Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Rabbit-Totems and Purple Dragons

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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.)

Trio: Season Five, Suite #5!

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Trio: Season Five, Suite #5:
Influences (Pt. 1 of 3): Childhood
Like a Virgin (Madonna)
In My Life (Beatles)
Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie)

Trio – the original singer-songwriter web session – typically features original songs, but for the first in a special trio of trios I am covering some of the songs that have influenced me and my songwriting.

You can download the entire Trio, or start from a past suite of original songs:

See the rest of this post for chords to all three songs. [Read more…] about Trio: Season Five, Suite #5!

Leahla and the Longest Minute

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This whole conversion thing has totally thrown me off my agenda of NaBloPoMo talking points. Here’s a story.

I’ve always had crushes. My second earliest memory involves some tiny glimmer of my pre-school, and my sneakily telling my mother i had a crush on a classmate. (My earliest memory being the time my mom locked me and her keys in the car when i was two, which is another story entirely.)

In grade school my life was defined by my crush on Leahla. Pretty, smart, funny, artistic, blonde – who else could my 2nd grade heart have possibly desired? My grade school classes were small, so we interacted every day, and whenever i could engineer it i sat next to her, or did group work with her. We became fast friends, and friends was enough. I didn’t want to be turned into the schoolyard spectacle that a pair of young kissers at my school had become.

My mother aided and abetted my crush as much as possible in her legendarily unsubtle way. When she was a chaperone my mother always made sure Leahla was my hand-holding buddy. And, somehow she once contrived to have me stay at Leahla’s house for the day.

This contrivance was a big deal, as i rarely had a playdate with classmates outside of school. I was breathless in anticipation of seeing the inside of Leahla’s house. Crush notwithstanding, her mother was some sort of artist, and i think i was under the impression that the inside of an artist’s house would look like the crazy masquerade ball at the end of Labyrinth, complete with David Bowie mincing around in too-tight pants. What wonders did her home hold in store? Would the artsy mom leave us alone? Would i see Leahla’s bedroom? Would i see Leahla without her shirt on?

I can only laugh at the bundle of nervous energy and embarrassed reticence i must have been on my big day. What could i have done for hours with this… this girl? I remember in my hyper-precocious nine-year-old mind i imagined that we would spend most of it furiously making out, possibly breaking to discuss our future together and when we hoped to get married. In reality i think we probably just talked and played a gender-neutral board game.

Despite my highest hopes (and, apparently, my mother’s most ardent desires), our romance remained unkindled. My longing continued, unrequited but for field-trip hand-holding, until finally a do-or-die moment arrived: with middle-school imminent my classmates would be scattered to the wind, and i had no assurance that Leahla and i would be seeing each other every day, if ever again.

When I expressed my impending emotional desolation to my mother she, in her boundless and notably infinite wisdom, recommended that i confess my feelings to Leahla. Because, girls like boys who are in-touch with their feelings.

Being a naive momma’s boy who wouldn’t go on to kiss anyone until i was twice that age, i took her advice. I called Leahla to chat and through our smalltalk began bracing myself for the announcement. I chose the kitchen for this endeavor, as it was far removed from my mother and had a phone with a long, twisty cord, so i could pace off my nervous energy.

I paced and working up my nerve until finally i had an opening, a brief conversational stutter and, in suavest most in-touch form i blurted out, “You know, Leahla, i really like you.”

“Peter, i like you to. You’re one of my best friends,” she answered casually. If i knew then what i know now i would have seen that my chances already looked grim.

“No, Leahla, i mean, i really like you.”

Silence. My words hung suspended in the air by miles of telephone wires. I stood frozen, mid-pace in front of the microwave, watching the colon between the hours and the minutes count off the seconds until her reply. One one-thousand. Two one-thousand. Three one-thousand.

I jabbed at the open button on the microwave, rendering the clock blank. I watched the door sketch a leisurely arc to my right before it bounded backwards. My entire life flashed before my eyes. I was bearded and eighty years old, crouched beneath the kitchen table, holding the receiver to my ear with a palsied hand.

“I… i don’t feel that way about you, Peter.”

The microwave door lost its momentum and slowly swung back to the right. The cart must have been on a slant.

“Oh. Okay.”

Leahla’s arc ended at the moment – I have no recollection of her past that point in time. I’m not sure if it was over a long, hot summer after school was already out of session, or if my heart was first shattered on some unsuspecting weeknight, and i just blocked out any further interactions.

I held it against mom ever since – that was the last time she heard a peep out of me about a crush – but i never did learn my lesson; i kept on blurting out unwelcome, unreciprocated feelings for years to come.

No More Wire Hangers

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What to say about my mother that is suitable to print in a public forum?

She and my father got married when she was the same age as I am. When she became pregnant just a few months later she decided that she had to learn everything about creating the best environment for a baby. And, I mean everything.

Think about it. It is nineteen eighty one. We are talking about a woman who David Bowie could have had arrested for stalking on more than one occasion. A woman who changed into a white pantsuit at her wedding reciption so she could fly across the ceiling of the club on a trapeeze. She and my father were both professional, fulltime bartenders. She was the only-child of lower-middle class parents, one of whom didn’t even finish grade school. She herself had barely found the interest to get through high school.

