Well, it's official; for the first time since my accident last summer, this week I finally got my bicycle out of storage (aka my friend Patrick's garage, where it's been since my other friend Tom moved it from the hospital last August), and down to my friendly neighborhood hippie-owned repair store (and Critical Mass hotspot) Uptown Bikes, where I'm assured that it'll be ready to ride again by this coming Thursday. Well, how about that! I've been mostly thinking of this as ho-hum news, but it's actually much more profound a development than I usually give it credit for; after all, what we're really saying is that less than ten months after shattering my hip, and having a giant hunk of steel surgically implanted to hold all the pieces together again, I'm ready to resume an activity that even some healthy people can't handle, and certainly even 50 years ago would've seemed like an impossible dream to accomplish again after an accident of this nature. That's the thing, really, that strikes me the most intensely about this entire experience, of just how supernaturally quickly the medical industry as a whole has progressed since first adopting the scientific process back during the Enlightenment; for example, as recently as my own childhood in the 1970s, I remember it being generally accepted that an elderly person's chance of any mobility at all was pretty much dashed after breaking a hip, that they were fated after such a thing to essentially spend nearly the rest of their life in a wheelchair.

I mean, it's been a daunting challenge to get back into bicycling shape, don't get me wrong, with me for example now having participated in one form or another of painful rehabilitative physical therapy every day for something like 250 days in a row; and in fact there's an entire future entry to be written about my first-ever experiences this year with the subject of chronic pain, and how it is that most people you meet who complain of it tend to be a little crazy, because low-level pain that lasts 24 hours a day, every single day, is enough to drive just about the sanest person out there at least a little crazy, as I've discovered the hard way. (And this is not to even mention the bizarre things that start happening to your brain when you've been on painkillers every waking moment for weeks straight, which sounds delightful at first but, believe me, isn't.) But like I said, mainly I've seen these developments as the miracles of our modern (post-Renaissance) age that they are, and figure that as long as I live in a time in history where hard work and a little luck can get me back into nearly 100 percent fighting shape again, I might as well put in that hard work and gain control again over my life; and in this I suppose you can finally see a benefit to the intense stubbornness I've possessed my whole life and which usually causes nothing but problems, in that I tend to get wildly angry over the entire idea that some random act of a non-existent god could have such a permanent influence over the whole rest of my life. That's what keeps me motivated to stick with the physical therapy, frankly, no matter how painful it gets, is the opportunity to point to the Giant All-Knowing Finger In The Sky and scream, "FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE!" Yes, I know, they won't be making any inspirational Lifetime movies soon about a man who overcomes his handicap as petty revenge against a god he doesn't even believe in; but hey, it seems to work for me.

To tell you the truth, I still sometimes get palpitations simply over the idea of being on a bike again at all, and out among vehicular traffic in general; for those who don't know, among other things I suffered from a pretty bad case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the first month after the accident, or at least bad enough that I had to go on anti-anxiety medication for the first time in my life. But again, this taps into this overwhelming stubbornness I have regarding the world telling me what I can and cannot do, which as mentioned turns out to be a surprisingly effective motivation for doing things that are naturally difficult to accomplish; because I gotta tell you, I sometimes get just filled with disgust over the idea that some random dick with a car would be able to have that kind of control over me, that he could literally stop me from ever enjoying again what had been before the accident one of my favorite activities of all time. Many times in my past, when absolutely nothing else would do it, sometimes a long contemplative bike ride would be exactly what I needed to clear my head and get back in a good mood, and I'm looking forward to having that opportunity again, despite the unfocused dread I sometimes have right now over the idea of being back in the street again among vehicular traffic. Needless to say that for the time being, I'll be sticking a lot more than before to the non-vehicular bike trails of Chicago's parks (easy for me to do, in that I live just four blocks from the lakefront, which contains a "bike expressway" of sorts that stretches almost from the northern city limit to the southern one); but that said, I'm definitely looking forward to being back on my wheels in general, and as always will post updates here throughout the summer on how things are going, and hopefully some new videos soon as well.

So speaking of returning to fun activities I haven't done in awhile: at the end of this month, my arts organization CCLaP is finally throwing its first live literary event! Yeehaw! In fact, I've been meaning for awhile now to do just a general update here on how things have been going with the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, but realized a couple of weeks ago that I just don't have that much to say -- I continue to write book and movie reviews each day, continue to produce a podcast episode every two weeks (one interview a month, one music special a month), continue to publish and promote original eBooks, and CCLaP's audience continues to slowly grow each day as a result, as does the amount of media coverage the center receives. (In fact, just last week one of the authors I publish was the focus of a major article by the insanely popular PopMatters.com, including an incredibly astute analysis of the book he wrote for CCLaP, something I'm grateful to see because of this being one of the goals of the center in the first place, to help garner more academic-style respect for basement-press and self-publishing writers.) And this of course is exactly how it should be for CCLaP at this point in its history, as I've learned from my study of small business over the years; that the center is in the crucial stage right now of simply earning respect and loyalty from its customer base, and that it's much more important right now that I simply accomplish my humble stated goals regularly and reliably, than to be pulling off big splashy experiments that garner lots of short-term attention but no long-term rewards.

