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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it's official; I've now finally pulled off the first successful live literary event sponsored by my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (or CCLaP). Well, thank God for that! This has been a big part of CCLaP's plans since I first envisioned the center back in 2004, and is the way I plan on the center to eventually make a big chunk of its money, once I finally own a physical space for it somewhere in the city and can afford to do live events every night of the week; but based on the things I learned when studying small business in the early 2000s, it's also something I've been waiting awhile to actually start up for the first time, because of reading over and over in my book studies that the best thing a small business can do is wisely pick only a select amount of things to accomplish at first and do them very, very well, and to not even think about adding new projects until those existing ones are smoothly clicking along like clockwork. And so that's what I've been trying to do, starting with the book reviews in 2007 when the center first opened, then not getting serious about the podcast until the beginning of 2008, then not getting serious about the electronic publishing program until the beginning of 2009, and only just this summer starting to get serious about the live-events program.

And I have to say, such advice has really worked out well so far, and is something I recommend to others starting up small businesses; because just to cite this latest example, this first event of CCLaP's ended up getting four fairly major media mentions (Chicago Tribune, Time Out, Gapers Block, and even a full-length article at Chicagoist) with me having to do almost no work to make such a thing happen, and I'm convinced that the main reason for this was by the center building up a certain amount of trust and goodwill first by the other things it's done. As far as the show itself, then, I'm of course happy with how things went, although admittedly it wasn't the most earth-shattering event in the history of the Chicago arts -- it was simply a one-hour literary reading featuring a total of five writers, after all, all of them doing new pieces around a specific theme (urban decay and urban renewal for this show), the kind of set-up I preferred doing back in the '90s as well, when I was still part of the poetry community and was organizing and hosting a lot more shows, with this one garnering maybe 40 audience members total when all was said and done, perhaps 30 of them there specifically for the show and another dozen who were regulars of the actual venue. (If I haven't mentioned this yet, the show was held at this great "ad-hoc community center" down in Hyde Park called The Op Shop, founded and run by a friend of mine named Laura Shaeffer; she basically convinces the University of Chicago about twice a year to let her take over one of the unused retail spaces they own in the neighborhood, where for a month or two they'll run a full-time gallery, thrift store and performance/film center, eventually packing it all up and opening somewhere else in Hyde Park a few months later.)

The performers, however, all seemed to have a really good time (it worked out that they all got along together particularly well, which is always a great thing to see); and Laura seemed to have been really happy with how things went too; and we even had beer left over by the time the night ended, which is always a thing to celebrate, when you don't run out of alcohol halfway through and get grumblings from all the undergrads in attendance. And I'm grateful for all these things, because like I said I've been patiently waiting awhile now to hold CCLaP's first event, and so am glad that doing so generated all the goodwill and positive word-of-mouth that I was hoping it would; and of course I'm also grateful that the recording of the show came out decently as well (thanks again, Erik Cameron), which when run on the podcast and combined with all the Flickr photos and the upcoming electronic book version of the stories, gives the center actually four pieces of promotional product to come out of a single one-hour event. And this of course is a major component of CCLaP's operating strategy, as I've talked about numerous times here, to be like a Native American with a dead buffalo and to salvage as many different useful things out of that single kill as possible; as I've mentioned before, I see this as a key way for CCLaP to be able to provide an entire cultural center's worth of benefit for a fraction of the cost, and everything the organization does is in fact judged beforehand precisely by how many different tangible items it will eventually produce, in terms of either promoting the center or directly making money for it.

So anyway, hopefully another two artistic events like this will be coming before the end of 2010 -- one in September and one in November, the latter perhaps being a sit-down formal dinner and fundraiser for just a select amount of the center's readers, say twenty attendees at $50 a plate held in someone's home, with free entertainment and with me cooking (I used to be a personal chef long, long ago) -- so definitely let me know if you have any tips on venue/sponsor leads, or if you're an artist who'd like to be involved with a future event. And then hopefully over the next year, I'll be able to first put together a few hundred dollars so I can take some bookbinding classes at the Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, and then another $1,500 or so to actually put out CCLaP's very first paper book by this time next summer. And that will suddenly jump the center to a whole new level, because with its first paper book I'll finally have a chance to make up to a maximum of $10,000 on a single project (and in all realistic likelihood actually will make something like $5,000 or $6,000), which will make it the first time I'll be able to tell people that I run an arts center for a living without feeling the need to add an invisible air-quote asterisk to the end of such a sentence. So as always, I guess we'll see what the future holds; for now, all I'm concentrating on is getting an event pulled off in September that's at least as fun and as successful as June's was.

And another first in the last two weeks to report -- I'm back on my bicycle again! Well, how about that! Yeah, I know, I too consider it a miracle of sorts, that I should be back to daily urban bicycling literally less than a year after shattering my hip in a bad accident; but I've written about the wonders of modern medicine in earlier journal entries, so won't go into it again today. In fact, here's been the real surprise, that nine months now of daily physical therapy actually has me in better shape now than even before the accident; or at least, between my real bike and the stationary one at the gym, it's not much of a challenge to put in at least ten miles every single day and sometimes fifteen, a pace which I most definitely could not keep up with before the accident, and I also find myself able now to go five and sometimes six miles at a stretch without having to take a single break at all, not even a 30-second one to catch my breath and take a sip of water, when before the accident my absolute maximum for such a thing was four miles.

Surprisingly (and gratefully), being back on the bike hasn't been nearly as psychologically difficult as I feared it was going to be -- after all, I was freaking out so badly after first crashing, for a month I actually had to go on anti-anxiety medication for the first time in my life. But then, I'll also admit this, that so far I have been sticking almost exclusively to either the lakefront bike path or the extra-wide streets in my neighborhood with dedicated bike lanes; plus I haven't biked even once yet at dusk/night or in/after bad weather; plus when forced for short periods on narrow side streets in my neighborhood, I tend to constantly check my rear-view mirror so that I can ride out in the middle of the street most of the time, in that I am still awfully skittish about riding anywhere even near parked cars along street edges (which of course is what caused my accident last summer, someone in a parked car flinging their door open a split-second in front of me). But still, in general I'm surprised by how easily I've been able to take up bicycling again; and this makes me very happy, in that before my accident, biking was one of the most effective ways I had for relieving stress from my life (like many, I often enter a state of trance-like calm when I'm exercising), so I'm grateful to be able to add such a calming influence to my life again, after a year now of perhaps the most stressful existence I've ever faced as an adult.

As I mentioned here last time, I'm trying not to have unrealistically fast goals, and in general am preferring to simply be grateful to be back on the bike in the first place; but that said, I think I will almost undoubtedly be attempting my first 20-mile day within the next week or two, an important milestone for me in that this was the maximum I had ever put on my bike in a single day before the accident, so doing so again would effectively prove that I'm finally back to "100 percent" healthiness (or, not really, but you see what I'm getting at). My whole goal last summer was to be able to put in a 30-mile day by the time Labor Day rolled around, which I was going to prove by biking from my place all the way up to the Chicago Botanical Garden in the far north suburbs (which believe it or not you can do via a 30-mile nature trail), then taking the Metra train back to the city afterwards, which only costs five bucks on weekends; I'm not saying necessarily that I'll actually be able to pull off a similar goal this summer, but certainly I see nothing wrong with shooting towards this goal. As always, I'll let you know the latest here in future updates.

So how am I dealing with the ruckus these days about Facebook's lack of privacy over personal updates? Easy -- I simply don't say anything there that I wouldn't want to be public knowledge, the simple solution for pretty much any grown-up with even a modicum of willpower. And yes, I know, this is an awfully glib joke (I know, I know), and is also the lazy justification used by supporters of censorship and government spying ("If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about"); and in fact, the entire reason I bring it up is actually to make an entirely different point altogether, which is this -- thank fucking God the web didn't exist when I was nineteen years old, when I was young and naive enough to go around blabbing about any ol' bullshit to just about anyone who would listen, which of course is exactly what a nineteen-year-old should do. It's a whole issue that the current generation of youth are going to have to deal with, that even my generation never did, of having each and every stupid little fucking thing you ever say in your life dragging behind you in a virtual paper trail no matter how old you get, to pop up for out-of-context misinterpretation exactly at the moments in your future where they'll precisely do the most damage. I mean, even the founder of Facebook himself has been a victim of this, when an old transcript popped up last week of a random drunken chat he once had with a friend when he himself was nineteen, unwisely boasting of the stupidity of his original Facebook customer base and professing amazement that they were so willing to hand out private information to a complete stranger in the first place. I shudder to think of some of the stupid shit I did and said at nineteen suddenly becoming front-page news in my forties, or being brought up during a job interview or whatever; it's going to be one of the major cultural issues facing society another twenty years from now, mark my words, as this current generation of pot-smoking, boob-shooting college students become middle-aged parents and community leaders themselves.

So can I talk about something sensitive here for a moment without being called a Jew hater? Because I'm not a Jew hater, just to make it as obvious as I can, which I've learned the hard way over the years is something I simply need to state in a basic way here sometimes when talking about sensitive issues...

I'm fascinated with the idea that the fracas going on this week with Israel opening fire on a flotilla of Palestinian aid workers might turn out to be a tipping-point catalyst of sorts, for it finally being socially acceptable here in the US to be publicly critical of things done by the Israeli government. I've been thinking about these subjects a lot this year, because of doing a lot more reading over at CCLaP recently about the beginnings of the Postmodernist artistic movement; and as I read more and more of these great older books from the '60s and '70s by people like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, I'm coming to realize just what a thorough plan was put into place in the US after World War Two to make it socially unacceptable to say anything bad about either Jews or Israel at any time or for any reason, a big reason why it's generally perceived that the US has a much friendlier relationship with Jews than with Muslims. (In fact, it's very common now for American Christians to fondly view their religion as the sort of younger brother of Judaism that ended up doing well for itself, while if you had suggested this to most Christians pre-Holocaust, they would've looked at you in horror.) But see, this came at the cost of simplifying the Jewish race in Christian eyes into a profoundly reductionist, almost cartoonish kind of caricature; this is what Roth and Bellow (and Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce and Mel Brooks and all the other great Jewish artists of Postmodernism) were complaining about back then, and in many ways you can see the entire countercultural period for them as being the struggle to bring a more complex, more realistic view of Judaism to their mainstream American audiences.

Far from being a sign of anti-Semitism, I think this recent wave of Israeli criticism here in the US is the best thing that could've ever happened to Jews; it means that Judaism has become legitimate enough and permanent enough in the eyes of the world to deserve a complicated viewpoint, to acknowledge that there are actually both conservative and liberal Jews, that they actually don't get along most of the time, that the radical fringes of both groups often actually do things that a lot of others find morally reprehensible. It's a hell of a lot better attitude to have than what you saw in the US in, say, the 1950s, when Jews were generally thought of in Anne-Frank-saintly, permanent-victim terms, and when it was considered in bad taste to even mention Judaism in polite conversation in any context at all. Like I said, this is exactly what the daring, envelope-pushing Jewish artists of Postmodernism were fighting against (with surprisingly the most important one of all perhaps being goofy ol' Jerry Seinfeld, who when you really look at it, did more to normalize the complex ins-and-outs of daily Jewish life to mainstream America than maybe any other Jewish artist in human history); and it's a real testament to these artists, I think, that in 2010 you can have a growing amount of Americans feel comfortable with calling out the radically conservative current leaders of Israel for their radically conservative actions, without fear of being branded a general Jew-hater by society at large. My two cents, anyway.

And finally, a recent observation I made about the tech world (yes, I still have them, "Great Fucking Start-Up Disaster of 2006" notwithstanding)...

Whenever I finish a new blog entry over at CCLaP, I almost always take the time to add a robust amount of helpful terms in that entry's "tag" field; and that's because I'm one of those people who have been updating websites since literally the mid-'90s, so have become inured to the idea of adding as many useful tags as possible, to make those entries much more popular at the various search engines out there. But I confess, on the days that I don't have the time or energy to add such tags, I no longer worry that much about it; because Google by this point has become so sophisticated, it hardly matters anymore whether you add useful keywords or not, in terms of it understanding what that blog entry was about and how it should be ranked during specific searches there. And that got me thinking about how Google in fact has pretty much ruined several sub-industries within the tech world that first got their start in the dot-com '90s, and if not for Google would now be multi-billion-dollar sub-industries just on their own; take for example the entire subject of "search engine optimization" (or SEO), which even a decade ago was a big enough issue to support thousands of people in this country getting paid millions of dollars, all in the name of trying to get their clients' websites to show up higher on result pages at the various search engines out there, which at the time mostly amounted to these quasi-legal scams involving complex backend coding, expert manipulation of these very tag fields just mentioned, and the hiring of thousands of flunkies to literally sit there hour after hour at their home computers, conducting thousands of searches for these client websites at Yahoo and MSN. Google eventually made the entire process so sophisticated yet so plain, that it's now patently obvious to just about anyone as to how to get your website listed high in search results -- simply talk in an informed, entertaining way about the subject at hand, and make sure that your customers are liking it and linking to you. That's it -- no complicated keyword schemes needed anymore, no paid Yahoo trolls, no six-figure SEO scam artists.

This is the thing that so many people in the tech world still seemingly don't get, and is one of the many things that makes me thank God that I'm no longer trying to establish a career in that industry -- that Google didn't become the juggernaut it now is by being the best at what all its competitors also do, but by literally changing the very rules by which the entire game is played, rightly deciding for example that if you spend 95 percent of your budget making a product that simply works amazingly, and almost none of your budget on fancy marketing and advertising (pretty much the opposite of the rut most tech companies found themselves in by the late '90s), people will just naturally flock to your product on their own, without you needing to pathetically beg them to through false promises and flashy distractions. Every time I see Bing announce another twenty-million-dollar ad campaign, or Yahoo announce another tie-in with some sad Hollywood actioner that no one wanted to see in the first place, I laugh and laugh at all the fucking losers in that industry who still can't see what is plainly staring them in the face, and marvel at the mass stupidity of most humanity that still somehow lets us function as a society at the rate we do. Sheesh, I can't tell you how glad I am sometimes to be an arts administrator now.

Okay, I finally did it -- I finally figured out how to get the BBC iPlayer to work on my American computer. For those who don't know, this is basically the British Broadcasting Company's version of the streaming sites you see among all the American television networks here, where hundreds upon hundreds of hours of BBC content (both TV and radio) are available for instant watching/listening at the touch of a button; but since the BBC is paid for by British taxes (and since their American rebroadcasts are done on cable, which you have to pay for as well), the entire site is disabled to all internet connections that don't originate from a UK server address. Ah, but it turns out that there's a fairly simple workaround for this, which is to install a way to use a fake proxy server on your system, to literally trick the BBC website into thinking that you're based out of a British country; for example, I used Lifehacker.com's guide to installing the "FoxyProxy" extension on my Firefox browser, then just Googled the term "British proxy server lists" and used the very first fake IP address I found, which has worked perfectly the three or four times I've now booted up the BBC iPlayer here at home. (And just so there's no misunderstanding, let's plainly admit that what I'm talking about is against the law in Great Britain; but more on the ethical considerations of all this a little later.)

I've wanted to try this for a long time, to tell you the truth, because just in general I find the pop detritus of a foreign culture to be infinitely fascinating; this is one of the big things I learned during my trips to Germany in 2003 and '04, for example, that among the items I found most exotic and interesting while there were such lowbrow things as bathroom graffiti, local tabloids, highway billboards, daytime television programs and the like. And let's face it, I'm already a fairly heavy Anglophile to begin with, which I absolutely do not deny, and have already established a habit over the years of watching an unusually large amount of British television when given the chance -- in fact, many of my favorite shows of all time are originally from the UK, such as The Prisoner, Monty Python, Doctor Who, The IT Crowd, Monarch of the Glen, Ballykissangel, Absolutely Fabulous, The Young Ones, Rising Damp, Coupling, Fawlty Towers, and a lot more.

