For the unfamiliar, which should be everyone (Gris?) and would’ve been me a day ago, he’s made only two real films in English as far as I can discern, but they’re both appallingly good. One’s playing at Albuquerque’s barely-breathing Guild theater in Nob Hill by the university district, 2009’s “Double Take”, a film ostensibly about Alfred Hitchcock, but much more about the Cold War, power politics, media, and what’s going on with the planet. My Dad and I saw that last night and had to come home to find his other film, 1997’s “Dial H-i-s-t-o-r-y”, which is about 9/11. Except it was made four years before 9/11. But watch it and tell me it’s about anything else. You can find it online; you may still have to pay to see Double Take.

Almost exactly halfway through editing The Best of All Possible Worlds, putting me well behind the expected pace at this point, though that indicates a general enjoyment of this trip that has made it all worthwhile. The themes for the book are finding resonance in all kinds of places, not least perhaps in the Grimonprez movies, all of which means that either the book is scarily relevant or I’ve just got it on the brain. Reality is probably a mix of both, but it’s generated a comfortable excitement for me about the work that has prompted this very lax attitude about actually getting the editing done. I think once I get on the plane tomorrow and head back to the East, it’ll be time to just put my foot down and get work done. If only so you all can have some idea what I’m talking about.

In the last couple months, I’ve found it harder than any prior point in my life to focus on reading one thing. In the midst of watching Dial H-i-s-t-o-r-y tonight, I realized that I’ve been carrying around Don DeLillo’s White Noise in my backpack since buying it alongside If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler in Ariel & Michael’s favorite Philadelphia bookstore. All I want to do tonight is start it, setting aside editing yet again and certainly bypassing The Spire and War and Peace and Madness and Civilization. Prior to this year, I don’t know if I’d ever gone more than a week or so reading multiple books at once and now I’m on the precipice of starting a fifth simultaneous book. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I mean, sure, I’ve lost some interest in all of them in one way or another, and maybe that’s the problem, that I haven’t just given up on most of them. What does it say about now or my state or something else that I seem incapable of completing readings while churning out novels of my own? Why am I losing interest so quickly? How will I be impacted when I head to Liberia and have to hole up with books for days on end, according to what Emily has led me to believe about the schedule there?

Speaking of which, it’s the first anniversary of our seven to date that Emily and I have been apart. It’s enormously challenging, but I take some solace in the nice round joy of the sound of seven years. A marriage is forever, but it takes some time for its lifespan to start sounding like something that reflects the permanence and seriousness of the commitment it contains. I’m not sure quite where the threshold is, but seven years seems a lot closer than any of the prior milestones.

Been spending much of this leg of the trip discussing the nature of God with my Dad, working out Jumbles and crossword puzzles with surprising interest and aptitude, downing green chile and old memories in equal measure. Just a moment ago, I landed, and already the plane station looms with its promise to whisk me back away. The tighter I hold on, the more sure I become of the need to step back, relax, put it all in context. Watch my Mom knitting in the comfy corner chair. Pull the threads.

Zorba’s was doing its usual middling business, but the PCC was a ghost town. The three floors of gigantic rooms were completely empty, though the building had been unlocked. And blasting away throughout was the air conditioning, cooling the outside humid 85 degrees to something more like 70 amid much noisemaking. At least the lights were off for the most part.

I ate my falafel in silence while reading a bit of Madness and Civilization, then threw away the bag it had come in and the wrapper and the chip bag, able to recycle the class bottle of Orangina I’d had. Then I went upstairs to the PCC Library, which was just as cool, and cracked into editing The Best of All Possible Worlds for the first time, completing 5% of it while there.

I spent maybe an hour and a half in the building all told. No one came, no one left. The air conditioning persisted through every room of the gargantuan club, a place that may sit idle for days at a time, though they’re keeping it open till midnight or two in the morning apparently. Just trying to make it comfortable in case someone comes in to enjoy the hallowed halls of what someone built as an alternative to eating with the proletarian Princeton students in the regular dining halls.

There are times when I think that I might be a bit too cynical about the hope for change on this planet. When I might underestimate what one single individual without power or fame or voice can do to stem the tide of immense corporate waste and collective mismanagement. Then there are days like today, when I find myself to be a bit naive, all told, in comparison to the real depth of the state of things.

