So, I had this interesting experience over the Fourth of July. You want to hear about it?

For those who don't know, July 4th here in America is a national holiday; it's the American Independence Day, as a matter of fact, a day that theoretically is spent honoring the foundation of this country, but is most likely celebrated by being drunken and shirtless and barbequeing and not thinking anything about this country of ours. And I had been planning on spending this Independence Day, to tell you the truth, staying inside and working on my various websites, because that's what I've done for the last five years or so of various Independence Days in my life, and indeed is what I did for the first five or six hours of this year's Independence Day too.

And then...and then. And then I started feeling really weird about the idea of spending the entire Fourth of July cooped up in my apartment, no matter that that is exactly what I've done every Fourth of July for the last half-decade now. So weird, in fact, that at a certain point (6pm, to be specific), I decided that I needed to jump on my bicycle and ride down to Navy Pier here in Chicago, just to be in the middle of a crowd on July 4th, just to see some fireworks that I literally have not done in years and years and years.

And while I was down there at Navy Pier, six hours after I started feeling weird for some unknown reason, it finally occurred to me why I was feeling so weird to begin with.

Because I, Jason Pettus, was feeling...

...lonely.

Yeah, I know, pretty alarming that it took me six hours to recognize the simple emotion of loneliness, because of it being so long since I last experienced the emotion. And this gets into yet one more thing about this massive lifestyle change I'm making this year and have been documenting at this website, albeit one of the things I talk the least about; that on top of quitting smoking, bicycling every day, the new diet and the other physical changes I'm dealing with, I'm also attempting to re-attach myself to humanity again emotionally a little more, to not be quite a sociopath anymore when it comes to whether or not I give a shit what anyone thinks of me. See, I teeter right on the brink all the time of being a misanthrope (or humanity-hater), and what usually determines the side of that line I'm on at any given point is how things in my life are going at that particular point, that particular moment.

And see, for those who don't know, five years ago now I went through a particularly bad breakup with the last person I dated; so painful and overwhelming, in fact, that the only way I survived it was by deliberately stepping forever over that line into sociopathy, and deciding that I simply no longer gave a fuck about anyone or anything. And thus did I become a sexual swinger for about two years altogether after the breakup, and documented the first four months of it in what is irrefutably the most popular book of my then-literary career, and ended up writing a sex column for a year for this goofy British magazine called Liv4now (no longer open), which I'll be compiling soon into a free eBook entitled The Swinger, just as soon as I have the time to actually sit down and compile the book in the first place.

I'm not especially glad or proud of my decisions or experiences in those years, but also acknowledge them as a necessary way for me to have gotten through those years; but like I said, I teeter on the brink of misanthropy to begin with, and recently I've started tiring of being such a completely successful humanity-hater. I've gotten tired of never feeling certain emotions, of being unnecessarily cruel in certain situations, simply because I don't understand that I'm being cruel until one of the 'hoo-mons' points it out to me. So just as I'm getting my body into shape this summer, so too am I starting to exercise my social skills once again; to get out a lot more, simply spend more time outside, not blow off my friends so often. And part of that is the new CCLaP Podcast as well, which gives me a weekly responsibility to get out to at least one cool event, to go around shooting footage and gathering info and interviewing people.

Because really, the decision to go from sociopathic recluse to normally social person is not an overnight one; it's a gradual decision, actually, one that takes a number of baby steps to achieve, for example starting with simply getting out a lot more, kinda like how all those five-mile bike rides I'm putting in this summer is going to eventually lead to me being able to put in a 35-mile trip (i.e. to the Glencoe Botanical Gardens) by the time Labor Day rolls around.

So to feel emotions like loneliness again is actually the goal, which means that the fact I'm actually feeling such a thing should be celebrated, not pitied. That's the whole point, after all, is to start feeling a desire to do things again like date, host parties, attend parties and the like, as well as make my business plans go more smoothly than before. I'm ultimately glad that I'm starting to feel ups and downs again, even though of course the downs naturally suck some. There's unfortunately nothing to be done about such a thing, if you're desiring the good experiences as well.

So yes, things are still going swimmingly well with my new arts organization, the CC of L and P (or CCLaP, for those who need a snotty acronym to remember what I'm trying to do in the first place). The latest?

--Well, for starters, if I haven't mentioned this yet, I had a little under 11,000 people stop by the CCLaP website the first month it was open (June 4th to July 4th, that is), or about three times the amount of people I was expecting to stop by. And that's flattering, and there's no way to get around the fact that that is flattering, so I'm not even going to try denying it; that when you're expecting 3,000 people to show up during the first month of your new website, and have 11,000 people instead, that's flattering, no matter how ethically bothered you are by the idea of being flattered by your readers. That's just how it is, you know?

--Plus of course I'm starting to receive more and more compliments at the various literary social-network accounts I maintain (such as LibraryThing, Shelfari and GoodReads), where I reprint all my CCLaP reviews, and that the compliments in many cases relate directly to what I'm going for with those reviews in the first place -- because my reviews are long, because they're insightful, because they're analytical, because it's this exact type of book review that is rapidly disappearing from newspapers and magazines. And again, there's no point in denying this, which is why I don't bother trying to affect a false modesty about the situation; that no matter what the mainstream media actually thinks, there are millions of small-press lovers in America and Europe who are desperately seeking good, intelligent reviews of the various small-press books coming out these days. And the fact that the mainstream publishing companies don't understand this, the fact that the mainstream critical-review gatekeepers don't understand this either, doesn't mean that the literary industry is falling apart, like these institutions enjoy claiming; it simply means that their understanding of how things work is falling apart.

There are just as many human beings who are into smart books as there has always been. It's the means of getting that info out to smart reaaders that has changed. And if you're too sad and too slow to keep up, then seriously, you need to stop asking me to feel sorry for you; what you need to do is hang it all up in such a situation, retreat to your basement and play with your model trains, or whatever the fuck that sad, old people do when they can no longer understand the way the modern world works. Seriously, go down in your basements with your little New York Review of Books crap, and read your Joyce Carol Oates crap about how everything in the modern world sucks crap. And leave the rest of us the fuck alone. Seriously; LEAVE THE REST OF US THE FUCK ALONE.

Okay, that's enough from my high horse today. See you later.