All of that just makes my mother’s baby initiative – and really my whole childhood – all the more amazing.

She did not take any aspect of her young motherhood for granted – she questioned everything. And, my mother discovered very quickly that just because something was socially accepted, or scholastically average, or even medically recommended, didn’t mean it was beneficial for a baby Peter.

Example #1 – I was not allowed to eat hotdogs or drink soda, and my father’s side of the family was determined to give me both. One one occasion I was convinced to eat half of a hot dog and – predictably – became sick. I have never seen my mother come so close as to devouring someone’s very soul as I did that night. SHE was the mother, and SHE said NO hotdogs, so THERE WOULD BE NO HOTDOGS.

To this day I don’t drink soda.

Example #2 – In first grade one of my classmates got placed into a mentally gifted program because he was smart. My mother pointed out that I was also smart, but got fed some sort of B.S. in reply about how I didn’t carry my numbers when I did addition in long columns. So, she had me tested in a controlled environment. When they checked my test they informed her that I hadn’t answered a tough word problem correctly. She pointed out that I had, but that I had just skipped showing my work because I used multiplication to solve the problem.

Example #3 – When I started visiting orthodontists to consult over my impending braces, one offhandedly told her he would have to pull out several teeth to make things work. I think she physically picked me up out of his chair to leave the office. I wound up without a single tooth pulled and a perfect smile.

Also, my mother never once patronized me just because I was a child – as soon as I was old enough to carry a conversation was expected to do so in all circumstances, and to make change for myself when we played Monopoly. And, so I did. I used to eschew naptime in kindergarten in favor of chatting about current events with the teachers. I watched the nightly news and Johnny Carson almost every night of my childhood.

In my anecdotes my mother is usually painted as comic relief, sometimes as a foil, and often as as a too-patronizing voice of reason. However, She will still devour your soul if you fuck with her, me, or her cat. She still has frighteningly good taste in music (David Bowie included).

And, much to my continual exasperation, she still questions just about everything.

Live From the Icebox

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I’ve convinced my inner OCD Godzilla that there’s no harm in randomly surfing through some NaBloPoMo blogs as long as I track them meticulously via a spreadsheet. He, in turn, will not consume my soul with the power of his Atomic Breath.

I’m realizing that Fussy, much like the Dooce, almighty queen of the internet, is a blogger with a small child. The difference would seem to be that Dooce was already in-progress on queendom when she had her baby (the adorable Leta), wheras Fussy began with precocious Jackson already in place.

In any event, young married women with adorable children (Alpha Moms? I’m not clear on what that means, exactly) seem to be Fussy’s primary demographic, so i have no doubt i’ll be encountering lots of cute little babies in my web surfing, which is fine, because i completely understand that while babies are cute they also scream indiscriminantly when you are recording a new song, and i am still way too self-involved to want to be responsible any sort of creature that involves my having to record more takes of anything. This also extends to birds and yappy dogs.

What’s a little disconcerting is that a lot of these people are totally my peers, except they spend their money on diapers and care about other people while i’m still spending money on concert tickets and am completely self-involved. It sortof freaks me out. I mean, i can withstand, like, ten whole minutes of pictures of cute babies, but the lack of self-involvement is a little disturbing. At least Fussy and Dooce are both still obsessed with themseves. And, they both still enjoy a strong cocktail.
Oh, right, websites. The first NaBloPoMo blog i happened upon is called Rudderless, and Loving It. Here i thought the title was just punny and figurative but – NAY – it is about a family who lives on a boat in the Florida keys (to which my response was OMG, they have internet on boats!!!). They link to quite possibly the cutest halloween picture of all time.

When i was younger my mom seemed to primarily date men who owned boats, and even though i could never fit my entire comic book collection onto one i really liked going for a ride because boats just make so much more sense than cars, and because i liked parking it in open water and then going underneath to take a nap. Also, the first time i rode on a boat it was with a funny older lady who had a cat and an inexaustible supply of oreo cookies, whereas the first memory i have of a car involves my mother locking a tiny, toddler-sized me in our golden Nova at a gas station.
And people wonder why i don’t have my driver’s license. Oh, right, topic. Back to the topic.
Pam Rentz blogs at You’re Doing It Wrong; anyone who ends a technical blog-related lament with the sentence “No doubt a bottle of red wine will be involved” is awesome. Also, apparently Lucy Lawless remade herself into some sort of blues-belting rock animal via a television show called Celebrity Duets? I never really watched Xena, but there is definitely something inherently awesome about Lucy that just got awesomer now that i know she’s an aspiring blues singer trapped inside the body of a Glamazon.

I just wandered downstairs and i think it is literally warmer in the refridgerator than in the rest of the kitchen. Gingerbread Latte often refers to herself in third-person plural and uses [redacted] in her blog, which i love. Gimme Sanity is stunningly gorgeous, lives in NYC, has an adorable baby, is a serious knitter and student, and runs marathons. She has pretty much won life.

Okay, i’ve been sitting on this post for an hour now, i need to just let it go. And maybe build a small fire out in the hallway.