On my way home, I drove by a dying squirrel, flattened and twitching on its back in the roadway.

It apparently came out in 2003, but it looks like it was just produced yesterday. If anything, its being seven years old justifies a little bit of its naivete in places, though it usually counterbalances this with an appropriate amount of cynicism. It prominently features Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and Naomi Klein. It has probably never been more relevant than it is right now, in the wake of the BP spill, at a time when it seems like many are starting to understand the depths of the problems innate to capitalism.

Unless, you know, it gets more relevant in 2011 and 2012. Which I’m afraid it will.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Thursday night.

Something snapped when I saw that bird picture. It looks like my Dad had a similar experience. I bet you did too. The series of heartbreaking photos capturing a generation of pelicans whose deaths are just the opening salvo in a slaughter of untold proportions unfolding on the Gulf Coast.

It’s of little significance when compared to the American slaughter of Afghans and Iraqis, but it’s still something. It’s something to consider that if the oil keeps gushing till August or December, as they’re saying now, that maybe every single beach in the world will somehow be impacted by the endless stream of our greed for petroleum. This isn’t something esoteric about the future, ten, twenty years. Not even as debatable as global warming or the extinction of species. It’s the end of beaches, coastlines, oceans. For as long as the potential for something like this exists, unchecked, it has every reason to happen repeatedly in the future, until we’ve nothing left to show our children but the few sickly animals we’ve salvaged for zoos, or perhaps the handful of species considered lucky enough to save for ritual slaughter and consumption.

It’s to this end that I’ve made manifest the first thing that struck me when I saw the outstretch-winged pelican, how closely it resembled the flag of its home state. And so I am presenting five new designs of Blue Pyramid Merchandise, not as opportunism so much as an outlet for outrage. I feel better knowing that I’ve been able to convey what I feel in something simple, and that someone else might take small solace in the power of this harnessed anger.

For as has been clear from Duck and Cover lately, clear from anyone thinking carefully about this issue, it’s not about BP. It’s not about the particular company or group of individuals who made this one incident happen. It’s about a system, a way of life, an approach to the Earth and its contents that is innately unsustainable and always has been. The sooner we realize that all drilling is wrong, that all oil companies are doing ill, the sooner we can stop the nonsense of trying to ream one scapegoat while we sow the seeds of tomorrow’s disaster.

It shouldn’t be a controversial perspective, but it seems remarkably un-universal, especially given the recent surge of belief in science, physicalism, and a reductionist materialist view of the world. So many people now seem to argue that there are great benefits of our human nature and natural instincts, that trying too hard to control or convert the hedonistic nature of our animal selves will create more problems than its solves. Of course, these people tend to put happiness at the keystone position of their ethos and seem particularly ill equipped to explain how humanity is going to make any progress in the fields of moral or rational thought.

I am writing all this now because I recently found one of the most brilliant articles ever on this issue, which makes the case for my perspective more succinctly than I tend to, and in a way more befitting of mainstream appeal. You can read the article here now. Be forewarned, it’s longish, but the details matter and it’s length is sort of part of the point anyway.

The article is more concretely about patience and the ability of people, largely young children, to delay gratification. The case constructed by the psychologists in the various studies profiled in the article is that people’s willpower and ability to distract themselves into changing their own motivations – the essence of self-control – is perhaps a larger factor for success in humans than intelligence itself. And that where intelligence feeds self-control and vice versa, the most essential building blocks to fulfillment and self-actualization are to be found.

I have been telling a lot of people lately that the difference between my ability to write multiple novels in a year (not done yet, but looking awfully promising at this point) or hold down jobs while impressing my employers on the one hand, and being homeless and destitute and an utter failure on the other hand, is entirely because of my ability to fabricate meaning for deadlines in my own head. I mean this statement completely sincerely – the most important skill I have devised in my life has been the ability to believe in an arbitrary date and accord all the significance in the universe to it. Throughout high school and college, I never missed a single deadline for a single class (except for the one I deliberately failed, of course, but that was its own little experiment with self-control), because I convinced myself that doing so would lead to immediate failure, expulsion, and possibly death. I played an extensive eight-year game of chicken with my consciousness, starting papers later and later, studying less and less, but I still turned everything in the minute it was due, without fail.

