fine whine

It has come to my attention that I am apparently not the only Michael David Lietz publishing bad poems on the internet. I happened across poetry.com which, ever since I renamed one of my poems (”wet dream” being too racy a title, I guess) and sent it to them, hasn’t let me go a week without some sort of mass email about a trophy or a book or a trip to Disney World. You know, for poets.

So anyway, I haven’t sent them anything new in a number of years, but imagine my surprise when it was shown to me that I had apparently struck again, writing this poem without knowing it.

It’s possible that there’s a whole ‘nother Lietz, M.D. running around out there however unlikely that may seem. It also does not help matters that my actual submission was done under the name “Mike D Lietz”.

So it goes.

So I am left with this mystery: is there another me out there, or, more frighteningly, am I writing poems in some sort of amnesiac haze?

Who am I, anyway? Am I to be defined by what I do and have done, on a professional basis? Am I just a web designer or denim technology coordinator, formerly a computer network analyst? Breaking those down further, am I merely a troubleshooting problem-solver with a keen attention for detail? I don’t think so.

I’ve never had a real business card. My status as an employee has never been so defined (or stable) to warrant such a thing, apparently, and I never take the time to push the right people or buttons. Long ago I considered printing my own through iPrint or Versa or any of a number of sites willing to run off a batch of them for me for the mere price of shipping and a big ad on the reverse side. Though I could do little with the default layouts that inevitably were provided, I had bigger, bolder plans for those things which I could control. Lacking at the time a title more official than “student” I thought instead that I would throw in some carefully-chosen adjectives like “curious” or “interested” or lesser-used ones such as “eccentric” in a tasteful font just below my name in letters with subtle serifs.

The address(es) to put below or to the right of all of this, of course, presented another sticking point. Was I to give my dorm address, which would be out of date well before I could have given out however many hundred cards? Or should I opt instead for my so-called permanent address where my parents (and my lava lamp and encyclopedias and model cars and so on) lived, though I was rarely there?

Anyway, I drove to Evanston this afternoon on my way to B-Fest. It was an uneventful trip, though I did take care to write down a couple things on my way. The first was “nameless creek 109″ and that means that I can find the so-called “Nameless Creek” (with its accompaning sign proclaiming such) somewhere between milemarkers 110 and 109 on the Indiana side of U.S. 70 west. I’ve driven past it some eleven times at least, now, and I’d like to somehow get a shot of it (or rather have a passenger take such a shot) but until now I hadn’t found where I’d, er, find it that closely. Perhaps for the return trip. At least now I’ve got it written down.

Likewise my scrawling of “Gas 240″ which indicates the best exit on I-65 North to refuel before hitting Chicago (and its generally inflated gas prices) . This time around the best prices were here, and I was happy to find gallons for fifteen cents less than most places (and in fact far less than stations here in Evanston).

Evanston’s changed, and at the same time it hasn’t. I wandered into Saturday Audio Exchange (which is also open on Thursdays) and bought a cheap laserdisc about the Apollo program. They led me down into the depths of their labyrinthine basement to check their remaining crate of crap movies, but I had no further interest in any of them.

Not even The secret of my success, even for a mere five dollars.

I was killing time, anyway, looking for Ray. I have since been informed that he was twenty feet directly across the street from me the three times I rang his doorbell, digging his car out of the mounds of snow.

So it goes.

Enough of such mundane things. Tomorrow begins B-Fest, and I need to be rested for it.

I done a baaaad thing.

Originally uploaded by mikelietz.

Here’s what a flash of inspiration, an hour of perspiration, a third of a roll of masking tape, some black paint and a white t-shirt can make. I assembled all of the materials last night, and here’s what it turned out being.

If you don’t know what it is, I’m not telling. Yet.

(Incidently I’m trying out this new-fangled flickr automatic-posting thing. Overall, I’m still not sure what to think of it.)

Email is a funny medium. Every message (at least every normal one) has a header showing the sender and recipient, yet so many people (myself included) nevertheless address them anyway in the body of the text.

I’ve found, recently, that I feel the need to repond in kind when somebody starts with “Hi Mike,” with a friendly “Hi [name of vendor person]” and I cannot address the message without being casual in return.

Even if that “Hi Mike” is atop a twenty-point email (I mean 20 issues, not a large font) that will take me an hour to respond. Go figure.

I came, I saw, I played some cards and went home.

I’d like to say that I emerged triumphant from the Magic tournament today, but I did not. I lost too many games early on, due to building a bad deck and also from taking too long in one of the matches. I had fun, though, and that’s really all that matters.

I’ve got some twenty to thirty unfinished drafts of posts (from this month, and the last two) and a day off that would be perfect for clearing some of them out, and yet, I accomplish nothing.

Instead, I find myself trying to prepare for a Magic tournament (the card game, not sleight of hand). I haven’t played competitively against people I didn’t know in quite a few years, but nevertheless I’m looking forward to the opportunity.

Well, the new monitor never arrived yesterday but I’ve got bigger and better things to which to look forward. A week from today begins B-fest 2005, and to say I’ve been waiting a year for it is an understatement.

The lineup has been posted, and I’m happy to have seen so few of the films this time around.

So I’ve got a week to find a (headless) gorilla costume, a diving helmet and some rabbit ears.

