It's the fourth sign of the apocalypse, ladies and gentlemen -- Jason Pettus finally owns a credit card. And in fact, it's actually a companion piece to my new bank account, not exactly my first-ever like with the Visa, but certainly the first in years and years and years. And that's because last fall, I finally received the settlement check for the bicycle accident I was in a year previous to that, both of which I've detailed here in the past already; and despite my doubts about the subject, it turns out that my friends and parents were right, that when you show up at a bank with a high-five-figure check, they're more than happy to let you open a bank account, no matter how bad your credit is. And did I mention that yet, by the way? My credit is fucking terrible, which is why I haven't had a bank account in so long, and partly why I've never owned a credit card, along with the fact that I've just never really wanted one before now.

It's just one of those things that sorta generally came about in my life; not from one big terrible incident, but rather just years of being first a poor art student and then a poor artist and never really caring for the subject of finance, or at least apathetic enough that I've just left a trail of small bills behind me for decades now that I've just never given much of a shit about paying off -- medical bills, my old college bookstore bill, old utility bills and the like. And so, thank God, that's left me without the tens of thousands in debt that so many of my friends my age now have, because of mortgages and car loans and student loans and credit card bills, but it does leave me with a credit rating that's virtually worthless right now, and an only spotty record even of my very existence, as far as the government and corporations are concerned.

But as regular readers know, I'm in the middle these days of trying to change all that; it was in fact one of the major goals of the new ten-year plan I wrote for myself in 2004, the same time that I quit writing in order to open my arts center instead, which I've also covered in the past here at the journal, in case you need to go back to 2004 and get a little refresher course on how all that came about. And now that I suddenly find myself with this chunk of money I wasn't expecting, I'm using a big wedge of it simply to get my credit back in order, which miraculously looks like it's going to be even easier than I imagined; because when I finally pulled my credit reports last fall, I learned that there's only less than $10,000 total debt listed on them right now, or in other words only the last seven years' worth of bills (and almost all of that related to my bike accident), when I had always assumed that unpaid debts stayed on your credit report for the rest of your life. (They don't -- a company has to pay an extra fee every seven years to do so, and most choose not to after seven years unless the amount owed is huge.) So paying all that off, combined with a year of avoiding trouble with a checking account and a "secured" credit card (i.e. they hold in cash reserve whatever the maximum credit amount is, so that the credit company ultimately gets paid one way or another), is apparently enough to at least put your credit rating back into the "not terrible" range, at which point your bank will most likely offer you a "real" credit card; and apparently a year of doing well with that is usually enough to qualify for a small loan from your bank, a few thousand for something like a car or (more likely in my case) a fancy mobile recording studio for CCLaP; and if you pay that off with no problems, all that added up together is apparently enough for your credit to be back in the top tier again, and to qualify for full mortgages and low rates and the like. And that's literally five to seven years from now, if you count receiving this settlement check as day one.

It all reminds me of something I learned several years ago about fantasy author JRR Tolkien that's stayed with me, that he deeply believed in a concept he called the "eucatastrophe" -- that is, a sudden and unexplainable event of luck or good news that can randomly happen to a person with no warning, just like the more well-known "catastrophe" of the opposite fate, for example like getting cancer and then beating cancer. (In fact, Tolkien was so enamored with this concept, he used it as the climax of Lord of the Rings, which is how I learned about it in the first place.) And I've been thinking a lot about this recently, because in many ways this is exactly what this settlement check represents; because despite my desire to get all this financial stuff taken care of this decade, the fact is that it would've been almost impossible to do so in a timely manner without this check suddenly falling into my lap, and that with it I'm suddenly going to be able to do a bunch of amazing things that I couldn't do before, for example be in a position five to seven years from now (hopefully) to actually be able to afford a permanent physical location for CCLaP for the first time, instead of it continuing to be the pipe dream it's been since first envisioning it back in 2004.

So in a certain way, you could say that getting hit by a car a year and a half ago was actually the best thing that ever happened to me; and yes, as I joke with my friends when discussing the subject, "...and it only took a shattered hip and three rounds of surgery for it to happen!," but it's hard to deny that the events that have resulted from it are going to change my life in a profoundly better way. And frankly, I like thinking about my accident in those kinds of terms; because believe me, it's very tempting to wallow in self-pity when you're going through something major like that, especially in my case where I had to do things like go on anti-anxiety medication and move back in with my parents for three months, and I had to fight against this crippling depression and self-hatred every day that I was going through the recovery process. And so, just like I now find myself with a much bigger appreciation for taking long walks in cold and snowy weather, simply because I now can after not being able to for so long, so too do I like being able to look at my accident in terms of the accidental good things it's brought to my life, the "eucatastrophic" moments, if you will -- the fact that I now work out at the gym three times a week, the fact that I now have this screaming-fast high-end computer, the fact that it's allowing me to get my credit back in order, and thus one step closer to dating agin, and this time dating women who aren't batshit crazy, since those are the only women you can convince to date you when you're unemployed, in bad health, and don't own a bank account. It's a bit pollyannish, I suppose, but much better than to be consumed by bitterness and self-pity, so it's a choice that for now I generally take. How strangely blessed my life sometimes seems these days...with the operative word of course being "strange."