This has of course translated into me being able to motivate myself for artificial deadlines (imposed by self or others) at work and especially in my new free-form writing life. I thrive on deadlines, at least when they’re realistic. I feel a great deal of adrenaline around the approach of a deadline, the elation of getting things done, and every successfully met deadline has worked as an extra bulwark for both the need for me to continue making them and as a positive motivation from the pure euphoria I feel when they are met.

I don’t think I ever deliberately tried to create this spirit about deadlines, but the article above corroborates my thesis that this trait alone has kept me off the streets and in a relatively stable place in society. But the most important aspect of the article is the evidence that this can be taught. What’s frustrating about the article is that it then starts to raise doubts about the idea of teaching this kind of self-control and willpower, even though most of the article makes it abundantly obvious that this can be learned, and pretty easily, especially at a young age.

The article also relates the issues of self-control and willpower to drug use and overeating, which are pretty obvious correlations. The fact that I’ve been able to live my entire life without alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs, to control any impulse to try them even once, to be able to rationally evaluate the decision and overcome impulse, is highly linked to the deadline thing. And all of these things are truly essential skills for living a fulfilling life, especially if one is also prone to addictions or falling into long sustained periods of inextricable obsession.

The most disturbing aspect of the article, though, is that it still pays homage to the materialist demons that haunt every aspect of the modern psychological community. The researcher who pioneered the study of willpower through the use of marshmallows, whose thinking has led to such important conclusions about humanity’s struggle to overcome its base nature, is most excited at the moment about… brain scans. He wants MRI’s to spit out little illustrations of the self-control fold in the brain so he can give people drugs or surgery to shortcut them to it.

And here is where I have to part ways with the nature of the experiment. It may be that there seems to be a physical reflection of the phenomenon of being able to believe in arbitrary artificial self-imposed deadlines. And it may not. If it is, it’s still putting the cart before the horse, for the fact is that these things can be taught and that would change the folds of the brain. The entire problem with the materialist approach is that it tries to do things backwards, tries to manipulate people as bodies without giving them the understanding of what they need to change that will build a lasting commitment to the new approach. Even if you could surgically create the folds, there’s a larger chance that they’d just change back and re-alter their brain afterwords. This is why so many people who get major life-changing weight-removal surgeries tend to end up putting the pounds back on, while people who actually train themselves to approach food differently can lose weight and keep it off.

So now the goal of humanity is to not only overcome our human nature, but to ditch our desire for a physical solution to every problem. We’ve long recognized that the human mind is the most complex and fascinating aspect of our world. We should offer it the respect and due diligence it deserves, not try to play Frankenstein to its monster.

It all started this morning, when this article from late last week caught my eye on Google News. The article in question is on the Huffington Post, the place known for being too liberal for my friend Greg in criticizing Barack Obama from time to time. Anyway, the point of the article is to list ways in which Christians tend to be bad Christians, while all the while touting their Christianity. This seemed like exciting, relevant stuff.

The first one on the list was as follows:

1) Too much money. “Wealthy Christian” should be an oxymoron. In Luke 12:33, Jesus says, “Sell your possessions and give to the poor.”

What a great start. I was sure that pacifism would be next on the list.

But instead, most of the rest of the list was about being judgmental, about being holier-than-thou. And interesting critique, and probably valid, but certainly not tops on the list of “Ways Christians Tend to Fail at Being Christian”. And certainly not needing to occupy half the list in repackaged titles like “Too invasive of others generally.” followed by “Too invasive of others personally.” Pacifism, meanwhile, made no appearance on the list.

Which is troubling, because Jesus might be the all-time pioneer of pacifism. Turning the other cheek is not exactly pro-war, nor is loving one’s enemies, one’s neighbors, or blessing the peacemakers. (And by “peacemakers”, Jesus was not referring to missiles.) While I’m not a Christian, it’s arguable that if Christianity really propounded the teachings of Jesus on non-violence, I would be. It would almost be worth the other trappings of organized religion to be associated with such a doctrine.

Of course, that’s not what the modern Church does, especially in the United States, where most congregations set aside a small part of every Sunday to pray for the success of those men and women engaged in killing Iraqis or Afghans. And while it’s obvious that most modern Christians fail to give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and cast as many first stones as they can, the whole supporting murder thing seems just the slightest bit higher up the chain in terms of transgressions.

