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.

I have this old buddy in Chicago, Dr. Garth Katner, who among other things used to work for this group called Interfaith Youth Core, and still may as far as I know. So he was always getting these interesting invitations to these spiritual academic events in Chicago, and always inviting me along because he knows I'm fascinated by that stuff, intellectual and atheist that I am. So one of the extremely cool tickets he scored back then was to this annual event called the Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Jerusalem Lecture, which features these really impressive people and is really hard to get an invite to. See, for those who don't know, Bernardin used to be the Cardinal of the Chicago Archdiocese for many years, and ended up developing this rabid fan base from all over the city, both Catholics and non, because of his extremely liberal views on religious tolerance, racial unity and artistic expression.

In fact, there's this extremely cool story about Cardinal Bernardin that I always love telling, whenever his name is brought up, which I'll share with you as well. Back when I first moved here, see, there was this huge flare-up in the artistic community one fall, when an underground artist here redid the famous series of stations from the Passion (the story of Jesus being crucified, that is) for a group exhibition, but completely done with international stick figures on actual metal streetsigns, so that they looked like "No Jaywalking" signs but with a little Jesus being nailed to a cross. And this just pissed off a bunch of Catholics furiously, needless to say, which led to them accusing this artist of making fun of their religion, and pressuring the gallery to get rid of the pieces. So what did Bernardin do? Why, he purchased the entire set with church money, in fact...and then had them permanently installed in the sidewalks circling the Archdiocese's church (near the corner of State and Chicago, in the River North neighborhood, sadly removed again after Bernardin's death). Because Bernardin didn't see this as an insult to Catholicism at all, but rather a reverent and relevant modern portrayal of the Passion story, one that deserved to be displayed as a circle around the church in public, much like purchasing a piece of public sculpture.

Wow, you know? It's hard not to admire a religious leader who has a mindset like this, if you see what I'm saying. And so another thing Bernardin did, back in 1995, was sponsor a really famous Jewish scholar to come give a talk to all these Catholic mucky-mucks, about current Catholic-Jewish relations and how they can get better. And this Jewish organization invited a Catholic to speak at one of their own events as a result, and this has all led to a large and greatly respected annual interfaith event concerning these topics now, still held to this day. So this is what Garth scored me a ticket to, and it really was just endlessly fascinating, and I actually got to hang out like ten feet away from Cardinal Francis George, the current head of the Chicago Archdiocese, as well as meet a whole bunch of holy men and women in funny clothes (all kinds of funny clothes, in fact, from priest outfits to African robes, representing a whole bunch of different holy men and women).

Anyway, so one of the results of that was that I got to pick up printed transcripts to all the previous annual lectures, for free, which I did and then promptly forgot about when I got home. But earlier last year, as regular readers know, I adopted the Getting Things Done time-management system into my life, which led (among many other things) to me putting a centralized box together in my apartment now, where everything exists that I still need to sit and read through. And these lecture documents are only 15, 20 pages long, so they make for perfect small reading material around my apartment; when I'm sitting on the toilet, when I'm going to bed, while eating, etc. And so that's why I've been finally making my way through them recently, and why I've been spending some time recently thinking about Jesus, as strange as that may sound coming from me.

See, for those who don't know, Jesus is the fundamental difference between Christians and Jews; both groups believe in the same God, the same Old Testament as well, believe that Jesus was a person who really did exist and who was an amazing teacher. It's just that the Jews believe Jesus to be only a man, albeit an extraordinary one, while Christians believe him to be the literal son of God, sent deliberately to Earth in human form to save us all from eternal damnation. And really, that's it, that's all that fundamentally differs between Christians and Jews, a difference that first started appearing around two thousand years ago; and it's that single difference that has led to two thousand years of both religions' histories, and to them being so different from each other by now.

1999's Jerusalem Lecture, in fact, was by an expert on this subject - Anthony Saldarini, from the department of Theology at Boston College, who spent his entire career studying the historical environment behind first- and second-century Jewish-Christian relationships (and who sadly died in 2001, I just found out). And boy, his transcript is fascinating, just so fascinating, bringing up all these new ideas about Christian-Jewish relationships that are in actuality as old as the religions themselves, really painting a new picture for me of how Christianity began in the first place. For example, he talks quite a bit about something that was also mentioned in that Catholic history book I read a couple of years ago, when Pope John Paul II died; that for the first 150 years of their history, Christians actually considered themselves a mere sect of Judaism, not a separate religion at all. And to understand that, you need to understand that there were a whole bunch of Jewish sects back then, like different branches of Socialism in the modern world, who all fundamentally believed the same thing yet bickered endlessly with each other over the details.