So did you know that Kevin Smith is now producing a new podcast literally every single day of the week? It's part of a fascinating thing that's going on in his life right now which has been mesmerizing to watch, in which he is basically converting his career from that of a filmmaker into a full-time, professionally paid raconteur -- a fancy word, basically, for someone who tells witty off-the-cuff stories at cocktail parties and the like. See, he and his longtime producing partner Scott Mosier have had a weekly podcast for awhile now, which they call the SModcast, in which they basically sit around and randomly shoot the shit for an hour while Smith is high, and in which it's become clear that the two have the natural rapport of a professional comedy team, which has then convinced them to do the show live on certain occasions and even go on a full national tour last year with it. And that got them talking about how fun it'd be to open like a little 50-seat theater in Los Angeles that exists only for live-audience SModcasts, which is exactly what they did, called the "SModcastle" and with tickets generally ten bucks to any particular show; but now since they had this new venue that could potentially be open seven nights a week, they suddenly now needed at least six other podcasts besides the original to fill those nights, which again is exactly what they've done in the last six months, the vast majority of them featuring Smith in one way or another.

And so I now listen every week not just to SModcast (still easily the best of them all) but to "Jay and Silent Bob Get Old," in which he and his old cohort Jason Mewes sit around talking about random stuff and playing trivia games with the audience, and which ultimately was started mostly as a weekly public challenge for Mewes to stay sober; and I also listen every week to "Red State of the Union," in which each week Smith has been promoting his newest upcoming film* by doing long-form interviews with his cast and crew. And then there are some podcasts I've sampled but wasn't much of a fan of, like "Plus One" (the podcast Smith does with his wife); while there are others that don't feature Smith at all, like the comics-related "Bagged and Bound" or the hockey-centric "Puck Nuts," which to be honest I just don't give much of a shit about. And as you can imagine, these shows end up varying in quality, sometimes drastically: for example, Mewes in real life seems to be just as brain-addled as the "Jay" character he's played in so many of Smith's films, and will often resort to the mere screaming of curse words when running out of things to say on the podcast; while I've now learned the hard way what a nightmare it is when Smith doesn't have anyone else around to banter with, and how listening to a half-hour of him talking with no interruptions is akin to being in the first circle of Hell -- you know, where demons aren't exactly pulling your body apart limb by limb, but it's annoying as all fuck nonetheless.

(*And speaking of Red State, the film just had its public premiere at Sundance literally a day before I wrote this, and early reviews aren't good -- Aint It Cool News, for example, called it meandering and obvious, with the usual Smithian overly talky dialogue but this time not in service of a witty comedy but a preachy drama about the dangers of Fundamentalist Christians. And Smith dropped another bombshell at the premiere, too -- he announced that the film is going to be entirely self-distributed, basically one city at a time through a national tour, each stop of which will include Q&As with various cast and crew, and that will cost significantly more than just a simple movie ticket, so that the whole thing will make a decent amount of profit before coming out on DVD in October, which frankly is how the vast majority of its total audience will end up seeing it.)

What's turned out to be the big breakout show, though, and easily my own favorite as well besides the original, is a weekly look at the entertainment industry called "Hollywood Babble-On" that he does with a wacky radio DJ in Los Angeles named Ralph Garman, which has become so popular that it's moved to the 300-seat Jon Lovitz Comedy Club. And that's not because of the content -- after all, it's mostly just the same kind of fluffy stuff you'd see on Entertainment Tonight, recaps of box-office receipts, casting gossip, recent obituaries and the like -- but rather because the combination of these two personality types literally works out not just like a comedy team but actually as a professional comedy team, with Garman's otherwise intolerably cheesy radio personality tempered well by Smith's constant filthy jokes and laid-back attitude, and in turn with Smith's unending references to weed and dicks made vicious fun of by Garman. It's a prickly relationship, but one where both participants respect each other's boundaries and never take the jibes very seriously, which as a result makes just about anything they discuss come out unintentionally hilarious, a big reason why the show now has nearly the same ratings at iTunes as the original SModcast itself.

Based on the things he's been saying in these podcasts, it's obvious that Smith clearly sees this as a central part of his future career, and not the films for which he first became known, with recent changes to these podcasts that clearly reflect a new emphasis on long-term profit-making (every episode of every show, for example, now starts with an entire ten minutes of commercials, while "Hollywood Babble-On" is set to clear a third of a million dollars this year just in ticket sales alone); and I find that utterly fascinating, in that this might well now make Smith the very first person since Oscar Wilde a century ago to get rich simply from telling funny cocktail-party stories in public. And I have to say, despite my up and down opinions about Smith himself as both an artist and filmmaker, I have a tremendous amount of respect for him simply going out and trying this crazy thing that no one else thought would work, and has me now thinking about how easy or hard it would be to try something like that in Chicago, to take one of those 50-seat storefront theaters endlessly sprinkled across the city and nurture an entire series of live-audience podcasts at it. Maybe something for when I finally get a permanent space open for my arts center? Absolutely; and in the meanwhile, it's worth as well thinking about how a smaller version might be set up right this year through an existing space somewhere in the city, so that the theater's making some money and the hosts are making some money, and CCLaP gets lots and lots of original interesting content to feature and hopefully monetize at the site in some way. In any case, I encourage you to check out all the shows in the "SModcast Podcast Network," if you never have before.