None of this would be so bad, of course, if I didn’t have to hear the flip side of the hypocrisy on my local NPR station later in the day. On today’s “Talk of the Nation”, they hoped to examine the issue of how to make the disenchanted youth in various American Muslim communities resistant to what they called “Jihad Cool”. But as the last caller aptly pointed out, the story had morphed from an examination of negligent forces inside certain fundamentalist communities to an outright assault on Islam’s tenets as a religion. The main guest, who had recently written a lengthy piece on the wife of the alleged would-be Times Square bomber, waved off this critique and said that Muslims need to recognize they have a chronic problem in all their communities.

So where are the people saying there’s a chronic problem in the Christian communities, the flag-waving groups making their children available as willing foot-soldiers in the imperialistic struggle to claim the Middle East for American corporations? Why don’t we have radio programs explaining that a weird conflation of nationalism and Apocalyptic evangelical fundamentalism has been heavily influencing foreign policy, leading to the slaughter of thousands? Is it because this fundamentally really is just another religious war, just another Crusade draped in supposedly secular flags?

Maybe it’s because the alleged terrorists getting caught up in alleged jihad never actually kill anyone, but they do it locally. While the people who drive to work in America and then direct the actions of lethal drone planes half a world away kill hundreds, usually innocent, but do so in a region so esoteric and physically distant that it feels more like a video game than a war.

It’s time to pray, all right. But not for the reasons you might think.

How can this be possible, ask Americans, those incapable of believing there are more than two parties? Because not only are there three substantial parties in the UK, each garnering more than 20% of the nationwide popular vote, but there are actually 10 parties who earned seats in the British parliament this go-round. And three more who had a seat, but lost it. Plus a true independent, unaffiliated from any party.

For decades, the only independents able to win seats in the American Congress have been those who drop their major-two-party affiliation after establishing a long career. The lone possible exception to this is Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, a Social Democrat who knows well enough to run as a straight independent in our system. Because apparently voting in large blocs for a third party is as appealing as hemlock for the American public.

What about the British system engenders this kind of vibrance in their democracy? Part of it must surely be involved with the proliferation of nationalist factions in different regions of the country. Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales each have a seat-winning nationalist party that advocates moving toward dissolution with the mother country, one of them to the point where they refuse to even take the seats that they win. But this isn’t the whole story. There are other factional parties, even the Greens, who win seats in Parliament. And there are three enormous parties who get to share the national stage.

One could argue that part of it is about the size of the constituency. The average MP represents 75,000 people, while the average US Representative votes on behalf of 650,000. That’s pretty much a scale of magnitude difference and ensures the people with particular local or factional appeal are left out of the system altogether. And while it’s hard to imagine a US Congress housing thousands of representatives, maybe an intermediary body could be forged to give a more robust voice to the people.

Granted, there are significant issues with the British system as well. For one, the fact that the Prime Minister stems directly out of the parliamentary majority means that people must choose between prioritizing their local representative over their Prime Minister selection or vice versa, if they prefer respective candidates from different parties. They may love their local Labour MP and want Nick Clegg of the Lib Dems to take over 10 Downing Street and they are forced to choose between these desires. Not ideal.

Additionally, the lack of proportional representation in favor of regional apportionment means that the relative influence of parties is often grossly misrepresented. This is most obviously illustrated by those Liberal Democrats in 2010, who earned 23% of the vote and just 9% of the seats. Meanwhile, the Conservatives got 47% of seats for just 36% of the vote and Labour won 40% with only 29%. The only argument I can see against proportional representation is the idea that it will limit the influence of specific regions or constituent areas.

But this argument fails on face empirically. Most of the specific regional parties would actually increase their influence under prop rep. For example, the Scottish National Party (SNP) won 6 seats, but would be awarded 11 under proportional representation. In fact, every party winning seats would still win seats under that system, plus four more. And people would have even more reason to vote for smaller parties, knowing their vote would count no matter where they voted or what the status of their constituency might be.

So there’s a lot to be learned from the British system, as well as much that could be improved. I think my ultimate bottom line is that we rebelled from a system with more robust democracy to create our own. Granted, the colonies weren’t being particularly enfranchised at the time, but we could’ve waited to be part of a system with a double-digit number of contentious parties. And such a system, when it produces hung parliaments like this year, ensures that every tiny party could potentially be able to get enormous concessions from the major power players.

