Man, has it been ugly in Chicago this week - high temperatures of 95 degrees (33 or so Celsius) every single day for eight or nine days in a row now, with apparently no end in sight either. And this is highly unusual for Chicago at this time of year (usually it's hovering right around the 75 to 85 degree mark [25 to 30 C]), which means that things keep breaking down - half the el stations on the red line, for example, lost power this weekend for an entire day, and over 100,000 citizens on the south side lost power for an evening and night. And it's an ugly 95 each day as well, with high humidity, which is mixing with the smog and 'heat tunnels' here in Chicago (the canyons between skyscrapers, which can reach sometimes 40 degrees hotter than even the normal temperature) to produce this spongelike haze permeating everything, and even making it difficult to breathe right in the middle of the hottest part of the day.

Ugh! Tell me, why do we even bother putting up with the insane winters here in Chicago, if we're just going to have summers like this? Anyway, so I'm taking it easy today - hanging out at Intelligentsia Coffeehouse, down in Lakeview (Broadway and Barry to be specific, if anyone wants to join me), splitting my time between the outdoors and in, stopping and showing off my portable fold-up cellphone keyboard to a curious fellow customer every five damn minutes, it sometimes seems.

If I haven't mentioned it yet, having the ability now to not only compose but also post my entries on the go has very quickly become this really addictive thing, as you might imagine. For those who might be absolutely brand-new readers, I should explain that I have neither home internet access nor a day job, so am doing 100 percent of my web interaction these days through my mobile device, a palmOne Treo 600. (Well, that plus the occasional days I can afford to go to an internet cafe, which is real hit-and-miss right now because of my finances - later today, for example, will be the first time in a week and a half I've gone online through a desktop.) Anyway, so one of the things I've been doing as a result is optimizing the new MovableType-powered version of my journal (which is maybe a week, a week and a half away from being finished and "official") so that I can maintain it through my Treo - post new entries, delete old ones, hopefully even trick out the user interface eventually, so that I can edit entries and rebuild files straight from my device.

Now, long-time readers will of course remember that I've actually been composing original content on my Palms since way back in spring of 2000, when I first got my IIIe (RIP) and first got addicted to the little suckers. The difference between then and now, though, is that in the past I've only been able to type as fast as either Graffiti or later FITALY let me - maybe 30 words per minute (WPM) through the former handwriting option, 60 or so through the latter alternative keyboard. Which was fine for jotting down small thoughts that I would later add to larger journal entries, but usually too much of a pain in the ass to do entire 2,000-word entries just on their own.

These fold-out portable keyboards that palmOne makes, though, actually work just as perfectly as a full-sized one hardwired to a desktop, which means that I can now type on my Palm just as quickly as I can on my computer at home - 105 WPM, to be precise, thus ensuring my eventual posthumous entrance into the Geek Hall of Fame. And now that I can type 105 words per minute wherever on the planet I happen to find myself, there's really no need at all for me to be home in order for me to write my journal entries - I can do them from right here at the coffeehouse, for example, and not only write them but edit them, look up hyperlinks, insert all the proper HTML code, and post it in real time to the blog on top of everything else.

The temptation to be out and writing my journal entries on the go has been great, so I've been giving into the temptation - this is, I think, the twelfth entry in a row that I've written and posted away from my apartment. And let me tell you, it's just such a different thing to be a writer in a public location, with the people milling about and the sunshine on you, versus feeling really locked up in a dark dungeon when you're having to finish up entries inside your apartment. It inspires me to write more and to write more often, because it's simply such a more pleasant work environment...which then of course trickles down to you, the person who enjoys reading what I have to say, and who admittedly has more likely than not been frustrated by my lack of website access over the last year or so.

Anyway, anyway. (That's the flip side of writing on the go, by the way - your attention span is a little more diverted, so maybe you don't come to conclusions concerning subjects in quite the same tidy way.) And speaking of awkward segues.... My parents were in town this weekend. And that was nice, although we took it nice and easy the whole day, both because of the weather and because of just all the crap going on in Chicago this weekend (Taste of Chicago, Nextfest, Pride Weekend, MOBfest, the American Librarian Association convention and at least four neighborhood festivals, if you can believe it), and the millions of people these events drew to the sidewalks this weekend.

We ended up going on one of those double-decker bus tours of downtown, which believe it or not was the very first time I've ridden one of these things in the eleven years I've lived here and the six years of visiting Chicago before that. I thought it was going to be silly and cheesy, and granted that it did have some of those elements (with our tour leader, for example, seemingly knowing enough about Oprah Winfrey's personal life to qualify for a restraining order); the surprising part, however, was just how legitimately fun the tour was as well. I mean, I had never really thought about it before, I guess, but you see a whole different side of the city when you're twenty feet in the air - instead of viewing skyscrapers from the ground floor, as they were designed, you're instead eye-to-eye with the second or third floor, which is where all the decorations and cherubs and gargoyles and all that other weird-ass stuff you find on Chicago buildings begin. And that was really fascinating, because it was almost like seeing a whole new city - a secret city that's been around me the whole time, just a story or two above where my head usually is.

Anyway, so the promised bike was delivered as well, and it's even better than I was expecting - it's an 18-speed mountain bike, in fact, with one of those reinforced frames with shocks and everything, versus the slender 10-speed sidewalk bike I was expecting. But it's been way too miserable the last couple of days to really get it out and start playing around with it yet, which is why I have no photos to show you at this point. And like I said, the heat isn't expected to let up soon - in fact, it's not going to be until next Friday that they're expecting the weather to stay below the 90s, so it looks like it's going to be another four days or so until I really give the bike its first good test around the city. Anyway, I'll make sure to bring my camera along then, so you can see plenty of pictures of it in action. Thanks again, mom and dad, for the wonderful unexpected gift.

