I don’t want to talk about healthcare today. Not much, anyway. It’s weird to be in a maelstrom of euphoria that seems so unwarranted and unfounded, touched with a counterpoint of ludicrosity almost as bizarre. It’s a little like the day Obama got elected, I guess, except I at least understood that there was potential there (since unrealized) and history in the mere fact of America’s ability to overcome the deepest depths of its historical bigotry. But this? This? This is just alienating.

I watched some of the debate last night on the computer, mostly because Em had it on. I guess I didn’t watch so much as listened, heard the same rhetoric over and over on the lips of one Representative after another. One side, then the other side. One side, then the other. It, like all political discourse, was simply a sorry excuse for debate. If only APDA could show them how it’s done, show them what a real discussion with advancement of ideas and engagement of the opposition’s points looks like. But our opportunity to do that was squandered by a few paranoids who became more concerned that their God-given right to drink on Friday nights might be impinged by documentation of their ability to rise above 99% of elected officials in the ability to cogently discuss an issue. So it goes.

You, unless you’re one of about 3-4 people I could imagine reading this (or you’re not an American), are either euphorically happy today or you think the country you used to love is sliding into socialism. I am baffled in either case. I am baffled at how you could love a healthcare bailout that exchanges a few token sacrifices of the worst health insurance practices of the past for the great unknown of the egregious health insurance practices of the future. As though you can start trusting profit-driven companies once they’re given the free license to do whatever they like (save a couple small things) in the pursuit of free-enterprise on the back of the mandated poor of America. If this bill was so terrible for the health insurance industry, why did stocks go up today? And I’m even more baffled if you equate a requirement that everyone buy something from a private company with socialism. Socialism isn’t some ism word that you can just throw around whenever it suits your purposes. It means something, and it does not mean entrusting everyone’s health and fate to greedy corporations.

Ahem. I didn’t want to talk about healthcare.

I wanted to talk about writing.

Namely, The Best of All Possible Worlds, currently chugging along at a sprightly 48 pages through 18 days of work. Those of you scoring at home may note that this is less than three pages a day, which doesn’t necessarily mean good things for the original deadline of 17 May 2010. (The same pace maintained from here till then would yield 200 pages total by said date, which is a bit on the skimpy side.) At the same time, I’ve had a lot of distractions, including not having the thing mapped out at all. Which is certainly burdensome in some cases, but really exciting in others.

It also must be noted that the equivalent day in the life of American Dream On was 26 June 2002, when the novel was not only well short of 48 pages, but was also two-thirds of a decade shy of completion. And while there’s a chance I will look back ruefully on this post about the best-laid plans for the Best Of, I have reason to believe otherwise. It’s something about that freshness, that not knowing where everything is going.

I mean, I know where it’s going, ultimately – I think it would be pretty challenging to start a book without knowing the ending, more or less. What would be the point? The point might end up being something one disliked, and it takes a pretty apolitical free-thinking writer to be cool with that. No, I know where it’s going in the end. But how precisely it gets there and what happens along the way are largely opaque to me. Or they were on 5 March when it all began.

In the mere two weeks and change (it feels like months, actually, which must be good) since, a lot of the mystery has gotten solved. Things have come to light that seem like the obvious inevitable answer all along. Little loose ends are coming together. And there’s still a majority yet to figure out, but the way things are clicking, I have faith it will all coalesce nicely in no time.

What’s great about this is that, while the location and discipline are the same, the method is quite different from ADO. And yet it’s still working. My biggest concern in abandoning Good God earlier this month was in going off-script, in risking everything to an ad-lib process when I’d enjoyed such success with a paint-by-numbers spreadsheet scheme. And, indeed, this process is even looser than Loosely Based, which was somewhere in between. I had nursed the ideas for LB for less time than the current project, but I had them more fully fleshed at the time of the opening lines. This one is pretty much being made up as I go along.

It’s exciting. That’s really what it comes down to. I remember this conversation I had with Lisha at the Academy about our little ventures into independent English study in sophomore year. Our high school was trying to take its best English students and give them the opportunity to go off-book, to write assignments individually assigned at a higher and specialized pace. We still would go to classes as normal and read the same books as everyone else for discussion, but then do independent analyses or creative projects on the side. She was working with Pat Scanlon and I with Eric Moya – I forget if anyone else was doing this, but I think there was at least one more person. Served us all right for turning in extra short stories and papers to our prior year’s English profs.

Anyway, she was talking about a long and arduous conversation with Scanlon about a particular work she’d turned in for the independent study and related that he’d lamented her inability to find writing to be fun. And then Lisha and I digressed into a long sidebar about what it would mean for writing to be fun in the sense the prof meant. What it came down to, as I recall, was that nothing in an academic setting like that could be fun in the sense Scanlon wanted to elicit. That there was something innate to the academic context, to exterior-imposed deadlines and requirements, the necessitated bludgeoning most of the enjoyment out of the process. Even in an independent study.

The Academy abandoned the project and we resumed normal classes the next year. I would resume the debate about academic bludgeoning of writing with many more people and went on to a four-year college career without taking a single class in the English department.

Writing this novel is fun. I am having fun. Not fun-relative-to-other-things. Not fun-for-writing-which-is-quite-a-chore. Honest to God fun. Like playing a video game fun. Debating fun.

Not debating on the House floor fun. Real debate fun. Just to clarify.