It’s almost enough to make you start dredging the waters for tea as well as oil.

• It seems I don’t write much about politics here anymore, largely because of the twin forces of Duck and Cover and TMR getting first crack at my political musings. I almost cross-posted this commentary on Obama’s lack of Socialism here, but instead I’m just linking it. Enjoy.
• As promised yesterday, I recently put up the APDA Nats brackets for 2010, complete with results of submitted brackets from current APDAites. (Those distant from debate should note that this is not how APDA Nats is actually structured, but a hypothetical based on the NCAA basketball tourney.) This hasn’t generated as much discussion that’s gotten back to me as I expected, but I’ve heard rumors that people are still enjoying it from afar. Given that I’m on a bid to become Tab Director of Nats 2011, this will probably be the last of these I do for a while… it seems a little weird for people involved in the Nats tab staff to publish a ranking of debaters partaking at that tournament, which is why I didn’t do one in 2007.
• The last two M’s games have been amazing. I missed the Tuesday game because I was doing prep work with the Rutgers team for Nats, but yesterday’s was a real gem. I am a huge fan of the new additions to the team, including the fact that Milton Bradley seems to be happy and ready to produce for this team. But Chone Figgins is threatening to become my favorite Mariner. Between the steals and the walks, he reminds me of Rickey Henderson so much it’s ridiculous. And I loved Rickey Henderson. But he seems to have even less of an ego than Rickey, which was the latter’s one annoying trait. Then again, Chone isn’t exactly contending for the all-time steals title.
• Did, in fact, get our taxes in on-time, yesterday. We do owe both states a little money, and TaxAct scammed us out of more money than they should have. But it’s done and the Feds owe us a lot.
• I wonder if the West will characterize this bombing as “freedom fighting” while everyone else utilizing these methods are “terrorists”.
• My mental state and health have continued to be somewhat subpar in recent weeks. The main issues seem to be a general feeling of dissociative malaise and surreality that may just be endemic to April, and also migraines. I’ve been averaging about 4 migraines a week, an astounding spike in frequency that seems inexplicable when observing normal triggers and factors. This combines uncomfortably with this dreamlike sense of reality that’s overtaken much of my last 2-3 weeks, which may partially be related to the subject matter of the current novel I’m working on. (Though I haven’t been working nearly as much as I’d like, but I’m mostly doing plot work to enable really cramming on output in the next month or so.) I feel largely like I’ve been looking at my life from 30,000 feet, or at least 30 feet, watching myself live instead of actually being in a first-person view. It’s strange and makes me sound completely nuts. I’m not completely nuts. I just feel more like I’m living through a filter than that I’m actually fully here. I sort of feel that this reality is all illusory anyway and that life’s core realities are a little like our souls playing a video game (but with meaningful consequences) on this planet, so maybe I’m just more aware of that reality.
• The other explanation for the above issues, of course, may be that there’s something seriously wrong with my brain. I’m inclined to think otherwise, but it’s good to keep all the possibilities in mind. I’ve told Emily to keep an eye out for me behaving really erratically or out of character, which would be indicative of a possible brain tumor. I’m not actually that worried, though, because the migraine symptoms have been so classic. (Though such symptoms also mirror those of tumors and aneurysms somewhat.) The other factor that I entertained was that I was somehow drinking decaf coffee – that the batch of Folgers I’m working through is either mislabeled or contaminated somehow. Because honestly, foggy worldview, increased tiredness, and more migraines could all be explained by caffeine deficiency too.
• Debate Nationals this weekend – always one of the most exciting times of the year. I’ve attended 7 of the last 11 nationals prior to this one and this weekend will make 8 of 12. For all that I probably should feel a little strange about being so old and having seen so much on APDA, I really feel nothing of the sort. I think I’ve been in the work world long enough to understand just how meaningful and valuable I find the APDA community to be, to treasure how rare its intellectuality is. I’ve been thinking a little about how much work I’ve put in to the Rutgers team, all unpaid, and realizing that I don’t see any of it as a chore. I think this is what it would be like to really love one’s job, because I do it all voluntarily. I’ve worked for organizations I truly love before, but never felt this way about the actual work. If the writing doesn’t work out, I need to figure out a way to swing professional debate coaching. Possibly in Africa.
• 

One of the subtler overall changes on the page, going with a relative simplicity that reflects my effort to refind some focus. I’m not that far off, not all over the place, but still not quite as centered as I’d like to be. Ever since I got back from Virginia (all of 48 hours ago), I’ve felt a bit foggy, rather dissociative. As though this is all a big dream I’m about to snap awake from. Not all of it, as in the last 30 years, but all of it, maybe most of the last 48 hours. It’s odd.

