(Almost) Famous

Thanks to Tim Engle, whose KC Star write-up brought these lucubrations into the local limelight. If you didn't see the piece, you can probably still do so here.

I was greeted with a number of kind phone calls and messages from friends, but I have to admit I was disappointed that there wasn't a better turn-out at the airport when my flight arrived from Seattle. I had expected to be hoisted up on the shoulders of the masses and carried all the way to economy parking, but the only people I saw when I came out of the gate were a pair of shady limo drivers and a security guard. Oh well.

There were a few humorous circumstances surrounding the article, however. For one, the headline beneath the story on me was titled, "Older people on Facebook are creepy." My brother actually handed the paper to me folded so that it looked like the headline was meant to accompany the photo of me grinning non-threateningly. I would normally laugh this off as coincidence, except that I just joined Facebook last week, and even my younger sisters have told me they're not sure they'll accept me as a friend. How do you like that. My own flesh and blood.

The cover of the FYI section on Saturday also featured a nice story about Miles Bonny, an old friend of mine from KU and my favorite local DJ and music producer. If you didn't see the article on Miles, than try out these lines from his wikipedia entry instead:

...(Miles) co-founded Hip Hop group SoundsGood in 2000 with Kansas City based rapper Joe Good. In the early years of SoundsGood the group was well known in the "house party" scene, where they were known to "kill it", "throw down" and "lace crowds off."

Speaking of lace, it also appears the name "Renaissance Man" might have some unfortunate staying power. One friend chided me about this, saying "no wonder you wanted to go to the Renaissance Fest, Renaissance Man." The name does suit me in one respect, though. I have been drinking a lot of the "Renaissance Blend" tea purchased at Tea Drops in West Port. It's fantastic. Really, you should try it.

Reading the story, I had to wonder what someone who didn't know me might think, and ask myself if that guy in the story was really me. I like to think that I've got greater social concern and spiritual depth than finding good tamales and writing Japanese-inspired poems about jelly beans, but I also can't deny that these are matters of some importance to me. It just so happens that these petty but impassioned laments fit rather conveniently into the blogging format.
Eventually I'll pack it in, get a proper Web site portfolio and divert my energies entirely to to other efforts, but for now it looks as if there is still some fun to be had with this site. I owe that to you guys, especially the folks who chimed in with some Wakarusa Festival alternatives last week. Those were great.

The photo, by the way, is plucked from Jenn's new Seattle set. I'll follow up later this week with some impressions of the Emerald City. Also look for upcoming posts about topics such as The Fairer Sex, The Kansas Hermit, witches, missile silos and 36 weeks in Hamburg. And maybe I'll go ahead and post a list of favorite tamale locations since I kind of dodged that question in the Star.

God bless, my itsy-bitsy but appreciated readership.

the dog days

Well listen friends I just got off the phone with the folks at Blogger and boy are they not happy. It seems that because I'm not generating enough ad revenue or page views they might have to put me on a rolling blackout. Meaning that by day my page would be visible to readers and by night it would go offline in order to give resources to non-popular bloggers in places like Singapore. So unless I can drum up some more readership soon, this could spell the end for lucubrations.net.

While it is tempting to continue to lay on the couch and let the flies joyride on the back of my fan blade while I drink horsefeathers and spoonfeed myself jars of chilled marshmallow fluff, I feel that I must use my between work hours more wisely. More aggressively. More bloggorifically.

So in order to keep this ship from going down I'm going to hit visitors to this site with everything I've got, only in more regular, manageable doses. If I'm going to exist in this blogosphere, I might as well keep the wheels turning...

intimacy, blogging, guns

I still don't know exactly what the fuss is about blogging. I went back and looked at Wil Wheaton's blog, which I'm told is one of the most popular ones out there. I also randomly came across the blog of some housewife (there are more of these than you might think) complaining that people were stealing her ideas without giving credit, which hurts her feelings because she spends all of her "precious-kids-are-sleeping-time" blogging (and this is the thanks she gets!)

The popularity of blogs baffle me, but from what I can tell, the more personally revealing the content, the more fanatic the response.

With this in mind, I'd like to go out on a limb tonight and let you in on some things I've kept hidden from everyone for the past couple of years -- hidden from even myself.

