fine whine

"You can never go back" -- Nirgal

Back when I was a high school student, I had a backpack.

There were a number of things that made mine different from everyone else's, though. First, it was made by a company called Drifter that makes simple but very durable bags out of parachute canvas. This backpack is still in great shape and probably will last another decade, particularly since I haven't used it much since graduating from college. Having served me well for over nine years the bag has seen more than its share of different contents.

In high school I carried a small toolkit with me in the side pockets. I had a nut driver (basically a wrench for two common sizes of nuts and bolts), a flathead and phillips-head screwdriver and a utility knife. Oddly enough, even after I started carrying my multitool--which had a replacement for each one--I probably still kept those in the backpack pocket anyway. But I digress.

Attached to the strap closing that pocket were a number of rolls of tape. Sometimes I had a roll of duct tape, black electrical tape, and even for a while some gaffer's tape. Always I had there a roll of masking tape, though.

A lot of other students had customized their backpacks in various ways, sewing or gluing patches to them and drawing or painting them. Such was not an option for me, however, since I knew with some certainty that this bag would be lasting me well into the days when I would no longer need it. Though I'm sure I was a humourous and witty fellow back in high school, nothing I could have done to it would likely be very collegiate.

That said, I did not want to leave it plain. Hence the masking tape. With a permanent marker from another pocket I was able to write and draw slogans, sayings and doodles and temporarily attach them to the bag.

After a while, I'll admit, it got a little out of hand. What started as a rotation of two or three strips of tape turned into a bag covered with tape curling at the edges and tearing in the middle. I had things that were meant to be witty and others merely inflammatory. I had NUKE EARTH FIRST! on there twice, once with the emphasis on the planet and the other with the emphasis on the radical environmental group. This I followed with PAVE THE WHALES and things like IF CRYPTOGRAPHY IS OUTLAWED ONLY OUTLAWS WILL 10111010... and I USED TO BE SCHIZOPHRENIC BUT NOW I'M JUST LONELY.

No bumper sticker too dull nor statement too trite was safe from being stuck to my bag. Sometimes I relied on odd juxtapositions, as in the case of TRUST NO ONE / BUT / EAT YOUR BEANS which I never did quite understand but thought was amusing.

I sometimes used quotes, too, from Emerson (WHOSO WOULD BE A MAN WOULD BE A NONCONFORMIST) and characters more fictional, such as Nirgal, mentioned above, who is found in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars novels (Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars). The quote (YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK) that I used is somewhat cryptic, but I knew what it meant to me. Once something (or somebody) has changed, there is no return. I knew this in high school even, and only understood it more as the years went on.

On the other hand, some things never change. It has come to my attention that Tobe Hooper, maker of the "classic" Texas chainsaw massacre has released The toolbox murders. I will say nothing more about this film.

I would much rather discuss Zach Braff's excellent Garden state, a film which I thoroughly enjoyed watching yesterday. In it, Braff's character Large goes home to Jersey for his Mom's funeral and to pick up pieces left over nine years before. Or something like that.

There's a great scene early on that has Large sitting on a couch, surrounded by a buzz of activity from sped-up partygoers and other hubbub. He's sitting still and everybody else is zooming around him. I know exactly how that feels.

It becomes obvious from this and other scenes that Large is not the person who left town so many years ago. He encounters a lot of people who recognize him but he remains distant. The only person he becomes close with is Sam, played excellently by Natalie Portman. She shows more talent in this movie than most I've seen her do since Leon: the professional. Peter Saarsgard puts in a good turn as the only friend with whom Large is really able to reconnect, albeit still from a distance. I found myself thinking that he'd be a convincing son of John Malkovich, and I later discovered he'd played that very role in The man in the iron mask. Go figure.

As for homecomings, though, the movie's right on. Every time I leave somewhere coming back is more and more different. Last month when I went back to Evanston I'd found so much that had changed, from people to buildings and everything in between. Of course, I didn't write and direct a movie about it, let alone such a good-looking and intelligent one.

It gives me pause to realize how much Mr. Braff has done onscreen and off and to know that he's just about my age. I look at what I do, and then I watch something like Garden state, and I get all sad and envious. Why can't I write stuff like that? Other than the lack of drug use and friends who know Klingon and a Hollywood career and a psychologist father and a disabled mother and a secondhand motorcycle, I'm not all that much different from the character in the movie. I can only assume the same for Zach, at least metaphorically, or that he's really, realy good at writing believeable characters. So where's the great story about coming back to suburban Ohio? Not anywhere on this site, I'd wager.

At just about midnight this morning my hard drive died. I was using the computer at the time, and it suddenly spun to life and started making some forlorn clicking noises. Windows shut down and when it restarted my drive wasn't recognized. You see, I need to use two hard drives to run Windows: my 20 gigabyte drive, partitioned into five or six virtual drives, filled with pictures, music, and games, and the one gig dinosaur that boots Windows because it can't recognize the bigger drive.

I'm sure that if I monkeyed with it enough, I could've gotten down to one drive, but now that is a purely hypothetical exercise. It's all gone, now, and I'm going to have to find somebody to pay to get my stuff back. I've been bad about backing stuff up, since I figured that since I bought this hard drive new it wouldn't give me a problem after a mere five years.

This is, of course, not the first drive I've lost. It's not even the fifth. It is, however, the first one that I bought new, and moreover the first one I had that was manufactured after 1997.

I've got hundred megabyte hard drives from 1992 that still work, dammit.

So I'm a fool for not making backups, and a sad fool at that. To think just a couple days ago I was so happy to be in Chicago with my friends, and now I have this instead. I want to go back; I want to go to bed and to have this all be okay in the morning.

