Greetings from Intelligentsia Coffeehouse, at Broadway and Barry in the Lakeview neighborhood, where I'm enjoying an iced tea and doing my usual gawking at all the sexually-ambiguous Lakeview hotties passing by every minute. (11 months since I last got laid! Who, oh who, will break my dry spell? Will the circle remain unbroken, for fuck's sake?) I ended up having an unusually busy Friday, so thought before anything else I'd get the stories written down and out to you.

Things started at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m., in fact, which is when I had to leave my place to make the Chicago Small Business Expo, held down at the basketball arena at the University of Illinois - Chicago (otherwise known as the UIC Pavilion). For those who missed the backstory, this is an annual trade convention (which might actually be more like twice a year - I'm not sure), sponsored mainly by the city's Office of the Treasurer, and completely free to attend for any Chicago citizen interested in starting their own small business. And why does Chicago find it so important to support local small-business dreamers so much, international readers might be asking? Well, here's a little fact about the US that you might not be aware of - that small businesses (those with less than 100 employees, that is) actually provide something like 80 percent of all American jobs, and generate something like 60 to 70 percent of our national gross product, facts that are conveniently ignored by the international press every time they want to make a snarky point about another Starbucks opening in China or whatever. As a result, the cities here in America that are thriving the most (including Chicago) are finding it increasingly important to not only encourage people to start their own small business, but to establish the business there where they're currently living, versus moving to another city to do so. And so that's why Chicago has such a pervasive system of government resources for local small-business owners; why we have one of the largest and busiest Small Business Administration offices in the country (a federal agency whose quality varies widely from field office to field office); why the Office of the Treasurer sponsors things like a free annual small-business expo, open to any schmuck who feels like calling a phone number and registering.

Of course, we've all been to such "free community" events in the past, no matter where we live, that have left something to be desired - half a dozen broken conference tables, a pile of third-generation xeroxes and a bunch of bored-looking interns, and not much else. So, you know, thank God that Chicago's wasn't like that! It turns out that they needed a place like a basketball arena to hold the Expo, because there were literally something like 200 organizations there filling booths - banks, government agencies, marketing agencies, poster and printing services, third-party payroll services, special-event coordinators. I mean, literally, picture just about any industry somehow associated with small business, and there was a booth there representing them.

I ended up having a whole bunch of interesting conversations, as you can imagine, and for the first time finally got some solid financial data that I can stick into my business plan, as far as what I can expect a third-party payroll service to cost me, an annual external audit of our books, etc. Plus, I finally, finally sat down and talked to the boys at SCORE (it's always boys as SCORE, it seems), a non-profit collection of retired corporate executives, who exist to do nothing but consult on business plans, get small-business dreamers hooked up with financing sources, etc. (In fact, here in Chicago SCORE and the SBA actually share physical offices, down in the Loop, and often share consulting duties with a new client simultaneously.) I've been meaning for months now to contact SCORE and to set up a formal critique session for my nearly-completed business plan, so it was great on Friday to finally just sit there and actually do it. Anyway, my session with them is actually tomorrow morning, so I'll let you know tomorrow afternoon how it went.

So on top of all the booths, another thing the Expo did was sponsor a whole series of free workshops throughout the day as well, across the street at the UIC student center. And man, those were great too! The most interesting by far was a talk from Chicago's new Department of Business Affairs and Licensing, which is so new that they technically haven't even opened for business yet. (They promised that their new offices, on the eighth floor of City Hall, would be painted and ready for business by October 1.)

The new agency was basically spurred by a common complaint here among small-business owners in Chicago - that the process of applying for all the various city licenses required here is fucking maddening, with the various programs being run by three or four different agencies, and none of the bureaucrats knowing anything else about any of the other departments' licenses. So, the city authorized the creation of a new agency, where each and every license the city dispenses will be brought together, and a giant "all in one" application process will be created for new small-business owners, including informed bureaucrats who will sit down and act more like "case managers" with new business owners. And that's great, because the complaints about the old system really are true (including the fact that it takes nearly two years for a lot of people to get a liquor license in Chicago, between the red tape and all the corrupt mafia guys who have to be bribed along the way).

Anyway, as you can probably tell, the Expo was what I consider a day well spent, and I encourage all of you in Chicago to attend the next one yourself, if you too have ever been interested in starting your own small business. You never know what kind of inspiration you might find there!