But those are all major, traditional shows we're talking about, easy to export to other countries and with a fairly surefire way to generate revenue; what gets lost in this overseas transfer instead are the local versions of the more transient stuff, talk shows and soap operas and local news, the stuff that makes up the bulk of any television station's daily programming, no matter where on the planet that station is located. And that's the most fascinating stuff, I think, because it's like a window into daily life in that other country, and just as big a peek into another national culture as viewing locals' photostreams at Flickr or reading their blogs, which as I've discussed at length here before is something I find one of the biggest singular pleasures about the entire internet as a communications platform, this opportunity to literally transfer your consciousness to another location (if you do it right), and to feel for at least a few hours like you have literally somehow magically transported your physical self to a location halfway around the world.

And so like I said, I've ended up booting up FoxyProxy about three or four times this week, and have now watched or at least sampled somewhere around 15 or so shows; and I have to confess, it's been so far just as riveting and interesting an experience as I thought it was going to be. Because the thing to know about the BBC if you don't already is that their big, splashy, well-known expensive dramas and comedies represent only a small fraction of what's on the air there each day; much more common there is just a whole endless series of inexpensive talk shows and game shows, news shows and soap operas, almost none of which we ever even get glances of here in the US. And so for example I've now watched episodes of Have I Got News For You (one of the oldest of these game shows), and Never Mind the Buzzcocks (a music version of these game shows), and QI: Quite Interesting (a popular and unusual game show hosted by Stephen Frye, and the inspiration behind NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!), where I've discovered that they all essentially work the same way; that in reality the "game" part of these game shows are basically excuses to bring a panel full of British comedians together to riff on various current events from the news that week, and with each and every one of them starting with monologues that basically pair up current headlines with outrageously silly photos and videos. And then for another example, I've also now watched the talk shows Frank Skinner's Opinionated, The Graham Norton Show, Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, Russell Howard's Good News, and the teen-oriented The 5:19 Show (and had already gotten hooked a year before over at YouTube on The Sunday Night Project, one of the first British talk shows to get me interested in throwaway programming to begin with), and they all tend to share a lot of the same traits too, including this penchant for wacky-photo opening monologues, as well as the BBC's habit of making all their show sets primarily revolve around bright purple color schemes. (And why do all the sound stages at the BBC seem to share this purple color scheme? Well, I guess that's a question for someone else to answer.)

The reason I find these so fascinating is precisely that they discuss the things that don't usually transfer well to an international audience; they are chock full of references to local events, feature a whole series of only minor celebrities who will never ever be known to American audiences, rely on jokes that many times go straight over my head. But so too is it fascinating to see the different style of humor and patter that used for these shows, a much more biting and dark-edged style of comedy than seen in most similar-type shows here in the US; and speaking of that, by the way, I've also learned this week that the cliche really is true, that these shows sometimes seem to be nothing but an excuse to create an entire self-sustaining industry for an endless series of genial, tired-looking, leather-skinned middle-aged gay comedians, in that you tend to see the same dozen or so of them pop up on show after show after show, sometimes as the host and sometimes as a guest. I don't know why I find all this so fascinating, but I do; perhaps it's the sense of getting a glimpse at another society, or perhaps the sorta taboo aspect of it all, albeit a type of taboo that has its roots in the banal.

And to tell you the truth, this isn't all the types of shows I've been checking out this week: I also sampled Question Time, their version of Meet The Press but where random audience members get to directly ask politicians questions (which, by the way, is yet another aspect of these shows I find fascinating, that politicians also regularly appear on these jokey current-events quiz shows, and are expected to be just as funny and sarcastic as the comedians they've been paired up with, something you would never see on American television in a million years); and I also checked out one of the Prime Minister debates that have been in the news so much this month, as well as a few of the public-opinion shows that appeared before and after them (where it becomes clear that the British public finds the whole thing a lot sillier and pointless than how American news sources have portrayed it, a sort-of reality-show popularity contest that to many Brits represents the worst of dumbed-down surface-level American influence on UK culture, not the "historic game-changer" it's been portrayed as by CNN, the New York Times and others); and I even caught the latest episode of Britain's most popular soap opera, EastEnders.

That might've been the most surprisingly fascinating experience of all, to tell you the truth; because despite it being not much more than exactly what you would expect from a low-budget daily soap opera, this look at a fictional working-class neighborhood in the troubled east side of London features what's easily the most racially diverse cast of all the BBC shows I've now watched. And that says a lot, I think, and goes a long way towards explaining why Europe is having such a bigger problem than the US is as far as educated, supposedly assimilated Muslim youths turning to extremism and terrorism in their twenties; because in a country whose media only even allows such people to appear on the air at all while in the guise of a trashy melodrama about low-class problems, while all "prestige" shows feature almost exclusively rosters of pale white males in their fifties and sixties, that's a society that obviously has deep and profound problems concerning the idea of permanent class divides, one of the few issues that nearly everyone can unanimously agree that America deals with in a better way, which is why you see so profoundly many more young people of color in the US successfully transition into quiet middle-class adulthood, instead of becoming angry poor suicide bombers like what plagues such cities as London and Paris these days.

Now, to be honest, I doubt I'll be doing too terribly much more illegal BBC-watching in the future, after I get all this cultural experimenting out of my system, because frankly there's not much of a reason for me as an American to do so; out of all the shows I've now sampled, for example, the only one I liked enough to want to watch the entire run of is the truly hilarious, half-improvised, creative-class family comedy Outnumbered, and that's one of these traditional prime-time high-budget shows I was talking about before, which makes it much easier to simply rent out on DVD through Netflix, instead of going to all the trouble of setting up this fake proxy server and dealing with the hiccups of streaming videos online. (And to be clear, there are still shows on my list that I haven't gotten around yet to watching, such as Waterloo Road and Skins and Mock The Week; and for all its coolness, I should mention that there are some BBC shows still simply not available through their iPlayer service, such as the half-century-old astronomy show The Sky At Night, the venerable University Challenge, and such other "legacy" shows kept on the air mostly for tradition, but whose actual ratings are in the basement.) That's the ultimate thing about an activity like this, which is why I don't feel bad about it technically being illegal, just like I don't feel bad about watching the occasional TV show illegally through BitTorrent when I miss its original airing, in that I never use these options as a way of doing a permanent runaround; that when it comes to the projects I truly enjoy and wish to support, the Doctor Whos and Losts of the world, I'm more than happy to consume these shows through the proper revenue-generating channels, like renting the official DVDs or watching them on ad-supported television. Everything else is basically fun experimenting; but like all experiments, they're meant to be both short-term and temporary, not a means of literally taking money out of the pockets of the shows' creators.

So anyway, that's what's mostly been eating up my time around here this week, which I thought you'd enjoy hearing about. I'll talk with you again soon, I'm sure.

So if you don't know already, I should mention that I've been walking with a cane now for the last nine months, ever since my bicycle accident last summer; or I guess I should say seven months, since I was technically on crutches for one of those months of recovery, and then of course during my first month after the accident was either in a hospital bed or wheelchair and not allowed to walk at all. And that's been...well, like with all the details regarding my recovery, it is what it is, and I've seen no real point in dwelling on it, because that won't change the fact that I still need the cane to get around. And in fact there's actually something a bit perversely pleasurable about using a cane in public as well, precisely for the reasons that make canes seem cool when you're a little kid, in that it's unusual and anachronistic and a bit hip in this weird way and gets you attention and lots of questions about what happened and even people getting up for you on buses and the like.

But that said, I've been looking forward to getting rid of it too, which is why I'm so regular with my daily physical therapy; and my goal this whole time has been to be ready to be back on my bike by the time summer rolls around, which is why starting last month I've been going to a fitness center almost every day as well, and putting in somewhere between seven and ten miles each day on a stationary bike. And that was going just fine for the first couple of weeks after I started; but then just about two or three weeks in, I realized the hard way that I had actually been pushing myself too hard, by which I mean that I developed a whole series of profoundly painful spots all up and down my legs and thighs, and soon got to a point where I could barely even walk for a few days. And so that necessitated a week of almost complete rest, except for the minimum I needed to do to keep my muscles loose; and now I'm on a more limited but realistic schedule, doing either the bicycling or the physical therapy on any given day but not both, and keeping the tension on the bike cranked down to level 1 or 2 (out of 20), when before I had it on 4 or 5.

It's been a big lesson for me to learn, one I'm having a hard time internalizing, which I suppose is for the best that it's coming now at middle age, when I was going to have to learn it one way or another -- that I'm simply no longer at the age or in the condition where my body can automatically keep up with what my brain and sense of discipline is ready to commit to. And again, although this mostly sucks, I suppose there's some benefit to learning such a lesson this way, where my body just literally will quit on me if I push it too hard; because that if nothing else absolutely forces me to learn to cope with it, whether I want to or not, in that there is literally no way to get around it. And so for another example, a few weeks ago when we had our first warm day of the year, I celebrated by going for my first long (three-mile) walk, which before the accident was definitely a long day but nothing too terribly extraordinary; but once again I found myself just completely wiped out for a good three or four days afterward, which made me realize that it's simply going to be a long time if ever that I'm back to the level of physicality that I was before the accident.

This fall, winter and spring has been a time to simply get comfortable with this, to learn to accept it and learn that there's no point in pushing myself to a level I can't accept; and in this you can think of it as actually a very Zen-like process, the process of simply acknowledging your disadvantages and acknowledging that there's nothing you can do to just make them magically disappear. And that ironically has been a very good thing for me, and brings a certain sense of mature calm that I've never had in my life before; but I also admit that sometimes it's a real struggle, in that as an intellectual, I'm used to my brain mostly giving orders and my body mostly obeying, and it's hard for my brain to just completely relinquish that control it's otherwise always had. I mean, it helps to think about how close I came to being a whole lot worse off; that with just a few feet of difference in my crash site or where I skidded, for example, I could've very, very easily been run over and killed, or had my legs taken clean off, or be only one-eyed now, or any of another dozen nightmares. That definitely helps keep things in perspective, to remember that I could right now be going through the process of learning how to live life as a double amputee, instead of merely being frustrated over the fact that I'm probably not going to be bicycling again for a few more months longer than my original ridiculously optimistic estimates.

But still, it definitely is frustrating, a frustration that's even more annoying in that there's nothing that can be done about it; and that's just one of the dozen issues caused by the bike accident that I'm dealing with these days. I'm sure in the coming months I'll be slowly getting around to talking here about them all.

So some random link at some random site a few weeks ago led me to this place called the Encyclopedia Dramatica (or ED), which like so many things online is fascinating like a trainwreck; it's essentially a wiki-style repository of almost every weird-ass internet meme that's ever existed, no matter how obscure, except that the entries themselves are written by the anonymous, monstrous Comic Book Guys out there whose sociopathic "let's gawk at the retards" attitude precisely turned all these bizarre subjects into internet memes in the first place. (Such people are known within the lingo as "trolls," which is how I'll be referring to them myself for the remainder of today's entry.) And it just so happens that the article being featured on the front page the day I visited was on Kevin Havens, who is one of those people for whom internet memes were invented in the first place: functionally retarded, a victim of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, from a poor white-trash family and with a sister who's one of those creepy pro-wrestling-watching Insane Clown Posse "juggalos," Havens' mental problems has led to him over the years developing an all-consuming obsession for those expensive lifelike sex dolls you sometimes see on the news, lives among people who indulge that obsession, and doesn't possess enough intelligence to know not to obsessively talk about it online using his real name, including penning a truly disturbing Henry Darger style epic erotic fanfic saga about the subject. And in the meanwhile, as his ongoing flame war with the trolls was first developing, he ended up getting into a romantic relationship with a grossly obese wheelchair-bound fellow misfit, who has to patiently compete for his attention with his growing collection of "Real Dolls," all of which Havens also obsessively documented under his real name, because of being too mentally challenged to know not to, which was like throwing a can of gasoline on the troll fire that had already been simmering.

Havens' entry at ED tells this entire years-long story in excruciating detail, including archived copies of all the material I've been talking about, using the absolutely most vile and offensive language possible; and God help me, I sat there and read every word, because I'll be the first to admit that trainwrecks really are fascinating, which is why the saying about trainwrecks became a cliche to begin with. And it turns out that this is merely one entry in a whole portal over there devoted to people with Asperger's who make jackasses out of themselves in such very public places like MySpace and YouTube, and the "normals" who obsessively follow and taunt them because of the safety of anonymity; and that's when I realized for the first time in my life that there are actually hundreds of people online like this now, hundreds and hundreds of them, that places like social networks and media sharing sites have in fact created an entire subgenre of piss and vinegar to add to our already hellbound modern society. There's something about the entire thing that I find both queasy and riveting, kind of like my ongoing can't-look-away obsession over the atrocities committed by otherwise very boring middle-class suburban Germans during the Nazi years of the 1930s and '40s, of how mental illness and technology and the psychological horrors of the Bush years created this sort of perfect storm in the early 2000s here in the US, a situation where heavily medicated fame whores and anonymous cowards who get off on random degradation can provide for each other exactly what the other needs, and thus create this unending cycle of pain and humiliation that eats away at the souls of everyone involved like some sort of cancer. Like I said, fascinating like a trainwreck.

And then in the meanwhile, one of the other sidebars in this Havens article is on a guy named David Hockey, who at first seemed like just some normal middle-aged, middle-class suburban guy, who was upset that these anonymous trolls at ED would pick on the mentally retarded in such a merciless way, and tried to voluntarily initiate some legal action to stop it (which of course was a complete failure -- as most people know, this kind of behavior is expressly protected by the first amendment of the US Constitution, a big part of why such behavior has become an unstoppable snowball recently); but this of course brought the crowd-sourced investigative powers of the anonymous hacker-friendly mob down hard on Hockey himself, at which point it was quickly learned that Hockey's real motivation for defending Havens was because of being an obsessive lover of sex dolls himself, including having posted a whole series of images, videos and "humorous photo stories" at various fetish sites, featuring he, his friends and their various Stockholm-Syndrome-suffering romantic partners intimately interacting with said sex dolls in the comfort of their suburban ranch homes.

And this had me really fascinated, to tell you the truth, because it reminded me of something I found fascinating as well about my time in Chicago's swinging community almost a decade ago, back when I was a sex columnist and writing my books on the subject. Because the fact is that I saw some things back then that would shock a whole lot of people, that would undeniably sicken many of these people as well, and I always found it difficult to reconcile these images with the blase middle-class suburban homes in which they took place, to watch for example a sex-slave gangbang take place on a tasteful living-room furniture set while surrounded by an entertainment center from Best Buy filled with Disney DVDs. The simple fact is that we humans can train ourselves to get accustomed to just about any development life can throw at us, so accustomed in fact that we soon forget that there's anything unusual about it in the first place, and will incorporate this bizarre thing into the humdrum details of our day-to-day lives until it too becomes humdrum, until we nearly forget how strange and sometimes monstrous it is until it becomes public knowledge to a whole group of people who aren't used to it.

Looking at these archived photos over at ED of Hockey and his friends, of them making these silly light jokes over the fact that they all enjoy taking their clothes off in front of each other and fucking five-foot-high plastic dolls, it makes me realize how it is that our society in general could've become such an out-of-control trainwreck by the time the Bush years were over, of how we could've had so many thousands and thousands and thousands of people who thought nothing of committing horrendous corporate crimes, of watching an abusive porn shoot taking place in the middle of a frat party, of doing coke off their office desks during work hours, of using their political offices to pull off acts of corruption unequaled in all of American history. When it becomes all you know, when you surround yourself with people who are always doing it too, just about any atrocity can seem normal or even blase; and the older I get, the more I realize that this is exactly how the Nazis came about, exactly how the Bushists and teabaggers came about.

I don't really have any big conclusions to make about all this; it's just something I've been thinking about this week. Um, the end.

For those who don't know, I essentially live underneath America's poverty line (I make less than $10,000 a year); which I don't mind since it's in the service of trying to grow my arts center as quickly as I possibly can, but that has definitely had me living an ultra-frugal lifestyle for at least the last seven years, which is the last time I held a full-time salaried position in the corporate world. In fact, what has turned into one of my favorite pastimes of all is a deceptively simple thing, almost monk-like in its austerity, which like I said I just got to pleasantly experience again a few days ago: of simply running errands in my neighborhood on a warm day while having my iPod strapped on, listening for the first time to the fully finished version of the latest episode of my arts center's podcast, with just enough spare money on me for maybe a cup of coffee or pint of beer halfway through, but otherwise simply enjoying the sensation of being a creative, morally consistent human being, out existing in the universe, in a city I love on a day I love surrounded by other sexy creative people everywhere I turn.

