Uh-oh, it's been happening to me again; that thing I've written about before, that is, where after a particularly long online session, I'll start coming to believe that I have somehow managed to physically leave the city of Chicago, and am now residing in a make-believe city made up of the creative-class neighborhoods of the world's hundred largest urban spaces, which in reality is the makeup of the people who both create and visit most of the websites and other online destinations that I myself patronize, which is why I've come to call this fictional place "Onlinistan" in my head when thinking about it. Because, really, it's not just me, right? The "online world" really is starting to feel more and more like its own unique destination, right, different and in some ways better than any particular geographical point you might pick in the physical universe? Well, at least that's how it's been feeling more and more to me, as this collective cloud of stories, photos, videos and informational updates from around the world but among similar types of people (literate, creative English-speakers who can afford online access, that is) start coalescing more and more into an actual destination, a place with its own history and with a persistent timeline of events that just keep occurring whether or not you're there yourself.

In fact, I've talked before about how pleasurable it is for me to spend a Saturday night fully "visiting" Onlinistan in this really full-sensurround kind of way, or at least as immersive as a clunky interface like a desktop computer gets; you know, pick up a six-pack, smoke a joint, listen though all the new music from around the world I downloaded a song at a time earlier that week, look through all the new photos that my thousand-something friends at Flickr around the world posted that week, do the same at YouTube for all my acquaintances' videos, do the same at Google Reader for their drawings and written thoughts posted at all their blogs, keep my Facebook and Twitter and GChat windows all open to watch the real-time updates from all these people come streaming in from around the planet. I can spend an entire pleasurable Saturday night doing nothing but this; and then when I occasionally stumble back out onto the streets all googly-eyed afterwards as I sometimes do, to go have a beer at the corner pub and get re-adjusted to the physical world again, it can often feel like I just got back from a very real other place, like if I was just getting home to my place in Oakland but had just spent the evening at a really fun party in San Francisco.

I guess this is so fascinating to me because I can already picture how quaint and innocent it's going to sound to future ears; how in a hundred years, no one's going to think twice about the concept of half their consciousness permanently residing in this virtual destination that's become as real in people's minds as any physical space, but how right now when it's happening for the first time in human history, those of us taking the time to think about it are all having these kind of existential-crisis freakouts over it all. Because really, when all is said and done, it's that "consciousness" part that's the key to why this is such a future-shock paradigm; it's essentially humanity beginning the process of permanently redefining what it means to "occupy" a space, making it much more in the future about what it is that is commandeering your attention, your time, your dedication, and not necessarily dominating just your physical surroundings, which is how we've always defined it before. And this is really why the makeup of the places I'm going to online is so important to this process, and not simply that I'm using a technology that a whole lot of other people are also using at any given moment; because the people like me who exist scattered around the world -- creative, intellectual, tech-savvy, introspective -- we're not just finding each other and assembling online, but actually creating something unique and of value there that doesn't exist in any of our individual creative communities scattered around the planet.

Onlinistan doesn't contain the full plethora of different neighborhoods like a normal urban space does, no dangerous slums or apocalyptic-looking industrial zones; instead, it's an entire city made up only of fun artsy districts, an endless parade of tastefully decorated streets full of used-record stores and art galleries and renovated Victorian mansions, where everyone bicycles and everyone recycles and everyone has WiFi and everyone treasures the local park system. And so in some ways, it's actually preferable to whatever Tea-Party-filled hellhole you might actually live in out in the physical world, and certainly at least a much different experience than simply visiting a different city, a much more delightful experience that actively makes you want to believe in it, believe that you could actually live there full-time if you just wished for it hard enough.

And in my case, the weird blending of these experiences doesn't end there; the photo above, for example, is the view from a cafe in my neighborhood I frequent almost every day, the place my Facebook friends are always seeing me check in from, and I know from personal experience now that if you blurred the actual language in the signs, it'd be nearly impossible to differentiate this view from one of a random quiet creative-class residential streetcorner in Denver, Amsterdam or Frankfurt, and I'm sure a thousand other middle-class urban spaces dispersed around the planet. So in my case, all that media consumption from similar places around the world when I'm visiting Onlinistan is only amplified when I head back out into Chicago again, because my physical environment here in Uptown and Lakeview and Lincoln Square is nearly identical to the eco-liberal-creative space of Onlinistan itself, leading to these sometimes almost hallucinatory experiences where I'll just be biking around my neighborhood and suddenly can't remember whether I'm in Chicago or London or Sydney or Barcelona, whether there's dollars or euros in my wallet, whether I'm heading to the slacker neighborhood or Die Kuenstler Distrikt.