What both Saldarini and that book argue, then, is that early Christians never saw the Jews as 'killing Jesus,' and never meant for future generations to see it that way, either; they saw it as one specific sect of the Jews killing Jesus. They couldn't blame the entire Jewish religion, after all, because they considered themselves Jews as well, and certainly didn't blame themselves for Jesus' death. And so this, for example, either negates the entire plot of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, or puts it into clearer focus, depending on how you want to interpret it; that yes, technically it was some Jews who actually led to Jesus getting killed, but that Jews weren't considered one unified religion back then, just like Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists are considered two very different forms of Christianity.

What really started making the Christians split away from the Jews for good, in fact, had nothing to do with Jesus at all, but rather concerned the topic of ritual in religious services. See, the Christian Jews happened to be an unusually vocal sect of the religion as well, and greatly believed in getting out there and converting as many others to their religion as possible (a tenet still deeply believed by most Christians to this day, in fact). So this led to Christians getting further and further into the outreaches of the Roman Empire by the second century, and to more and more start converting Pagans into Jews. The only problem, though, is that these 'gentiles' didn't want to do the things the orthodox Jews were insisting on; like hacking off all the extra skin on your penis, for one alarming thing. And so the Christian Jews said, "That's all right, you don't have to hack off pieces of your penis to be a Jew; as long as you believe in God, and say your prayers, and live a good life, you can be a Jew anyway." And then the other Jews said, "Uh, wait a minute, Christians, you can't actually promise that," and the Christians said, "Sure we can, we're Jews too," and the other Jews said, "Yeah, but most of us disagree with that," and so the Christians said, "Okay, screw you, we'll just go off and start our own religion. Come on, gentiles."

And that, both Saldarini and that book argue, is what led to the vilification of Judaism in the second century AD, to creating this myth that 'the Jews killed Jesus,' which festered and grew for 1,800 years until finally leading us to the Nazi era. And that, Saldarini argues, is finally when a whole bunch of Christians (most of them, he argues) suddenly became quite alarmed with the way their religion had been viewing Jews, and ever since have been slowly and successfully building a new relationship between the two groups instead. Which, yeah, is definitely a great thing, I agree, but also lends credence to the argument by Arabs, that Christian nations shouldn't lead Middle East peace conferences, since they really do fundamentally side with Jews more than Muslims.

Saldarini's basic argument is an intriguing one, I think; that both religions have now been around for thousands of years, that neither one is going away anytime soon, so it's finally time to stop arguing over which one is going to make it, which is ultimately what all the second-century trash-talking between Christians and Jews boils down to. (It's the same as well, really, between Christian and Pagan relations - that's why 'witches' were redefined as evil creatures in early Christianity, for example, and the pentagram as an evil symbol, simply to discredit the existing Pagans who were still around.) Instead, he argues, the two groups should simply acknowledge that there are differences between them, and meanwhile spend the majority of their time discovering the ways that they are alike, where they can join efforts to produce greater results in the real world. And I'm always for stuff like this, which is why I'm a big fan and supporter of the interfaith movement, even though I'm an atheist; because I also believe in cooperation and collaboration, of groups making a difference not through negative bans but through positive change. Whether that's because of a religion motive or not, if you're out changing the world in positive and constructive ways, ways that lead to humans better understanding and appreciating each other, I'll always be a supporter.

But perhaps the thing that Saldarini talks about that intrigues me the most is this: his argument that there is a growing amount of historical evidence being collected these days, proving that Jesus really was an actual human being, who really did live around 0 AD and taught Judaism to the 'common people' around Jerusalem, for lack of a better term. And this would be remarkable, I think, if we were to definitively learn that Christianity really was fundamentally based on an actual human being who once existed on this planet named Jesus; because man, that puts Christianity in a whole new light, you know? Why, in that light it's nothing more than just one more religious cult, like Scientology or the Moonies, one that just happened to get really, really, really, really, really popular, to the point where it actually once ruled almost the entire western half of the planet.