Oh boy, am I excited. Sometime today they’re going to be coming to my cubicle with a new 17″ monitor, to replace mine. The one I have is okay and all except for some odd quirks. Namely, it has some streaking issues whereby white windows bleed green (to the right only) over scrollbars and borders. It has something to do with the light and dark balance of what is on screen, and I’ve controlled it somewhat in the past with cunning use of dim or bright wallpaper, as need be.

I’d mentioned my problems to somebody a little higher up the other day (we were talking about them giving me a new desktop but keeping my plagued monitor) and today she told me to call the help desk. Before opening the ticket, the helpdesk guy could only suggest that I try degaussing. Sorry, been there, tried that. The only solution, other than ignoring it for half the day, is to fiddle with windows and wallpaper at the expense of time and efficiency. Or I can just take the day off and not deal with the monitor at all, I suppose.

Anyway, sometime this afternoon my problem will be solved.

I suppose I should move my sandwich then. Lately I’ve gotten into the habit of tossing my sandwich up on top of the back of the monitor (over the grilles) to warm it up and melt the cheese, in lieu of using the microwave. It gets a little bit dry, but it’s still edible. Make of that what you will.

Despite the fact that we only had this conversation less than an hour ago I have already forgotten all but the gist and punchline of it.

The scene opens with a married couple and a couch. I am sitting down and my wife lifts up the blanket and sits on my legs. I shift myself, my book and my glasses sitting on my legs.

She apologizes, saying, “I’m sorry, I didn’t see those there.”

“What, did you think I’d taken them off and stowed them somewhere?” I reply, by way of a question, bemused.

She continued. “Well, sometimes you take them off and put them on something.”

“They’re removable?” I was intrigued. I looked down, puzzled about my apparent past of shelving my lower appendages. “My legs?” I asked.

It was only then that she told me, “I was talking about your glasses.” Thereupon we laughed for quite some time.

Our cat, despite being rather quite old, is still active. She often runs around the house at thirty scale miles per hour (in my estimation, based on an entirely imagined sense of scale) completely on her own, but she does occasionally interact with us, too. Jessica’s bought her a number of small toys that jingle and roll and things like that, except that the cat ignores them almost completely and they lay on the floor or elsewhere still and silent.

Except for when she’s in a playful mood and we are in a cooperative one, and we throw the toys around the house for her. Were she a dog, she’d fetch them and bring them back to our feet with a wagging tail, and expectant puppy dog eyes, but she is a cat and as such just sprints to where it lands, or somewhere nearby.

I have a theory. It’s not that she’s too lazy to return it to us, it’s that she isn’t interested in it like that. I think she just wants to make sure it hits the ground, as though to find reassurance in the continued existence of gravity. As though if she weren’t watching it, it might not land, and instead be floating somewhere.

The act of observation changes the data, after all. Schrodinger chose to use a cat for his uncertainty analogy, after all.

I’d think it silly except that every morning as I leave for work I pause in my driveway, watching the garage door close. If I haven’t seen it stop at the bottom and I go off to work I get nagging doubts that I closed it at all and often end up turning back just to make sure I’d closed it.

I haven’t forgotten to do so yet. Yet I worry and turn around.

You might think that to see it start closing would be enough, but it isn’t. There was a day this summer when the door would go all the way down, hesitate and then go back up–repeatedly. There was no way to keep it closed short of interrupting it going upward with a quick tap of the button.

Despite the fact that it hasn’t done this since, I still find the need to make sure that the door closes and stays closed. I can only wonder if I will ever be able to trust it, and in doing so, get back those half minutes every morning on my way to work.

It could be the fact that I never watched the show nor was I watching any cartoons in 1968 at all, but Wacky Races wasn’t all that interesting. Perhaps if I had seen only two episodes a week for seventeen weeks, spread out over two years or so, instead of thirty-four episodes (actually, two so-called episodes comprise a half hour, but I’ll get to that later) in under a week, then I might not be so un-enamored with the show, but whatever the reason it just didn’t grab me.

It’s so much of the same thing, over and over, oftentimes even the same cels pasted onto different backgrounds or the same gags slightly re-drawn. The announcer begins to grate quickly and the repetition moreso. Admittedly (again) the original audience watched a little bit a week, inbetween other cartoons, and not the entire series at once as I do with this DVD set, but even then I think it would’ve gotten old quickly.

Of course kids eat this kind of stuff up, I guess.

In a more grown-up sense, although admittedly about childish or at least mischevious adults, is Jeux D’Enfants (Love me if you dare) which Jessica and I just watched. Clearly sold and produced as an Amelie follower if not imitator, it matches the former film in whimsy and colorful palette if not quite the same playful and cute attitude that set Amelie so much apart.

This is, I think, a sad thing, as Jeux D’Enfants gains little from cranking up the color saturation quota. It’s really a different movie, albiet with a little of the same ideas. To know that one film would not have been widely released if not for the success of the other is to realize that it is pocketbooks and not plotlines that dictate what we end up able to watch.

I wouldn’t even be watching this if not for the fact that the trailer for it has been on every Paramount Classics DVD I’ve watched from Northfork on back. For that matter, I only watched Northfork because of the trailer for it that showed up on an earlier Paramount Classics DVD. Damn that DVD, whatever it was.