And that's all very frustrating, and makes me sometimes want to bang my head against a wall; because all the things I just mentioned are major goals I've had in my life since 2004 now, when I first quit writing as a professional pursuit and decided to open CCLaP instead, and when I'm in a bad mood it's easy to see things currently as not even one bit better than they were three and a half years ago, when I started working towards these goals in the first place. Or that is, part of me is able to acknowledge that things are moving forward in my life, and that especially in the last year I've been laying the groundwork for a lot of things that should hopefully pay off in the future, once they reach their "tipping point;" but I'm still making barely any actual money these days, for example, money I can actually hold and spend, nor am I actually going out on any dates, nor getting to see a doctor on a regular basis. You can't work on these goals for a decent amount of time without sometimes getting very frustrated and stressed-out about the slowness of it all; and now add the fact that I in particular have a worse time dealing with this than many others, and you can see why I can sometimes get so bent out of shape over it all.

Better, I guess, to try to acknowledge the things that have been going right in the last year; for example, after three years of endlessly bullshitting about it, I finally managed to get a working version of CCLaP up and running nine months ago, albeit one with no budget and no paid employees. CCLaP may have only generated a total revenue stream now of exactly 21 cents (or exactly one Amazon referral, and thank you to whoever that was), but at least it does have around 12,000 unique visitors on any given month now, and around 2,000 unique visitors each day. CCLaP's now been mentioned favorably at such places as MetaFilter, and my reviews have been generating quite a bit of attention and discussion over at such literary social networks as GoodReads; and these are all good signs, the quiet growth that needs to happen for CCLaP to reach its tipping point in the first place.

Plus, today is my one-year anniversary of being cigarette-free; and this is something I shouldn't blow off, given that I tried and failed to quit eight times before this most recent successful attempt, and also given just how many non-smokers end up relapsing in their first twelve months. And as I explained in detail last year here, this has set off a whole chain of events that finds me in a much different physical condition than I was in a year ago: that is, quitting smoking let me get serious about bicycling last summer for the first time, which helped shape up my body somewhat and repair my lungs faster than otherwise; that has increased my appetite over the ensuing months, which has led to me actually putting on weight this winter for the first time in something like half a decade; that then is going to lead me into the start of this year's bicycling season with a lot more extra energy to burn, which will let me bike profoundly longer and further this year than last. And all of that is good too, although I'm not exactly at a place yet where my body can be called physically healthy.

And then of course is the biggest issue I'm dealing with these days as far as this transformation I want to make in my life, which is the whole idea of treating other people better, of not being such a sociopathic little prick all the time; and that, frankly, has been progressing more sketchily than any of the other things mentioned today, with me having plenty of small relapses at specific moments as far as being a manipulative, unpleasant little asshole. I've been thinking about this in particular a lot this week, actually, because last weekend I had this pretty horrible little experience over in Wicker Park, while attending a literary event for my old buddies Shappy Seasholtz and Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, both New Yorkers now who were in town to promote new books; I won't go into details, but let's say that it rather profoundly reminded me of just how much anger and bitterness and contempt I still have over my years in the performance-poetry community (1996-2002), and for the vast majority of people I knew in those years. And that led to me just sorta losing my shit at this literary event, and screaming obscenities at this person I knew from my poetry years who was there as well, which has led to me just feeling weird and bad all week now, profoundly disappointed in myself for letting someone from that long ago in my past still get me that riled up.

I'm trying to get better at all that, and relapses like that frustrate and upset me, because it makes me feel like I'm never going to get better at it all. But then I have to remind myself of the small victories I've had this year; for example, at least I haven't actually made any new enemies in the last twelve months, haven't inspired any new people to start hate blogs about me or actively try to sabotage my love life. (And can I just say this, by the way? No matter how dickish I was as a young man [and I admit that I was plenty dickish as a young man], not once did I ever actively try to sabotage someone else's romantic life, a pathetic low in my opinion that this person I ran into this weekend has been guilty of with me in the past, which is mostly what made me so profoundly lose my shit with them this weekend in the first place.)

I know I still have some baggage from my past to process and get rid of, but I like to think that I've at least drawn a clear line in the chronological sand; that from here forward in my life, I am very sincerely working on treating people fundamentally different than I used to, so that this list of people I have awkward, obscenity-laced relationships with will actually go down instead of up. I mean, granted, that partly involves admitting some kinda ugly truths to myself about the subject, so as to understand my own behavior better and be able to change it; for example, with time and contemplation I've come to realize what one of the major problems was for me in the '90s with this subject, that I was acting to my acquaintances like I wanted to be friends, and thus were disappointing these people when I failed to live up to my half of the friendship. I have a whole new attitude about all this now, for example, with the new people I now meet in the literary community through CCLaP; I now try to have a very hands-off approach with such new acquaintances, to not really hang out with them or spend time with them in a way that "friends" do. They're fun people, don't get me wrong, people I love running into once a month or so at some literary event or another, and having pleasant little 20-minute conversations with regarding all kinds of nerdy artsy subjects; it's just that this is all I want from such people, all I ever wanted from such people, and so now try to make that abundantly clear when spending time with such people, versus acting like we're close friends and that I want the things that come with a close friendship.

This seems to be working for me, although admittedly is not the most pleasantly optimistic way of looking at humanity; but as I've been saying over and over today, I guess it's important to look at this stuff as the small steps they are, to acknowledge such small successes like that at least I've made no new enemies this year (or at least none that I know of). It's a complicated, sobering way to look at one's life, which I suppose is what has me in such a complicated, sober mood today on my 39th birthday.

Well, all right, that's enough for today, I guess. See you later.

So first, some facts.

Fact 1: I'm very uncomfortable with the entire concept of pity, especially pity that is directed my way, which is why I'm so hesitant about writing today's entry (which I have started and then given up on three times already, before the draft you're now reading). I know that a certain amount of people will be tempted to feel pity for me after today's entry, and maybe even want to write an email and express so; but please believe me when I say that that is not only the last thing in the world that I want, but that the very letters themselves would make me deeply uncomfortable if they were to be sent. So.

Fact 2: It's been about three years now since I last had sex. Three years, in fact, since I last physically touched other people on a regular basis. I don't necessarily mind this so much. After all, before I hit my mid-twenties and became a writer and suddenly "quirkily attractive in a nerdy artistic way" in the eyes of many, my love life was much like the one I have now, marked more by the time I spent sexually inactive instead of active. And let's not forget, of course, that my last period of being sexually active was actually spent as a swinger and sex columnist, an experience I definitely enjoyed going through and found fascinating, but that definitely left me burnt out for awhile after it was all over on the entire concept of sex. And it's true that I'm mostly unemployed and broke these days, which puts a real crimp on one's dating life; and it's true that I'm about two-thirds of the way through some pretty major dental work these days, which makes me extremely self-conscious over the idea of kissing other people.

Anyway, my point is simply that it's been what I consider a long time since I've been physically intimate with someone, a situation that I don't want to have arouse any pity because there's actually been plenty of beneficial things to come out of it, and is a situation I'd call 75-percent voluntary to begin with. And in fact, as regular readers know, this has been coupled with a general receding from the public on my behalf in a number of other ways over the last half-decade as well; the way that I lost most of my former friends here in Chicago in the early 2000s, for example, the way that I now mostly do my professional work online instead of at an office. And again, this is neither good nor bad from an objective sense, but simply one more stage of an admittedly pretty complicated life that I've led, one more opportunity to learn and understand things about myself that I didn't before.

And I have been learning things about myself in these years of semi-solitude; but they're mostly bad things, frankly, the natural result of combining solitude with intense self-examination, and can very quickly start sounding like a pity party when discussed, which is why I rarely talk about the subject here at my journal. Over the last couple of years now, I've been forced to privately acknowledge things about my personality that various others have complained about in the past, but that up to recently I had been unable to see in myself -- my absolute mastery over the emotional manipulation of others, for example, or my innate lack of sympathy for the plight of most other people, a manageable trait when I'm in a good mood but that can swiftly explode into full-blown sociopathy when I'm not. Although to be truthful, I misspeak when I say I've been "forced" to come to these realizations, because the truth is that I've been deliberately seeking out such understandings over the last several years; ever since losing most of my friends earlier this decade, in fact, which is when I first acknowledged that there are bigger things going on with me than I understood, and that I really owed it to myself to figure these things out, if that is I ever wanted to have any friends again.

It's been a...productive process, I'll give you that, but not something I would ever call fun or pleasant; it's never fun to spend years in semi-seclusion, obsessively breaking down each and every bad personality trait one has, and trying to understand where they come from and how to gain a better control over them. And one of the strangest things about the process, I've discovered, is what I mentioned before; that in some ways I can feel myself reverting again to the same emotional state I was in back in my youth, back before my years as a big-city hipster-doofus nerdy sex symbol. That as I got more and more comfortable with that position in my twenties and early thirties, and more and more comfortable with casual sex, kinky sex, group sex and other activities, I lost sense of what it's like to be truly intimate with another person, and to have a truly intimate relationship with them. That many of my current problems, in fact, can be traced back to this, and that this period of semi-seclusion is ultimately good for me, this re-remembering of what actual intimacy is all about.