Ah, but don't get your panties in a bunch, Christians, because I don't mean this as an insult; the thing I find really remarkable, that is, is that Jesus wasn't a David-Koresh-style zealot at all, according to this supposed new historical data, but really was just this simple carpenter who used to go roaming around the countryside of the Middle East, living a happy life and quietly explaining to others how he did it, whenever they asked, and especially becoming friends with the fishermen and other tradespeople of the area. What a remarkable thing, I think; that an entire worldwide religion, one of the most powerful in human history, could all stem from one little laid-back peace-loving dude, who simply roamed around being content, and telling others how to be content when they bothered to ask. This is a basic tenet of most Eastern religions as well - that the best way to share one's spiritual beliefs is to simply live a good life, and that others will naturally approach you in such a situation and voluntarily want to know the secret to your success.

The aggression and violence of the Christian religion, the Crusades and abortion-clinic bombings and all the rest, have only come with first centuries and now millennia of disconnection with the guy who started it all; if this new supposed historical data turns out to be real and correct, though, it means that these aggressive, violent Christians have been wrong all along, about what Christianity is supposed to be, which will hopefully lead to a slow but fundamental change in the way that the everyday average Christian sees both himself and the world around him. And I'm all for that, man; I'm always for more individual self-change, and less abortion-clinic bombings (or unjust wars declared against Arab states, or sexually-deviant hypocrites getting rich off high-handed morality, or any of the other perversions that have happened with the Christian religion of late).

And really, what an amazing message it is to all of us, I think, if it was to turn out that Jesus really was an actual person, who lived an actual life like this. Because if he could do it, then any one of us can have a real and profound impact on the world as well, simply from quietly living one's life in the way we think it should be lived, and quietly explaining our thoughts to others when they specifically ask us. What an empowering thought, you know, that if you're simply true to your convictions, you don't have to yell or scream or picket to get attention; hell, Jesus has, whatever, 100 million followers now, so the least I can do is have a healthy audience for my arts center. (NOT THAT I'M COMPARING MYSELF TO JESUS; which I can't believe I actually have to clarify, but I know that if I don't, some whiny moron will write a blog entry tomorrow that says, "Pettus is comparing himself to Jesus now, that smug arrogant prick.")

So anyway, that's all I have to say about that!

And some random notes, as long as I'm here...

--Well, okay, finally got the brochure for CCLaP (the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, that is, the organization I founded that's opening in September) uploaded here to the site; you can click here to find CCLaP's current web headquarters, in fact, until May rolls around and CCLaP's own website finally opens. Oh, and cool news as well, that I think I finally even have my mom sold on the idea of the center, and excited about what's going to be going on with it. And this is actually kind of a priority for me with the center, to tell you the truth, to devise a way so that even middle-aged, suburban grandmothers might be really excited about one particular product or service we offer. See, if I haven't made this ridiculously clear yet, the whole secret to CCLaP's success will be to build as diverse a group of participants as we can; not only young urban artists, creating the material that we'll be selling, but also older fans of the arts with money, who can actually afford to purchase the things we'll be selling. This is where most traditional arts centers fail, I think, by only being good at gathering one type of group or the other: either you're the Art Institute, it sometimes seems, with a huge crowd of richies but almost no broke subversive artists; or you're a weekly poetry slam at an inner-city dive bar, full of the next wave of great artists but with no customers around to actually appreciate them. I'm convinced that there's a way to actually bring both groups together, without insulting the sensibilities of either; my center's entire future is counting on it, in fact.

So anyway, mom's naturally been on the fence about most of the products and services CCLaP will be offering: she doesn't care much for our live events, doesn't really read the kinds of cutting-edge authors we'll be publishing. Her eyes all lit up last week, though, when finally getting to the part of the brochure about free events, and especially the idea of Members getting to propose and run their own discussion or craft club, with the center taking care of all the promotion and publicity for them. Because, see, my mom is one of those rubber-stamping people; in fact, she's one of those obsessed rubber-stamping people, who makes something like 700 greeting cards a year, and has completely transformed my old childhood bedroom into an overwhelming rubber-stamp art studio. (And let me make it as clear