Well, happy Pride Weekend, everyone! And I admit, I'm feeling pretty proud myself these days, although in my case not necessarily from my fierce political convictions concerning my sexual orientation. (I fuck everyone...er, fight the power.) No, I'm feeling happy because the arts organization I own, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, is finally open to the public and ready for business.

Ah yes, CCLaP. That "crazy thing Pettus has been working on for two years, that doesn't make much sense but at least he seems to know what he's doing." You know, that project that many thought would never see the light of day, and that I admittedly had my own doubts about at points as well. And I confess, now that CCLaP actually is open to the general public, I find myself flooded with two competing emotions these days, which I'm sure is the thing that stops so many others from opening their own small business: a certain thrill, of course, now that the center has a chance of being an actual success in the real world for the first time, not just a good-sounding idea on paper; but then coupled with a certain overwhelming stressful nausea as well, knowing that the center now has the chance to actually fail in the real world for the first time too.

But I mean, that's part of the point, right? That's what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says, the author of the seminal '80s book Flow, a book I've been obsessively reading myself this spring; that one can never really be a success, can never really progress to new levels in one's life, unless there's a very real chance of failure in whatever it is that one does. See, for those who don't know, Csikszentmihalyi is this sociologist who has been studying human behavior for the last half-century now, trying as scientifically possible to answer the philosophical question, "What makes people truly happy?" And his results over the decades, needless to say, have been sometimes quite surprising; for example, that the experiences we end up over time remembering as our most enjoyable ones, were not really that much fun when we were actually going through them. And that, according to Csikszentmihalyi, is because what truly causes happiness in a person's life is not simple pleasure at all, but rather encountering a challenge and then overcoming that challenge. And it's this pushing of ourselves that lies behind all enjoyable experiences, no matter what they are in actual nature; that even if someone has dedicated their life to kinky sex with a multitude of partners, for example, it's the challenge of seducing new partners, as well as becoming a better and better lover, that is ultimately causing that person's enjoyment, not the simple pleasure of the sex itself.

Csikszentmihalyi goes on in the book to detail all the traits these so-called "flow" experiences share, about eight or nine altogether: that they neither challenge the person too much nor too little; that the ultimate goal is the activity itself, not an external reward; etc. And one of these details, like I said, is that there has to be a very real chance of failure associated with any of these truly enjoyable experiences; that without that sense of accomplishment, of knowing that you overcame legitimate obstacles that in other circumstances you might not, you can never really appreciate that experience in the profound way needed to truly change your life.

I've been thinking about this a lot over the last several days; and that, like I said, is because a newfound opportunity for failure has suddenly entered my life as well. Like, I can't stop staring at those sidebars while at the CCLaP site myself, for example; the colored boxes on the left-hand side, where visitors can quickly check for the latest news concerning all 30 or so different products and services the center offers. We've just opened, of course, plus aren't starting up our full schedule until September; so for now most of these items contain just placeholder text only, entries about how a show is starting up in a couple of months, entries about how we're now ready to start accepting event proposals and creative work.

Now, like I said, it's fine for now that most of these items are blank; but I admit, I'm not going to truly start feeling comfortable until each and every one of these sidebar categories finally has at least one legitimate entry associated with it. And so whenever I go to the site, I can't help but to sit there and stare at that big empty sidebar and think, "Well, I wonder when the hell that's going to happen?" Because it could just take a month or two, you know, before the center is awfully busy and there's new work coming in and out of the front page all the time; but you know, it might be never, proving my critics right, that I never really did know what I was doing all this time, and had just deluded myself over the last two years into believing otherwise. And as long as the majority of those sidebar items are blank, the possibility of the latter being true still exists; which yeah, even at this early date, is already starting to fill me with a larger and larger sense of dread, each time I look at the damn thing.

