My arts center's latest original book finally came out last week, a day-after-tomorrow novella called Life After Sleep by a local sci-fi vet named Mark Brand that I have to say I'm very happy with; and like the other three books that CCLaP has now published, it's had me thinking recently about my life, my career, aging, and other subjects along those lines. Because the fact is that these little ebooks the center puts out are ridiculously far away from being any kind of decent moneymaker; if history is any indication, for example, I can expect to make absolutely no more than $400 or $500 from this latest title, with half of that of course going to the author, which means I'd have to publish over a hundred of them a year just to make the same kind of salary as I would as a low-level office secretary (i.e. around $25,000 a year, the absolute minimum I need to live in Chicago). And so until CCLaP has the capacity to pay me that kind of money, it's always essentially going to be more like a toy or hobby than job or career, no matter how seriously I take it, no matter how close I am at any given point to it being my main source of revenue; so while I'm very happy with the release of Life After Sleep, right now it's hard for me to see it as much more than having just played my latest move in a giant game I've been conducting since 2007, that game being "Let's Convince People To Give A Shit That I've Started An Arts Center," and my opponent being the entire rest of the human fucking race.

But then again, now that I'm in my forties, I find myself thinking a lot about middle-age, the questions that middle-aged men ask themselves at this point in their lives, and how I might or might not be reacting differently to them if the circumstances in my life were different; for example, how it's highly doubtful that I in particular am going to go through a mid-life crisis, and that if I were the type of person who had one, doing something like opening an arts center would be my exact response to it anyway. And that's not something I take lightly, because over the years I've learned at least one of the great lessons that life has to teach us, that we tend to blow off the problems that people in other life circumstances have that we don't, instead of being happy and grateful that we've managed to avoid those problems ourselves. And now that I'm middle-aged, I gotta say, I can quite easily see just how miserable so many other middle-aged men around me are, and how even my friends deal many times with some pretty dark issues that I never have to even contemplate; and in fact, this is one of my greatest pleasures in publishing fellow middle-agers like Brand and his peer Ben Tanzer, is that they are both middle-class husbands and fathers who examine all kinds of fascinating moral issues in their work regarding these subjects.

The fact is that I shouldn't blow off the relief of knowing that I'm not going to have a mid-life crisis, because the fact is that I'm exactly the kind of guy who has one; or, that is, in an alternate universe, I'm exactly that guy who was a creative and motivated young artist but who in his thirties turned to a life of middle-class corporate mediocracy (for any of the ten thousand reasons that people do, both legitimate and il-), then right around 42 has a big giant freakout over it all, and leaves his family and quits his job and motorcycles across Asia or opens an arts center or whatever dumb shit I do in that particular space-time thread. And I'm glad for that, because that's an extremely important part of my life -- the fact that I can definitively state what I do, the fact that I can take a clear moral inventory of myself and ultimately come out on the positive instead of negative side of the karmic balance range. This used to be not much more than a platitude when I was young, but is something I find more and more important with each passing year, the issue that mainly influences whether we're to have a mid-life crisis in the first place -- the question of whether we're a decent human being, of whether we're doing something decent with our lives, something constructive or destructive, something that adds a tiny bit more to the world or that takes a tiny bit away.

Say what you will about the lack of money, stability and health, but I'm at least ethically proud of being in the arts for a living, of my job being to present new and beautiful things to the world instead of convincing preteen girls to spend every cent they own on dressing like a slut. I'm not trapped in a loveless marriage, like some of my unnamed middle-aged friends are; I don't slightly resent my children for ruining my aspirations; I'm not stuck like an indentured servant in a job I detest because of a loan I won't get paid off for decades still to come. Or, you know, if you want to be less dramatic -- I'm not a high-school principal. My job is to expand minds, not belittle them. To create things that used to not exist, not take away things that someone else has declared a threat. I'm proud of every single thing I've done in the last ten years that's made me money, something I bet that less than five percent of the population can say, and that's not something to take lightly at all, and especially not in the particular age we live in.

And so I balance all this agains the more pressing question, the one also asked more and more with each passing year, and the question that most usually kills artistic careers -- of whether I'm kidding myself that I can ever have a career doing this in the first place, of whether I'm one step closer to winning that giant lottery that the arts is. And the professional arts is a lottery, make no mistake, which is why so many give up on it; and the irony is that you have to be at the top of your A-game at all times even to be eligible to randomly win it, whether or not you're ever given that random opportunity. Because you never know when tomorrow is the day that an Oprah producer downloads Life After Sleep and changes my life permanently; but it's all for nought if that producer comes by on their random day and the site's not up to its full potential, or the book itself isn't impeccable, or you don't already have a ton of people out there talking about it, meaning that you have to be on top of all this at all times no matter what kinds of rewards you're currently receiving from it. And so that makes it extremely difficult to determine the difference between a good plan that merely hasn't come to fruition yet, and a bad plan that's never going to succeed no matter how many random opportunities it's given.

That's why I say that the whole thing feels like a game so often, because it often is; and the maddening part is that it's nearly impossible to tell whether you're doing things exactly correctly, so that things really will explode that random day that that Oprah producer comes by, or whether in fact you're completely deluding yourself over whether you have what it takes to be a big success, whether this "game" you're playing really is one, just some giant complicated round of Solitaire to distract you from the fact that you'll never really be a commercial success. That's another hard realization to make as you get older, of how many people in the arts are in reality just "playing" at the arts, and having legitimate successes even as they come nowhere even close to what one would consider an actual career; that's the big danger of electronic books, after all, which was the same danger of performance poetry back when I was involved with that in the '90s, that the petty instant rewards (downloads, praise, booze, sex, a pocket full of cash) help distract a person from the fact that they're really accomplishing nothing long-term or substantial, that they are again just another piece of this giant game they're playing.

And so that's what happens when a project like Life After Sleep is finally finished and comes out, is that I ask myself a series of questions and make a series of observations, to help determine where on the "pointless game/worth my time" scale it belongs. It's going to make very little money in the grand scheme of things; but I'm not some ennui-filled professor having a pointless affair with a 19-year-old student. There's no paper version of the book; but I didn't have to hide in a public toilet from an asshole boss a single time this entire year. CCLaP's last book cracked the Amazon Kindle Store Top 100 in its category (sports memoirs); but that still only accounted for an extra ten sales. But did that lay some kind of groundwork at Amazon that didn't exist before? Was one of those readers someone who might be able to randomly help out five years from now, and will only do so because they happened to have such a good experience five years previous? Or even if I make no money at all, isn't this still better than having a bitter wife who's drunk by lunchtime each day and a resentful daughter who cuts herself when no one's looking?

They're questions without definitive answers, of course, but something I go through every time I release a new book or host a new event through CCLaP. In any case, though, absolutely I'm very proud of the new book itself; and I have to admit, no matter what the other circumstances in my life at any given moment, there's still a real thrill that comes with being able to say, "I publish books for a living." Take away everything else, and being an arts administrator is still almost worth it just for that alone.