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 gave blood again today. This time around I didn't even try to time myself, though I know for sure that I beat at least two people. The volunteers were particularly chatty this time (but in a friendly and engaging way) so the whole process took about half an hour longer than it should have, but all I was supposed to be doing was working, anyway. It's not like I also left half an hour early to make sure I'd be virtually parked on the roads and make it home even after my usual time. Ah well, this is winter in central Ohio.

Winter in central Ohio wasn't quite the same last year, as there is one key difference between this December and the last. This time around I have a driveway, and the accumulated five inches of white stuff today needed to be shoveled. And wouldn't you know it, Jessica's ride from downtown took quite some time so the task was left to me. On the upside, her kind co-worker found herself pulling into a clear driveway on an otherwise snowy street. It's the little things that count.

Speaking of counting, tonight as I watched the final hour (and most of the DVD extras) of Shaun of the dead I knocked out another seven hundred calories over just over four miles. Sure, I was taking it easy, being tired from shoveling and probably a bit weaker for being a pint low, but there was just too much good stuff in that film for me to quit.

And it's not like I was going to park my sweaty self on the couch.

The movie's great, by the way. I understand now what people mean when they say that it is two films in one, a comedy and a zombie flick. The two intersect but it is not a zombie comedy (unlike the very underrated My boyfriend's back which I do so enjoy), oddly enough. It's a comedy that just happens to be set inside a zombie movie. And it's a brilliant one at that, even with its (slight) self-awareness and jabs at other movies (pay attention at the end for a newscaster shooting down the theory that it was caused by monkeys infected with rage). It's got a lot of heart and humor, and if I were to make a best of 2004 list it'd certainly be on it.

It's also nice to see the actors who played Dawn and Tim on The office getting some more work and showing some ability to not be pigeonholed as their BBC characters.

As for the basement situation, it's temporarily on hold. Obviously the house isn't going to drop out from under us this very week, so we've got a bit of time to sort things out. Clearer minds have prevailed, and we're going to shop around a bit before committing for sure to the seventeen thousand dollar solution.

Namely, I think we've realized that the best way to get somebody to take an honest look at the basement is to find somebody who gets paid to take honest looks at basements, not somebody who gets paid to fix basements with costly solutions and cunning uses of sketches. This is not to say that we won't be spending the cost of a new Mini Cooper, but this way we'll know for sure that we should opt for that instead of a perfectly adequate Kia-priced fix.

Well, I realize the title up there says "fine whine" but I'd like to think I don't whine too much. Heh. So there's always been this crack in the wall of the basement, right? Before we bought the basement wall and the rest of the place with it, the home inspector had looked at the crack and figured that the caulk/cement stuff that had been put into it was an adequate patch, and we'd need worry only if it seemed to get worse.

Well, it got worse.

It turns out that we weren't in any danger of our wall bowing, as he and we had thought, but the whole north end of the house is sinking, slightly, slowly. Apparently this would explain the stair-stepping pattern of the crack on the wall and also quite possible the cracks in the basement floor too. This also explains the just over seventeen thousand dollars we will be throwing at the Basement Guys to "pier up" the house and also rip up the outlying two feet of the basement floor to fix the pipes and gravel that haven't quite been getting all the water under the house down to the sump pump. When it's all over we'll have a rock-solid foundation again (with a lifetime warranty, this time) and far better drainage.

Unfortunately Jessica's not taking this very well. I'm not happy about it either, but I can't see much else I can do but get it fixed and move on. I'm looking forward to having the basement problems solved and future ones compeletey headed off. There's just that minor (heh. Who am I kidding? It's major major) expense of the seventeen thousand dollars and change.

In other news, I've been rocking out on the treadmill like nobody's business. Tonight while watching the John Frankenheimer (forgotten) classic Seconds I worked off another six hundred calories in just about fifty-two minutes. I'm pretty sure that covers my whole dinner since I drank water and chowed down on a bunch of Macaroni and Cheese.

Yesterday I'd done four hundred (and had sandwiches and some rice) and the day before three hundred, but I can't imagine I'll keep just upping the total every day willy nilly. I've got another sixteen or seventeen days of this before it becomes a habit, and even if I notch it up another hundred each day that still puts me over two thousand in January. I'm interested in getting healthy, but not so committed as to give up more than two hours of my night to do so.

Of course, it's entirely possible that we will have trucked the treadmill back to Sears well before then for the cash. So it goes.

Yesterday I finished packing up my cubicle and I did so in the same fashion that I have done every other move: I packed several containers (this time around they were high-tech Tyga boxes) in a nice and organized fashion several days before the end, and then at the last moments I took everything else and shoved it willy-nilly into the other containers.

All of this just to move into a cubicle that is in fact smaller than my one before.

Enough about work. Yesterday I also finished watching the Wire and it held my interest to the end. I have already reserved the second season DVDs from the library though I'm pretty sure that set hasn't been released yet. It was really, really good. Toward the end I found myself wanting more, though, and not just more afterward but the stuff in between. Though it spans nearly thirteen hours, I got the feeling more than once that the show skipped over side story stuff and didn't delve into other things nearly as much as it should have.

These are all minor quibbles. This show rocks, and I'm disappointed now that I need to wait for my next fix. I suppose I could check out some of the other HBO shows again (I'm at least two DVD seasons behind on the Sopranos and I've never watched Six feet under or Band of brothers), but there's no shortage of them for me to reserve.

It's funny, though. I say that I don't watch TV, and technically I don't. I skip the broadcasts (and paying for premium channels and cable altogether) and wait for them on DVD. So does that count? Snobbery is so precise.