And again, again, none of this is being said to arouse pity; because believe me, I'm glad I went through the process in my twenties that I did (and will never ultimately complain about the amount of kinky sex with beautiful women I had, not once, not ever), and I'm infinitely glad about learning the things I learned from those experiences, just as I'm ultimately glad I'm learning what I'm learning now. This is the aspect that makes me worry a bit about the reversion process, in that I had a whole host of opposite issues concerning sex before my mid-twenties; a deep terror of most women, a deep confusion over the entire flirtation process, a disgust with my own body and a complete lack of understanding over how anyone could ever find it attractive. That's why I embraced casual sex so whole-heartedly in the first place, back when I first moved to Chicago and the opportunity first presented itself, for the same exact reasons I've been embracing semi-seclusion recently; because of not understanding certain things about myself, being frustrated over that lack of understanding, and determined to do the things needed to come to that understanding.

As ridiculous and cliched as it might sound, my years of serial dating and sexual swinging did teach me a lot of good things about myself, and did ultimately make me a better person. It wasn't until I started taking pictures of myself nude, for example, that I truly understood that I looked no better and no worse than anybody else around me at any given moment; that finally let me imagine a world where people could actually find Jason Pettus attractive, which then gave me the courage to finally start asking people out on a regular basis, without it having to be a big traumatic event each time. Because of a series of edgy, kinky fuck-buddies throughout my twenties (who I called "girlfriends" at the time, but now realize were never much more than extended flings), I came to a much better understanding of my sexuality, my orientation, my desires and my limits than I had ever had before, had even had the possibility of learning without all that crazy sex with all those crazy girls (and occasionally boys). I ultimately don't regret any of the things that happened to me in those years, or any of the decisions I made (well, okay, a couple of the decisions); I understand that those experiences are just as important as anything else as to making up the person I am today, and that I would be a worser person right now for not having had the experiences.

This is why I worry about seeing some of these old traits again in me, that I haven't seen since my youth; because frankly, I don't want to turn back into some mousy little wallflower who's afraid of even talking to women, who doesn't even understand his own desires and so of course can't explain them to a sexual partner (much less even think of a person as a "sexual partner" in the first place). But at the same time, I also now acknowledge that I eventually got too good at being this other way; that too much believing in yourself ultimately makes you a cocky little shit who no one wants to hang out with, that too much time not caring what others think ultimately makes you a manipulative little sociopath. Now that I've gone through these two very different periods of my life, and have seen both the good and bad things that come with them, I'm hoping that now as I enter middle age I'll be able to finally find a balance between them. That I'll be able to say, "I know the good things about being kinda shy and humble and thoughtful about situations, and I know the good things about being brash and confident and jumping into situations, and now I finally understand when it's appropriate to react in either way."

That's a big part, after all, of what led me to quitting creative writing when I did and trying to open this cursed arts center of mine; of just finally getting tired of taking all that manic energy I constantly have over things that get me excited, and expending it all on "me me me me me me me." I acknowledge that this manic energy is ultimately a good thing, a thing that a lot of other people don't have and that helps me to convince people to support the things I want them to support; I've just recently gotten to the point where I want to direct that energy towards the projects of people around me, not the projects I myself am creating, and to truly try to find a place of financial and emotional comfort for myself while doing so. And it's why I continue to live a celibate life these days as well, even while having more and more days right now where I think that I might just possibly freaking die if I don't get laid soon, because I understand that I'm still in the middle of some pretty major "processing" these days (to quote my friend Michelle Tea).

So why am I even bringing all of this up? Well because, see, I hung out with this person recently, and the situation brought up all of these issues and more, which I haven't really been able to get out of my head for the last several days, which is why I thought I'd sit and write about it, although like I said I'm usually deeply uncomfortable with discussing this aspect of my life. I don't want to dwell too much on the actual story, because it's a friend of mine (who reads this journal regularly on top of everything else), and the actual situation wasn't that big a deal, and I don't want her to feel embarrassed or awkward over it by me talking too much about it. But let's just say that sexual tension has always been a part of our relationship from the start, and that various different circumstances over the years have always prevented this tension from being resolved. And the other night we were hanging out for the first time in a long time, where she was explaining that something is coming soon that's going to change her life pretty profoundly, which made clear in an unspoken way that right now is pretty much the last time in our lives when we could theoretically have sex, that this big change coming soon is pretty much going to take even the possibility off the table for good. And not only that, but that in her own life my friend has been experiencing more casual sex than normal these last couple of years, bringing us for the first time on-par with each other as far as attitudes concerning one-night-stands.

This was all hashed out over many drinks at a bar in my neighborhood, in the middle of a Sunday afternoon getting all lit up over pitchers of mimosas (of course); and then eventually we ended up back at my place, smoking dope and showing each other on YouTube the various British television shows we've recently become obsessed with (Little Britain for her, The Friday Night Project for me). And it was there that I experienced something I hadn't in the longest time, just the longest time, which was a sense of sexual tension and sexual frustration so palpable that it seemed to almost exist as a physical object floating between us. A sense of horniness and desire and lust so bad, it was actually physically affecting my body -- making my heart race, making me breathe shallowly. And I came to realize right there in the moment, that it wasn't the idea of the sex itself that had worked me up to such a state, but rather the realization that this other person desired me in that way at that moment; this person who I find attractive and intelligent, who I both admire and enjoy spending time with, whose feelings matter to me because I've been deliberately making her feelings matter to me.

I hadn't experienced those kinds of feelings and sensations since I was literally 23 or so, and they turned out to be a little overwhelming; they've led to a series of highly erotic dreams the last several nights, for example, with the kind of five-sense detailed recollection I also haven't experienced in years. I've come to realize, in fact, that it's the first time in more than a decade that I've actually enjoyed a night of sexual tension that didn't lead to actual sex, that merely the flirtation involved and the sense of intimacy created is something to appreciate and savor, simply for it unto itself and not because such things are what lead to intercourse. That the unrealized possibilities of what might've happened are in fact probably more fun than whatever actual sex we might've ended up having -- sex that undoubtedly would've been at least partially awkward, given the longstanding platonic nature of our relationship, sex that was being both motivated and justified by copious amounts of drugs (never ultimately a good thing, although often a fun thing), sex that most likely would've complicated a situation that doesn't need any more complications.

When I was 27, 28, none of this would've mattered to me; in fact, you could safely bet money in those days that before that YouTube video was even over, that person and I would've been naked and on the floor and humping each other like a couple of animals. Like I said, it's a balance I'm trying to find for myself these days; a balance between simple horniness and knowing when a situation is right or wrong for me, a balance between what I want and what's best for the other person, and of doing the right thing when those two answers clash with each other. This night of sexual tension I recently experienced was ultimately a very good thing for me, for a variety of reasons at once: it reminded me firstly of simply what it feels like to have someone desire you, and also reminded me why this is so much more of an intense thing when you actually like that person back and care about their well-being, while also reminding me that a crucial part of the entire process is in caring what they think as well, and of stopping and spending some time putting yourself in their shoes, of understanding what the best options for any situation are from that viewpoint and not just your own. Well, and it gave me a boner too. A big giant fucking boner that didn't go away for three fucking days. I mean, pardon my French and all, but goddamn.

All of these things I mention today are ultimately good; they are external signs that things are working, that the goals I set at the beginning of the year for getting healthier, for reconnecting with humanity again, are ultimately succeeding. It can sometimes (er, many times) be a painful process, I don't deny that at all, certainly an unpleasant process a lot of the time, certainly a process where I sometimes find myself unbearably horny and heartbreakingly lonely, yet forced to say no to almost-guaranteed sex anyway. If I were a religious person, I'd be tempted to say that this is a form of penance that I'm paying right now, and thus not something anyone should feel particularly sorry that I'm going through; that for every bad day I have these days, every experience of being emotionally overwhelmed by my own inadequacies, it's yet one more day that makes up for me being an asshole to someone in my youth, for making a romantic partner cry, for ruining a friendship. If I were a religious person, I'd say that the balance is still fairly out of whack, that I can still expect a whole heaping pile of further shit to be flung at my head before things will finally start looking better for me. That this is yet one more reason not to feel pity for anything that's been said here today, that ultimately I deserve whatever bad things are happening in my life, and that the day they finally let up some is the day I'll know that I finally paid off that karmic debt. Thank God I'm not a religious person, I guess.

I call it the "Distributed Life," and was first inspired by a new innovation in technology that's become quite popular in the last half-decade, called "distributed computing." Basically, it's a way for an organization to gather up the kind of computer power that usually only comes from a highly expensive "supercomputer," but for a fraction of the cost, namely by convincing thousands of volunteers to run a special piece of software on their home computers when they're not using them themselves. After all, modern home computers have gotten powerful enough to be called legitimate micro-supercomputers on their own; network a thousand of them together in an intelligent way, and they really do become as powerful computation-wise as an average Cray owned by a university or special-effects company. This then allows a group like NASA's Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program to continue the complex work of analyzing trillions of bits of random radio data, even in an age when such programs' budgets are being slashed more and more with each year, precisely through getting fellow geeks and their powerful home computers directly involved. In effect it's using the latest advances in online technology to envision a "grid" of power and connections that already exists around us at all times, and to re-imagine that grid in a new way that an organization like NASA can take advantage of.