Okay, so I was back in my apartment by 3:00 or 4:00 or so, had a couple of hours to rest, and then on Friday night it was off to Strawdog Theatre (near Broadway and Grace) to attend a play by one of my readers, Mass Mind Rape by Chris Tutor. (Chris offered me a free ticket in exchange for me reviewing it here, which I'm happy to do whenever I have the time; feel free to drop me a similar line yourself if you want. By the way - sorry, Chris, that we never seemed to find each other that night.) And how was it? Oh, well, it was...it was okay, actually. The play is basically an absurdist tragicomedy about corporate work environments, and how they slowly kill the souls of those who resist the "CorporateThink" required to succeed in such an environment. And there were certain moments in the play, to be sure, that were extremely funny and quite striking - such as the middle-manager S&M fantasy that suddenly broke out in the middle of one scene, as well as the office workers who would walk across the stage chanting "Times New Roman 12 Point Type" every time the company's official font usage was mentioned. The biggest "problem" in the play, in fact, derives not from any limitations of the playwright's skills, but simply in the subject matter - namely, after years of Dilbert and The Office, I'm not sure if there's actually anything original left to say about corporate office environments, and the way they kill the souls of those unwilling to play along in that atmosphere. And this was the main problem with "Mass Mind Rape" as well - what was said was not necessarily bad, but was nothing I haven't read a thousand times already on the comics page of the Tribune.

Ultimately I felt that the play was a fine product from someone whose own program notes admitted that this was his first-ever produced script; the fundamentals are certainly there, and there are certainly also moments of originality and spark that show you that Chris has a lot of potential talent. But here's a bit of advice for Chris, in case he's reading - that you really step up to the plate with your next script, and tackle a subject in a way that not a lot of others have already. Like, I kept thinking how interesting it would've been if the throwaway gag involving the chanting office workers turned out to be the beginning of a whole weird-ass "story behind the story" - that like that law office on the old television show Angel, this office actually was the front for some kind of demonic religious cult, and that they really did burn people at stakes for non-compliant font usage in memos and reports. That would've been fucking hilarious - to go into this show thinking that it was a foible about office politics, then a half-hour into it learn that it's a highly metaphorical morality tale instead, told against the backdrop of blood-drinking, sword-fighting, ass-whipping S&M cult freaks. I'd encourage Chris to take this tack with his next project - to take the absolutely most outrageous details of what you currently have, throw everything else away, and start all over with those most outrageous moments as your starting point. You have a great voice in there, Chris, and now that your first script's actually been produced, it's time for you to step up and take control over your future ones.

A couple of short notes as well:

--Hey-ho! 56 new photos up at my Flickr account! I didn't mean to wait so long to get all these new photos up, frankly, but it just seemed to work out that way - now that I'm updating my blog through my mobile device, I'm trying to visit the internet cafe as little as possible (only twice a month, if I can help it); and since I can't do things like assign tags and create slideshows at Flickr through my mobile device, only upload the photos themselves, unfortunately I have to wait until I'm at an internet cafe to post photos anymore. Anyway, so you can click here for photos from my friend Tom Henkey's recent apartment move; here for shots from the dinner I had last month with my old pal John Davis; here for shots from the Gaper's Block blogger panel discussion last month at Sulzer Library; here for shots from the Mud Queens of Chicago fundraiser and recruiting event; and here for the 30 or so unthemed photos I took last month as well. Enjoy!

--Just a strange random thought the other day, that I felt like sharing...

I don't know how many of you realize this already, but the big hot new thing in the porn world right now are "porn blogs" - just like the traditional TGP (Thumbnail Gallery Preview) format that's been a staple of the industry for years (where porn producers provide 10 or 15 free photos from a shoot, which can be referenced by the person running the TGP site, in exchange for the visitor seeing officially one trillion ads for the porn site in question), but this time with a supposed human being on the other end, actually looking through all these thumbnail gallery previews they're sent on a daily basis, and posting only the ones they in particular enjoy.

The whole appeal of these new porn blogs, of course, is the same appeal of a place like Gawker or BoingBoing (or my business blog [metafeed], for that matter) - that there are actual human beings there, sifting through this mountain of unsorted information that you don't want to go through yourself, picking out just the items that they think you might enjoy, if you happen to have the same tastes as the author of that blog. And it's funny, I think, how much of my ability to believe that there's a human running any particular porn blog, comes simply from the "blog-style" format used at these blogs - with the entries, and the time posted, and the poster's name, and all the rest of the things you'd see at any other blog.

Like, one of the ones I visit regularly is called Sensual Arousal, which is supposedly run by this young bisexually-curious girl named "Lori," who just happens to be into all this really great women-oriented amateur porn that I happen to be into as well (I Shot Myself; Abby Winters; etc). But, I mean, God only knows if "Lori" is actually real; the vast majority of her posts come from one of a half-dozen producers, so in reality it could just be some pasty intern at one of those companies running the blog, and just throwing up every new shoot they do indiscriminately. My enjoyment of such a blog is more than what I experience at a TGP one (which, let's face it, offers pretty much the same thing); but it's only more when I take the time to pretend that "Lori" is real, and really is just this horny cute girl out there somewhere, masturbating to all this great amateur porn and sharing her discoveries with all of us.

Um, I don't really have a point here - just thought the whole thing is strange, that's all. See you again tomorrow!