And why I do I love listening to new podcast episodes under such circumstances? Oh, well, because the podcast gives me a sense of accomplishment that my web-based book reviews simply don't, a sense of something that was begun, executed and finished, and that now exists in a "physical" form that one can own and swap and remove from the digital world altogether if they want, and transfer to the physical world via mobile MP3 player. Actually editing these episodes is a tiresome, piecemeal process; so I love having a chance to simply download the finished thing through the podcast's RSS feed just like everyone else when the whole process is over. It provides a sense of completeness, a sense of closure to the project, that nothing else currently with CCLaP does; a sense of, "Hey, I did that. That's a cool thing, a thing that now exists in the world and makes the world a tiny bit better of a place; and I made that thing that makes the world a tiny bit better of a place." And like I said, although I anticipate feeling the same about CCLaP's eventual physical books, classes, live events and the like, currently there's almost nothing else regarding the website besides the podcast that gives me this feeling, especially when combined with a warm day and a great neighborhood full of good-looking busy people.

In fact, the monk metaphor is actually quite apt through and through regarding how I seem to be feeling about life these days; because believe me, when you can't afford to participate in even the most basic consumerist events in the United States (I've been to a movie theatre once in the last year, have gone out to eat in restaurants twice, haven't seen a single live band or visited a single museum), whether or not you want you learn how to appreciate the ultra-simple things in life, things like well-tested muscles in a middle-aged body, like a cold pint of beer on a warm spring day. And what you come to realize like I have in the last half-decade is that the entire subject of "happiness" is ultimately a relative one; that as it's seemingly taught to us over and over and over (most recently in the huge Danny Boyle hit Slumdog Millionaire), being happy isn't about achieving some outwardly defined objective state, but rather finding a relative state within whatever life one lives, a state where we are stress-free and one with the natural universe for a moment as it exists around us, no matter how the actual trappings of that stress-free moment correspond to certain actual dollar amounts from person to person around the world.

In fact, it seems that a whole lot of Americans these days are in serious desire of this lesson; as it's becoming clearer and clearer during this "Great Recession" of ours, in fact, just like the Soviet Union in the '80s, the US economy in the '90s and '00s seems now to have been falsely held together through a fake front, except in America's case through the shiny veneer of conspicuous consumer consumption (or just "consumerism"), of elevating the concept of "Keeping Up With The Joneses" to a level where it could literally generate billions of dollars of revenue. It's a hard thing to get across to those in other countries, but by the time of, say, Bill Clinton's impeachment in 2000, we really did reach a point here in the US where consumerism had become a legitimate lifestyle; an age where we were taught to no longer even question celebrity worship, where there seemed to literally be no limit to the number of cable stations and glossy magazines and mall multiplexes that could be created and become financially soluble, all of them serving up the same exact warmed-over crap over and over, the point no longer anymore to even enjoy the arts in the first place but merely to have an excuse to exchange the money needed to keep our late-capitalist (a.k.a. "post-Industrial") society actually running. And thus did it suddenly cost $200 per person to see a rock band in concert; and thus did it suddenly cost ten dollars per person to see a two-hour movie; and thus did every corporation on the planet suddenly become experts at gnawing away and gnawing away at customer benefits at every corner, in an attempt to become as financially efficient as humanly possible. ("Removing three peanuts per bag saves airlines seven million dollars a year! Why provide customer service to everyone for free, when you can call it a 'premium service' and convince a certain amount of them to pay even more!")

IT WORE AMERICANS OUT, and to a lesser extent Western Europeans; and it's no coincidence that the Bush years of the early 2000s saw the rise of "Girls Gone Wild," hate porn, corrupt politician after corrupt politician after corrupt politician, a weary brain-dead populace happy to accede to any crazy cartoonish villainy the Bush Regime could even conjure up, all of it sold to the throughly worn-out brainwashed masses through the exact ultra-sophisticated Postmodern-Age advertising industry that sold them on the idea of consumerism-as-lifestyle in the first place. Jesus Christ, no wonder our country became such a fucking mess for awhile. And now there are tens of millions of Americans who are crying out for something else, which is the whole way we got Obama in the first place; crying for something real, for something substantial, for a way to be happy that doesn't involve slaving oneself to death in an absurdist, Kafkaesque office environment, in order to afford the thousands spent per year on empty, unsatisfying, prettily prepackaged "Corporate Approved Authentic Experiences," trained to vent their frustration over it all through TMZ-produced "Hate Hours," where the audience is encouraged to despise and attack the very celebrities they've been brainwashed into handing their money over to by the thousands in the first place. Jesus Christ.

And thus do we arrive at the conclusion I've been making over the last several years too; that happiness is a state of mind, a place we can take ourselves to no matter what we're doing or how much money is coming in and out of our lives at that moment. And I don't think it's any coincidence that so many people are re-examining their religious beliefs these days in the US as well, and by the millions turning away from the hateful Evangelism of the '80s and '90s, to the more inclusive Moody and Osteen style of Christianity suddenly so popular in this Obamian Age. Because although it didn't start this way when first invented in the early 1900s, the Evangelical movement has ended up becoming colluders and collaborators with this all-pervasive amoral consumerist lifestyle juggernaut machine I've been talking about; note for example how by the early 2000s and the Bush Years, most conservative Christians were being taught to actively ignore the obvious hypocrisy that comes with religious people supporting aggressive, unjustified wars, in that support of such wars was the only way to continue holding together the Cold-War-Era military-industrial complex and resulting consumerist lifestyle, thus keeping the nation ticking along for a few more years in the pampered, resources-wasting, McMansion-filled way we had become accustomed to living.

Those In Charge were able to perpetuate this intellectually bankrupt idea for a long time after it became economically terrible; but something about the Bush Era, the endless human indignities our government perpetuated in those years, the endless worship of the Britney Spears of the world, finally started spelling the death-knell for late-capitalist consumerism-as-lifestyle, and now suddenly we're in a period where both theists and atheists are yearning, searching, for something more, for something that really matters. It's what I think about every time I go on one of my little springtime afternoons of errands and podcast-listening; of how simple a good life can be if one merely chooses to make it so, of how easy it is to reject all this late-capitalist consumerism if one merely concentrates on noticing how such a thing subtly manipulates their day-to-day existence. I'm convinced that it's going to spell a profound change to our society, to the relationship between Western and Eastern Civilizations, to the role that both religion and rationality will play in our daily lives; how strange and pleasurable that I should come to understand all this simply because of being broke all the time these days, and of being forced into a post-consumerist lifestyle whether I wanted it or not.

--By the end of each day, handle all new emails and instant messages that have come in over the last 24 hours.

--Do a thorough read of Google News every morning, as well as a thorough scan of the 500-odd RSS feeds I subscribe to (which isn't as difficult as it sounds; once you start tracking a lot of blogs at once, in fact, you quickly realize just how much safely-skipped crap is published at most of them throughout the day).

--Read at least 100 pages each day of the various books I review at the website for my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (or CCLaP).

--Watch at least one movie or old TV show each day through Netflix, for the same reason (to review it at CCLaP, that is).

--Write at least 1,500 words of original content each weekday for the CCLaP site, a hodgepodge each day made up from pieces of the following master list: a photo of the day; links to interesting random news items I've recently come across; major (thousand-word) book reviews; minor (200-word) movie reviews; and occasional personal entries, also usually around a thousand words.

--Produce two new episodes each month of the CCLaP Podcast (posted every other Monday) -- one an extended interview with a local or touring artist, the other a college-radio-style showcase of the latest indie-rock music.

--And put out a new electronic book through CCLaP Publishing every couple of months; the next, for example, will be the long-awaited best-of compilation of my old Second Life blog from 2006 and '07, In The Grid (which for those who don't know, at its height was the 13th most popular Second Life blog on the planet), coming out in about two weeks and collecting up the 60 or so most interesting articles I wrote back then.

And now of course we're finally on the cusp again of the weather in Chicago turning warm; and that means a start to the bicycling season again soon, which I'm fairly screaming in anticipation about, because I've been deliberately packing on pounds this winter so that I'd have extra energy to burn this summer, so that I can go farther and longer on my bike this year than my undernourished ass has ever been able to before, and get a substantial amount of work finally done on these customized bike maps for Google Maps and Google Earth I've been trying to create regularly for a couple of years now, but haven't been very good at actually getting done on a regular basis. And so anyway, after sitting down this weekend and mulling it all over, here below are all the things I've decided to try to add to my life in the sixteen weeks comprising May, June, July and August of this year, in addition to the things mentioned that I'm already doing:

--Go on at least one bicycle ride every day, no matter how short. On Thursdays, devote my entire morning and lunchtime hours to a major bike ride, one well-documented so I can create a detailed Google map of it that weekend. Also shoot video footage during each ride, to edit together and post to YouTube on the weekends as well. (For those who don't know, videos can be embedded into customized Google maps just as easily as still photos; it really is a remarkable little programming mini-environment, for those like me who like combining physical activities with computer code. See here for yet more thoughts I recently had on this subject over at my other personal blog, as well as a ton of screenshots of my bike maps as they actually appear in the mindblowing Google Earth 3D view.)

--On top of the weekly bike map and video, also update each day a little experiment I'm trying this year for the first time which I call a "placeblog." Basically, this was inspired by Google now publishing RSS feeds for all customized maps in their system, so that people can subscribe if they want and be notified of all new updates to that map. That plus the ability now to embed an interactive version of these maps on a web page essentially turn them into a type of blog unto themselves, if you choose to use them that way; it's just that instead of the archived blog entries being sorted by when they were written, and presented to new visitors as a list on a page, here they're plotted on a map based on where they were written, so that new visitors check out old entries based on place instead of time. I just thought htis would be an interesting thing to try, to rack up 100 or so little blog entries over the course of a summer, that all include a little photo or video plus a small write-up about something interesting in the city I came across that day while bicycling.

--And then on top of these Thursday rides, also dedicate my morning and lunchtime hours every Monday as well to bicycling to the Harold Washington library in the Loop. And the reason to do this is because of CCLaP's newest long-form essay project, of which I do around three or four a year; namely, I've decided this summer to read the complete and total ouevre of Nelson Algren, arguably the most important writer in Chicago history, one book a week for 14 weeks straight, and write brand-new essays about them all at the CCLaP website, in honor of Algren's 100th birthday this year (and in fact the entire project in general is entitled "Algren at 100"). And the Harold Washington is the only library branch in the city where you can find many of Algren's more obscure books, which is why it'll be necessary to make a trip there every week this summer to begin with; so I figure I'll just do it on my bike each week instead of train, so that I can as always shoot lots more photos and videos for my maps, and have an excuse to loiter at a downtown cafe on Mondays and do my writing that day down there, where the people-watching is just so much more fantastic than any cafe in my far-north neighborhood.

--And then finally, publish another three new books through CCLaP by the time Labor Day rolls around: first the center's newest outside original book by a local author, Sally Weigel's novella In Rainbows, coming out at the end of May; then the weirdo non-fiction book/online-project thing I've been working on all winter and spring, entitled The Wikicloud Guide to the British Empire, coming out in mid-July; and then finally in late August the book version of Algren at 100 (which by the way will be the very first book of essays I've done since opening CCLaP where I will be attempting to actually drum up some outside publicity; if you run a lit-blog or whatever and know already that you'll be interested in talking about this book of essays of mine that'll be coming in August, or at least would be willing to review it, do please drop me a line and let me know).

And that's it! Whew! So what do you think -- you think I'll actually manage to pull all this off by the end of the summer, not just the big new fun projects but while keeping on top of all my new emails each day, keeping on top of all my book-reading? I have to admit, if I do, I'll be legitimately and overwhelmingly happy with myself, and will consider this a really successful year in my life for the first time in a long, long time. And of course this is combined with the equally great news that my four years of dental work is finally coming to a close this summer -- my dentures finally come in around June 15th, and then I will finally and completely be done with all this dental work for once and for all, which I'm so looking forward to I don't know where to even start. (How long has this process been? Twitter didn't fucking exist when I had my first round of oral surgery. That's how long.) And that of course has me wanting to get out to more readings and social events this summer, which will not only help my personal life but also give me lots more content for the CCLaP Podcast; and for those who don't know, this is the year I've also decided to start going out on dates again, for the first time regularly since 2001, so that gets all wrapped up too into the plans for bicycling and the teeth and being more social, etc etc. Oh, it's all a grand tapestry, I'm tellin' ya.

I don't know -- I'm just really looking forward to this summer, if you can't tell, and really feel somehow that this is the year I finally get out of this overwhelming funk that's literally been ruling my life since September Freaking Eleventh. Maybe this is the year all of us sad, angry, pathetic Americans finally get out of our 9/11 funk, I don't know. Anyway, wish me luck in trying to get all these things done by the time Labor Day finally rolls around in early September. As always, we'll see how it goes.

All my life, I've always been very interested in the topic of presenting traditional things in new ways; so back when I was a photographer, that meant photography, and then when I was a creative writer and self-publisher, that meant creative writing and self-publishing. And now that I'm an arts administrator, and am reading a lot more traditional history as part of my job, I thought it'd be interesting to start exploring new and exciting and cutting-edge ways to present even this, even boring old stuffy traditional history and traditional academic-style research. And then this is all combined with yet another thing going on in my life these days, which is that I'm constantly in the process of trying to come up with yet another full-length publishing project to create and release through my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography; as regular readers know, I release such publications for free there once every month or two, simply to maintain as big an audience over there as possible, plus to get X amount of people each time to say at their blogs, "Hey, wow, look at this cool freaky thing Pettus has yet again done," thus giving the entire center some free publicity, and with a message more powerful than any advertisement could convey. And then this also all doubles as a way of reinforcing all the time what I sell as my main strength during the day as a freelancer -- that I am a highly attuned, highly original expert on the future of the arts and entertainment industries, especially when it comes to emergent technologies, and that your company should hire me to give you expert advice as it pertains to all this stuff, and how you can incorporate less complicated versions of these projects into your own commercial endeavors. (I counsel both big corporate clients and small non-profits; seriously, drop me a line if you're interested. The first consultation is always free, my guarantee.)

So, one of the things I've been doing at CCLaP because of all this has been to take on a big major historical subject two or three times each year, just as a fun personal project concerning a subject I've always wanted to know more about; last winter, for example, it was Gilbert & Sullivan, while next summer will be India. And the way I do this is just like any other amateur history buff would; I simply sit around every weekend and read a little bit more about the subject at hand, every weekend for four or six months until I feel like I finally have a sophisticated understanding of that subject. And to be frank, most of this is done through what has to be my number-one destination on the internet besides my email account, which is Wikipedia; and every time I'm there doing one of these Saturday afternoons of research, I keep thinking of what a bizarrely modern and pleasurable thing it is to do amateur history-buff-style research at Wikipedia, of how a Saturday afternoon there reading up on a subject is such a different thing than a Saturday afternoon of reading through a paper encyclopedia, which I also used to do when I was a kid because I am a nerdy moron. And the difference, of course, is the hyperlinks, which in terms of pure ideological innovations is perhaps the most profound thing our entire internet age has so far created; because as anyone who's ever done an afternoon or late-night of web-surfing can tell you, the causal and magical connections we make in our heads through ideologically-linked reading is just so much more powerful a thing than any static collection of paper pages, no matter what order those particular pages were first put in. And that's because presenting such information in a hyperlinked way is like tearing off the spine of such books and throwing all the loose sheets into a cardboard box, yet attaching ultra-smart little robots to each loose page, so that one can pick up any of the sheets therein and say to its bot, "Go fetch me every other page in this giant box that's somehow related to yours, when it comes to this particular tiny little criteria that I've randomly picked," and have this bot return those pages instantaneously; and that verges on science-fiction, frankly, and becomes at the end just such a more profound way for human beings to learn academically about a subject, to just be able to intuitively follow a line of thought from related reference to related reference to related reference, as far as one wants until one's ready to backtrack again, and start going down yet another specific side-alley of history.