In my usual nerdy way, then, this got me to thinking of another invisible grid that's in all our lives, which is the grid by which our day-to-day lives are lived out, with certain "zones" in which certain general things happen, and specific periods within those zones for doing more specific things. For example, it's been a reality for millennia that most people require eight hours of sleep a day; that's an entire third of a 24-hour grid that can be immediately inked out, in that it's impossible to do anything else while sleeping besides sleep. If you're an average corporate employee, then, you might have an eight-hour block of this grid set aside for "work," although that's not really the case when you stop and think about it; that the zone we commonly refer to as "work" actually includes the time to get to that place of work and back, the hour in the middle of the day for lunch, the time spent showering each morning and the time spent winding down when getting home. In reality, then, at least for most corporate employees in the Western world, the "work" part of their daily grid lasts more like twelve hours a day than eight. Combined with the time needed for sleeping, then, this leaves most middle-class Westerners with roughly four or five hours a day for so-called "pleasure," which in our modern world comprises everything from family time to sex, entertainment, intellectual pursuits, social obligations and more. Then on most weekends, corporate employees are suddenly given that sixteen-hour two-day work block of their grid to devote to personal activities instead; and this is why, of course, most pleasure activities as well as family ones occur on the weekends.

But as almost all corporate employees these days know, not even the above scenario is quite true anymore; that a profound rise in technology has created a situation where workers can now be at the 24/7 beck and call of their corporate masters. And this being the beginning of such an age, of course, much like the beginning of the Industrial Age it has mostly been the corporations themselves gaining from such a thing, and workers mostly getting the shaft; the situation as of the writing of this essay, for example (autumn 2007), is that most offices require their employees to still physically be there eight hours a day, Monday through Friday, but then also be at the 24-hour beck and call of cellphones, pagers, email, IM and the like, whenever and wherever Management just happens to want them. But see, this situation is going to change, just like the initially abhorrent Industrial Age eventually gave way to the minimum wage, weekends off, the 40-hour work week, organized labor, environmental laws, indoor plumbing, and a whole lot more. Eventually, although admittedly maybe not soon, the balance of this new technological reality is going to swing towards the benefit of workers as well; that in return for your "work day" now stretching towards 24 hours, you will no longer be required to physically be an office for eight of those hours each day.

I mean, we've been moving towards this reality for decades now; telecommuting jobs have been common since the '70s, and at the millennium there are more people than ever who are office workers half of the week, freelancers and other independent operators the other half. Offices still mostly get away with eight forced hours on-site each day simply because they can; but more and more, smart cutting-edge companies will start offering alternatives, like only having to come to the office 20 hours a week, which all other companies will eventually have to adopt themselves or risk not attracting any decent employees. Yes, this might still take a long time from now to become the mainstream norm -- as long as 30 or 40 years, in fact, although maybe the world will surprise me and transition within a decade; the fact, though, is that we as Western Society are marching towards this new reality little by little on a daily basis right now, just as surely as the pope is Polish...er, German, German.

At the same time, then, the nature of traditional education is starting to slowly change as well, although admittedly even more incrementally than the business world is, or in other words at a glacial pace; this is the institution, after all, that even in 2007 is still determining its calendar based on the idea that their students need the summers off to work on their family's farm. When you strip away all the ritualism of academia, though, all the "we do it this way because we've always done it this way" dogma, you'll see that rising technology is profoundly changing the way that education even works, not to mention the list of useful things students need to know by the time their basic education is over. For example, although computers still can't replace the benefits of human teachers, they have certainly gotten powerful enough to replace some of the duties of human teachers, especially mundane ones; combined with the web, virtual realities, distance learning and more, it's also a powerful enough environment to serve as an individualized tutor for each student, at the times they wish to delve into independent study of an advanced topic. Like I said, human teachers are still very important to education in this day and age, and always will be; in fact, I see this rise in technology as aiding this process, in that it leaves the teachers more free to devote individual time to each student, for the real-time one-on-one tutoring that is precisely the best thing about having a human teacher in the first place.

In both of these situations, then, not only in education but at corporate offices, what I'm really talking about is no less than an entirely new breakup of this daily life grid, one that's been more or less around in an unchanged form since the beginning of the Industrial Age itself, in the early 1800s here in America for example. And this leads to what I call the Distributed Life, an entirely new way of thinking about what we could be doing with our time; that much like the distributed computing described earlier, what if we were to spend part of our time each day in a distributed real-life environment, one that combines personal time with work time with school time with family time? Instead of our daily life grid including an eight-hour uninterrupted chunk of time at an office or school, why not devote just four hours a day to them instead, spending the other four hours of that chunk at home, doing our work and school activities via technology?

My theory is this -- that if you were to do such a thing for both parents and kids, in both a working and educational setting, so that the time at home was the same for everyone involved, it would create a situation much greater and more wonderful than simply working or going to school only half-days. That if you were to use technology to your advantage, change the very institutions which would need to work cooperatively with you to create such a situation, you could literally have a new part of your daily grid that millions cry out for these days -- where you are spending a profound amount of quality "family time" together each day, while still being as proficient or more so at your day job as you were before, while at the same time your kids getting an insanely better education than the current Industrial-Age model could ever hope to bestow. It's not just a more leisure-filled life, but where that leisure time is filled with more important and fulfilling activities than our current situations; where people are more relaxed and in better moods than our current times, able to concentrate more and able to add more of the arts and culture and intellectualism to their lives, where "family time" means not just a shared dinner around a formica table but an actual chunk of your professional life, an actual chunk of your kids' education.

Now like I said, the vision I have in my head is not just a matter of slapping a bandage on the current systems of Western society, but an entire redefining of those systems themselves; that's a big change in both technology and attitude you're talking about, that would need to happen at both schools and offices for such a Distributed Life to be a mainstream reality. For example, for such a new daily grid to work, parents would have to start looking at their children's education as a partnership between themselves and the school district's teachers; that half of that child's oversight and guidance would now come from the school system, the other half needing to come from the parents at home through distributed technology. What this in effect means, then, is an entirely different approach as to how we educate children in the first place; a splitting of what we find important, that is, into a half that's best done with a teacher and a half best done through independent learning. Individualized humanities electives, for example, based on that child's individual interests, would be best done during the four hours each day now spent at home, things like a foreign language or history or literature or whatnot; things that we find important to standardize, like minimum math levels, would be best done at school, where teachers can keep a close eye on each student's progress.

In effect what it does is create a situation where every parent gets to homeschool their child part-time, while creating a work environment that encourages this homeschooling instead of making it a daunting challenge. But at the same time, though, it still preserves all the things that are best about a central location for group educational activities; things like sports, band, a theatre program, a shop program, an A/V department, field trips and more. And meanwhile, this is an extra four hours a day as well for adults to claim a little more as their own; where they're still doing office work, sure, but at least are not chained to a desk every minute of those four hours, in a much more comfortable home environment and while spending part of that time with their kids as well. As I think most office workers will tell you, it's not the actual requirements of their jobs that drive them the craziest, but more the insane amount of time wasted each day within a traditional office environment; that of a typical eight hours being forced to be at an office, maybe only three to four hours of actual work gets done, leaving half a day that could be so better spent by each individual, if only their xenophobic bosses weren't terrified by the idea of not hovering over their employees' shoulders every minute of the freaking day.

Most companies aren't ready to do this yet; most are still stuck in the 200-year-old mindset of the Industrial Age, the one that says that employees are shiftless lazy uneducated animals, ones that will stop being productive the exact moment you physically take your eye off them. In the Information Age this simply isn't true; success in our age requires much more individual decision-making, entrepreneurialism and initiative from the start, meaning that you naturally fall behind through inaction whether or not a boss is watching you. It self-motivates a lot more middle-class workers than ever happened in the "humans as machines" days of the Industrial Age; we now live in an age where workers actually do better when given significant amounts of time to work at their own pace, unsupervised in a comfortable environment. Like I said, this change in attitude will eventually happen on a society-wide basis; it's already happening in the high-tech world, after all, with an increasing amount of employees in that industry already having a work situation much like the one described today. And with such things as homeschooling and Montessori schools becoming more and more the norm, especially among the upper-middle-class bracket that most high-tech workers find themselves in, it creates a situation where more and more people actually can implement a Distributed Lifestyle exactly like the one I just detailed. And this, like I said, is why I ultimately hesitated about writing this up for that futurist website I'm a fan of; that ultimately I'm not really describing a brand-new situation, but merely arguing that this cutting-edge reality is bound to become more and more of our societal norm with every passing year.

Still, though, quite an interesting concept to bandy about, at least in my opinion; an interesting way to think about what daily life might be like for the average Western citizen sooner than we think, of what kinds of new benefits can come to our lives because of the Information Age. As with the onset of any great new age in human development, there are not only detriments to the changes in society going on these days but exciting new opportunities around the corner; that for many of us, we might soon start seeing a life that makes us profoundly happier more quickly than we thought possible. If nothing else, it's at least something fascinating to spend some time contemplating, and thinking about how could be best implemented in your own life.