And then speaking of Facebook, I'm sure this is a big reason why the Onlinistan Problem is becoming more and more pronounced with each passing year; because with so many of us in our particular circle now owning "smart" mobile devices, even when we're out in the physical world we're carrying a magic little doorway to Onlinistan in our pockets with us, and can both follow all our Onlinistanian friends in real time and let them follow us in real time, not just an opportunity to talk at any given moment like phones have let us do for a long time already, but a constant barrage of multimedia updates, photos and videos and venue check-ins conveniently centralized and contextualized for us via a surprisingly small number of applications that are always a flick of a touchscreen away. The online world was bad enough when we could only access it at home while literally chained to a monitor the size of our head, but at least it just seemed like a technology then; with it now being ported to our pocket in real-time passive pushes no matter where we are, it's no wonder that it's more and more starting to look like the geographical equivalent of Esperanto, a culturally neutral shared space where everyone across the planet can come together to exchange information quickly and easily, while simultaneously celebrating their own culture wherever it is that they live.

Anyway, no big conclusions today; it's just something I've been thinking about a lot again. Sigh -- I need to get out more.

So yes, it's true; for the first time in officially a decade, I'm out exploring Chicago's live literary community on a weekly basis again. (And I mean exactly a decade; I officially quit the poetry scene and first lost track of all that stuff in April 2001.) And that's because, lo and behold, after four years of shooting my mouth off about it, my arts center's first paper books are finally here; and unlike the electronic books we've been publishing since 2007, if I want to actually move a decent amount of paper books I need to go out and get myself ingratiated into the local scene again, not only to directly sell copies that way, but to get my authors booked into more and more local events, and to get more and more people out to CCLaP's own occasional live events, such as the giant release party I'll be throwing this August for CCLaP's first four paper books all at once (Mark R. Brand's Life After Sleep, Sally Weigel's Too Young to Fall Asleep, Ben Tanzer's 99 Problems, and Jason Fisk's Salt Creek Anthology, coming June 30th). And so I'm out making the rounds again, hitting anywhere from one to four shows any given week, and shaking hands and buying drinks and gabbing about projects and handing out CCLaP samplers like candy.

I have to confess, in many ways I'm finding the entire thing kind of tedious, and something I'm doing definitely more because I have to than that I want to; but on the plus side, I used it as a flimsy justification to buy a new Kodak Zi8 hi-def video camera (the first HD camera in history to retail for under a hundred dollars), so to shoot little recaps of at least one show a week, to post at YouTube and the CCLaP Podcast to generate yet more monetizable original intellectual property out of the entire thing, because why just do something when you can do it and get monetizable original intellectual property out of it? Sheesh, people, I swear! And also to be fair, it's not necessarily the quality of the shows themselves that make the whole thing tedious to me, but rather that when I was younger, I spent almost a decade attending and performing at almost four shows a week myself, every single week all year long, and got so completely burned out on the whole thing even back then that I really could've gone the entire rest of my life without attending a single one ever again.

It's funny -- I recently met this local writer named Lauryn Allison Lewis who I'm thinking of publishing through CCLaP next year, and that's had us gabbing a lot recently, where I'm getting to tell the entire story all over again of being a spoken-word artist in the '90s and all my good and bad experiences with it, and it's just always an interesting thing to look at those years through the fresh vicarious eyes of someone who wasn't there and who didn't know me then, back when I was a much different person than I am now. As I was telling her, although I suspect that my thoughts about this subject will mellow with time, here ten years after my experiences with the poetry-slam community, I still carry around a lot of bad blood and unpleasant memories of those times, and so in some ways being out at all these live shows again is like experiencing a Vietnam flashback...oh, and especially at shows in crowded bars with no microphones that last for three hours and don't end until midnight, which is pretty much the definition of my entire twenties in a nutshell. But of course in some ways it's a much better experience now, precisely because I'm no longer a performer but an administrator; that since I'm now the guy who publishes all these people instead of having to grab the attention myself, I can simply sit back and enjoy myself more at these events, don't have to be in the room's spotlight but can rather just sip my beer and let the artists themselves go on and on (and on and on and on and on and on). Plus, let's not forget, it's mostly now fiction and other narrative readings I'm attending, which by and large is a completely different kind of monster than a typical poetry reading, and whose better focii and earlier end-times tend to gel better now with my sorry middle-aged ass.

Anyway, ever onward, I suppose, with the good news being that it's working; I'm literally selling books these days as fast as I can make them (and I mean quite literally -- I have copies targeted for specific customers drying in the corner of my apartment as we speak), which I'm frankly astounded, humbled and grateful for, given just how many other small publishers out there right now are instead sitting with entire garages full of unsold paperbacks that they can't even give away for the price of postage. It's a precarious time right now for the underground arts, as we shift from a predominantly physical to a predominantly digital industry, and I'm going with an experimental plan for CCLaP that hasn't nearly been proven yet will work; so I'm grateful to see things finally starting to click, now that I finally have all three parts of the center's convoluted publishing plan in place (that is, to give out the electronic version for free, sell it on a customized USB stick at live events for ten bucks, then sell a handmade, Arts-&-Crafts-style paper version to hardcore fans and full-time book collectors for twenty bucks, to subsidize all those free ebooks that generate most of the title's actual readers). I've suspected for half a decade now that a plan like this would be a big success, both financially and from a publicity aspect, and I'm enormously satisfied to be able to finally start it up and so far be proven right.

Okay, that's it for today. Talk with you again soon.