But see, once you decide that you want to put together some kind of cool project that takes advantage of the stream-of-consciousness that comes with hyperlink-based historical research, you immediately run into a problem; just how do you collect this "cloud" of not only the information you gathered but how it hypertextually relates, delivering the scattershot results of an afternoon of Wikipedia-browsing in a recordable way that others can exactly follow later in the same order you came across it? For example, I recently decided on the next research project I'm going to take on, which I definitely plan on doing a full-length book concerning for eventual free download at CCLaP; it's the most general subject I've taken on yet as an amateur historian, in fact, the entire subject of "The 19th Century," taken on deliberately as an extra-special challenge to myself, in that I feel like I've finally become a good enough amateur historian to try taking on a big huge subject like this. And given these global times we live in, and this new theory of historical research that says we should look at the events of a time period from around the world at once to truly understand that period, I've decided for the first time in my life to delve into my own research project from all global aspects at once: I'm not only reading about the three American waves of history that happened in the 1800s (the "nation-building" years, the Civil War, and the "Manifest Destiny" years), but also the British Empire at the same time, as manifested through the Regency and Victorian periods; plus the Napoleanic Age in France; plus the rise of the Tsarist Russian Empire to the global stage; plus the efforts for self-rule in such "white colonies" as Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand; plus the British Raj in India; plus the massive and chaotic "Scramble for Africa" among all the world's "industrial nations;" plus the simultaneous declines of the Ottoman Empire, Holy Roman Empire, Spanish Empire, Portuguese Empire and Mughal Empire; plus the rise of the Barbary pirates; plus the Edo and Meiji periods in Japan; plus the Qing Dynasty in China; plus the Haitian Revolution; plus any other major national movements on the planet in the 1800s I come across in my research. Whew!

So at Wikipedia, then, if you start your first day of such research on the page labeled "The 19th Century," you'll find direct links to all the major global epochs and republics and empires and whatnot I just mentioned there on that main page; so what I did today, for example, on my very first official day of work on this project, was go to only one of these major split-off pages, the one for the British Empire, where over the course of around three hours and several beers I ended up reading from start to finish a total of 43 Wikipedia entries. And of those 43 entries I read on this particular Saturday afternoon, 30 of them are what I consider "complete" and that I never need to come back to again (shown in either black or gray in all of today's multi-color screenshots); five of them refer to major events that are arguably more important to other societies than to the British Empire (shown in red in these screenshots), meaning I should wait until I'm doing my major research in those parts of the world before starting to click through all the exotic links seen; and eight of them I imagine will remain only sub-topics to the main one of the British Empire, but just were too long and detailed of entries for me to finish on this particular Saturday afternoon (shown in all these screenshots in blue). So if I were to record my research this afternoon in a traditional hierarchal list in a traditional word processor, for example, the above screenshot is how it might come out; and while that's decent for at least recording all the Wikipedia pages I ended up going to this afternoon, and for being able to share those URLs with other people afterwards, it's lousy at conveying to others the beautifully messy way these subjects are all connected through hyperlinks at the Wikipedia site itself. And like I said, that's the main point I want to get across; that a major research project done at Wikipedia is ultimately a more complex and more rewarding thing than simply sitting down with paper books, in that the links inspire and teach us to think of the subjects in newly complex, interrelated ways.

(Click image for larger version)

So now take this second screenshot, created through a freeware program called Pathway, which is a pretty cool little program indeed; it is partly a Wikipedia-only web browser, partly a mind-mapping graphic-design program, so that every Wikipedia page you go to gets automatically added in real time to a giant visual map, along with lines showing how you got from one page to the next. Freaking brilliant! Do you know how long I've been waiting for a program that would do this, that would record the exact pathways of causal connections I take at Wikipedia on any given Saturday afternoon? Like I said, this is half the genius of doing historical research at Wikipedia in the first place, is because you get to follow an insanely intuitive order to your reading, not one arbitrarily based on dry historical dates or the random whims of some unknown professor; I love that this program so easily follows and tracks this order of reading I do on any given day, without me having to stop and laboriously track it all myself, including the loads of unvisited sublinks for any given page that I'm constantly having to come back to under such a system. So what Pathway does, then, is simply plop these graphic elements on a giant blank space as I web-surf, each of them evenly spaced from one to the next; then when I'm done with my actual surfing, I can go back to the white space and rearrange these icons with my mouse in any way I wish, like for example the pretty little cloud you see here. And this is great, because I can even arrange my unfinished research in an intuitive way if I want; like seen here, for example, where the farther out on the edge on the map I placed any particular topic, the more unrecorded side-links are left to explore concerning that topic. And that way on subsequent Saturdays this year, I have an ultra-easy way to determine where to start on any given afternoon, by simply glancing around the edge of that map and picking any of the subjects found there.

(Click image for larger version)

Of course, this being freeware, Pathway also has a number of serious drawbacks that you can do nothing about; as you saw in the previous screenshot, for example, there's no way to change the color or size of each particular entry being tracked, no way to format the text to reflect yet more sophisticated information. So to do that, then, I moved to yet another piece of freeware called FreeMind, a much more powerful mind-mapping application but that unfortunately does not have the automatic Wikipedia page-tracking of Pathway. And as you can see in this screenshot, when I go to the trouble of redoing the mind-map through FreeMind, I come up with a document both prettier and more useful; in this case, a map with better titles, once again displaying the contextual colors of my original text document (red: links away to other coming major maps; blue: British Empire sub-topics with still more links to come; black: "closed" entries, completely read and with no more links to check out), plus with the opportunity to draw tangential arrows across the entire diagram if I want, plus with the chance to make the text of each entry smaller or larger depending on how important I think it is to the overall development of the 19th Century. And like I said, this would be perfect if FreeMind simply tracked your Wikipedia-browsing automatically like Pathway does; and Pathway would be perfect if it simply offered the kind of formatting sophistication that FreeMind does. And that's simply what sometimes comes in the world of freeware, is a whole series of applications that each are nearly perfect but none of them exactly so.

(Oh, and a digression, as I sit here looking at the diagrams once again; remember that the connections being shown in them are not just arbitrarily chosen by me for sociological or historical reasons, but literally reflect the order I found the articles when doing random fuzzy-mind web-browsing over at Wikipedia. This is an integral part of the process, I'm convinced, to making such a multimedia, hyperlinked academic-style research project actually worthwhile, is to make sure to record the exact order that these links were inspired, of which subjects led you to being interested in which other subjects, which with any luck will be an order that will deeply and naturally resonate with many others as well.)

So here's the plan for now when it comes to all this, and you'll of course have to drop me a line and let me know what you think, let me know if you'd voluntarily slip CCLaP five or ten bucks afterwards if I actually did manage to get such a project finished and online for others to check out for free...

For the next six months or so, keep logging in a whole series of these three-hour afternoon Wikipedia sessions, whenever I have the free time to put another one in, hopefully adding up to an insane amount of articles eventually read about the 19th Century by the end, maybe close to a thousand altogether if I'm lucky, concerning subjects spread around the world and spanning literally the year 1800 to the year 1900. Then when I'm ready to present my results, post both my collected Pathway file on the subject and my collected FreeMind one online; it's easy to do both, after all, to post a file from both these applications online, so that others with these applications can download them and start using them directly. And not only are both of these applications free for all to use, but in both cases the files' "nodes" even contain active links to each Wikipedia entry being referenced, so that when using such mind-maps all you have to do is click on a title to get shuttled automatically to the article being mentioned. And that will officially count as the "coolest" way to follow along with the research project I've done, the option that most mirrors what I wanted to try to do with the project in the first place, the option I'll most encourage people to take on themselves, by downloading one or another of these freeware programs to their own computer, and then downloading the appropriate file.

But of course as we all know, most people won't want to go to the trouble of doing that; so I'll also prepare a traditional narrative book as well, where I take a plethora of screenshots of these mind-maps, and lay out the threaded lines of thought in as straightahead a way as can be done. And that'll be offered up like all of CCLaP's minor books are offered up, as a free download in PDF form for either American or European laserprinters, as well as a version for Sony Readers, along with a link to CCLaP's Paypal account for anyone who'd like to make a donation afterwards. So basically I would bundle all this up together on one page, an "online headquarters" just like I do with all of CCLaP's books; and hopefully this would all be enough to make a lot of people go, "Wow, okay, I get it, it's an entirely new way to even approach the idea of academic research, and of tracking that research, and of doing so-called 'dilettante' research as a weekend hobby on one's spare time." And like I said, would also hopefully help raise how my skills are perceived in the eyes of a growing amount of people, which would hopefully increase the amount of freelance consultation and futurist work I'm getting on any given day regarding these skills. Because seriously, I need to start making some significant money this year for the first time in a long time, or else I'm going to...I don't know, die of malnutrition or get hit by a car or some ridiculous pointless thing like that.

So...what? Does this sound like a plan for 2009? An interesting way to present a thousand Wikipedia entries about a given massive general subject? An entirely new way to even think of the idea of intuitive, productive information-gathering? I don't know how everyone else will react, frankly; but at least for now it seems like an interesting idea to me, if nothing else a project that's helping me in a personal way profoundly understand the 19th Century with a multifaceted complexity I never did before. I guess that's the real proof in the pudding, that such a style of research is at least working profoundly well for me; and hey, as long as I'm doing it this way, I figure I might as well record it, so that I can share the process in the order I did it with others, in the hope that it'll help them make more sense of an ultra-complicated subject too. As always, it's a work in progress; and as always, I'm sure I'll be posting yet another update concerning it all before too terribly long.

So like I mentioned here last time, one of the side-effects of me opening my arts center about a year and a half ago is that I'm simply making my way these days through a lot more artistic projects, from books to movies to photos to music and everything in between. This is in fact part of my job now, no matter how tempted some are to scoff at such a statement: as an arts administrator, it's simply part of my job to keep as caught up as possible with the general creative culture that exists, to have at least a dilettante's knowledge of as many different creative pursuits as possible, so to have a so-called "expert" knowledge on how they all relate and what's coming next. (And this is in fact part of what I do on a freelance basis during the day, for those who don't know, senior-level "futurist" strategy advice for corporate entities regarding what's coming next in the worlds of entertainment, online developments, etc; just contact me at [ilikejason at gmail.com] if you're sincerely interested in learning more.) So how this will often pan out in my particular life, then, is that the raw creative material itself will pile up over the course of a busy week -- all those songs featured at all those music blogs, all those sketches featured at all those drawing blogs, all those photos being posted at the Flickr groups I belong to -- and then on a typical Saturday or Sunday, I will sit down around lunchtime and go literally until that evening doing nothing but making my way through this material, a veritable multimedia orgy of Web 2.0 goodness: I will fire up Google Reader, start up 1001 (a photo-oriented feed reader just for Flickr accounts -- see the screenshot above), log into Facebook Chat, open up the folder on my hard drive with all the MP3s I've been downloading that week, maybe crack open a beer or load a bowl, and literally just lose myself over the course of seven or eight hours to this freeflowing instanteous sampling of culture from around the world at once, artsy things and candid things and silly things and astonishing things, eight hours of reading and looking and watching and conversing and laughing and crying and being moved and having my mind changed about certain things.

And that's what I really want to emphasize most of all today, how much I legitimately love and look forward to my Saturdays of doing such a thing, certainly as much as being on my bicycle on a warm Saturday and spending the afternoon out in the sun, most definitely a lot more than a winter Saturday afternoon of bad syndicated television while laying around on a couch eating potato chips, like I wasted so many Saturdays in my pre-internet youth. And that's had me thinking as well about this recent experience I had, of joining yet another online service that required me to fill out a profile, and having that service as part of filling out this profile ask me what my hobbies are, and me getting mystified in this deconstructionist way all over again regarding the question of what exactly a "hobby" is in the first place. Back in the sleepy '70s middle-class suburb where and when I grew up, for example, nearly all the middle-aged dads had at least one traditional hobby or another that kept them busy over the course of a Saturday afternoon too; and now that I'm a middle-aged man myself, it's had me thinking about what it is that you might call my own generation's shared set of hobbies, and of why middle-aged men are so fascinated with such pursuits in the first place. But since all our fathers were raised at the end of the Industrial Age, all of their hobbies of course revolved around physical objects and physical activities -- model trains, model rockets, rebuilding cars, landscaping their yards. So then is the lack of similar physical objects and activities among my own generation proof that the entire concept of hobbies is dying, that we are moving forward enough as a civilization that candid creativity is simply now an everyday part of all our lives, not something to be shuttled off as a special weekend activity? Or is it that since my generation was raised during the beginning of the Information Age, our "hobbies" are of course going to be of a similar aethereal nature, afternoons of reviewing and sorting and analyzing thousands of pieces of digital global creative culture like I just exactly described?

And so the more I look into it, and the more I study and parse the entire subject, the more I'm coming to realize (as far as I can tell, anyway) that hobbies can mainly be defined through three characteristics:

--They serve no direct useful purpose in a person's life, yet can be a powerful teacher of various general character-building traits -- patience, discipline, commitment, curiosity, attention to detail, etc;

--They're obsessively fastidious as far as the level of detail one can theoretically get into if one theoretically wants, all the way down to a scary meth-addict level of nervy fastidiousness if one chooses;

--And thus are these two things able to put the engaged hobbyist into a sort of happy trance under the best circumstances, what sociologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "achieving a state of flow," where the mind is open and receptive and churning along at this fantastically high level, while simultaneously losing all sense of the passing of time and indeed that it's even functioning at such a high level to begin with.

Certainly, for example, this is the state I can often get into during these weekly inhalations of global culture I do, and in fact I've talked in former essays about this being a major reason why I do it in the first place -- this concrete sense suddenly of being a member of a whole new kind of organized society, one based not on geography or race or religion but on the shared virtual destinations so many of us end up at online, the hundreds of millions of us who are regulars at Flickr and YouTube and MySpace, all the people around the world who update blogs and podcasts and Twitter feeds on a daily basis. I love the science-fictiony feeling this produces in me, that suddenly I'm not sitting in an apartment in Chicago at all, but rather some fantastical city that could never actually exist, that I could step out the door of my building that moment and somehow magically be in London and Capetown and Mumbai and Mexico City all at the same exact time. This is very much how it can start to feel, I think, after spending several hours casually devouring several thousand pieces of global creative culture, photos and videos and indie-rock songs and written blog entries, and funny little Facebook updates and live chats with random friends; it's during these periods when I can literally feel time slipping away from me, when I can feel my mind cleaning itself of its cobwebs and making new synaptic connections in unexpected ways.

And then of course all this takes on an extra dimension for me in particular, in that it's online where most of my socialization these days takes place too, because of what I've talked about here plenty of times before, of how I lost most of my Chicago friends during the early 2000s and now have only a handful of acquaintances here I physically get together with at all. And don't get me wrong, I still think that the complex benefits of physical interaction are a very necessary part of any person's life -- I still can't even imagine, for example, how people possibly presume to say that they're in a "romantic relationship" with someone they've never physically met, and still argue that such relationships are doomed to crash and burn every single time said couple actually do start spending time together physically. But that said, I do wonder many times these days just how much of what we consider traditional human physical interaction can in fact be faithfully duplicated through technological means, of exactly which aspects of being a "social creature" can absolutely only be accomplished through physical means, versus virtual ones that trick our physical senses. After all, what really is a dinner party but merely a group of friends gathered around a table, so that they can observe each other in real time while conversing? If the same group of people gather in a webcam-based chat room with full audio and video, and with the capability to have quiet little private conversations away from the main group, will the resulting evening be much different? I mean, certainly it would never be 100-percent the same, I definitely agree with that; but I find myself wondering a lot these days whether such a thing could eventually at least be 95-percent as good as a physical dinner party, given the continual rise in technology when it comes to this exact subject? Are we in fact in the process as we speak of constructing an artificial yet very real new space in the cosmos for human existence, a place where people around the world gather at once and interact just like they would if they all lived in the same city? The same one-billion-person city?