Of course, in part, it’s April. Every April, I get to thinking and hoping that maybe it won’t be so bad, so strange, so despondent. Most Aprils, I have to remember that there’s a reason I have this whole time-is-a-place theory going. This time round, at least, I have two insanely busy debate weeks back-to-back to keep me distracted. And then it’ll be time to enter the home stretch of a book that feels like it’s not quite off the ground yet. This month may yet prove to me that two books a year is a more reasonable expectation than three.

But I’m still hoping otherwise.

This past weekend was pretty debate-heavy as well, if only because it takes about 13 hours to drive round-trip to and from Charlottesville, home of one of the better campuses in its absolute peak time. Arriving in Virginia under an 88-degree sky was pretty much just what I needed at the time and I thoroughly enjoyed the tournament there, in no small part because of Rutgers’ great successes. Not only did Dave break for the second straight weekend and the third in the last six, but our newest novices were second novice team and both made the top ten novice speakers. And Dave & Chris managed to establish that they own 7th place, having finished exactly 7th all three tournaments they attended together. One could do a lot worse, especially for a junior-freshman duo. The tournament also just managed to be a bunch of fun, I got to judge many good rounds, and everyone was generally in high spirits. Although the less said about Friday night the better – suffice it to say that it’s easy to block out the worse parts of college over time and thus even harder to when they’re re-presented to you.

The only good thing about April, consistently, other than debate Nats I guess, is the start of baseball season. And what a great start it was today, with the M’s almost coughing up a win only to demonstrate they might have enough offense this year after all. Watching Chone Figgins and Casey Kotchman come through so consistently was great. I am going to have a lot of fun watching this team run this year. It was all almost enough to make up for the heartbreaking NCAA Finals, though that itself was such a great game. And both of these were big uppers compared to the amazing but horrifying video that Russ has up on TMR.

That video was on its way to sending me into quite the tailspin. If you don’t want to make the jump or want to know what you’re getting into first, it’s basically 40 minutes of American military chatter about 11 unarmed civilians that were slaughtered in a 2007 incident the US denied knowledge of until very recently. This is followed toward the end by a triple-missile attack on a building that also seems filled with civilians. It’s perhaps the most chilling piece of video I’ve ever seen in my life. As bad as it is to watch 11 people killed (and trust me, one sees them shot and killed), it’s probably worse to hear the live reaction from the people committing the murders. In some ways it feels like a vindication of all the things I say about people in that situation, but I’d really rather just be wrong. Perhaps most compelling of all is the vision of the blurry lines between video games and reality for a whole generation of American soldiers. The whole situation, from the dialogue to the monochrome target-screen, has the look and feel of a sophisticated first-person shooter (I mean, think about that phrase as a genre of video game on face there for a second) and one gets the sense that the people killing can’t quite get over the psychic break between the surrealistic setting and the fact that what they’re doing is all too real. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking; maybe they know full well and are just that awful and/or manipulated.

In any event, I’m still struggling with it. It’ll be with me for a long time. It’s encouraging to know that there are people who would post it, who would make it available, who would spread it around, though part of me almost feels like it’s an Orwellian exemplification of how much can be gotten away with. Still mulling.

The cat’s sick and we took her to the vet, who knew no more about why she was sneezing and wheezing than they do about my migraines. But they gave her some medication, just like me, and wished her the best. There was a lot else on my list to do today, but I only did about three other things. My brain refuses to be still and yet won’t move quickly either. It’s pickling in a jar, just for a time, letting itself soak up the brine between the folds like some grimy spa catharsis. As though to gird itself for April and all it entails. As though to make the push into the depth of where I need to go to really fulfill The Best of All Possible Worlds.

I don’t like pickles.

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.