Regular readers know that for the last several years, I've been spending more time by myself than I have at any other period of my life, because of a series of small things that have been happening all at the same time: because of losing a lot of my former friends in the early 2000s, for example, because of being mostly unemployed these days and in no financial position to go out much, because of most of my professional work anymore being done online from home, not at an office with co-workers. And when you spend such a larger amount of time alone than normal like I have recently, you can't help but start understanding humanity in a way you didn't before -- from a different perspective, if you will, kind of like seeing your home country in a different way after visiting another country for the first time.

In fact, this has been somewhat of an ongoing emotional struggle I've been dealing with this year, in that when you do have new understandings about human behavior based on sudden new large periods of seclusion, those new understandings tend to be pessimistic ones (i.e. "I'm starting to understand how humans can be so incredibly cruel and violent towards each other"), with all that time alone turning one in general more bitter, more closed-off from the rest of humanity, less able to relate to normal human concerns. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, because of being able to feel this bitterness and seclusion do its work on me, and because of it not being something that I want to have happen -- I don't want to eventually turn into "Old Man Pettus," living by himself at the end of the block and with everyone else terrified of him, working some profession like used-bookstore owner that allows him to continue being a clueless grumpy little prick 24 hours a day, without ever needing an excuse to act otherwise.

What I've been doing very recently, then, is thinking about these depressing new realities concerning humanity I've been learning this year, and trying to turn them on their head; to understand how those realizations can also reflect good things about humanity, and how this new awareness of how humanity works can be used for productive purposes as well as the usual destructive ones. I know, I'm not making much sense, so let me just get right to the heart of the depressing realization I've made this year, which will help illustrate my point; namely, that apart from actually hitting each other with sticks or whatnot, all other ways that humans interact with each other is based solely on those humans' willingness to let that other human affect them. So, that is, anytime someone says something that hurts your feelings, it is solely and completely because you've let that person have the power to hurt your feelings; that if you choose not to care what that person thinks, there is absolutely no way for that person to affect your physical and mental well-being, short of picking up a stick and hitting you with it (or punching you, or stabbing you, or throwing a cocktail in your face, etc).

Yeah, I know, it seems at first like a simple realization to make, something that certainly doesn't require years of being cut off from humanity to realize; but just think of all the ways this truth about human behavior affects our daily activities, even stuff we never think is influenced by such a thing...

--The fact that we bathe on a regular basis, for example, because we care whether other strangers think we stink or not;

--All the times we don't launch into tirades against strangers in public who piss us off, merely because we don't want the other strangers around us to think of us as some kind of maniac;

--The fact that most of us don't go around talking to ourselves out loud in public, merely because we don't want strangers to think we're crazy.

In fact, the more you think about it, the more you realize that the entire concept of "society," of "civilization," is predicated on this behavior; of the majority of people in that society voluntarily putting caps on their most outrageous and disruptive impulses, because for some reason they care what a million other completely random strangers think of them. This is what keeps most people in a society, for example, from going around punching whatever strangers happen to piss them off on any given day; take away this inexplicable worry that most people have over what other strangers think of them, and society itself would immediately and completely fall apart. After all, this is why we label sociopaths as "dangerous to society," even though technically it's simply one of a myriad of valid ways to look at one's fellow humans; because sociopaths really don't care what any other human thinks of them, and therefore not only behave in the most unimaginably cruel ways possible, but also with nothing that can stop them, short of hitting them with a stick (or locking them away, or pumping them full of drugs, etc).

That's why this realization has been so depressing to me this year; because it's a realization of just how fragile civilization in general is, much less an enlightened liberal society like America was from its founding until 9/11. You come to realize that the reason Bush happens, the reason Hitler happens, is because of too many people in that particular society being the opposite of sociopaths; of not standing up to "evil" behavior, of not standing up for what they know to be ethically right, because of too big a fear of what everyone else will think of them for doing so. It's the great social contract that makes up society, you come to realize: the one radical end where you do anything you feel like at any time you want, the other radical end where all your actions are done for the betterment of the State, of the status quo, and the balance between the two that all of us have to find for ourselves. If you have too many people in a society on one end of this spectrum, then you have constant chaos and violence and civil strife; too many at the other end and you have fascism, with a couple of bullies in charge and millions of others who simply tolerate them, because they don't want to make waves.

That's the really depressing thing about all this, of course; because the next logical conclusion after all this is that everything going on in America these days is stuff that deserves to happen to America, that it's karmic retribution for a nation of soft, lazy, uneducated ethical pussies, the result of a tidal wave of history that's no more possible to stop than a physical tidal wave is. After all, situations like Bush are self-fulfilling ones; that if the majority of Americans were willing to think for themselves, were educated enough and smart enough to understand the issues of the day, then fascists like Bush and his cronies would've never gained power in the first place, would've never been voted in in the first place, much less be able to strip away such a profound amount of civil rights without the general public making any kind of fuss. The very fact that the American public has allowed this to happen means that America deserves to have this happen; that Americans deserve to have their rights stripped away from them, deserve to be ruled by an iron fascist fist, deserve to have their right to privacy and a fair trial and everything else taken away from them, deserve to be slaughtered in massive numbers in far-off lands. There's no point in protesting these things, no point in trying to fight them, because it's the great forces of history you're seeing at play, and there's simply nothing that can be done about them; that much like Germany in the 1930s, the only option left for truly smart and freedom-loving Americans is to simply pack up and move, to slowly and sadly watch that home country fall apart from the distant safety of Europe or Australia or Asia.

Yeah; FUCKING DEPRESSING AND BITTER, like I said. And also like I said, an attitude I don't want to have; this defeatist, weasely, nihilist little shit attitude, this attitude that screams, "The world's going to hell and there's nothing I can do, so I'm just not even going to care anymore." Like I said, too much time viewing the world this way is what turns you into Old Man Pettus, a situation I'm trying as hard as possible to avoid, simply because it messes with so many other areas of one's life -- with the ability to run a business like I'm trying to do these days, the ability to date (hell, just the ability to find other people attractive), on and on and on and on. In fact, that would probably be the first response I would have to those who have chosen to permanently adopt the bitter attitude I've been talking about today; that when such people ask, "What's the point of caring, anyway, when society is falling apart and deserves to do so," the first thing I would say back is, "There's a difference between what's going on with a society and what's going on with you, enough of a difference that you should care."

This is what the Taoists teach us, after all, as well as many other Eastern philosophies; that in a world of infinite sin and chaos, the only thing one can do is worry about oneself, and to live one's life in the way that one ethically knows it should be lived. If every single person did this, the Taoists argue, then we would need no laws and no religions in the first place, no police and no armies; the world would naturally be a place of perfect order and peace, precisely because each individual is accepting responsibility for their own life and behavior. And that even though such a thing will never actually happen, there are still a lot of benefits to acting in that style anyway; at least your own life will be calm and happy that way, despite whatever's going on around you -- and you never know, you might just inspire some others around you to live that way as well, bringing the world that much closer to that ideal state the Taoists pine for.

This is what I mean by flipping the situation around; that instead of sitting around saying, "It doesn't matter how I treat others, because it doesn't matter what others think of me, and the world is going to hell and why should I even fucking bother," you always have the choice to say, "No, wait a minute, it does matter what other people think of me, and it does matter that I care. It matters because that is the very definition of humanity; that without it, humans are not much more than six-foot-tall cockroaches, who have no other purpose on Earth than to fuck and eat and shit and die." We need to care at least a little about what society thinks of us, and whether we're getting along in society or not; like I said, that's the very way we create a society in the first place, is by finding a balance between the two extremes, not by floating to one end and grasping on for dear life. That in a world where radicals are running around every day, getting away with the most ridiculously inhumane things because they literally don't care what their fellow humans think of their behavior, this is how we differentiate ourselves from them; by giving a damn what our fellow humans think of our behavior, by stopping and thinking about what we're about to do, and whether that would be considered monstrous or maybe even simply wrong in the eyes of others.

The reason to act "good" is merely for the sake of acting good; because it feels good to act good, and that's why they call it acting good. The reason to act good is because we admire others who act good; because when we see someone act selflessly or with sincere regard for complete strangers, we think with fascination and respect, "There goes a better person than I." And we should be striving to be those people, to be better humans than we are; because that then makes us better humans, and it makes our time on Earth more meaningful and more significant. These are the kinds of things you can counter with, whenever you're feeling down about humanity like I've been feeling this year; they are the things you can remind yourself of the next time crazy ol' Bush and his pals strip away yet one more American freedom, torture yet one more "enemy combatant," hire yet one more unaccountable bloodthirsty private militia to do the work our armed forces are supposed to be doing, as a way of circumventing the laws regarding these groups' actions. It's been helping me feel better recently, helping me start integrating myself back into humanity; I urge frustrated Americans to spend some time thinking this way themselves as well.

And that phrase is "Global Singular Disorder," or GSD, which describes a certain mental state that one can sometimes achieve, when one is a heavy consumer of amateur online user content from around the world; not just the feeling that one has visited certain places around the planet even when one actually hasn't (which let's face it, is nothing new anymore), but instead the very feeling that you're living there right now, that you're simultaneously living in six or eight places around the planet at once, even as your brain rationally acknowledges that such a thing is logistically impossible. It's an intense feeling, one that can sometimes screw with your head for short periods as profoundly as something like hypnotism -- just this overwhelming surety all of a sudden that you are at that moment actually in London or Sydney or Berlin or San Francisco or Cape Town instead of where you really are, or perhaps even some fictional amalgam of all these cities that doesn't actually exist in the physical world.