The following is a list of things that I just recovered from under the cushions and crevices of my living room couch:

- a drumstick (for playing drums, not the kind you eat)
- a stick of "silk & shine" lip gloss
- a strawberry Capri Sun (empty, flattened)
- a broken pencil
- a pink Crayola "glitter" crayon
- a ticket stub from the KC Symphony's performance of Mozart's Requiem
- a matchbook from Neurolux, a nightclub in Boise, Idaho with a "pleasant atmosphere" (weird because I've never been to Boise)
- the remote control for my CD player
- a graphic pin of "Dashboard Confessional" (who I swear I've never listened to)
- a bunch of lint
- John Cale's "Vintage Violence" CD (strange because I had the song "Big White Cloud" in my head all day)
- enough change to get two Tacos at Taco John's (but only on Tuesdays)
- a 9-chamber LeMat revolver left over from the Civil War (not true, but wouldn't that be neat)

Actually, I shouldn't joke about guns popping up in unlikely places. When brother Dave returned James's Jeep after borrowing it for a few months, he called to have me check and make sure he hadn't left something specific behind. I didn't find what he was asking about, but I did find $120 in an envelope maked "Ghosty." Also, when I reached under the driver's seat, I felt a cold, heavy object that I removed to take a closer look at.

A handgun.

I was a bit frightened for a moment until I realized it was one of those air gun things that shoots tiny yellow plastic balls. James had lost it a year before, but we'd always assumed our Mom had confiscated it because she hated how it looked and felt like the real thing, especially since James had painted over the orange tip to make it look more like a real firearm. Apparently it had been under the seat for the entire time Dave had the car.

Fortunately, Dave hadn't been pulled over at any point and had the car searched. That could have been disasterous. They probably would have taken him for an armed gangster named "Ghosty."

I'll be back to post more photos, news and KC-related stories soon, but I'm glad I could share these intimate details with you today. Thank you for reading -- it means so much. I wish I could respond to all of you personally, but as you can see the comments have been pouring in and I just don't have the time. A blogger's work is never done!

save the planet/kill your blog

I relocated this rant about the state of MySpace/the blogosphere to a more appropriate location.

the (mock) bloggicide of Lukas Wetzel

Right now I'm sitting at a table in the back of Bo Ling's Chinese Restaurant, alternately sipping from a purple taro milk bubble tea and a variety of colorful cocktails in big paper-umbrella-covered glasses. In front of me sits a giant platter of fortune cookies. One by one, I remove the cookies from their wrappers and eat them, without even bothering to remove the fortunes. As I do so, I look back on my career so far as a writer, blogger, and sufferer of much heartbreak and adventure...

There comes a time in every blogger's life when he must ask himself if he wishes to continue blogging. Few blogs these days survive their infancy, and a fitting epitath for many a blog might be, "No sooner am I done for/I wonder what I was begun for."

My own baby steps in the blogosphere were well-intentioned. I wanted to have fun, tell a few stories, show off some of my girlfriend's photographs and maybe share a song or two. But my path strayed into stagnation, schizophrenia and awkward silences, and a lack of comments spelled out a virtual vote of no confidence on behalf of my (imaginary?) readership.

To make matters worse, my friends' blogs began dying out, and I felt like my namesake Mr. Skywalker on Ice Planet Hoth, stumbling about half-blind on a cold and uncaring planet. Only instead of Hoth's wampas and tauntauns, a different set of predators thrives on the Internet. Unmanned spambots and porn drones patroll the premises, and celebrity smut-peddlers sell soul in exchange for advertising space. Honesty is a liability, and you never know for sure who is watching you.

These are hardly conditions to live in, much less a place to get any real writing done. But to be perfectly honest, I never intended for this blog to outlive my 25th year. As some of you may have noticed, the title of this site is a nod to Goethe's "The Sufferings of Young Werther," the 18th-century epistolary novel in which an overromantic hero does himself in when the girl he loves gets betrothed to some other guy. I figured that, because Goethe published this book when he was 25, I would bury my own Web log sufferings at the same age.

But as uncomfortable as I've grown in this online space, I can still remember what made blogging fun in the first place. You can write about whatever you want, you can make up your own rules, and you might even reach someone. So before I blow the brains out of "The Recently Updated Sufferings of Young Wetzel," I would like to bequeath a few tips to any aspiring bloggers out there who want to give this form of communication a try.