In fact, this has turned out to be one of the biggest lessons I've learned in general about the difference between a professional business owner and a mere dilettente, that the former makes sure to get all the stupid little shit crap work done that no one else wants to do, that they indeed garner an immense amount of respect simply from doing the stupid little shit work that stops so many others from being small-business owners themselves; and so that's why for example I concentrate so hard on trying to get a piece of original content posted to the site every single weekday, no matter how little I'm in the mood to do so, which then forces me to get a hundred pages of reading done every single day too, no matter how badly I've instead wanted to get CCLaP's events program up and running. And get it up and running I definitely have been wanting to do for awhile now, which of course taps into one of the biggest ironies about my life these days -- that I in fact have decades now of producing highly fun and successful live literary events (including co-creating and co-running all thirty daytime and late-night events at the 1999 National Poetry Slam, which were collectively attended by several thousand people, one of the biggest highlights so far of my entire career), a fact which is barely known by most of the people I currently count as peers, because of most of them being page-based writers who didn't meet me until long after I had quit the slam scene in 2001.

In fact, for those who don't know, I have a complicated relationship with Chicago's performance-poetry community, for a variety of complicated reasons: because I'm not nearly as liberal as most others in that scene, for example, so have a limited tolerance for the more ridiculously leftist things that happen within it; because of the community's aversion to all non-ephemeral elements of the literary world, making one's time in it essentially an ephemeral experience with no long-lasting benefits; even because of simply getting older, and no longer having the tolerance for the late hours and rampant substance abuse required to be a legitimate success within that community. (In fact, that may turn out to be my biggest lasting legacy within the slam community, of being the guy who invented the joke, "The poetry scene is like Menudo -- everybody eventually ages out.")

But then there are all kinds of things about that community that I liked as well -- the camaraderie, the chance to be regularly influenced by your peers in a way simply impossible with page-based work, the almost palpable sense of electricity that can be generated in the immediacy of a moment like that, and of course the increased sales of related product that results. And back when I was active in the scene myself, I used to especially love producing and hosting my own events, although (surprise, surprise) I tended to run mine a little differently than most others; mine were always based around a common theme, and usually I would make the participating performers write something brand-new for the show, and I would limit these writers to only one piece lasting between five and ten minutes, and I would hand-pick the order of the performers myself, and would put in the kind of attention to that order usually only seen among teenagers making a mix tape for their romantic partner. And unsurprisingly, audiences tended to really respond to details like these, especially within a world otherwise consisting of four-hour shows in the middle of the night with no microphones, and where the majority of the performers are doing the same old shit you've already heard at half a dozen other four-hour shows held in the middle of the night.

I mean, this was the entire reason I decided to open CCLaP in the first place, back when I retired from creative writing in 2004 and was deciding what to do next, because I have a bad habit of getting fatally bored with a subject once understanding the winning "formula" for making it work; with as grand a project as an entire cultural center, though, I can essentially put each new activity by the center on "autopilot" mode once finally learning this formula (which of course is another key part of making a small business a success -- figuring out what your customers want, then feeding it to them ad nauseum), while being able to turn my creative attention to the next big new activity I've decided to take on, once I have the older one running in smooth clockwork fashion. And it's just been this year that I've started feeling this way for the first time about the center's podcast, that I've discovered a format and publishing schedule that audience members seem to be really responding to in a positive, lasting way, and have gotten good enough at them now to be able to put together a whole episode in just two or three hours (versus the entire workday it used to take me when first starting out); and so that's allowed me to start more and more putting the podcast on autopilot while still churning out episodes I'm happy with, which then gives me the extra creative energy to take on a new activity this year, namely the live events (which I should mention will be recorded and aired on the podcast as well, thus making them a "value-added product" without having to spend any extra money, a key part of CCLaP's operational strategy as an extremely low-budget organization).

Anyway, this first show is centered around the theme of urban decay and urban renewal, because of the space in which it's being held; namely, it is part of the events schedule at a sort of ad-hoc cultural center in Hyde Park called The Op Shop, founded by a friend of mine named Laura Shaeffer, a former commercial gallery owner who last year somehow managed to convince the University of Chicago to let her take over one of their empty spaces around the neighborhood a couple of times a year, to turn into a deliberately transient performance center, gallery space and more. (This is a big hot thing in Chicago in these "Great Recession" days, in fact, figuring out cool artistic things to do with the hundreds of shuttered retail locations now found throughout the city, a fact which I'm sure heavily influenced the U of C's decision to greenlight this project.) Anyway, the latest version of the Op Shop is being held in an old Modernist commercial space at 1530 East 53rd Street (next to the Metra tracks), which among other things has been a bank, a clothing store and a video rental outlet over the years, and is slated to be demolished just a few weeks after the center moves out, which is why I decided to go with this particular theme; and it features what I think is a pretty fascinating line-up too, including short-story author Sally Weigel, novelist Ben Tanzer, science-fiction author Mark Brand, poet Jason Fisk, and blogger/urban explorer Katherine Hodges, all of whom will be bringing something unique to their look at urban decay and urban renewal. All the details can be found at [cclapcenter.com/events]; admission is free, and yes, you're encouraged to bring your own spirits. I hope to see all you locals there!