Now like I said, I'm convinced that GSD can only come with being a heavy consumer of amateur creative content online; and that's because I've only been feeling such a thing myself since the beginning of this summer, which is the fist time in my 25 years now online that I've been heavily ingesting amateur creative content from around the world. Because that's something I want to try to get across as clearly as I can today, although I'm afraid maybe I won't be able to, because of it being such a subtle thing; that the feeling I've been experiencing this summer is different than a simple recognition of "global culture" to begin with, which is something I've been living with for ten years now and have gotten quite comfortable with over that time period. Indeed, it was this first explosive exposure to global culture in the 1990s that led to so many people like me back then maintaining the prototypes of blogs in the first place...which led to millions of others being inspired to maintain blogs themselves...which then led to blog software getting more and more sophisticated...which eventually led to entire cottage industries devoted to specific subjects but based on the "attitudes" of blogs -- like podcasting ("like blogs for music"), YouTube ("like blogs for video"), Flickr ("like blogs for photos"), etc.

I used to talk about this all the time back in the '90s, when I first started this journal of mine; of how surprisingly mindblowing it was to write about what I considered the boring minutiae of my everyday Chicago life, and suddenly having people passionately reacting to it from Estonia or Israel or Japan or Argentina or wherever. For example, for those who don't know, in the ten years I've been maintaining a presence on the web now, I've gotten emails from people in 38 different countries, a fact which used to astound both me and everyone else a decade ago but now mostly elicits bored shrugs. And that's because a decade later, all the things I mentioned in the previous paragraph have actually come to pass, leading to things now like 60 million blogs around the wold that are now updated on at least a monthly basis, a quarter of a billion photos at Flickr, who only knows how many millions of amateur streaming videos. In the span of just ten or fifteen short years, we have gone from almost no one being online to a growing amount of people actually living a quantifiable percentage of their entire life online; where if you add together the amount of time that person spends updating a blog or podcast or MySpace page, consuming other people's content, and interacting with others via IM, Skype, Second Life and the like, you can literally say things like, "Yes, that person spends 20 percent of their entire life online, and that person spends 30 percent."

I'm one of these people, for example, now that I'm running this arts organization I recently opened, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (or CCLaP), now that my job precisely is to showcase the best amateur online creative work I can find. Would you like to hear, for example, just how much user content Im plowing through on a weekly basis these days?

--At least a skimming, for example (and often a detailed reading) of over 300 RSS feeds, representing everything from major newspapers to personal blogs, constituting something like 1,500 unique "articles" every 24 hours;

--A real-time tracking of over 180 photographers and 75 groups at Flickr, constituting approximately 600 or so unique images I at least glimpse at per day;

--Approximately 25 podcasts, producing 10 to 20 total new hours of audio and video to consume each week;

--The listening of 30 to 40 new Creative Commons songs each week, to find the two or three I feature in each episode of the CCLaP Podcast;

--Not to mention the dozen YouTube videos checked out each week, all the new blogs, all the reader tips, all the random recommendations, and all the hundreds of resulting Wikipedia pages providing more information.

Whew! And this is on top of the two to three full-length novels I read each week these days as well, plus the two to three full-length movies I watch, so as to write reviews for at the CCLaP website. Double whew! Now that I'm no longer an artist myself but an arts administrator instead, consumption is the name of the game for me; and in this I am much more now like the average global citizen on the web, who takes in a lot more content than they usually produce. And like I said, I can feel something changing in me these days because of it, because of taking in just so much damn input these days from around the world at once; and not just taking in finished artistic projects like has always been the case in the past, but now with half of this material simply being candid records of everyday events, shot and posted by non-professionals. That's another important difference here to note -- not just that I'm consuming so much amateur creative content these days, but that so much of that content is simply photos of friends at parties, tales of frustrating days on public transit, videos of teenage skaters goofing around in their school's parking lot, audio conversations between intellectual friends at some random sidewalk cafe.

It creates a sense of profound intimacy with that area of the world, the more and more such material one is exposed to from that area of the world; and of course because of certain cities being much more popular these days than others when it comes to user content, so it is that I seem to be developing these unusually intimate feelings for a host of specific cities around the planet these days, places like the aforementioned London and Sydney and Berlin and San Francisco and Cape Town, places like Tokyo and San Paulo and Copenhagen and Ljubljana. And like I said, it goes beyond just the familiarity one develops after consuming a lot of media from a place; it's a whole new kind of familiarity that comes from this media constantly being updated, from it being rooted in one specific neighborhood and constantly showcasing a small amount of neighborhood venues, from it being rooted among one small circle of friends who you actually come to know as acquaintances yourself. It's one thing to simply see a bunch of photos of London online; it's quite another when you track the stories of two dozen of its citizens on a daily basis, featuring images and stories and audio and video from the same neighborhood landmarks over and over and over, under a variety of slightly different conditions based on the weather and time of year.

Like I said, it creates a situation which I believe is brand-new to the human condition, a situation which deserves its own term since it's so unique -- a sense that you are as caught up with the day-to-day dealings of these places as some of its actual citizens are, or at least are experiencing the kind of regular engagement that goes way beyond the typical tourist and the typical holiday. I've never actually been to Dublin, yet I can give you walking directions from its main train station to several of its most well-known pubs. I've never been to Australia, but I can describe in surprising detail what many of its youth think of the current local political situation there. I can tell you where the hipster neighborhoods are in Oslo, where bored stoners go in Blackpool to get high; I can tell you which garage band is fighting with which other garage band in Moscow. The corner of my computer screen gives me the weather in Frankfurt at the same time I'm checking the weather out my window; it also lets me know that my friends in Bali are currently asleep, that my friends in Lisbon are drunk and partying, that my friends in Texas just started their workday. And not only that, but that for at least one person in each of those areas, I could send a message to them right that moment through my web browser at home for free, that would instantly reach them through their mobile device no matter where they were or what they were doing.

And this is maybe the final piece of the puzzle, as far as differentiating the mere acknowledgment of global culture from GSD; the idea that this profound affinity for a far-flung place has partly to do with the increasingly interactive nature of the online and physical worlds, the increasingly 24/7 nature of it all. That the world is increasingly becoming a place where people no longer sit down "formally" in front of a computer and "compose" a piece of user content (or at least no longer only do that), but also create and post it on the go from their mobile devices while out in the physical world, able to receive real-time feedback from around the world to that mobile device as easily as sending the content was in the first place. And again, this is highly applicable to my own life as well, which is maybe why such a thing as GSD is only hitting me for the first time this summer; I do in fact, for those who don't already know, maintain what's known as a "moblog" on top of this personal blog, which I update almost exclusively while on the go through my mobile device, a Palm Treo 650. (The company that hosts my moblog, VOX, in fact has an excellent free mobile client available, which is why I maintain my moblog through them in the first place.) And since I have Gmail Mobile on my device too, anytime someone sends me an email concerning one of these mobile entries, I get the feedback in real time as well.

It's something about the online world I still haven't gotten used to yet, to tell you the truth, despite having one form or another of such a thing for over three years now; this idea that I can be out and in whatever kind of mood I'm in, and am able to capture an image or video or a few thoughts concerning that exact moment in my life, and 30 seconds later have already shared those thoughts with however many tens of thousands of people who read my moblog now, a certain amount of them in real time no matter where on the planet you're talking about. That's still a trip to me; still something that seems like a science-fiction dream instead of the banal reality of my actual life.

There's something to all this, I'm convinced; that the overwhelming amount of everyday user content being posted to the web these days is starting to profoundly change the perception of global reality itself, of those who are most regularly exposed to it. That far beyond making us simply aware of an entire planet worth of culture and stories, it's making us a part of those stories, in dozens of locations at once, sometimes as profoundly as if we physically lived there ourselves. That ten years from now, all of us are going to understand the very concept of the world in a different way because of all of this; that it is bound to have the kind of surprisingly huge impact on politics, philanthropy, romance, small business and the rest that the mere existence of the web itself had starting around 15 years ago. And I'm sorry I can't precisely quite put what I mean into words, because I can't -- 2,000 words after I started today, I still feel like I didn't quite get my point across. But you at least get a sense of what I'm talking about now, or at least I hope you do. Anyway, as always, more thoughts on the subject when appropriate. See you later.

I know, I know, this makes me sound like a horrifically old-fashioned fuddy-dud! I know! But what can I say? I really am a bit of a horrifically old-fashioned fuddy-dud, and I don't deny it; that no matter how much of a champion I am of bleeding-edge tech and the Global Online Lifestyle, I also remain a hopeless Luddite when it comes to certain subjects. I will always retain a paper notebook for certain tasks; will always prefer face-to-face meetings to virtual ones; and there are certain theories about life developed hundreds of years ago that I still believe in, that I feel are still the best theories to have about life. And among the odd collection of specific issues I in particular am fascinated by, none are more volatile than that of city planning and urban renewal, and that's for two related reasons of course: 1) that the issue didn't exist longer than 150 years ago; and so 2) no real time-proven theories have yet emerged about the subject, and with a whole lot of different theories now tried.