Have Fun With It
Otherwise there's no point

Don't Take It Too Seriously
Why should you?

Keep It Short
Never was my strong point, though I've come to see how brevity probably best suits this format. As my friend Mabel once said, "Sometimes I'll have 10 minutes at work and want to read something fun, so I'll swing by your page only to see some 12,000 word essay on godknowswhat, and I think...this isn't really what I'm looking for right now."

Take into consideration that blogs are publicly accessible (but don't let that cramp your style too much)
A anonymous, or semi-anonymous author credit is not a bad idea. And you obviously don't want to boast too much about doing drugs or committing crimes that might be traceable to your IP address. But don't be overwhelmed by the thought that you're putting stuff out there "for the whole world to see." Because that's actually pretty unlikely.

Be Consistent/Have a Plan
It's easier to maintain a blog, and often more satisfying for readers, if your blog has a consistent theme. My favorite blogs have been written by friends who are traveling, teaching abroad, or writing about a specific thing or place. Personally, I'm all about the variety blog, but with endless possibilities of what to write about, it can be hard to know where to start. Perhaps the most important thing, however, is to be sort-of regular about updating. Because we all need sites to check when our e-mail boxes our empty.

Don't Blog At the Expense of other writing
I found blogging to be a good way to keep my pen sharp and show off a couple of shorter pieces. But I've also noticed that sometimes the more I blog, the more erratic and sporadic my other writing projects become, which is unfortunate. Keeping a blog may feel like you're getting writing done, but it's not always easy to tell if you're making progress, or if it's just blogress.

Don't Blog At the Expense of your Life
Being out in the world, on the town, or with friends is ultimately more satisfying and will give you something to write about later.

Take it or leave it, but these are just a few things that I learned along the way. The most important one to keep in mind is to not take blogging too seriously or get sad if not that many people are commenting on your posts. The blogs that get the most hits are usually the anonymous confessions of some teenage call-girl in a faraway city, which get a million page views and a huge book deal before it's revealed that the person writing it is actually a middle-aged dude across town. Smut is hard to compete with for the public's attention, so don't even try.


I always tried to write as clearly as I could, to make it seem like there was a real person on the other end of the interface. On my better days, I felt like this guy; a display stand of sweets and a bringer of treats/smiles to help people's days along.

Other times, I didn't even know why I was blogging except to show off and call attention to myself.


But none of this matters now...

I slurp up the last of my soup and give the waiter the pre-arranged signal. He nods, walks over to the table and sets beside me a silver dish with a revolver concealed under a red silk napkin. I wave the waiter away without lifting my gaze from the table and set about eating one last fortune cookie. Only as I'm crunching on it, a bitter taste forces me to spit out the cardboard-tasting cookie and unravel the saliva-soaked fortune inside. "Stirb nicht," it reads. Do not die. I normally don't put much stock in fortunes, but the fact that it was in German struck me as profound, and I was touched enough by the cookie's life-affirming message to reconsider my bloggicidal plans...

There were many times this winter when I wanted to leave the world of blogging and never look back, but this all seemed too final, too grandiose, too self-indulgent. I didn't really want my blog to die, I just wanted to take a break from it once in a while, to give it a new name (without the increasingly inaccurate "young" in the title), and maybe relocate to a different server once I find the time.

Goethe once said of Young Werther, "I shot my hero to save myself." I had planned to do the same to Young Wetzel, but I didn't have the heart. So if you find me slumped over my table in a nice Chinese restaurant in the blogosphere, don't worry. I'm probably just taking a nap.

my myspace treatise

While dusting off my old quill pins and shaking the loose German phrases out of my head in preparation to write about my most recent European adventure, I went ahead and finished up my sociological treatise about making sense of life on MySpace. In this essay, I make sure to ask and attempt to answer all the big questions, such as "Why are we here?" and "If half of your top 8 friends have profile pictures featuring perverted/fictional bunny rabbits, what does this say about you as a person?" Whether you abhor the social network or are a MySpace veteran, I encourage you to read my take on the whole affair and possibly even chime in with your own observations. Together, we can make sense of our online world.