And that of course is why the very best way of all to end these Saturday afternoon-evenings of online global cultural inhalation is to eventually end up at a neighborhood pub around nine or ten o'clock in the evening, sometimes meeting up with a Chicago friend or a drink or two and sometimes just going out on my own, to have a nightcap and do a little flirting before yet another early weekend night to bed, because I'm middle-aged now and middle-aged people are fucking pathetic. Especially now in the winter, I find, just that ten-minute walk out in the bracing cold weather can be like a refreshing splash of cold water on the face, after eight hours of sedentary sitting and typing and mouse-clicking, a reminder of how great it actually is to be a physical creature out in the physical world; and then of course getting half-lit in a public space is a great reminder of what is so important about physical meet-ups, that the last five percent of human interaction the online world can't provide is the most important five percent of all, the five percent of smelling someone's hair or touching someone's arm, of body language selling a joke, of nervous stuttering making you fall in love.

Like millions of others, I'm trying to figure out where this balance lays in my life, this balance between living my life online and living it out in the physical world. But also like millions of others, experiences like these Saturday afternoons of culture-gorging are starting to force me to acknowledge the internet itself as a legitimate "place" in my head, a place where I legitimately "reside" for X amount of hours each day instead of residing in Chicago, where I have essentially left my body behind and become for all intents and purposes a virtual citizen only. And this is a hard concept for us humans to wrap our minds around, because of the ephemeral nature of it all -- of the internet not really "existing" in the way we traditionally think of existence, of not even the physical mechanics behind its existence being centrally located somewhere, of the shared billion-person space we know as the "online world" actually existing within the silicon guts of a billion little servers scattered evenly across the globe. It's hard for us to think of such a thing as an actual place, an actual destination that you can spend time at, apart and away from the physical world (and don't even get me started on the magical portals known as "cellphones" that connect these two worlds in mysterious real-time ways); and I'm sure that's why so many of us, myself included, have such a hard time defining our relationship with the internet these days, of what exactly it means to us and of how exactly it is both adding to and subtracting from what we've traditionally defined in the past as a "good life." Anyway, just some random thoughts on a Sunday afternoon, after yet another Saturday pondering all these subjects yet again.

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.

Did you know that it's been two and a half years since I last had sex? Well, okay, that's not technically true; there's been a couple of isolated experiences in there as well, half-intimate things that rarely led to full intercourse, with people I barely knew and in most cases never saw again. So okay, to be technical about it -- it's been two and a half years since I last had full intercourse with someone who lives in Chicago and who I run into on a regular basis. And that, as they say, is a long-ass time for a sexually active person to go without sex, especially someone like me who just five years ago was having sex with someone new every week (as part of book I was writing at the time on Chicago's swinging community).

Frankly, there are big chunks of the year when this lack of sex doesn't bother me in the least; indeed, when I see it actually as a benefit, in that I'm not wasting all that time trying to meet people and set up dates and go out on dates and attempt to be impressive on dates, et-fucking-c. And those chunks of the year not so coincidentally tend to line up with the winter months here in Chicago; it's difficult to get excited about the dim prospect of sex, after all, when you're looking at a half-hour bus ride and 15-minute walk through four inches of snow in 20-below weather just to make it possible. (Okay, maybe it's possible for people to get excited under such circumstances, but not me.) Ah, but once that warm weather hits here again every April or so, and once everyone starts spending a whole lot more time outside in a whole lot less clothes, look out -- it's the mighty annual appearance of Horny Jason again, as predictable as the swallows returning to Capistrano each year (and as full of birdshit, some might argue).

And sure enough, it's started turning warm here in Chicago again, and sure enough I find myself a little more...er, distracted these days than normal. But I'm caught in a weird situation these days, when it comes to the prospect of casual sex, because: 1) I'm not swinging anymore, because I'm afraid of it interfering too much now with my daytime career goals; 2) all my old fuckbuddies now either have boyfriends or live in other cities; 3) I don't have any current platonic friends of the type I could ask to be new fuckbuddies; 4) I have ethical problems with the idea of hiring prostitutes (and can't nearly afford it anyway, so is a moot argument); and 5) I don't want to put some poor woman through the charade of a real relationship for a month or two, just because I wanted to get laid on a regular basis for a little bit, ultimately to unceremoniously dump her ass six weeks later. I did that enough in my twenties to last the rest of my life, you know?

So I'm stuck in a sense; in a mood to have casual sex, but with seemingly no options for finding partners. So I've been looking into other options, frankly, especially online ones that allow people to be sexual with each other without having actual sex (hence making it attractive to a greater number of people). For example, regular readers will remember my first explorations about a year ago into the world of IM-based erotic chat and photo exchange, using a couple of volunteer readers who were game for helping out an enthusiastic newbie. And it was fine for what it was, I suppose, although it confirmed yet again that I'm mostly a visual person when it comes to sexuality. It made me wonder two things, in fact, when all was said and done: of what such an experience might be like when live webcams are added; and if there's a central place online where horny people with webcams get together, expressly to do sexual things with each other. This is half the battle, after all, when it comes to online sexual activities; actually, now that I think about it, it's more like 90 percent of the battle, in that it's very hard to find these places but very easy now to acquire the technology to make it all work.

Yeah, so, guess what? A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that a friend of mine here in the city had a decade-old webcam on a shelf at his place, not being used, and he agreed to let me take it home and try it out when I asked. And even though it was a Windows cam and over ten years old, I still managed to track down a freeware driver online that lets it work perfectly fine on my Intel OSX Mac. (Oh, internet, is there anything you can't do?) Okay, so I have a webcam! Now...what to do with my webcam? Like I said, this is 90 percent of the battle when it comes to the subject; sure, I now have the means to broadcast my wee-wee to the world, but where do I find people who would actually want to watch it (and mirror my actions in kind)? So I just kept doing what I've been doing for the last year or so, which is to fire up my IM software whenever I'm in a particular randy mood (usually late at night), in the hopes that some old lover will contact me out of the blue, or perhaps a random reader who's feeling like being a little naughty. (Hey, ain't like I'm getting paid to maintain this website, you know what I mean?)

And indeed, last week a random reader did contact me out of the blue one late night, and we sat around gabbing on IM for a couple of hours about all kinds of little subjects. It was her who told me of a service called Camfrog, which she claimed was just what I was looking for; a place that combines chat rooms with webcams, in other words, along with a central interface so that strangers can easily view and contact other strangers. And so I downloaded their proprietary software (cross-platform, thank God), booted it up, and...and what do you know, it actually worked! And not only that, but turned out indeed to be an almost perfect implementation of what I had been ideally expecting -- a place where anonymous naked strangers can quickly and easily find each other, check each other out, either move on quickly to the next stranger, or have a dual voyeuristic/exhibitionistic sexual experience with, if you're both willing, and with the options of text chat and audio too. And it's free! Fuck; what's not to like?!

How Camfrog works will be pretty familiar to anyone who's used chat software before; you basically create an account, which includes a username and profile, letting you share as little or as much info about yourself as you want. Then you log on, at which point you're presented with hundreds of "rooms," each of which have a certain amount of other people in them at any given time. When you visit a room yourself, then, a new window opens, showing the transcript of the group public chat on one side, a list of everyone in that room on the other side. Where the Camfrog software starts getting clever, though, is with that list of users; all one has to do is click on a name to immediately load up another new window, giving you a live, real-time view of that person's cam. This new window then also gives you all the other options of a traditional IM service as well; send a private message, view their profile, add them to your buddy list, etc etc.

This is all freaky enough, of course, and enough to get just about anyone addicted at first, sexual or not, but the killer aspect of Camfrog is this -- that whenever someone is viewing your particular cam, their icon in the big list suddenly acquires two giant green eyes, letting you immediately know that they're watching you. (In fact, I think the Pro version even sends you real-time alerts in the corner of your screen.) It is this one single feature, in fact, that is the entire key to meeting up with anonymous strangers for sexual activities there, in that you don't even have to talk to the other person under such a system; you simply watch each other's cams, using the mutual green eyes to prove to each other that you're both actually watching each other at that moment.

In effect, it creates a digital version of something the gay male community has had for decades, which is a cruising location; a series of danceclub-like spaces (most even have dance music playing, as well as bar-type trivia games), where people are literally hanging out naked and checking each other out solely in terms of if they'd like to immediately have sex with them or not. Ah, but, you see, it adds something as well that you can almost never guarantee at any physical cruising location, which is a layer of safety to it all; if anyone starts getting the least bit snippy with you, after all, you can always turn your computer off, or ban them from viewing or contacting you, or just wait for one of the overzealous administrators each room has to kick the person's ass out. And so this, of course, is what convinces women to get involved with the cruising too, as well as couples who would normally never go swinging, not to mention men who would never normally go cruising. My hat is off to you, Camfrog; you're freaking geniuses!

Now, just because I'm sure at this point that any Camfrog employee reading this is about to have a cardiac arrest -- let me me it clear that the majority of Camfrog's services are non-adult in nature, non-sexual as well, and that 100 percent of Camfrog's official marketing and promotion goes towards the family-friendly stuff there. In fact, it's quite clear that Camfrog is suffering the same dilemma right now that Yahoo Groups did in the '90s, back during the original Dot Com Boom; that their most passionate users are there for the one thing the company wants to de-emphasize the most, creating an environment where they must simultaneously support these users and not support them. For example, like Yahoo, Camfrog doesn't really put any kind of central structure into place for what kinds of activities are appropriate for which rooms; and so no matter what the name of the particular "adult" room, over the course of Camfrog's history a set of regular users have congregated in that room, and made "house rules" that may or may not have anything to do with what the room is titled. So a room called "Wild Girls," for example, may kick you out immediately for showing your penis on-cam, while a room called "Wild Girlz" may berate you for not showing your johnson. Yeah, very confusing, not to mention that it makes the goal of finding a good room a bit of a wild goose chase.

Now, let's not kid ourselves; if you're a single straight male, like everything else when it comes to easy sex, you're going to find a lot more hurdles than anyone else and a whole lot less successful hookups. To be sure, there are real women at Camfrog -- anywhere from 5 percent to a third of any particular room's total makeup, in fact -- but it's also a fact that many of these women have their cams off, or pointing to a wall, or sometimes set in "Private" mode (another feature of the Pro edition), which means that they may or may not being broadcasting a pre-recorded video instead of a live cam. (How can you tell? Look at their icon; the addition of a blue "P" means they're in Private mode, although not necessarily that they're showing a video.) And of the women left over in a room, whose cameras are on and are definitely real, most of them remain clothed the entire time, either chatting with friends or actually playing trivia or making fun of a bunch of naked schmos because she can. There are definitely erotic pleasures to be had for straight males, which I'll get into a little later; but just like all other things concerning this subject, most women who get involved can expect to be flooded with responses, while most men can expect no response at all.

No, the best thing about Camfrog for me, and what keeps compelling me to go back and back, lies with the bisexual's best friend, hot man-on-man homoerotic action. Thank you, hot man-on-man homoerotic action! Stop having a heart attack, Camfrog marketing staff! And in this, Camfrog's extra layer of safety and anonymity works wonders as well; it convinces just hundreds of normally straight guys, in fact, to suddenly derive pleasure out of wanking their dick in front of a bunch of other guys, guys who would normally be physically cruising if not for the creepy, dangerous aspect of the physical version. The biggest all-male rooms there, in fact, are just these cornucopias of sexuality: from 18-year-old built skaters who like showing off, to old rich queens who like fucking them, from politically active club queers looking for boyfriends, to laid-back bisexual alterna-emo-slackers like me just looking for someone to rub their dick with. And like a perfect cruising environment, you have a number of means at your disposal for interacting; you can either put on a show and see who comes to you, or watch the group chat and see who's advertising a show, or simply view random cams in no particular order and see who will notice and watch back.

It is fascinating, I have to fucking admit it, and I'm sorry to anyone out there who is offended by such a thing, but it is. Because ultimately, it's kind of like the homoerotic experiences I had in my swinging days, which mostly were deliberately with laid-back pale emo slackers like myself, because those are the guys I mostly get attracted to via the limited bisexuality I have. (For those who don't know, I consider myself about 80 percent straight.) But in a way, it's kind of like going clubbing in Chicago's Boystown for a night, or New York's Chelsea, or Munich's Gaertnerplatz; if you want, you can spend the entire evening watching nothing but pretty muscular boys, naked and oiled down and doing just the most disgusting things to their humongous cocks you can imagine, all of it voluntarily just because they like putting on a show. But then it's kind of like a suburban sex club; couples are of course encourage to appear on-cam together, and most rooms have several, and most of them are actually having sex on their cam that you can also watch live. But then again, it's also kind of like a singles bar for those who are legitimately gay; lots of men keep their face on-cam the whole time, for example, and are looking mainly for people they click with and can have an ongoing relationship with.

It's all of this bundled into one -- like a fucking mall for fucking, for fuck's sake! (I hereby apologize for the preceding play on words.) You can see why I've gotten kind of obsessed with this place over the last couple of days, right? Sure, it's a free sexual service, which is going to make it popular no matter what, but it's a whole lot more; it's one tool that lets you simultaneously be a voyeur or exhibitionist, depending on your taste, dominant or submissive depending on your mood. It lets you try out fantasies that would normally stay in the mind for one's entire life; lets you do things in front of others that you won't admit to your friends you even know exist. It lets you be a slut, without the danger or stigma of being a slut. And most importantly for many of the most mainstream people there, it lets them explore a side of sexuality that the circumstances of their lives (job, marriage, kids, etc) simply don't let them normally experience. That makes Camfrog's denizens not only a bunch of dirty little fuckers, but an entirely different breed of fuckers than a place like a swinging website; not just the hardcore lifestylers, but a whole lot of good-looking suburban middle-class white-collar workers and students too, who are sometimes the dirtiest ones there but who you would least suspect if encountering on a sidewalk.

For example, as I mentioned, there's definitely a legitimate erotic pleasure for straight men to have there; and that's because in almost every room at almost any time, there is at least one very real woman who is putting on a very real show for others to watch, as well as granting requests posted in the group chat and sent via private message. And sure, a fair amount of them are Asian prostitutes or American strippers, but you'd be surprised how many are just the normal everyday women that you see in all other facets of your life; college students, housewives, freelancers, doing stuff on-cam that you normally only see from porn stars, gladly acceding to just some incredibly graphic requests being posted in the public room. In fact, this might be the most brilliant thing of all about Camfrog -- that ultimately they get both the men and the women to the same sexual state (naked and doing filthy things for each other's amusement), even though it was almost opposite motivations that got them there to begin with.

I've talked with enough women about this, so I know it's true in a lot of cases; that when a woman is excited about stuff like this, a lot of it is about the seduction involved, the power, knowing that sometimes several hundred men are all watching you at once, all of them being driven to orgasm by what you're doing (which, don't forget, you're watching onscreen as they happen). I'm not saying that all women are into this, or that there never exists nights when a woman just gets all horny like a man and wants to grind her pussy in some stranger's face; but based on what I've now seen there, the comments a lot of women make and the things they do, I think it is this slow seduction and power exchange that is getting them the most turned on about it all. And again, I have to fucking admit, sometimes it is just the hottest goddamn scenarios a straight male could ever imagine: for example, undergrads in their dorms in the late afternoon, slipping in a naked quickie between the end of classes and when their roommate gets home; or sometimes these toned middle-aged soccer moms who initially start just as clothed spectators, but who end up all turned on and with a dildo inside of them before you know it.

I'm not saying that this stuff is for everybody; I am saying, though, that about 75,000 people there at any given time seem to be into it, and that is more than enough to have a satisfying sexual experience almost every time, which is the closest I'm having to sex these days so I'll take it. If I were to have a complaint, in fact, it's simply that it's still exclusively a one-sided relationship when it comes to the women there; no matter how many female cams I've watched, I've never had a single woman check out my cam for even a second, which of course leaves something just a little lacking in the whole thing. Of course, as mentioned, I do have cam abilities in Yahoo [username: jasonpettuschicago] and Skype [jasonpettus] as well, plus the ability to send photos through AIM [pettuschicago], GTalk [ilikejason] and MSN [ilikejason@hotmail.com]; maybe some female reader out there will have a little too much wine one night, and decide to beep me* in the mood for a little ridiculousness. As the great Billie Holliday sang, "I ain't too proud to beg."