And why am I so fascinated by city planning in the first place? Oh, I don't know; I just find it inherently interesting, I guess, the entire concept that we think ourselves capable of cramming a million people or more together into a tiny geographical space, and that we can maintain the mindblowingly massive infrastructure needed for such a situation, the resources needed to keep these million people in relative peace, instead of the constant state of disease, filth, violence and anarchy you would think such a situation would inspire. And indeed, this is precisely the situation most large cities produced at the beginning of the Industrial Age (late 1700s to early 1800s), as humans progressed from a mostly agricultural society to one that mostly manufactured things in mass quantities, using a rapidly increasing amount of manmade material. This need for massive manpower in small spaces is what led to the premature explosion of large cities in this period, done before humanity quite knew how to handle such situations; and as a result, at first these cities became veritable cesspools, apparent proof (or so the Luddites said) that the Industrial Age spelled the apocalyptic doom of humanity, and is what inspired the now-outdated pastoral movement, where people pined in novels, paintings and song for a simpler life in the country, a bucolic life sometimes so idealized that it could've never actually happened in the real world. And this is the same period, of course, when groups as the Transcendentalists came into being, when people like Thoreau tramped off into the woods to write Walden, when Germany's infamous naturalist/nudist community first formed, and all kinds of other such "back to nature" activities.

All of these things influenced the way people started thinking of big cities, and of the ways they could be improved; and so did the good things that came from the Industrial Age, like the chance for a lot more people to get a basic education (reading, writing, arithmetic, etc), leading to a profound increase in interest in culture, the arts, leisure, sport, etc etc etc. And thus it was that an optimism about technology was combined with an idealized pastoral nostalgia, to produce certain ideas about city planning that really started taking hold; that cities need to contain large interior green spaces, for example, as well as things like libraries and neighborhood centers, for providing culture and athleticism and health to the masses. Or that certain "zones" should be created within urban spaces, for making the venues located there as tolerable as possible; so that slaughterhouses don't get built next to private homes, for example. Or that the very mechanics turning humans into cogs can be used for human betterment as well; that electric trains can be built, for example, for cleanly and efficiently whisking massive amounts of people across relatively far distances.

We take all these things for granted now, too much for granted; so much for granted, in fact, that we've mostly forgotten how controversial these theories were when first proposed, how unproven they were and how warily they were greeted by the general public. The vision these "City Beautiful" urban planners were selling was literally a utopian one, when compared to the sad reality of what those cities were actually like at the time; impossibly rosy statements about how in the future, clean and happy citizens will bicycle and tram their way around well-maintained, sewage-free streets, spending their large discretionary incomes on exotic consumer goods, from a variety of well-lit and well-ventilated stores and cafes right in their neighborhood. A place where people can escape daily to lush, well-patrolled nature preserves right in the middle of the city; where free education for all is provided through public taxes at a variety of modern campuses evenly dotting the city, as are cultural events like concerts and discussion clubs, millions of books and movies, thousands of bike racks and trails.

HA! TOSH! BAH! HUMBUG! Clean and happy bicycling middle-class citizens indeed! But fuck me if it hasn't come true, you know? I'm living proof of that, a person who might as well be a space alien to the average citizen of the early 1800s, living an impossibly luxurious life that most of them were unable to even envision back then. Or, well, like I said, it's true for at least parts of cities these days, if not the entire city limits in most cases; here in Chicago, for example, such a situation only exists mostly on the north side of the city, not the south or west. And this is where discussions of this sort always get controversial; because the fact is that giant sections of Chicago, as is true with most cities, are still a giant shithole, with the citizens there living under the same kinds of filthy, unsafe conditions as those from the average Charles Dickens novel from the 1800s. And let's face it -- no one likes such a situation, and it is one of the biggest focuses these days among contemporary city planners, of how to "reclaim" these apocalyptic-wasteland sections of cities, and transform them into the same utopian visions that other parts of that city already are.

And this of course is why I get called a fuddy-dud by some, and a whole lot worse by others, because I literally believe that certain Victorian ideas concerning this subject should be instituted in such neighborhoods, in order to have the best chance of transforming these neighborhoods into clean, safe, vibrant, exciting ones. Yes, I believe in neighborhoods having lots of small, intimate parks and other public green spaces, places where locals can feel a sense of pride and ownership, and will therefore voluntarily keep those spaces clean and crime-free. Yes, I believe that we need to provide the funds to keep these spaces pristine and freshly mowed in the first place, their trails freshly repaired, their dark spaces well-patrolled and free of vagrants. Yes, I believe in the power of libraries; of smart public architecture; of mixed-income residential zones; of tax breaks for cafe and gallery owners. Yes, I believe in banning certain "immoral" venues from being erected in certain parts of cities; for example, in not allowing liquor stores or check-cashing places within a quarter-mile of a school. Yes, I believe in all of these things, no matter how old-fashioned they sometimes sound (or "preciously optimistic white guy", as the ultra-liberals might call some of my beliefs), and believe that a simple implementation of such things could literally save such places as Chicago's south side, as well as entire dilapidated cities like Detroit and Baltimore.

And so at the end of the day we're led back to a question I've been pondering a lot this summer, as my citywide post-cigarette-quitting bike adventures have had me seeing more of Chicago then ever before in my life; of whether we even live in an age anymore where such massive resources can be dedicated to such things. It's undeniable, it's absolutely fucking undeniable by now, that the United States is in a period of decline these days; that our most glorious days as a country are now officially and permanently behind us, just like Greece and Italy and Britain and all of the other former centers of now-eroded empires throughout human history (or "superpowers," you Americans, if you're more comfortable with that term than "empires"). In fact, when you look back now on what profound things were actually accomplished during this country's height, it can sometimes boggle the mind; here just in Chicago, for example, local citizens did no less back then than reverse the flow of a river, artificially construct over ten miles of new shoreland, as well as create over 500 public parks over the course of a century, 500 public schools, 80 public libraries. It can be stunning at points when all added together, and required a stunning commitment as well; billions upon billions of dollars, millions upon millions of man-hours, a patience among millions and millions of citizens for plans that sometimes took decades to fully accomplish.

It could be argued (and in fact I will argue) that such mind-boggling things can only be accomplished during the "rising phase" of a country's history (in America's case, for example, in the 75 years between the Civil War and World War Two) -- the years when that country precisely isn't a world superpower, when it doesn't have to commit such ridiculous resources towards a permanent military complex in charge of protecting and maintaining this superpower. That you can't convince millions of people to commit to such radical visions unless things are fairly shitty at the time, where even an untested and risky theory is preferable to what currently exists; that when a country grows prosperous and powerful (and fat and lazy), like the US has since the end of WWII, it becomes nearly impossible to get citizens to sign on for anything radical, long-term or expensive. So I wonder, then, if you could even get people in this day and age to support, say, a billion-dollar bond issue in the first place, one that would utterly transform something like the south side of Chicago or the entire city of Detroit, that would demolish thousands of dilapidated buildings even while constructing thousands of new ones, literally ripping up old street layouts and reterraforming entire neighborhoods. There's a lot of people out there who immediately smirk and roll their eyes when I get on this subject, which of course is my entire point; that 100 years ago people not only didn't snicker at such plans, but actually pulled them off.

Do we even have a society anymore that can actively transform parts of itself it doesn't like? Or are we doomed to suffer the fate of all crumbling empires -- a breakdown of the military-industrial complex holding everything together, an implosion of an artificially overinflated economy, a resultant lack of resources for even adequately maintaining what we already have, much less initiating anything new. We're in danger right this moment of entering a backwards period of American history; where, for example, we go back to the days when a huge part of the general population no longer receives a free basic education, because we literally can't afford it, in that we are forced to commit a greater and greater percentage of our dwindling and dwindling gross national product to fund a bloated and outdated Cold-War-Era military structure, that no one is able to transform because of extreme conservatives achieving such a complete and impossible-to-break hold over the governmental mechanisms keeping such a military structure in place, precisely by changing both the law and culture into a more fascistic, authoritarian one, done for no other reason than so they can keep skimming off the top and making themselves and their friends rich and fat. Such things have happened at the end of every empire, as anyone who knows their history can confirm; are we in America going to let it happen here too?

Or...or. Or we can actually learn the lessons that history wants to teach us, cut this slow decline off at the knees precisely because we know now what causes it. We can re-invent ourselves as a country, just like England did at the end of their empire years; we can "rebrand" ourselves, if you will, into something much more appropriate for a post-Cold-War world, into just another piece of the enormous jigsaw puzzle which is the global economy, the global culture. If we can somehow collectively give up the idea that the US needs to be the world's police, that we need to keep dedicating the insane amount of resources needed to be these world police, we will suddenly find an interesting situation on our hands; trillions and trillions of extra dollars, that is, to fund things that we previously thought impossible to fund, like a national healthcare system, an increase in public education instead of continual shutdowns, a transformation of certain urban areas. It's a choice that all of us as Americans face right now; who we choose for President next year, for example, is going to profoundly determine which of these two directions the US will be heading down over the next decade. I hope it'll be the right choice; but given the US population's track record of late, I'm certainly not betting on 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.

