A Month of Words

It's been way too long since I checked in, but there is a reason, and I want to explain my tardiness by sharing some of my November calendar with you.



Starting today, November 1, I will be participating in "November 2010," a writing and publishing experiment in which 30 writers (including my good friend and brilliant Shreveport writer Michael Harold) will be writing 200-300 words a day for each day of that month. At some point after the end of November, each author's writing for the month will be collected and published in booklet form. In addition, a booklet will be published for each day of the month with the writings of every writer for that day. I'm terrified and extremely excited about what this month will bring.

There is no proprietary relationship involving the writings, beyond editor and publisher Dan Waber reserving the right to publish them after the conclusion of the month. Therefore, I will be sharing them with you throughout the month. Of course, you will then have no particular motivation to purchase the finished product, except for your enduring loyalty to this anachronistic artifact called the "book," which you may have to explain very slowly and meticulously to your grandchildren, if you can compete with the somatic mind-meld video stream they'll undoubtedly be plugged into as part of their nanotechnology jumpsuit. Or something.

Now I've probably somewhere between 200-300 words right now, so these entries will be brief, compared to the usual tomes of wisdom you're accustomed to in these pages. But it'll be a fun journey, right? Without further ado:

November 1st

We received information today from the company through whom we have health insurance for our 10-year-old daughter, informing of the changes required by the new health care law. It seems to add up to a grand total of four, including removal of: overall lifetime dollar maximums (reassuring, but hopefully not relevant); maximums for mandibular joint services (jaw work, hopefully not some euphemism for death panels); and maximums for sterilization services(!) (did the eugenics lobby have to be appeased, along with every other special interest?).

Finally, eligibility for adult children has been raised from age 21 to 26. Now, this is my daughter Zora's policy, so this change applies to her children. She is 10 now, so let's suppose, for argument's sake, that she gives birth at 24. Previously, she could keep that child on this policy until she (Zora) is 45. Now, with this legislation, she can extend the coverage until she (Zora) is 50. The point is, this revised benefit doesn't kick in for 35 years(!). It's as if legislation passed by the Gerald Ford, denounced by Ted Kennedy and Ralph Nader and the 1975 left-wing media mogul equivalent of Glenn Beck (Dick Cavett? Tom Snyder? Some Maoist grad student in semiotics at Berkeley with a ham radio?), were just taking effect today.

Okay, so here's the actual point. This half-assed "reform" is nothing to be either praised or denounced as the second coming of the New Deal. It's business as usual, with some crumbs thrown to the insurance companies, so maybe they'll throw them back to the Democrats (God knows there should be less of them to have to divide the spoils after tomorrow's midterm elections). And hopefully, Zora's theoretical children will live in a society where the audacity of hope has some more substance to it. Either that or they'll live in France, and they'll be doing something more about it.





The weekend of November 6-7 is chock full. The New Orleans Book Fair (nolabookfair.com), one of the real highlights of the year, kicks off at 11:00 in the 500-600 blocks of Frenchmen St. I will be there with a full buffet of intellectually nourishing selections from Deep South Samizdat Books, as well as a selection of publications from contributors to the online journal Unlikely 2.0 (UnlikelyStories.org), edited by Jonathan Penton since 1998. The print anthology Unlikely Stories of the Third Kind was recently published, and several of the writers (including the aforementioned Michael Harold) will be