Csikszentmihalyi argues that this is part of the process: that without this queasy knowledge of how close you are to failure, you'll never really appreciate it when you succeed anyway. And this, he argues, is what separates the millions of people who sit around bitching about their lives and the much smaller number who actually do something about it; is that most lack the courage to confront this very real chance of a humiliating and public failure, much like what I'll go through if CCLaP ends up flopping. But man, I'll say this, now that I'm going through it myself; that I don't blame most people for not wanting to confront this themselves, because it really is just a quite unpleasant experience. There is simply nothing fun about having this permanent gray lump of stress sitting in the pit of your stomach, forcing you to wonder over and over if you perhaps have just made the biggest mistake of what has so far been your entire fucking life; and if so, how you're possibly going to dig yourself out of it afterwards, after it all comes crashing down, after it throws you into this impenetrably deep shithole of debt, broken promises and failed dreams of which there seems no escape.

And like I said, this too is something Csikszentmihalyi argues is simply part of the process: that the experiences in life we eventually find most rewarding, most enjoyable, may not have been any fun to actually go through when they were happening. And that's because of the nature of the process, of course; that since the true enjoyment comes from overcoming challenges, it's naturally going to be stressful at the beginning when actually confronting all the challenges at once, for the first time. This is something important to share about opening a small business, I think, something I wanted to make sure to get down before I forgot about it; that no matter how confident you are in your business's plan (and I'm very confident in mine, make no mistake), actually opening it is still going to make you run to the bathroom at least once a day with the dry heaves. After all, you've now just voluntarily put yourself one step away from making a complete jackass out of yourself in public; and doing such a thing is simply stressful, no matter how confident you are.

Anyway, so you know what all this means, right? That's right: that it's time for you who want to support the center to start becoming Members and Fellows. I am relying on all of you, in fact -- those who have been tracking the center's development all this time, those who have expressed an interest in getting involved -- to actually do get involved now, to start bringing an initial community to CCLaP's activities, so as to convince brand-new visitors to join themselves. Working artists, for example, can click here to learn all about our Fellowship program; a free version of our Membership program, with the exact same set of benefits, offered specifically to creative professionals in return for them donating us the publishing rights to some of their pieces. Fans of the arts, then, can click here to learn about and pay for a Membership; it's the same thing as a Fellowship, but simply purchased in this case, for US$50 (around 30 pounds, 40 euros). In either case, both Members and Fellows get the following for their involvement:

--Free admission to all our live events; or for out-of-towners, free copies of our first 10 paper books, starting in early 2007;

--A free t-shirt;

--Your own HTML page at our site ('cclap.org/fellows/your_name/'), so that others can track the latest news about your work, life and projects (click here, for example, to see one that already exists); as well as your own RSS feed ('cclap.org/yourname.xml'), so that those who desire can have future news delivered to them in real time;

--And perhaps most importantly for many of you, the opportunity to organize and run your own events through the center -- not only artistic ones but also discussion and hobbyist clubs, workshops, family events, late-night social events and more -- with the center picking up all the promotional costs and helping you find a venue if you need.

And don't forget, artists, we openly and proudly discriminate against non-Fellows at the center in order to favor you, when it comes to things like our publishing program, touring opportunities and the like; that's an integral part of the point, in fact, that the community opportunities we put together is primarily meant for members of our community. And it's free! Goddamnit! What are you waiting for?

So anyway, if you really do want to help lower the amount of overall stress going on in my life these days, I do hope you'll think about popping by there and applying to become either a Member or Fellow. The faster this happens, the faster we can start publicizing your work; and also the faster we can start buying things like our Sony Minidisc recorder, which will let us start adding yet more features and cool things there. I look forward to your patronage.

So what else has been going on with me over the last three weeks or so? Well, not a hell of a lot, actually; the CCLaP website pretty much became my white whale there for a little while, with me putting in 12-hour days on it pretty much every day there for a couple of weeks. There have been some other things happening, though, here and there, including one of my super-secret freelance clients finally going public; so I'm going to leave this entry up until Tuesday, I think, and then get up another one about all that, including lots of photos, audio and video. Anyway, so that's that; two major 2006 deadlines for CCLaP down, four more to go (the next being August 5th, the night of our first center-wide social event). Here's hoping that my head doesn't just pop right off the top of my body, before this entire process is over.