Okay, so that's it with the dirty silliness for today; and if I haven't given my haters enough now to rag on for the next three months, I don't know what else I can do, besides possibly eat my own shit just to see what it tastes like. Until that day, I and my patched-together webcam look forward to your call.

*I can of course also meet up with fellow Camfrog users for private sessions, but you'll have to write first to get my username there; I purposely had my computer just pick a string of random letters and numbers, so that a witty username wouldn't give me away. As always, you can drop me a line at ilikejason [at] gmail.com if you're curious.

Okay, I admit it, that recent circumstances in my life are all adding up to me being a pretty big loner here in Chicago this autumn. Start with the rapidly falling temperature; add that I'm currently working from home; and that that job is to do a culture magazine about a virtual reality; and that it's not making very much money yet, which means I'm too broke to go out much; and that because of my rather nasty experiences this summer, I'm in no rush right now to hang out with my fellow humans in the first place. So yeah, I've been spending a whole lot of time at home these days, most of my waking hours in fact, which is why there's never anything going on with me and so why I never have updates these days for this personal journal.

But that's also good news to you online readers; it means I can finally get around to some of those major projects I've been promising all year that I'd be getting to, once the craziness of this summer was over and I was having a lot more alone time to begin with. And so if you're visiting the actual website right now, versus the feed, you'll see one example of what I'm talking about; I finally got off my ass and finished the newest version of this site's design scheme, the twelfth in fact since starting this site in December 1997.

Yeah, it's about time, I know! Version 11 of this site was done when I was just starting to teach myself the CSS2 protocol for the first time; and it was also before I had home internet access, so had to load everything at a cafe, test it, go home and debug, go back to the cafe and start over, every time I wanted to make changes. Since then I've designed two other new websites from scratch, have learned a lot more about both Movable Type and CSS2, and also of course can debug my code in a matter of seconds now instead of a matter of days, which makes a huge difference, believe me. It's been something I've been wanting to do for awhile now, get an actual sophisticated, fully decent design scheme up here to my main personal site; so over the last week or so I've finally had the time to sit down and do it.

As regular readers can see, it's not too terribly different than version 11 in overall layout; there's still the date and title at the top, then my logo, then the main menu, and then that day's entry, with a bunch of supplementary information shuttled off to the left there. But I consider the details of version 12's layout to be much more nuanced than 11's, and to take advantage more of the relationship between content and white space; and I've also trimmed out a lot of the extraneous crap that used to be in the sidebar, since a lot of that was designed for when I was going out a lot, and I'm now not going out a lot.

Then there are other changes I'm working on as we speak; like, I want to start offering a playable version of my last video and audio recordings here in the sidebar, as well as shots of my last few Flickr uploads; so I'm busy right now hunting down the right code for all of that, and hope to have it all pasted correctly into the sidebar soon. Also of course, technically right now (Monday night Chicago time) it's just the front page that contains the new design scheme; over the course of tonight and tomorrow morning I'll be getting all the archived templates switched over as well. And then finally, I've got to sit down soon and figure out what's going on with the Jason Pettus Instant Locator™ -- my Treo hasn't been able to make the connection for a long while now, and I don't know if it's the Treo's fault or the website's, or whether my XML-RPC address is still current, or where to go to check all that information, ugh, the annoyances of bleeding-edge software, I'm tellin' ya. So anyway, I'll hopefully get that figured out soon, and then you'll start seeing regular updates of the JPIL again as well.

And since the other two blogs I'm maintaining these days both use a rather cold Helvetica scheme, I thought I'd go the opposite direction here for this update and use a warm Garamond (or Times New Roman, for those of you who don't have Garamond loaded on your computer). Just a change of pace, you know. Anyway, let me know what you think if you want, at ilikejason [at] gmail.com; I'm always interested in hearing opinion about web design.

So speaking of my hermit-like autumn, should I go ahead and tell you about what little else is going on in my life these days, as I spend the majority of my time cooped up here and traveling through the virtual world pumped through my broadband account? Well, the biggest news is the one that's obvious to regular readers; that my new blog about Second Life, In The Grid, is continuing to pick up steam in a way that hardly any other creative project I've ever tried has done. It's a bitter irony for me, of course, because the only reason ITG came about is because all my previous plans for this fall fell apart at once, at the end of this summer, and the Second Life blog was about the only thing I could think of doing that I could actually afford. But lo and behold, here it is five weeks later, and I have 1,500 unique readers a day there already, half of them regular readers, and with the blog mentioned already by such places as Boing Boing, Miss Snark Literary Agent, Clickable Culture and more. And with it being listed by Technorati now as the 12th most popular Second Life blog on the planet.

Why is ITG picking up such a fanatical audience so fast, when so many of the other things I've tried over the last several years (most of them much more sensible-sounding) haven't? Beats the hell out of me, you know? Part of it I suppose is because of the growing interest in Second Life beyond the people actually playing it habitually; those who are interested in MMO platforms in general, or virtual realities in general, or those who are on the cusp of signing up and are interested in learning just a little more. This is a big reason I write ITG the way I do, in fact; so that it acts as a sort of bridge between daily players who are in the know, and non-players who are just trying to get an idea of what's going on. I use a lot of slang, but also include a lexicon; I refer to both real life and Second Life an equal amount of time. That keeps interest healthy among both the Web 2.0 crowd and the existing residents of the grid; it's what keeps ITG straddling the line between a fanzine and a sociological journal, allowing it to pick up fans of both.

So I'm not going to complain; I'm just going to keep writing it, hopefully a 500- to 1000-word article of original content every 24 hours, although the continual shutdowns of the grid in the last week have made that more and more difficult. Now that I've got my first healthy chunk of daily readers, I'm looking into more sophisticated forms of advertising at my disposal (i.e. outside ad networks); I'm going to see if maybe I can't find a deal for ITG that will let me suddenly bring in significantly more revenue than I have been before. We'll see, anyway. In the meantime, though, like I said, just keep on keeping on with the publication; a new article a day, a new PDF magazine a month, get the HUD version of issue 1 done this week as well, in preparation for our postponed release party happening this Friday, a week late since the fucking grid was down last week when it was supposed to happen. You know, what all blogs do that end up really popular; just keep it regular, keep it consistent, and keep it entertaining.

And hmm, what else? Well, here's a nerdy loner thing I've been getting into this autumn that I could share with you; I've started having classic novels delivered to me a couple pages a day via email. Cool! It's a free service called DailyLit.com, in fact, that does a stupidly simple and ingenious thing; they're taking a growing amount of public-domain books, breaking them down into chunks that take five to ten minutes to read apiece, then setting up a mailing list to send out these chunks to people on a daily basis. So I'm reading three books right now, for example, all of which will end at radically different dates; HG Wells' The Time Machine, which will be over in about a month; EM Forster's Howards End, which still has a little over three months to go; and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, still with a whopping seven months of daily five-minute updates before it will finally be finished.

It's cool, because if I really do keep up with it every day, I find that I can easily hold the plots of four different books in my head; the three I'm reading by email in my case, plus one in paper form I'm always carrying around with me (which happens this week to be Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age). And the three by email are only 15 minutes a day; which since I can actually access through my Treo, makes for perfect reading on a train ride, in a coffeehouse, even during a longish walk. That's one of the things I love so much about my Treo, in fact; that it's a full-blown PDA, not just a cellphone with minimal web capabilities, which means I'm able to transfer a lot of daily online reading to my mobile excursions away from my crappy apartment. Nerd! Fucking nerd! Yeah, I know. What can I say?

So let's see, do I have anything else at all to report these days? Well, you know how it is; that even when you work from home, and you live by yourself, and you hardly get out at all under social circumstances, you still have a real need to establish daily routines for yourself. So I have a pretty rigorous sleep schedule I still maintain, for example -- in bed by 11pm, awake by 7am -- and I always stop for about two hours in the middle of the day to go to a coffeehouse, and do the crossword and eat a muffin and sometimes flirt with cute girls and all the other crap one does in a cafe. There are a lot of daily routines I simply get out of the way in the early morning hours (emails, RSS reading, Second Life tips), then a time when I'm very busy on the magazine, then times when I'm laying around watching television.

They're not things that make for a very exciting journal entry, but things that are important to me right now -- a sense of the day-to-day, of repeated times for repeated duties, and with a chance each day to be among my fellow humans for a couple hours as well (something important for me to schedule in; I'm notorious for forgetting it if left on my own). It's just...a time for work right now, you know. A time when I'm in most days, for most of the day, just doing work and getting those big items slowly off my lists. By this time 24 hours from now, hopefully version 12 of this site will be completely checked off; then it'll be time to move on to another one, I suppose, most likely the long-awaited overhaul of the GAD catalog. So anyway, that's it for now; and I hope that all of you are doing well, no matter where that is.

It's...frustrating. Very, very frustrating. I won't kid you. Ever since the beginning of July, in fact, when I first stepped in and helped save an ex-friend's internet startup from falling apart, my entire life has seemed odd and off-track, to the culmination of this week and realizing that my autumn plans for CCLaP aren't ready. And doubly frustrating, because every other aspect of it besides the financial one was going just fine; I was slowly gaining a real public interest in the shows, enough that I was feeling safe about meeting our break-even audience quotas, gaining more and more publicity, having the actual logistical details coming more and more into focus. So frustrating that all of that could be killed off so profoundly, just from a lack of a thousand bucks to buy some mics and speakers and flyers, what should be the most insignificant part of the entire process. And triply frustrating, because by all rights I should have this thousand bucks right now, and a lot more, which I legally earned at this crazy internet-startup day job I had this summer; but the owner ended up fucking me over at the end of it all, and screwing me out of over $3,000 I was owed, in this really petty way so that I will have to sue him if I want to see any of it, no matter how in the wrong he knows he is.

Frustrating, yes. Very, very frustrating. But it's just the reality of the situation, and there's not a whole lot I can do about realities, no matter how unpleasant they are. I don't have any money right now, so can't start the live-event program for my arts center. That's how it is, and so that's how it's going to be. And it'd be easy to be overwhelmed by cynicism and defeatism at this point; I know, because I spent the better part of this week wallowing in it. And thinking about how maybe I should just hang the entire experiment up, declare it a failure and go lead a normal life, one that's nice and quiet and private, where I just work for some company and get a paycheck and don't blab on the web about every little high and low in between. I thought a lot this week about doing that. I won't kid you.

But then a snotty little part of me thought, "No one likes reading about a whiny self-pitier." I certainly don't; do you? I love reading about people who have failures, and are determined not to let things like that stop them, and jump right back into whatever crazy new project they actually can accomplish at that point. So yeah, I ultimately decided not to be one of those people who hang it all up and go off to live some quiet, unassuming life; I've decided to just accept the reality of this situation, own up to it, then figure out what I actually can accomplish right now.

That's sort of the beauty of my arts center's plan, after all; that there's a whole lot of things I want to do with it, and so therefore have the implementation plan laid out as a series of stages, spanning out a good five to ten years at this point, all the way to the point of owning our own permanent physical space in Chicago. So, just as I'm pushing off one part of the plan until spring 2007, for lack of money, I can bring another part of the plan from next spring up to right now -- the publishing program, that is. Because fuck it, I can do the publishing program right now; I can solicit great photos and great literature myself, edit the work myself, lay it out all groovy-like myself, publish it electronically myself, promote it online myself, and collect voluntary payments myself. All for not an extra dime added to my current budget, using tech I already own, and needing no additional employees whatsoever.

Goddamnit! Nobody can fucking stop me from making electronic books and magazines! No matter how broke I am, no matter how little outside interest there is, I can still write and edit great material, and lay it out into a great-looking electronic publication. And so that's what I'm going to do for the next six months; I'm going to start up and really obsessively concentrate on CCLaP's publishing program, instead of its live-event program. And I'm going to maybe make some money, definitely make a lot of fans, for sure generate a lot of interest in what CCLaP is doing, so that by next spring we hopefully do have the structure and financing needed to finally start our live-event program, and maybe have it work this time.

Ugh! It's a struggle for me to remain optimistic and upbeat these days; frustrations and setbacks seem to have been piling up around me all summer, sometimes so tall that I can't see over them. But I'm going to stay optimistic, or at least keep trying to as much as I can; because I've been down that other road before, and know that it's no less frustrating. I spent a lot of my twenties giving in to depression and bitterness, defeatism and the like, and got really nothing more out of it than yet more depression and more bitterness; so now I try to do the opposite, and at least try to salvage something good and new out of every setback.

Like, here's something -- I now have the time to start my own monthly culture magazine about Second Life, something I've idly thought about doing for six months now, but never had the time before because of CCLaP's live-event schedule formerly starting in the fall. God, it's just so needed there right now, you know? It's such a random and chaotic world there in Second Life, and the makers of the videogame no longer provide a central web location to announce news and the like (they got sick of all the flame wars so decided to just shut down their entire forum system, believe it or not); so in the void, there have now been nearly 15 new SL-related publications open up in the last six months. Yeah, 15, I shit you not; but with almost none of them coming from people with real-life (RL) publishing backgrounds, most of them full of beginning design and editing errors, a lack of focus on theme or attitude, or just plain ol' crappy layout and stories.

That's something I can do; I can design shit good. And I can write shit good. And I can edit other people's shit good. And I'm already an insanely inquisitive person, with no fear and no sense of moral boundaries; so I make the perfect person to run a magazine about the "underground culture" of Second Life. Because that's another big mistake most of these other culture magazines are making; they're purporting to report on really unique, unknown stuff, but then all end up covering the same tourist spots and "shocking" articles about how you can have sex with furries while there. I'm already going to stuff for fun that would make for a highly intriguing magazine or blog; fetish fashion shows, vampire balls, Gorean cuffing ceremonies (don't ask), unpublicized ambient raves, violent "edgeplay" sex clubs, the works.

So, I thought, why not a two-fisted publishing approach, something else that none of the SL magazines are doing right now? Publish a monthly PDF magazine, doing in-depth profiles of the most interesting individuals and groups I met that month; and then a daily blog, run kinda like Michael Musto's gossip column, where I'm always out at crazy underground stuff, taking pictures, writing witty and snotty blog entries about what they were like. Then run ads, of course, with those who buy a magazine ad getting a free month of a blog ad too; and with my decade now of RL experience in interviewing artists, just pile up a whole crapload of intriguing conversations with intriguing people, and have lots of content for each issue whether anyone else contributes or not. A cross between a zine and a magazine, if you see what I'm getting at; still opinionated, still a one-man outfit, but with mainstream readership and advertiser interest. It's something a lot of my readers have urged me to do with this personal site for years, after all, is run banner ads; but if I'm going to accept paid advertising, why not do something natural for it like a traditional magazine?

So the magazine, lots of ebooks through CCLaP from writers and photographers, plus teaching myself Flash finally and building a really cool virtual photography gallery there too, complete with MP3 audio interview with the artist about each work being seen, as if you were actually walking through a physical gallery with them and listening to them talk about the work. Plus keep signing up Fellows to CCLaP, keep featuring creative work there, keep mentioning other cool things going on in the arts, and keep building up a fan base. Oh, plus there's this; that finally, finally today I became a Premium member of Second Life, which means that I'm finally going to own land there for the first time, which means I can get to work right away on CCLaP's first virtual gallery and performance space.

I can do everything mentioned in the last paragraph without spending any extra money, or needing a single other person's help, or needing a single other piece of tech equipment besides what I already own. Damnit. So that's what I'm going to do, because I can. Damnit! And because these are still all going to be cool things, popular things that impress people, although in my eyes not quite as cool as producing regular live events. It's something, though, something constructive instead of (self-) destructive, something that requires only time and skill, both of which I have an abundance of right now, and a lack of everything else. And something that keeps CCLaP's momentum moving in a forward, ever-enlarging direction, instead of on permanent hiatus or worse yet shut completely down. And so that's good, although still frustrating, yet weirdly hopeful, yet unsurprisingly depressing. You can take the boy out of the drama, but never the drama out of the boy. Sigh.

So, that's the plan. And now if you'll excuse me, I'm fucking busy; I've got to get the CCLaP website redesigned as soon as I can, and the Second Life magazine blog designed as soon as I can, and interviews scheduled and photos taken and lots and lots of piled-up landmarks to check out. So that's it; I'm off to work again. Talk with you again soon, and don't forget to start reading my new Second Life blog starting Monday.

