Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

betterment

family, but make it camp

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Today is the day of the annual family camping trip, where “family” means all relatives currently within the borders of New Zealand except for me.

I abstain from camping not only because it means sleeping near bugs, but because skipping it presents an incredibly rare occasion for to be alone in our house.

Both E and I have worked from home for the past two years and will continue for the foreseeable future, but I serve the role of our errand-runner-in-chief. That means that if anyone is occasionally left at home alone, it’s E rather than me. That means the family camping trip might ne the only time alone in the house for more than 15 minutes for all of 2023 – just as it was in 2022!

I claim to love being alone. In reality I like it for about twelve hours.

After that, I get lonely and want to make some food for someone.

It turns out that what I crave isn’t necessarily “alone time,” it’s uninterrupted time. It’s hard to choose that for myself when the alternative is a rare hour where E and I are both free to hang out, and even harder when I’m in the same house with an awesome and highly-entertaining kid during her waking hours.

I walked away from the perfect work/life balance of my dream job just to spend more time with that kid – so, of course I’m going to give up some potential quiet time to hang out with her!

Sometimes the only way to enjoy uninterrupted time to myself without feeling guilty is for the kid to be nowhere within a 100-kilometer radius of me. Maybe camping is that far away? I’m not sure. All I know is that it involves sleeping in a tent in a well-managed slice of wilderness with questionable access to plumbing and electricity. That’s a combination of factors I would only endure for a reality show with a significant cash prize. [Read more…] about family, but make it camp

time, see what’s become of me

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I am making a New Year’s resolution.

I haven’t made any resolutions for over two decades. I’ve always believed that resolutions are intentions to fail.

Or, as I said back in 2001, “You can’t really resolve to do anything except for those things so explicitly under your own power that you could and should be doing them anyway.” A decade later in 2011, I added, “Why should 1/1 be any different from 4/5 or 6/6 or any other day of the year?”

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

In January 2004 I said I was not resolving to do three things, but that I’d like keep my focus on them throughout the year. They were:

  1. Know What I’m Spending
  2. Be Aware of What I Eat
  3. Use Time Smarter

Even as my life got more complex in the following decade, I hewed closely to those non-resolves and they served me well. As I said in 2007, “even if I went on a bender of money or time wasting, or food devouring, at least I knew it was just a bender.”

(A decade ago I tried to expanded those three goals to 10 Commandments. They were an excellent set of commandments that would be terrific to live by, but they proved to be too many things to keep in mind all the time. Three is a magic number, after all.)

After I had those three rules in place, instead of making resolutions I began to focus on goals. Goals aren’t ephemeral ongoing vows. They are tangible, doable, accomplishable things, like “get my driver’s license” or “record 10 songs.”

I liked to set a large amount of goals in January and then see where the year took me. I thought of them as the corporate balance sheet of the business of me. I’d grade myself at the end of the year, and it could be as revealing to score well as to score badly. As I explained 2010, “The goals were good for something else, too – they let me know what wasn’t important. If I cannot bring myself to tag the last 800 posts from CK’s first three months even with my grade hanging on the line, it’s just not gonna happen.”

In 2014, I claimed even those goals were getting overwhelming, and I was going to strip down to a simple flowchart. I think that had less to do with the goals being a bad idea and more to do with having an infant human to raise and an infant start-up team to grow, plus two adolescent bands to lead. I needed simplicity.

Then, all of those non-resolutions and goals trickled away. I kicked off both 2015 and 2016 without mentioning them at all. January 2017-18 & 20 were consumed with comics posts. I didn’t even post in January of 2019 or 2021-22.

Something interesting happened in those intermediate five years other than just moving to New Zealand. To put it plainly: my life went from the simplest it has ever been to the hardest I’ve ever experienced. [Read more…] about time, see what’s become of me

run ragged and happy

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This is a meandering post about life and stuff. Content that’s all focused like a laser mounted on a deadly shark may or may not resume tomorrow.

This weekend E headed up the NNJ/NYC to play a show and help with some solstice cleaning along with the sibs at her mother’s house. I wanted to tag along to see her concert and reap the sib-time, but my life was in need of some cleaning up as well.

When I woke up on Saturday I felt like my to-do list was a litany of random drudgery. Organize this, scrub that, upload stuff to here. Even as I was crossing things off it didn’t feel very big picture. Typical: artist-, writer-, marketer-me trapped under a Sisyphisian list of uncreative to-dos. The only thing keeping me sane was my Twitter pipeline to the outside world.

As the day wore on I kept feeling like I was behind the boulder until I caught a social network update from my dear musical friend Vicky Spaeth, which read:

Simplify, simplify, simplify! I think we over-complicate our lives way too much.

I read that, then took another look at my list, and realized there was a big picture. It was all “simplify.” Organizing shelves and wires so my creative space is less cluttered, so I can create. Clean out the house so I don’t have a worry of other things to do nagging me when I want to create. Upload what I’ve created to as many places as will have it, so people can actually hear it.

I finally have the simplicity that provides one big picture. I have focus. Finally everything I’m doing points in the same direction.

I look back at the 2000 me. Within a two month span I started a blog, shot digital video of myself, and was the only songwriter on the whole internet uploading a concert every week. And it all came easy. But it was over-complicated. The technology was a tangle. The life was a tangle – pulling As and paying for my first apartment and squeezing in music beside theatre.

Maybe I was on the verge of conquering the world, but it wasn’t simple. There was no picture to focus on. Which was fine – I was in college! But that’s why we grow up. And hopefully get less complicated, instead of more.

It took the weekend and the twenty-seven years before it, but I am really almost there. Almost to the point that I can just flip a switch and empty my thoughts and songs directly onto the internet without a fussy mess of wires and files and wasted time.

And be worth watching.

It feels cool and satisfying, and I’m happy – happy sweating my ass off and mopping the floor, or putting away the umpteenth load of laundry, passing out on the couch while I wait for my wife to get home. Happy without any descriptors or mitigators, because there’s a point to it.

Just happy.