668 days, 1 hours, 25 minutes, 57 seconds

On the wall of her house upstate, in the room that used to be her study, there's a cardboard Howdy Doody clock. White, red, and blue. The puppet's face, then the numbers around it, and the two moveable clock hands. She wants to say she had this from her childhood, but in truth she bought it at a street fair the third weekend she and her husband spent together. She loved Howdy Doody, though. No lie.

Children today have digital clocks and watches (when they bother to wear a watch at all). They won't have to know the big hand vs. the little hand. That's what always confused his best friend's daughter. Now, for her daughter, for Christmas, they buy a plush Hickory Hickory Dock Clock with six brightly colored mice and a pendulum that rattles. The mice go in the chimney and come out the door. In her house upstate, not far from where she's hung Howdy Doody, there are real mice.

668 days, 1 hours, 32 minutes, 34 seconds

It was wrong to have reset her clock to the instructions at BackwardsBush.com, when the keychain was actually purchased from Nationalnightmare.com. Now, looking at their site, she sees it, too, is an hour off. That's what happens when she orders from California, she supposes. But she wanted to support the Bookshop Santa Cruz. Bullshit. She wanted free shipping.

668 days, 2 hours, 10 minutes, 49 seconds

Much as she's feared – the keychain and the computer's clock don't match – only the computer got this early start to daylight savings time. A submarine might have clearer instructions. There's the current time, then January 20, 2009 as the goal (actually you could set it for any time, up to 2024). At one point it looks as if there are 2400 days left. Then she finally gets everything set, but the clock on the computer says six hours, the one in her hand now says two. She runs a cold hand over her forehead, twirls a finger in her hair, finally remembers to refresh the computer's clock. The keychain's two minutes behind. Close enough. It's been a long day.

668 days, 6 hours, 39 minutes, 5.2 seconds

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. 38 seconds, 37 seconds, 35 seconds. She's waiting for one friend and one woman she's never met before. 30 seconds. This clock will never be stolen because our employees are always watching it, above the counter in one tacky diner after another. 38 minutes. She got here early. A waitress comes over to say hello. This is where she usually eats with her husband.

668 days, 22 hours, 46 minutes, 7 seconds

Again, late at night, she looks over old mail, mostly newsletters sent to her G-mail address. Breast cancer. Diabetes. Migraine. Why she continues to subscribe to all these is beyond her. She doesn't need to give hypochondria food for thought. She's got the best doctors. The migraines are under control.

Her headaches are almost under control. She waited too long to call the doctor, now has to wait over a week before she sees him. Botox only takes a minute, she tried to convince the receptionist. He said he could fit her in. He promised... An appointment for March 30. Her 17th anniversary. A reminder of the days leading up to her wedding. She didn't want to get married with a sinus headache, she decided, spur of the moment. She had no doubt it was sinus. A doctor thought brain tumor.

She said she'd marry him and then had her head examined: quip one. She had her head examined and they found nothing: quip two. This was before the cancer, before the diabetes, before she had access to the Internet.

669 days, 8 hours, 5 minutes, 57 seconds

The villa's about to be torn down! That isolated house in the middle of a 300 foot pit whose owner was resisting developers' efforts to purchase. It turns out this battle has been going on for more than three years. It turns out the owner doesn't live there. A judge now gives them three days to clear out.

She doesn't know what's more upsetting – the fact that it's being torn down or the fact that nobody lives there. It's just the owner's selfish greed that's been at stake here.

She learns of this on the night her co-op board meets. Talk about pettiness. One owner out of two hundred causing trouble. A board election which, for the first time in the twenty-two years she's been here, doesn't have enough candidates to fill the seats. And the building's facing a huge decision in 2012, when they lose their low-income tax incentive, so who's on the board over the next few years will be crucial. Her husband was president of the board before she knew him. He ran once again, maybe fifteen years ago, and lost. And here he is running off to the meeting.

She thinks she'll stay home.

671 days, 13 hours, 16 minutes, 25 seconds

Her father, twelve years ago now, two days after her mother's funeral, driving the family out to dinner and going the wrong way around a traffic circle he'd driven most of his life.

671 days, 22 hours, 43 minutes, 55 seconds

Another friend writes of driving around half the day in an attempt to focus. And she recalls many times, uptight, frazzled by the city, she's gotten in the car headed for her home upstate. It's physical then. She feels how tightly she's gripping that steering wheel. The sun comes through the windshield and lands on finger after finger. One by one, the fingers loosen their grip. By the time she's forty minutes out of the city most of the tension's drained from her body.

671 days, 23 hours, 30 minutes, 36 seconds

Christmas after Christmas they travel to Texas. Christmas after Christmas, sitting around the dining room table, they've learned to exchange snippets of their lives. And his niece told once of the troubled teens she teaches. There was one she had to wrestle to the ground. Others are autistic. That's where the video games come in. Kids who don't know how to have a typical conversation suddenly understand the script of the game, and will interact, making it into a dialog of sorts. The usually lethargic assume the game's animation.

What happens when these kids graduate high school? she'd bit her lip and dared to ask.

Well, many can go to normal colleges. In college there isn't the social conformity of grade schools and high schools, many of them will do fine.