That's a good question, one I've been pondering a lot too; because believe me, I ain't opening CCLaP for my health, that's for damn sure, but rather to get to a point as quickly as possible where all my bills in my life are getting paid because of it, and hopefully even a little extra, God forbid. Last year I tried opening CCLaP under a ridiculous proposition that a lot of people didn't believe; that I could literally start up all these new programs and cool projects at once, if only someone with $5,000 in spare cash could invest it in the center beforehand. And now under the newest plan, I'm yet again opening under a ridiculous proposition that a lot of people don't believe; that I can actually start raising semi-significant revenue without spending a penny in advance, or let's say just very few pennies (less than $400 altogether, when all is said and done). That's the idea, anyway, to have raised about a thousand bucks by this autumn altogether, so I can move on to the next stage of the revenue-raising plan.

So this is basically how I want to do it, which I don't mind sharing because it's a complicated plan (like always) that I think most people unable to pull off, even if they do know it in detail...

First, like I said, open this virtual photography gallery, all Flash-based and really impressive in that "ooh, that's a Flash site, ain't it" kind of way. And with audio interviews between me and the artist concerning each piece, which you can listen to by clicking a button in the corner, so that if you want it to be, it'll be like actually walking through a gallery with me and the artist as we gab about the work. And then probably creating a 3D virtual gallery as well in Second Life, because hey, I've got the land and it's all paid up until next October, for God's sake, I might as well be doing something there with it. And all of this includes a virtual exhibition catalog as well, in the form of a free downloadable PDF eBook, designed in the super-cool way I've done past books of photography. All of this combined will hopefully give the proceeding just a little bit more gravitas than simply pointing people to a Flickr account, for example, will keep photographers interested in showing there and an audience interested in checking it out.

So the idea, then, is to combine all this mentioned with some of that "print on demand" merchandise that now exists online; the places like CafePress, for example, MOOCards, Flickr's various commercial options, where they merely keep an electronic version of your artwork on file at their warehouse, and literally crank out one more t-shirt or postcard or poster or coffee mug or refrigerator magnet or whathaveyou each time someone orders it. It's not the best option for a small business, because that POD company keeps a significant amount of each sale; but it's a good option for people like me, who are going into all this without any upfront money whatsoever.

Any revenue generated from all that, then, gets split in half between the artist and CCLaP; the artist does what they want with theirs, while CCLaP's gets held as part of a book fund for the fall (but more on that in a bit). And then CCLaP has a Paypal account as well, so the virtual gallery will have a virtual glass box at the end too, in case visitors want to throw a few bucks in after the tour for a good cause. Strictly voluntarily, of course, and non-payment certainly doesn't withhold you from any of the show. Then combine that with a growing series of social events in Chicago, where I'll probably pass the hat once at each, again with about as low-pressure a sales pitch as possible.

So will all of that be enough for CCLaP to raise US$1,000 (500 pounds, 800 euros) by, say, October? That is, by not spending a penny of it, but instead keeping it in digital form where I can't get at it? Oh, and of course promoting all the merchandise through Second Life as well, on top of selling virtually matted and framed versions of the photos for just like a quarter apiece, for other avatars to hang in their own virtual homes, just as a gimmick that will get people talking and visiting the main website. If I can somehow get all of this to equal a thousand bucks by this fall, that'll be enough to publish CCLaP's first full-length paper book, 500 copies, which I'm budgeting right now at a dollar apiece to make, even though they'll be fully bound trade paperbacks (but more on that below), plus a $500 cash advance to whatever writer I sign, as an enticement for signing with CCLaP and not someone else.

So how am I going to pull off 500 trade paperbacks for 500 bucks? Easy; I'm going to make them all myself, I've decided, art-book style, with the pressboards and fabric and glue spindles and all the rest. That's one of the things, in fact, that I'm becoming more and more comfortable with this year, as I transition into yet another new way of doing things with my center; I'm finally admitting to myself plainly how much faster I am than so many other people when it comes to certain things, how much more energy I have for all this stuff than a lot of other people, of all the things I can accomplish that a full-time 9-to-5er can't. Like, I can hand-print and hand-bind, in a complex and high-quality way, 500 copies of a paperback book myself. I can, in my apartment, and bind say a hundred of them at first over a month, then keep slowing binding them as sales slowly continue through 2008.

That will give me a high-quality book at the end, in fact an even higher quality than a normal mass print run, because I'll be able to add covers of harder stock and the like. And that'll let me sell it retail for a decent price, $15 or $16, for only a production cost of a dollar, giving both CCLaP and the author much higher royalties than in most basement- and small-press situations. (That is, once you subtract marketing costs, postage, wastage, cuts for a distributor like Amazon or bookstore, and all the rest of the thousand ways they stick it to you). After all of that's paid off, again both the author and CCLaP split the rest 50/50, a much higher ratio than most presses; and since CCLaP's costs for the next book are getting paid for first, at that point I'll finally start feeling comfortable with keeping half of CCLaP's profits for myself, to actually start paying bills in my life, and re-investing the other half into growing CCLaP's budget for the next project.

Oh, and that'll let me do something else cool, too; to offer a really fancy custom version you can order directly from the website, where I actually print on the front page that that particular book was printed just for you, and leave a space for the author to sign it, and with probably special fancier covers and front leafs and the like. You know, something cool and fancy, a ridiculous $30 or something, specifically for the author's family and friends, as a way of being a little more extra supportive of the author than the usual reader. Just to give people the opportunity, you know.

Nobody does it this way because no one usually has the time or energy to do it this way; I do have the time and energy, which is why I'm trying it this way. This way is actually much better than any of the other ways; it's a higher profit margin per book, a much more intimate relationship between your press and your customers, and a much higher-quality book in their hands too. And that's how I'm hoping not only to eventually start turning a significant profit out of no upfront money, but in a way that will impress other organizations and make them say, "How does CCLaP do it like that?" And even better than all of this so far mentioned, I can do everything I've talked about by myself; no need to raise the money for an employee, no begging for a volunteer if I can't, no need to share the profits. I don't know why I tortured myself for so long, trying to do things the way that everyone else did them. I don't know why I didn't just tell myself before, "Jason, you're in a position to do things in a much different and better way than anyone else."

So, there's the plan. Will it work? We'll see! I'm willing to bet that it will, though. Maybe my numbers are a little off; maybe it'll take me until January 2008 to raise a thousand bucks, instead of October '07. As always, we'll see.

The plan this year has basically been thus: to try to get in a good five to ten miles every day of the week, and then once a week or so take on a longer ride, something themed that would make for a good map of general public interest. And so I've now done a detailed look at both Lincoln Park North and South, and also a ride through over 40 small neighborhood parks on the northside, plus have made it all the way down the entire 18-mile length of Chicago's lakefront path, and have also made it down to the Loop on several occasions using only inner-city paths (i.e. ones on vehicular roads). And then earlier this week I just completed my sixth adventure of the summer, which I'll be turning into my sixth map; of what used to be known as the West Side Park system, back when the parks in Chicago were run by a total of 22 competing organizations, which was the case all the way until 1934, when the city finally took them all over because of the Great Depression, and created the unified Chicago Park District for the first time.

In effect, the West Side Park system consists of three so-called "superparks" -- Humboldt, Garfield and Douglas, each of which have a ton of things to do and see on their own -- plus the Palmer Square area, which during the Victorian Age was a racetrack for semi-pro bicyclists, believe it or not; plus the Logan Square area, another miniature green space that houses the Illinois Centennial memorial. What connects them all, then, and is what makes it a "system" in the first place, is a series of broad green boulevards with extra-wide medians, "mini-parks" if you will, which was first thought up by city planner Daniel Burnham as a way of bringing health and nature and civic beauty to the outer lower-class neighborhoods, which were located in this area at the time. The full boulevard system, in fact, makes an entire ring around Chicago, which was the entire point; that much like the "lower drives" Burnham envisioned for industrial traffic, he envisioned this as the main means for humans to get from one side of the city to the other, either leisurely or quickly via bicycles, hansom cabs and the like. And in the meanwhile, it'd be a swath of undeveloped nature in the middle of what was otherwise at the time some heavily polluted urban areas, and a way of bringing a little civility to a place where people were mostly treated like animals (and who mostly acted like animals too).

The total distance of the entire system, once you add the distance from my apartment to its start, is 13 miles, or a little over 10 km, pretty much a perfect length for one of my day-trip bicycle maps; so I tackled the ride a couple of days ago, a nice and slow one that took me the entire day to complete, because of stopping and taking so many photos. And man, how exactly disappointing did the West Side Park system in actuality turn out to be? Jeez, let's start counting the ways...

