guard.

Although, for the record, I still do not own any white underwear.

2007 Song of the Day #6 – Independence Day (Ani DiFranco)

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In some prior July, possibly as many as nine years ago, I resolved to record Ani DiFranco’s “Independence Day” and post it on my website on the Fourth of July. Not on any other day, mind you – then it wouldn’t count.

Think about that – I’ve been procrastinating on this since I was a teenager … maybe since I’ve been in high school!

I’m happy to finally present you with my cover of Ani DiFranco’s “Independence Day,” from Little Plastic Castle.

If you want chords, performance notes, and lyrics, keep reading. [Read more…] about 2007 Song of the Day #6 – Independence Day (Ani DiFranco)

Goddess on the Bench

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As you may have noticed, it’s impossible for me to talk about any aspect of my life without mentioning my brilliantly talented and completely hilarious best friend and occasional co-songwriter Gina. We met at age twelve and have known each for just over twelve years (half our lives!). Appropriately, here are twelve of my favorite memories of Gina.

(Since Gina might not remember them the same way I do (if at all!) her rebuttal will be forthcoming)

  1. In my new school in seventh grade I ate lunch with two other oversmart semi-outcast boys. Gina and her friends – all oversmart overtalented girls – sat at the table behind us. We met when the boys decided it would be funny to throw snack food (was it peanuts?) down the blouse of one of the girls. Soon thereafter our tables merged to spend lunch laughing and singing terrible pop music, at one point during which we were dubbed “Spockchild and the Lunchroom Cadets,” due to my bowl-cut and Vulcan-sized ears.

  2. Gina was already a stage veteran at the time of my first audition, and I was appropriately intimidated by the idea of performing a monologue in front of my peers and teachers. To this day I have a perfect mental snapshot of Gina walking up the stage-right stairs wearing her distinctive purple velvet shirt, her long hair flowing all around a perfectly serene face. I remember thinking, “this theatre thing can’t be so hard.”

  3. Gina has always been skeptical of people who pick up a guitar and want to be taught how to play, probably because no one follows through. Very early in my guitar playing she wrote the music to my lyrics “Falling Down,” and played it for me before a theatre rehearsal. Later that night I left a message on her answering machine of me slowly-but-surely picking out the same pattern on my guitar. Ever since she has taken my guitar playing a lot more seriously.

  4. Both living in the same residence hall at Drexel I became the unofficial male roommate of her entire floor due to my frequent visits, always with guitar in hand. One day that winter I played Gina my brand new “Under My Skin,” and she started playing along. When we were done she said, “I like that one; let’s play it again.”

  5. In line for Weezer at the TLA the summer after freshman year we ate our Chinese Food with makeshift spoons fashioned from fortune cookies because I forgot to get forks.

  6. Stopping by my cluttered first apartment to keep me awake during the 24-hour Blogathon I heard one of Gina’s original songs for the first time – “Real End“. Also, we played everyone’s favorite U2 song, and barked like dogs while covering “Fido, Your Leash Is Too Long.” After my long wakeful night, she showed up with the sun the next morning, bearing decaffeinated coffee and cookies.

  7. Stuck for Halloween costumes at the last minute, we had a twenty-minute shopping spree in K-Mart. Emerging with glitter and giant fairy wings, we hardly had costumes, but by raiding our vintage closets we emerged as the godparents of punk rock and disco, respectively. I kept yelling “Where’s James?!” and giggling.

  8. After experiencing a rough few months in the middle of college we declared a personal day, and spent it shopping in Chinatown and drinking bottled smoothies, laughing all the while about the little insecurities we left behind in high school and all of the larger ones looming in their place. We realized that day that we had never once been in a fight, and resolved never to have one.

  9. Gina’s mother, an amazing actor, operatic singer, and dancer, has always been slow to warm to Gina’s friends, and over the years I always had a difficult time discerning if she liked me at all. I took it as a great compliment when I was invited to cook and dine along with her family for Thanksgiving in 2003. Ever since then Gina’s mother has treated me like family.

  10. Through a series of coincidental events, Gina moved into my awesome upperclassmen apartment, where our bedrooms faced each other across a vast, stuffy, attic living room we dubbed “The Grotto.” We decorated it with hanging lights and lanterns so that it would glow 24/7, hanging our fairy wings outside our respective doors. The first time we went out drinking together after she moved in we wound up crawling up all that last flight of stairs together, one step at a time.

  11. I have always partied through the Fall Back time every October, except for one year, when Gina gave me a complex lesson in applications chemistry and I explained the finer points of copy protection. I don’t think we realized how long we had chatted until the next morning when we remembered to turn the clocks back.

  12. In my first show after college, Happy Birthday, Wanda June, each night we made our final exit together, both having suffered an emotional breakdown in the preceding scene. One night we had both worked ourselves up into sobbing messes during the scene, and in our in-character emotional rush to exit the room we literally threw ourselves out of the stage door and tumbled down the backstage stairs.

    We wound up at the foot of the stairs in a heap, our sobbing resolving to barely contained giggling while the final scene played out above our heads.

That’s me and Gina, to a tee.