While I'm here, I wanted to try to briefly go over what will be going on with me over the next couple of weeks...

So like I said, we're on the home stretch of the new website design; most of the templates are frozen at this point, in fact, and only minor changes are taking place on the rest. In fact, the biggest task really left with the new design is all the detailed work that goes into making it "official" - getting the information pages written that you see in the black bar at the top of the page (contact, about, etc), getting all the links in the sidebar working, etc. Then at some moment in the near future I'll declare myself ready (and will have plenty of time to spare at the internet cafe), and the Grand Switchover will officially take place - I'll put up a "this site has moved" page at Geocities, I'll move the location of the new blog from its private "sandbox" folder (jasonpettus.com/blog, that is, which is where you find it right now) to the public root location (jasonpettus.com, that is), get the new AvantGo channel up and running, get the direct links to Bloglines and myYahoo and the like up and running, and be officially done with my Geocities site for good and ready to start using my main website exclusively.

At that point, then, I sit down and quickly finish up my latest travel book, Ach Du Heilige Scheisse!, which thankfully only has maybe four or five days' worth of work left before it's ready to be released. It's at this point, in fact, that you may start seeing a whole lot more of me around the web, because I've decided for the first time to also run an active marketing campaign for the electronic book, at the same time that I get it delivered to the people who have already purchased a copy. Specifically, over the last couple of months I've been putting together a master list of about 250 or so 'litbloggers,' those literary reviewers and other book lovers who are currently running their own blogs on the subject and have been getting quite the amount of attention lately.

My thinking is this - for about US$1,000 (800 euros, 500 pounds) I can finally run off several hundred paper copies of not only my latest book but also the one before that (Das Ist Kool) and finally get those out to those dear, patient souls who pre-purchased the copies before the tours themselves, and who in some cases have been waiting over two fucking years for it. And with the price I charge for the electronic book ($10), all I would really need to do is sell 100 copies of the electronic version online in order to raise this thousand dollars for the printing bill. And if I could get half the litbloggers I'm planning on contacting to at least mention the book, if not do a review of it or an online interview with me, that's less than one reader apiece that these blogs would have to convince to buy the book in order for me to meet my sales goal.

Well, fuck, if I can manage to convince such great places as Conversational Reading, Chekhov's Mistress and Bookslut to mention the book and maybe do a favorable write-up, I think I can almost guarantee that at least one reader at each of these types of places will end up buying the electronic book, and with luck a lot more. I acknowledge that electronic books are still a hard sell these days, which is why I usually give mine out for free; since I don't give out the travel ones for free, though, I thought I'd at least try this and see what might come of it; my sales goals are so small, frankly, and readers will get so much more for their money than they usually do with electronic books (including seven different versions of the book, for everything from tabletPC to European laserprinters to mobile devices, all for their one $10 purchase price), that I have to imagine that I have a good shot of meeting my 100-copy goal. Anyway, you'll be able to play an active part in the marketing campaign when it happens, if you want; but there will of course be a lot more information concerning this when the book's finally ready to be released.

Then after that I start releasing the reorganization of my poetry, which is a project from last year that long-time readers will remember; basically, since I definitely no longer have anything to do with the performance-poetry community, and have no plans to become an active writer in that format again, last year I decided it was finally time to sit down and get definitive editions published of the 400 or so pieces I did write during my years in the scene. While I was at it I wrote new notes for all the pieces as well, explaining what inspired them and what crazy stories might have accompanied their original performances; and I also wrote a new long-form essay as well, a sort of memoir of my time in the scene broken down by year.

Anyway, so the new series consists of 15 books: there are the six books now that collect up all the general work I wrote during those years (Chicago Stories 1996-2001); the four that are transcripts of special themed performances I was commissioned to write over the years (Jasonettes, The Heatseeker, Notes from my Grandmother's Funeral and Celibate); The Tao of Now, an experimental book I wrote in 1999, combining the rhythm of slam poetry with the length and subject matter of short fiction; the three "greatest-hits" collections that are now available (The Jason Pettus Portable Reader, More Poems about Blowjobs and Love Blender); and even an 800-page omnibus edition (Complete Short Work 1996-2004), to accomodate my obsessive stalkers.

So anyway, when the travel book is finally out, I'll be releasing this fifteen-book series one per week as well; most of them are finished, to tell the truth, and the ones that aren't only have minor changes left. And I thought that would be fun, to stagger the releases a little, so that those who have become readers since 2002 might have a chance to read through a type of work from me they're not used to - a more symbolic, much more rhythm- and pattern-infused type of work. But since the books are all chapbook-sized (20 to 60 pages, that is), it really shouldn't take anyone more than a week to get through any one particular book in the series.

And then after that, hopefully I start inputting the last six years of my personal journal into this new site design of mine, so that by Christmas all half a million words or whatever it is will be publicly available. And at the same time, of course, I'll also be adding 500 to 600 photos, a couple of dozen audio files and even some video files, so that hopefully by the holidays the complete input of all artistic material I've created in the last ten years of my life will be complete. And at that point, I guess, I can sit down and start figuring out what comes next. Whew!

I have some interesting real-world things coming up in my life as well soon - but today's entry is starting to run really long, so I think I'll wait until another time. The only one I need to mention right now, actually, is taking place tonight - Quimby's Bookstore in Wicker Park is presenting a show called "The Secret Lives of Librarians," to coincide with the American Librarian Association convention going on right now as well, which I guess is going to feature some younger punk-rock librarians who maintain racy blogs on the web (or something like that). Anyway, it's at 7:00 tonight and I'm planning on attending (a roomful of hot punk-rock librarians? How could I NOT?); maybe I'll see you there!