--So, on top of everything else, I've got more news that will get a certain amount of you excited -- I finally have the chance to start porting into Second Life (SL) again. Happy happy! Joy joy! In fact, it's been over two months now since I've last logged into the grid; and that's probably the biggest shame of all regarding my last job, that it just completely sucked away any chance I had to keep up-to-date in the virtual world, which means that I ended up just completely losing the momentum I had started building there, as far as getting the various SL micro-businesses set up that I had been working on.

For new readers, by the way, I should explain that that was the main reason I had been porting into the grid on a daily basis in the first place; not just for the fun of it (although admittedly it is a lot of fun), but also so I could start setting up a series of tiny little businesses there too, things like a new sex club and a new architectural firm, producing goods and services that I could sell to fellow residents for small but real amounts of money, and hopefully add to the rest of the revenue I'm generating out here in real life (RL), to maybe add up at the end to a decent yearly wage altogether (which under my definition is basically US$25,000, or about 13,000 pounds, or maybe 18,000 or so euros). And I'm still planning on doing this, actually, except that the details of the plan have changed -- partly because of what's been going on in my life, partly because of what's been going on in the grid recently.

For example, I've decided now not to open the virtual sex club ('boy-girl-other') that I had been planning on; and that's because I made the decision earlier this summer to give up swinging altogether, simply because it's starting to interfere more and more with the nonsexual things going on in my life. And yeah, I know, talking dirty with a cartoon character ain't exactly the same thing as attending a coke-fueled orgy with a bunch of strangers in the real world; but still, I suppose it's the principle of the thing, not the semantics behind what constitutes "swinging" in the first place. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'll still be visiting sex clubs while in the grid, and undoubtedly getting into trouble at some of them during some of those visits; just that for the sake of my arts center, and the other high-profile nonsexual things I'm trying to accomplish in my life these days, I thought it'd be best not to actually own and operate a sex club myself.

And then for another, the plans for my virtual architectural firm ('Fabb') have changed as well. Regular readers will remember the original plan -- to bring on a whole series of amateur builders, have them each create a unique design scheme, and then every couple of days release another "unit" (a bedroom, a dancefloor, an outdoor garden) that somehow fits into that design scheme. That way customers could pick and choose whichever units they wanted, and build semi-customized prefab homes on their property (which is where the name 'Fabb' comes from); plus have an excuse to check out our catalog every day, like how it is with clothing designers there, which is really the only way to make decent money in SL. So yeah, kinda like "Garanimals meets Habitrail meets prefabricated housing meets science-fiction." You see what I'm getting at.

I still think it's a good idea, frankly; but with all the chaos surrounding my arts center right now, I simply don't have the time to build the complex eCommerce site needed to pull off such a concept, nor the time to recruit and oversee a whole pile of amateur architects, a necessary key to making the whole thing commercially viable. So, I'm still going to open Fabb, but now simply as a one-man operation, a place where I can both slowly teach myself how to build and also occasionally sell the experiments I'm creating. After all, I still maintain the opinion I had before; that for a world where the normal laws of physics don't apply, the majority of architects there build surprisingly pedestrian, surprisingly boring buildings, voluntarily confining themselves to the physical laws that govern real-world architecture as well.

I still maintain that if an architect was to go into SL and build some really impressive things, taking advantage of such things as the lack of gravity there, they'd be able to clean up fairly easily. Like...how about a treehouse, but with both the house and tree made out of tintable glass? Or painted while, like the Tree of Gondor from Lord of the Rings? Or with different rooms hanging off the tree in ways that could never happen in RL? How about a retail store or art gallery that's a giant 50-foot-high glass cube, with layers of floating floors that customers can instantly teleport between? How about a treehouse without a tree, just rooms that completely float on their own in the middle of the air, with precarious rope bridges connecting them all?

This is what I'm talking about, people; that even in a world where all of this is possible, most architects there are still building the same crappy dumpy little ranch duplexes that I can't stand even in the real world. There's got to be a better way to do things, I keep thinking -- and if someone else isn't going to do it, then I'll just do it myself, once I finally have the time to sit down and teach myself how to build houses there. And then if they're cool enough, I'll be able to sell each of these buildings for, what, four or five dollars, the same price as a high-quality skin or elaborate clothing outfit or really kick-ass weapon for the gaming areas of the grid. And hey, I don't even need to own my own store under such a set-up! Instead I can just sell them through the amazing virtual eCommerce site SLBoutique.com, until I've raised the money (about 85 bucks) to upgrade to a professional account there, and have the right to own land and a store in the first place.

Let's see, and what else? Well, I definitely still want to re-broadcast all of my arts center's RL events in SL too; but I'm not sure at this point if I'm going to have the tech necessary to do this right away. I still want to hold "mesh" events -- where, say, a musician performs in my apartment one night for ten of her drunk friends, but then is also broadcast at the same time in the grid for a total of 40 or 50 virtual fans. And I still want to hold exclusive in-game events too; like SL's first-ever weekly poetry slam, for example, which can actually be done through Skype conference calling and then broadcast at a virtual club there in real time (given that you have the right software, which I do). So we'll see, I guess, we'll see. And if nothing else, at least I'll simply be there on a regular basis again; I've really missed playing, to tell you the truth, and am looking forward to becoming a regular again.

--And then I guess just one more thing I'll be trying to accomplish this fall; that after two years of promising to get around to it, I'm finally going to be trying to get all my archives back online, as well as new versions of all my old electronic books. See, for those who don't know, I've actually had one version or another of my website online now for almost nine years; nine years! Jeez, it sounds weird to even say it out loud. And so that's just hundreds upon hundreds of old journal entries that are currently missing from this version of my website, because of all of them originally being posted at my old one at Geocities, and me so far being either too busy or too lazy to get them imported into this new fancy-schmancy Movable Type interface of mine, which I started using for the first time just about two years ago now.

So anyway, nothing really here to report; just that I need to get off my ass and actually do it, which I'm hoping to finally do this fall. Plus of course do "final" versions of all my old books, from back when I was a professional writer; because I'm not a professional writer anymore, so would like to have a final resolution to that part of my past, for obvious reasons. So okay, that's it -- that's everything I'm hoping to get done from now until Christmas. Wish me luck!

So okay, I know, I now have two more entries here that I've been promising: first my thoughts on now posting social bookmarks to not only del.icio.us but to Digg and Netscape, and what kinds of differences I've noticed between the services; and then an essay concerning Nietzsche and cheesy Rob Lowe movies. (Don't ask; just wait for the entry.) So, yes, I will be trying to get those written and posted soon! Yes, I will! But in the meantime I've got an arts center to open, literally in a couple of weeks, so I hope you'll forgive me for taking what might be excruciating amounts of time to update this personal journal. Something always has to be given up, every time I take on something new in my life; and in this case it simply means that this personal site suffers, as long as I'm up to my eyeballs in CCLaP business. I thank you all for forgiving me, and for sticking in there nonetheless.

Bye!

So, what else has been going on with me, in the two weeks since I last updated this journal? I'm glad you asked...

--The most exciting thing, I guess, is that my new Mac Intel Mini finally arrived! This is the computer, to remind you, for which I held a reader fundraiser last month; and that went, er, okay, although admittedly the vast majority of the money needed for this new computer ($500 of $600) came from freelance work I did here in Chicago, not reader donations. (And yes, I know, it's been months now and I still haven't announced who my two new freelance clients are! And that's because neither of them are ready for me to announce them publicly yet, not until the overhaul of both their websites are finished later this spring. Anyway, patience, dear reader - all will be revealed this summer.) This is actually the first brand-new computer that I've bought straight from the factory in quite awhile, in fact; so I decided to be a complete fucking dork about it and actually photograph the entire process, from its unpacking to its first boot-up. Anyway, I put a Flickr photoset together of the whole nerdy thing; fellow losers can see it here.

Now, as regular readers remember, I actually already owned a Mac OSX computer right before this one; my aging but ever-reliable first-wave G4, graciously donated to me a couple of years ago by one of my readers. And apparently (or so my online Mini research told me), there's now a function built into OSX, that makes it easier than ever to transfer all the content of an older Mac to a newer one, specifically for situations like this where customers go out and purchase brand-new computers. It's called Firewire Disk Target Mode, for those who are curious; and so I tried it out myself when this new Mini arrived, and damned if the hype didn't turn out to be true! It was, in fact, just this amazingly simple procedure; so I thought I'd review it in full detail here below, for all you fellow Mac enthusiasts who might one day need the information:

1) Obtain a cord with two Firewire plugs, if you don't already own one.

2) On your older Mac, go into the "Startup Disk" section of your System Preferences. Click the button that says "Restart in Firewire Disk Target Mode." When that older Mac reboots, then, it will suddenly now think of itself as simply an external hard drive, not its own computer at all.

3) With the newer Mac still off, plug the Firewire cord into both computers; then, turn the newer Mac on. If it's the first time this newer computer has ever been turned on, it will automatically detect that an older Mac has been connected, and will ask you if you'd like to transfer its information before doing anything else.

And really, that's it; after clicking 'yes,' the entire process took my particular computers about two hours to finish, transferring a total of around 10 gigabytes of info, made up of tens of thousands of files. And much, much cooler, this process even resticks all those funky little files associated with each of your applications back into the proper folders of your new Mac, and even brings over your user information, administrative passwords, and prior network settings for your DSL. Wow! And even cooler than this, now that the transfer process is finished, my new Mini now recognizes my old G4 as a simple hard drive as well, meaning that I suddenly have an extra 30 gigs of memory at my disposal.

So that's all been really cool, needless to say, and I'm hoping that by this time next week, every single detail of the process will be complete. Oh, and did I mention that these Intel Minis now ship with that new Apple remote control, as well as a free copy of Front Row (Apple's answer to Windows Media Center)? They do! And the remote, I have to admit, is an extremely cool little accessory to now have; Front Row, however, has been less than spectacular. I mean, it's not that it's a bad program, not at all, just that it simply does a lot less than I thought it was going to; it is, in fact, nothing more than an alternative interface for four of Mac's in-house media applications (iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie and the DVD Player), just like using the programs as always but now with funky new animations! And this is underwhelming enough when it comes to the video programs; but even worse, the new Front Row interface for iTunes is actually worse than the one built into the program itself, much clunkier and harder to navigate through, definitely with much worse onscreen graphics while the song is actually playing. So that was a little disappointing, given that Apple could've used this opportunity to build some legitimately cool new functions into the software involved.

Oh, and did I mention that you can install Windows on these new Intel Minis as well? You can! So that's exactly what I'm going to be doing later this week, courtesy of Apple's new Boot Camp software and the patient telephone help of my brother, a cross-platform specialist for a bleeding-edge tech company in New York City. So hopefully that too will be as smooth as the hype indicates; and if it is, that means I'll suddenly be running Windows XP in my home for the first time in my life, and actually be able to install and run Windows-only software. And that too is extremely cool, needless to say, because there's simply some applications out there that I would really like to use, but that only exist for Windows; for example, I'll finally be able to run the Windows versions of all these instant-message programs, which means that I too will finally be able to see other people's webcams, and talk with them through the built-in audio function.

In fact, there's only been one real problem with the new Mini so far, which is that for the first two days I was feeling this tremendous sense of guilt about now owning it, and couldn't figure out why. Once I thought about it, though, I realized - this is the first time in my entire life that I've bought a new computer when my old one was still working fine. And once making that realization, I suddenly realized why I was feeling so guilty - because I had conditioned myself so thoroughly over the years, to think that the only appropriate time for me to get a new computer was when the old one had completely fallen apart. But of course I bought this new Mini specifically to run a program that my G4 can't (more below), and it's important that I be able to run this program at home; so there's really no reason for me to feel guilty about it all. And now that I've realized this, I'm not feeling guilty anymore. So, um...there you go.

--So, yes, as regular readers remember, the whole reason I got this new Mini in the first place was to run a specific application, that my G4 cannot; an extremely graphics-heavy videogame, in fact, entitled Second Life. (Curious as to why I want to play Second Life so badly these days, by the way? Well, because I have plans to actually make money within the game; serious money, in fact, enough to actually pay my rent each month. Those who want to know more can read through the 12,000 or so words I've already written on the subject, by clicking here.) Unfortunately, though, fate has conspired so that I have yet to actually play so far; that is, last Friday when the Mini finally arrived, I was too busy actually setting it up, and then this weekend an old friend of mine from high school ended up visiting Chicago (more below), and then for the last two days I've been too busy writing these journal entries and doing freelance work. So anyway, the plan is to hopefully port in this afternoon for the first time, finally, and to check out whether this Mini really is going to work well for Second Life or not.

In the meanwhile, though, this weekend I got a chance to run yet another graphics-heavy program for the first time, that my G4 also couldn't handle; it was the experimental Google Earth, in fact, the quiet little secret of the company, that you're always hearing uber-nerds whispering about in the dark corners of the web. HOLY FUCKING SHIT - have you tried this program, people? It is literally one of the most amazing things I have ever seen successfully run on a home computer; even now, in fact, two days after starting to play with it, I can scarcely believe it actually exists. I've put up a new photoset at my Flickr account with lots of examples, but I'll explain more below as well...

Google Earth, at its heart, is nothing more than a new interface for Google Maps, which of course all of us are familiar with - the zooming, the satellite views, the ability to type in specific addresses, etc. In the case of Google Earth, however, this information is presented not as a series of flat-screen maps, but rather textured around a virtual ball, so that you're actually interacting with the information as if it were a globe. And so that's cool enough - to be on one side of the world, for example, type in an address from the other side of the world, and literally watch an entire half a globe of Google maps spin in front of your eyes, until finally coming to a stop on the new destination.

Oh, but check this out - in Google Earth you can tilt these images as well, literally as if you had been reincarnated as a bird, and were flying over the area in question. And not only that, but you can still zoom and move around in tilt view as well, and can specify the tilt to be any angle between 0 and 90 degrees. Fuck me, man! And not only that, but in a total of around 30 American cities now (with more getting added each month), Google has built a 3D landscape into the cities as well, actually mapping the spatial coordinates of the downtown buildings found in those cities. And this is still while having the ability, mind you, to "fly" over spaces, to specify whatever tilt you want, to specify whatever angle you want. And this is all updated on your screen in real time, just like a cheesy CGI movie about killer snakes or volcanos or whatever, meaning that "flying" through these cities is now just like those cool-ass old planetarium shows from the '80s, but in this case with you having complete control over what exactly you're looking at. Fuck ME!!!

Oh, but shit, it doesn't even stop there; users of Google Earth, in fact, have the ability to create their own 3D renderings, just in case there's some building somewhere on the planet that Google hasn't rendered themselves yet. Or, if you want, you can also overlay a flat image onto a certain section of the globe; say, like in the above example, if you happened to find an old historical map, showing exactly what parts of Chicago burned down during the Great Fire of the 1800s. And not only this, but the fucking overlay will tilt with the main information, as well as spin, zoom, and everything else you can do in Google Earth!

OH MY LORD, I WANT TO GO TO CALIFORNIA AND SACRIFICIALLY OFFER MY BODY TO THE STAFF OF GOOGLE EARTH, for no other reason than for creating a piece of software that has blown me away so completely and profoundly. I mean, seriously, if you happen to have a computer with a fast-enough processor and enough graphics memory to run Google Earth, you really do need to stop everything you're doing, right this second, and go download the app right now. Believe me, you will not be disappointed.

--So what else? Well, like I mentioned, a friend of mine from high school was in town this weekend; his name is Ken Kase, in fact, just this insanely talented musician, still living in St. Louis. See, Ken is a good friend of this St. Louis band that did really well for themselves in the '90s, before breaking up, called The Sun Sawed in 1/2; and for the last two years now, the band has been convinced by Chicago's International Pop Overthrow Festival to do a "reunion" show of sorts, which the band has asked Ken to sit in on now for both years. And in fact, apparently last year's reunion show went so well, that a number of the original band members have started a new project, called Freshly Mowed Lawn, who also played this weekend; it's one of those New Pornographer or Pavement deals, actually, where the actual band members are scattered across the country, and only come together once every six months, for an album or special performance or whatever. Anyway, so that's why Ken was in town, to play these shows - Saturday at Gunther Murphy's, Sunday at Schuba's - and of course I wanted to go out and check the shows out.