The first disappointment was believe it or not the famed Garfield Conservatory in the geographical center of it all, a creation of the Victorian Age and the very first conservatory in the country to showcase plants and flowers in nature landscaping patterns. And as you can see above, it's not the conservatory itself that's disappointing; it's as beautiful as you imagine it to be, with the organic landscaping and rigid geometry of the walls and ceiling still providing quite the striking visual contrast. No, it's that the entire thing has been overrun with this crappy "Friends Of The Conservatory" thing, a group of mostly happy shiny rich white people, who are all marketing experts and crap during their day jobs, who have decided to take on the cause of this historically important edifice and apply all their super-duper cutting-edge marketing lessons to it all to get it to turn a profit. And thus does the entire experience become one of those clawing mall-type modern-museum "total consumerist environment" nightmares that I'm usually so keen to stay away from: the Starbucks equivalent of culture, that attitude that says, "Stand here, give me money, go look at this, glory in the wonder and whimsy of it all, now get the fuck out, and buy a coffee mug while you're at it, NEXT!"

Ugh -- I hate that attitude at cultural institutions, that pushy and aggressive and money-grubbing attitude that seems to have overrun almost any modern showcase of art or beauty anymore. I get it, you need money, just like every other cultural institution has needed money since the beginning of fucking time. But you defeat the point when you turn the cultural experience itself into a shrill mall-like experience, a dizzying sensory overload presented with all the charm of leading sheep to the slaughterhouse, designed to impress and guilt you into parting with every dime you have on you by the time you've left. That's not fun; that's exhausting, and there's no point of me going in the first place if that's the kind of experience I'm going to have. Ugh. Man, really disappointing.

But then here was the much worse thing about the entire affair; that I've finally discovered what a vast discrepancy there is between the way parks in Chicago are maintained, based on what section of the city they're in. Because make no mistake; as uncomfortable a truth it is to report, it definitely is the truth that the farther south you head, the more the entire park system starts falling apart, a veritable Apocalypse Now experience that ends with spaces not much better than an average trash-filled vacant lot. It was...extremely unexpected to discover, a very upsetting experience, something that had me legitimately scared for my safety by the end of it all, and now I find myself just unable what to ultimately think of the experience. Because it suddenly brings up the age-old question: Did this happen because the uneducated, mouth-breathing swarm were put in charge of things, and this is what of course happens when you put uneducated mouth-breathers in charge of things? Or did this come about because of the educated elite deliberately withholding the resources necessary in these areas for the parks to remain clean and safe? In other words, no one disputes that only a group of brain-dead fucking morons could let something once so beautiful go to such shit; but were these idiots born that way, or did their environment turn them into these idiots?

It's automatically an uncomfortable topic, because it's one that certain people over the years have used to justify racist attitudes and behavior; and I don't want to encourage that with whatever thoughts I have here today on the subject, but rather to emphasize that it's mostly a matter of intelligence and access to information and education that I'm really talking about. Nonetheless, it's alarming to experience the difference in upkeep between the northside parks of Chicago and the westside ones yourself; to get over to that section of the city and find just endless miles of broken liquor bottles, hypodermic needles, giant piles of cigarette butts and the like. To bump and rattle and roll over the endlessly broken and torn-up asphalt paths, to have to swing wide into grassy areas to avoid the winos passed out literally across the trails. This is not what the northside parks are like, not even close to what they're like, and you have to wonder -- what's the difference that has led to these two systems being so far apart in quality?

It's a fact, for example, that the Park District is so huge, it's actually divided into several regional sections that have little to do with the others. So is it that the northside region is better-funded than the westside? Or is it that more incompetent people work in the westside region than the north, maybe employees who are more corrupt and care less about their jobs? Lord knows, there's never been a corrupt Park District employee in the history of Chicago, you know what I'm saying? Whoever is in charge over there is fucking up, and badly, but the ten-dollar question becomes -- is it ultimately not their fault, in that resources are being withheld from them that are being given to other parts of the city? Or is it completely their fault, for taking an equal amount of resources as any other section and pissing them away?

Whatever it is, it was a truly, truly awful experience, one that rattled me so badly that I just came home and got shitfaced immediately afterwards, and wrote a crappier, drunker version of this story to my VOX account, before erasing it the next morning after realizing what a crappy drunken essay it was. It's a slap in the face, really, to all the people who made the West Side Park system what it is, the Ohlmsteads and Burnhams and Jensens of the world, who combined cutting-edge architecture with Progressive political theories, the support of the rich and the support of the poor, to create there no less than a completely new way to even think of working-class neighborhoods. To see for myself how the uneducated animals over there have ended up taking over, and have turned this once shining experiment into a literal unending pile of shit, is simply heartbreaking. And I just don't feel right about letting such an experience go by unnoticed.

In any case, after a half-year hiatus to get over my anger and recharge my batteries, I'm now ready to take another crack at it, and am still sufficiently spooked enough by the concept of external investors at this point to go an entirely different route this time, and to pay for CCLaP's build-up myself out of the profits of each project done under its name. So that now changes CCLaP's focus as well; that instead of last year's focus on creating a community of artists and fans, with me as a low-profile yet central administrator holding things together, this time the focus is on showcasing the most legitimately brilliant unknown artists I can find, and of outputting as much artistic criticism as possible so that you all will know what I mean by "brilliant unknown artists" in the first place.

In the end it may not seem like too profound a change, in that the center's activities themselves stay almost the same -- as before, CCLaP v2 will have a blog updated multiple times a day, a Flash-based virtual photography gallery, and eventually a publishing program and live-events schedule. The main difference, in fact, is in how I'm approaching these activities as the central administrator of it all, as well as the guy in charge of selling the whole thing to the public: that before, the idea was to publicly de-emphasize my role as much as possible, in that the focus was to be on the community being formed, while now the idea very much is to build a "cult of personality" around myself (like I have with this personal site over the years), and in turn to string CCLaP's activities and featured artists around that. As I've mentioned here before, under this new way of approaching things, what's of most importance now is to establish my credentials as an arbiter of underground culture; to publish a lot of criticism, for example, do a really good job with the virtual gallery, basically convince as many people as possible why they should give a fuck when I recommend an artist they've never heard of (and why they should pay me money for the experience, by buying CCLaP's merchandise and making donations).

That's what my "Movies for Grown-Ups" series of essays at my VOX account right now is about (which will be moving over to the CCLaP site when it opens), is to help establish exactly what I like in my favorite artistic projects, and why I like it; I'll be greatly expanding that then at the CCLaP site itself, including weekly reviews of just-published novels, daily showcases of interesting photographers at Flickr, etc. Pssst -- I'm looking for books to review, especially self-published ones. Drop me a line at ilikejason [aatt] gmail.com to obtain a physical mailing address, or do something even simpler and just email me your electronic book. That said, I won't be reviewing every book I receive, especially if it ends up sucking; as longtime readers know, in fact, in general I prefer not to publish negative reviews at all, but rather concentrate on promoting great artists that most people have never heard of.

I'm hoping, then, to add a weekly podcast to the activities as well, a mix of audio and video reports, that will also be a mix of original interviews and local event recaps, something for example I pray to be even half as sharp as CoolHunting.com (i.e. I will be ripping off their look on a regular basis -- thanks, CoolHunting!). And yet again, this is done for the same purpose as the critical essays, to establish myself more in the eyes of the public as someone whose opinions and tastes they should trust, and should take a gamble on sometimes as well. Hey, I'm sensitive to the various ways CCLaP v1 failed last year, other than the ways that weren't my fault; I haven't forgotten, for example, that I was able to raise barely any money at all through public memberships, and that this can be chalked up mostly to what we're talking about, of the public not trusting enough in my abilities to be parted from 50 of their dollars. As regular readers know, I'm not exactly afraid of failures, and in general see them as an opportunity to learn and grow; and this is simply one lesson to be learned from last year, that I need to establish my reputation as a critic and administrator more, as well as get more actual projects finished and presented to the public.

In fact, that's probably the most basic lesson of all that I learned from last year's experiences -- that even tiny electronic-only plans that cost nothing to produce, but that are actually completed, are much more highly regarded than big plans that exist only in the hypothetical, no matter how many other small projects you've already completed in the past and can point to as proof that you can pull off the big ones as well, if only someone with money would simply give you the chance to do so. It's why CCLaP's goals this second time might seem so much more modest -- to publish only online this summer, for example, to do no live events at all (except possibly a few social-only ones), to concentrate more on things like the podcast that I can do with equipment I already own. In a way it's a disappointment for me, a step down in ambition from what I was trying to do last year, which was already a few steps down from my original grandiose plan in 2004; but then again, the 2004 plan required $100,000 in startup money, the 2006 plan $5,000, and this year's plan nothing. Finally, a budget I can afford!

And of course if you're paying attention, you can spot another big change that all of this means, a change more troubling in nature -- that this time I need to be far more selective over who I feature and recommend through CCLaP, that my job now consists of saying no to a lot of artists instead of saying yes. Which, again, is simply the nature of the beast: that before, this community of artists and fans was going to determine what and who CCLaP considered "cool," with me being the mostly unseen hand gently shaping this vision; but now, CCLaP will be much more a personal reflection of what and who I in particular find "cool," with you either buying into that vision or not (and adding to/shaping the conversation via blog comments, guest entries, social events and the like). So like I said, that's going to involve me having to say no to a lot more artists than before; to refuse to review certain books, not link to certain websites, not publish certain authors. It's not a big deal now, of course, because CCLaP isn't even open yet; as the