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 Was I to give my dorm address, which would be out of date well before I could have given out however many hundred cards?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.