It's always strange seeing Ken, of course, since he and I have literally been friends for over 20 years now; we originally met, in fact, when I was a junior in high school and he a sophomore, our bond cemented because of our shared geeky love of such jazz pioneers as Pat Metheny, Sun Ra and Chick Corea. (In fact, all you jazz fans, Ken's brother Chris Kase is an extremely popular contemporary jazz trumpeter, now based out of Spain, which is why the Kase name might sound familiar to you.) And it just so happens as well that yet another friend of both of us, Tom Henkey, now lives in Chicago as well (who I actually go back with even further - Tom and I have been friends, in fact, since he was three and I was four), which means that a visit from Ken usually degrades into a weekend-long drinking session between the three of us, which indeed happened this weekend as well, with the childhood stories and high-school in-jokes getting worse and worse with each round of drinks, until eventually no one else in the entire goddamn bar can stand being around us. Hooray, rural Missouri and annoying '80s in-jokes! "Don't need nothing...but some pancakes!" Fight Tigers, motherfucker!

So anyway, that was a lot of fun as always; and as always, Ken and I ended up having this extremely long and drunken conversation about the arts, our careers, and where we are now versus where we thought we were going to be when we were teenagers. That's always an interesting conversation to have with Ken, to tell you the truth, because frankly we're about the only two people left from our high school who are still pursuing careers in the arts (although admittedly we've both taken a sideways step of late - I'm now an arts administrator, not an active artist, while Ken is mostly a music engineer now, not an active musician). It's always interesting, I think, when confronted with the ghosts of your past, both the dreams and mistakes one made decades ago when one didn't know better, and to compare them against where one is now.

Am I a better person than I was 20 years ago, when I was 17? Undoubtedly; I'm much better around women, I'm much more secure about my career and life choices, much more able now to understand and handle the complexities of the world. But the curious thing, I think, is that when it comes to certain subjects, my opinion literally hasn't changed one single bit, all the way back to my teenage years when I originally formed the opinions in the first place. I still think that teenagers get the fucking shaft most of the time from adults, and that we adults need to stick up for their rights, since they can't. I still think that God doesn't actually exist, and that those who sit around worshipping such a thing are wasting their fucking time. I still think that do-it-yourself artists are the very best artists of all, and that we as a society need to be doing everything possible to support this endeavor. I still think that most human beings are dangerously naive sheep, willing to go along blindly with anything that anyone in any position of authority tells them, and that this is the cause of most of the messes in the world, everything from the Inquisition to the Nazis to George W. Bush. I still believe that actions speak louder than words. I still believe in the terrifying power of love. I still believe that no one else has the right to tell you what to do, and that you are perfectly justified in saying "Fuck you, asshole" when you come across one of these people who believe otherwise.

This, I suppose, is the most surprising thing of all about being a grown-up, the older I get and the farther away I get from being legitimately "youthful;" that no matter how old you get, the majority of your moral code still remains the same as those conclusions you first made as a teenager. Teen readers of mine, I hope you won't pass this opportunity up - I hope you won't dismiss the things you're feeling right now as temporary opinions, ones that are destined to change as you get older. The details change, yes, as you learn more about the world, and learn about more and more subtle things concerning those issues; but your basic opinions of these issues never really do change, which is why I think it's so critically important that teens absorb as much information as they possibly can, to look at the world in as many different ways as possible. Believe me, your older self will one day thank your younger self, for making the effort in the first place.

Well, okay, I guess that's enough for today. Talk with you again in another week or so.

1) First of all, we're getting ever closer to the opening of my new arts center, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (or CCLaP); the first version of its website, for instance, goes live in about a month. And this is bringing more and more responsibilities and duties that are needing to get done; like, say, actually building this website that's set to go live in about a month.

2) Plus, I've fallen behind my year-long "Getting Things Done" schedule when it comes to two activities: getting my latest travel book published, and getting the archives of my website imported into this new version. And I'm realizing that what I'm going to have to do to get these done is probably just go on an entire sabbatical online, and not interact with the web at all while I'm in the middle of them.

3) And then, lo and behold, I was actually able to raise the $600 I needed to get this new Intel Mac Mini I've been going on about here. (Although admittedly, I ended up generating most of the revenue through freelance work I did here in Chicago, not reader donations.) Anyway, so that means not only setting up the new Mac; and not only bringing all my old apps, files and preferences over from my old Mac; and not only trying to turn my old G4 into an external hard drive for my photos and music (which apparently is a super-easy thing to do, using a combination of Firewire cord, OSX's Setup Assistant, Disk Target Mode setting and Bonjour IM protocol - we'll see, anyway); and not only playing with Front Row for the first time, and my new groovy remote control; and not only installing Windows XP through the new Boot Camp partitioner; but also starting to play the alternative-reality videogame Second Life seriously for the first time as well, which of course was the whole point of getting the Intel Mini in the first place. So needless to say, all that will be cutting quite profoundly into my overall time soon as well.

And then 4), of course, I've got a growing amount of freelance work I'm starting to do in Chicago as well, and hoping to pick up more and more such work in steadier and steadier amounts. And so there's X amount of my day that needs to be devoted to that kind of work as well, an amount that will be doing nothing but increasing.

And so these four things are starting to lead me to believe that I'm going to need to cut back on this personal journal here, probably for good, because there simply aren't enough hours in the day for me to do both this journal and all those other things. I mean, I've mentioned here before that it takes me roughly two to three hours a day to write one of these entries, when it's written out to full size (2,000 to 3,000 words) and is about something particularly interesting. When I was doing this on my mobile device, it would then take me another hour to post it and get it ready to be viewed; with the home connection now, of course, that's quite less, but still adds to the overall time. And giving this kind of commitment to my personal journal was fine for a long time, as long as writing was fundamentally what I was trying to do professionally as well.

I mean, that's an important thing to remember about this website, is that it's one of the last vestiges left in my life of my pre-2004 lifestyle, when I was a professional artist and trying to write for a living. It made sense back then to devote this many hours a day to writing this personal journal, because keeping an enthusiastic crowd around who liked my writing tended to help all the other projects going on in my life; the tours, the books, the online experiments and the like. In my post-2004 life, though, where I have set aside most of these pursuits to open CCLaP instead, this doesn't make quite as much sense: my main priority now is to convince people to become fans of other people's writing, not my own; plus, a large audience no longer matters to me, when it comes to doing in-house writing and other freelance work.

Once I made this decision in 2004 to switch careers, I've been slowly putting steps into place to shut down that entire old part of my life: I finally said completely goodbye to performance poetry (which I technically first did in 2001), I gave up going on literary tours, I gave up writing full-length books (save travel books, which I just find too much fun to give up). And so I suppose it's time for a change to come to this personal website as well, it too largely being the product of a time I'm no longer living. I mean, the journal won't disappear; I just think it might become more like the other personal blogs of editor-in-chiefs, like Andrew Huff or Nick Denton, where maybe I'm getting around to sticking something up here once a week or so, whenever I have the time away from all my professional duties.

I should make it clear that I'm not expecting this to diminish my online presence; in fact, you could argue that once CCLaP's website is up and live next month, I will be increasing my online activities if anything. I will have an entire center's website to run at that point, after all, and I'm expecting anywhere from 5 to 20 updates a day; plus I'll be maintaining the CCLaP wiki ("The CCLaP Guide to Being a Self-Sustaining Artist"), plus our Ning-based "Chicago Cafe Network" (a new social network just for Chicago visual artists, and the cafes that feature them), plus our Flickr group pool, plus our YouTube group pool, plus our event calendars at MySpace, Upcoming, Craigslist, etc. Fuck, are you starting to see why I might possibly need to cut back at this personal site in the future? Plus of course finally getting all the archives imported here, plus all the final versions of my '90s books published, plus the new hyperfiction project this summer ("Archimedes," more below), which is in actuality going to be a "resume" I can submit to alternative-reality-gaming companies (or ARGs) where I'm trying to get a job right now. Plus getting the latest travel book finally published, plus hopefully picking up more freelance work, plus starting to get serious in Second Life.

It's just that in all these instances, my main point from now on is mostly going to be promoting other people and organizations, not talk about myself. And that's fine; that's what I want, in fact, and is why I decided to become an arts administrator in the first place. Because that's the job, I think, of someone who administers an artistic event or venue; to simply create that blank space for others, then to step back and let them actually fill it. I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to be the rockstar of the evening, in the middle of the limelight all night or whatever; hell, I did it for ten years myself, and can attest that it's a lot of fun, and gets you all this attention and laid all the damn time too, and all kinds of other fringe benefits. But that's not my priority anymore; my priority now is to make more money, and to have a more stable lifestyle, one that can hopefully lead to health insurance and more regular international trips and whatnot. When I first made this a priority, in 2004, I happily agreed to step out of the limelight in order to make it happen, which I've been slowly doing in the year and a half since.

So anyway, that's what's going on with me these days. So if there's a lot bigger of a slowdown soon between journal entries, you're now equipped with the information to know why.

So yeah, plans are still in place to create my newest hyperfiction project, "Archimedes," this summer. The quick backstory, for those who need it:

Since 1997 I have been creating artistic projects within a cutting-edge genre called "hyperfiction;" like those old "Choose Your Own Adventure Books" you read as a kid, but these online, a lot more technologically complex, and definitely for grown-ups. I've only done it all these years as a hobby, knowing that there was no practical way to make money from such endeavors, happy to know that I was merely pushing the envelope and defining new rules for this intriguing genre. But lo and behold, time has caught up with us hyperfiction creators, and there is indeed an entire new job class out there for people with our skills. It's as the puppetmaster, in fact, for an Alternative Reality Game (or ARG), a brand-new type of online entertainment that has gained sudden new credibility and popularity just within the last year (including full-page articles in the New York Times, Wired magazine, etc).

I am an insane fan of ARGs, duh, for the same reason I'm an insane fan of hyperfiction; in fact, I developed a near obsession with one called "The Beast," back in 2001 to promote the film A.I. And last Christmas, in fact, I finally discovered the identity of the puppetmaster behind that one, a brilliant underground science-fiction novelist named Sean Stewart. And it turns out that he belongs to an entire agency that creates ARGs, 42 Entertainment, the same people behind the "i like bees" ARG to promote Sony's "Halo 2." (In fact, rumor has it that they might be behind the ABC show "Lost"'s upcoming ARG, starting this summer right after the final episode airs. But I do not know if that's true or not!) Anyway, so I wrote to Sean, and he wrote back, and he gave me all kinds of useful advice (much of it inadvertent) about how a hyperfiction author can come to the attention of a videogame company.

So I've decided to create a new hyperfiction project this summer, one that deliberately plays like an ARG, except with all the pages hosted at my own website to save on money. There will definitely be all kinds of different looks to different pages, though; like, one running theme is that every character belongs to this one fictional social network, so each of them will have a fake profile in the game that you can access. And these will not only look like typical MySpace pages and be cool that way, but will also be helpful "cheat sheets" to see which other characters this person actually knows, direct links to them, direct links to their journal entries inserted randomly throughout the story, etc. (And this also solves a problem I had with my last hyperfiction project, by the way, of where find public-domain photos to illustrate your characters; the characters in Archimedes will only have cartoon icons describing each person, a supposed free service of this fictional social network they all belong to.)

Anyway, so the site's going to have as many of the bells and whistles of a full ARG that I can get away with, because that's what I figure will impress ARG companies the most; audio files, for example, actually recorded by people around the world in different accents, reading my script as specific characters, supposedly in that section of the world themselves (South Africa, Germany, London, etc). And some pages will look like emails sent back and forth between certain characters, and in some threads you'll learn that it was BCC:ed to a certain character as well, which then changes the entire dynamic of the story. And there will be hidden pages, and information hidden within well-known pages, and information hidden as comments in the source code of certain pages, and all the other sneaky little tricks that will hopefully impress a startup for a new ARG.

I'm titling it "Archimedes," by the way, because of one of the many mathematical illustrations he did in his life; specifically, one showing a series of hexagrams (six-sided figures) meshing with octagons (eight-sided), perfectly and into infinity. And so this is the structure I've used so far to at least graph the beginning of the story: that the project begins at a dinner party being held in Chicago among eight friends, that each of these people have six friends, and that this is the cast of characters in "Archimedes," whose lives intersect in these interesting and sometimes messy ways. Of course, this doesn't mean the full list of 56 characters that one could theoretically get from such a set-up; most of these friends will be common friends of two or more of the dinner guests, for a grand total of maybe 25 characters altogether. 25 will be rough enough; the most I've taken on before has been roughly 12 or 13, for my 1998 project Creamed Corn.

Unlike my previous projects, I want "Archimedes" to have a definite if hazy timeline to the thing; that is, that you're definitely moving from a point A to a point B in time and narrative, not getting much of a chance to hop back in the story except via flashback. And this is quite different from, say, Creamed Corn, where the whole point is to be able to flash backwards and forwards in the storyline from anywhere else in the story. I definitely want "Archimedes" to tell a more straight-ahead story this time, but done through a myriad of characters, situations, locations and emotional threads. Instead of one book with an infinite amount of storylines, think of it as many books written about the same storyline and set of characters, but with this book concentrating on these five or six, and that book concentrating on another five or six, but with three of the characters being in common between the two books. And you can read through it all and then go back to the beginning; or abandon a certain storyline if it loses your interest; or step sideways enough to be in a completely new storyline within the narrative, if you want to take the time.

So since the main work doesn't take place until this summer, my main duties so far have been only to jot down interesting situations and characters for use in the eventual plotline. So I've definitely got this dinner party, for example, which both kicks off the story and keeps getting returned to throughout; and I know at this point that one of the party-goers is a former Olympic silver medalist, who is a sexual swinger now as an adult in her mid-thirties, but is really laid-back about it, which amazes her drunk female friends when they find out about it at the dinner party. And this will hopefully lead to what I'm calling a "node," important for my particular project: they are special topics embedded within the project's grid, freefloating of any particular plot or character grouping, where a whole bunch of disparate characters will end up interacting with the topic. You can think of it really as a literary "router," when it comes to the subject of hyperfiction; a place for your reader to come together with links to a bunch of different story threads, if they've decided that they want to hop off one and join another.

In this case, for example, the node would form when this woman accidentally lets it slip at the party that she's a swinger; this of course starts slowly gaining the attention of all the other drunk slackers at the party, who are at least fascinated by swinging if not having the courage or lifestyle to participate in it themselves. And of course almost all of them have at least one crazy story about a sexual encounter in the past, so this becomes the node: all these different characters sharing their story about crazy sex, as each of them end up getting sucked into this drunken swinger conversation going on in the kitchen. As you can see, the subject of a "node" has to be a general enough one, and put into the right context, so that it can generate tremendous random feedback from a variety of unrelated characters; a saucy talk about sex at a drunken slacker dinner party, for example, is a great one, as all of you who have attended drunken slacker dinner parties can attest. And that way you're able to build a fully three-dimensional "grid" for interacting with your story; not just spokes radiating outward from the center (the various plotlines of the various characters), but horizontal movement between storylines, via these nodes that pull a bunch of them together at once.

So anyway, lots more weirdness like this: part-time lovers exchanging podcasts between Berlin and Cape Town, odd scanned-in puzzles from a mysterious stranger's Moleskine, etc etc. You know, something cool! Something strikingly odd, vast in scope, and that will hopefully make an impression; something to get me a job with one of these damn companies, hopefully.

Anyway, so lots more on this as the summer approaches. Sorry, I know, didn't mean to get you all excited about this; all the boring archives and travel-book stuff comes first. Oh, and for the truly nerdy, you can think of the actual storyline grid as a series of "event" and "transition" rings, concentric and spiraling outwards, each of a different width depending on how important that particular event or transition is to the overall story, with the individual character plots spiking through them as radial spokes, and with nodes within the rings that act like a rubberband around a stack of straws, pulling them all together tightly at one concentrated spot. Er, this will make a lot more sense once I get to actually draw it out as a grid; but like I said, more on that this summer.