She remembers Diet Coke going down the wrong tract. She had no social skills growing up. She couldn't seem to have the sort of conversations her parents and teachers expected. She never made it to college. Writing, pad and pen, then later typewriter, became the equivalent of her video game.

She's just trying to put the world in focus.

671 days, 23 hours, 33 minutes, 36 seconds

Her husband, hearing the shots of the Bush game, calls up to ask what she's doing (implying why is she wasting her time), and she calls back down that she's not playing she's writing. Just trying to focus.

672 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 39 seconds

There's a parable she often uses in teaching, probably a bastardized version by this time. But a king's daughter was ready for marriage, and he announced he would give his daughter to the marksman who could hit the bird in the eye. He set a date for all interested men to gather. But one caveat: if they shot and missed, they'd be put to death.

The first hunter stepped up, aimed his bow. The king motioned for him to wait, then asked what he saw. "Oh," he said, "this is the most beautiful forest in the kingdom." The king refused to let him shoot. The next hunter came up and took aim, and again the king stopped him and asked what he saw. "The tree, in which that bird is, is the greenest tree in the forest," he said. And once again the king refused to let him shoot. And so on through hunter after hunter. Finally a man stepped up. When the king asked what he saw, he replied "I see only the eye of the bird." The king let him shoot, and of course he hit the bird in the eye.

So it's a question of focus.

The hand-eye coordination. Trying to predict where the head will bounce. Keeping her fingers steady. If she turns away for half a second that head bounces off the screen. If she moves her cursor a tenth of an inch off Cheney's face, that head bounces off the screen.

God, this much focus on a president.

673 days, 5 hours, 33 minutes, 56 seconds

With a now-blinding headache (possibly from staring into the computer screen, trying to meet it halfway), the new computer, and boxes all over the living room, this entire apartment has become a war zone.

673 days, 7 hours, 21 minutes, 34 seconds

She's got stomach cramps, one of the glucophage side effects she was warned about. So maybe the two pills are working, whereas one did almost nothing. She chews two Tums, just in case it's heartburn. But she's seldom been so happy to be sick. Except, of course, when she recalls those childhood migraines that manifested themselves as stomach aches. How quickly the body remembers pain. How easily she could become that child again. It'll pass in a week or two. Then she'll grow up all over, maybe this time with fonder memories. You can't relive the past, you can just rewrite it.

673 days, 7 hours, 52 minutes, 47 seconds

180 countries destroyed! Hate level 8! She's discovered, when Bush glides along that top line and the sound effects turn into machine guns, she could trap him behind Cheney's face and just keep firing.

Suddenly she has the memory of Monkey in the Middle. A game she detested. Especially when you're the shortest kid in the class and at the end of the line when the photographer takes pictures each year. She hated having her picture taken. But that lineup was just so the photographer didn't have to keep raising and lowering his tripod, her parents said. The school and the teacher made no distinction. And she was the first in line in the photograph from her ballet school. You can't have everything.

As soon as she starts thinking about all this, her aim slips. Even Bush as Monkey no longer entices her.

673 days, 9 hours, 26 minutes, 20 seconds

Downstairs, her husband's setting up his new computer, the first Vista in his office, or their household. She pongs Bush until her mouse-arm hurts. Those two Cheney heads on the sides – she remembers now, they're called Flippers. She thinks of Dolphins. Of the friendly dolphin in an area promoted as swimming with dolphins, who spooked and attacked a swimmer. She remembers her husband, when he first moved to Windows, learning mouse clicks then drag and drop by playing Monopoly with his boss as stand-in opponent. He kept winning and winning and winning. Boasting about his winning.

673 days, 10 hours, 23 minutes, 48 seconds

She knew about R2-D2 and his new stamp, knew the post office was setting up 400 R2-D2 mailboxes around the country, as a matter of fact she logged onto the post office website to see if they were selling Star Wars merchandise yet (great idea for a Christmas present, though this is only March). Then to find this animated little guy working his way around the site, covering up services, his gears squeaking (30 years is a long time). A video announces the coming attraction. Due out March 28. In the meantime, R2-D2 swallows a letter.

673 days, 11 hours, 8 minutes, 43 seconds

She wakes up, turns on the computer, checks her blood (normal for the third morning in a row), checks her mail, eats a Glucerna bar for breakfast, talks to her in-laws, racks up a score of sixty-one ponging Bush. Not a bad start to the day, although it's nearly one o'clock now. She slept late.

673 days, 22 hours, 8 minutes, 48 seconds

Back in her young, apolitical days, she loved playing pinball. These nights she follows the Backwards Bush links to arrive at a Bush Pong Game. Dominate, the first screen reads. Playing the theme from Bonanza. She madly clicks on the Bushhead bouncing about one of those flat maps like they have in schoolrooms. Sometimes it scores, sometimes not. Sometimes it racks up a score of ten or twenty with one shot. There are no instructions.

It takes her awhile to realize it's Siamese twin Cheney, one head on each side of the flat world, that has to bat against him for the guns to fire. Left to his own devices, Bush would duck behind the bobbing head and sneak off the screen.

Five heads per game, as if five heads are better than one. Bush's head gains momentum when ten countries are destroyed, then again at twenty and thirty. She's got to shoot precisely when the heads bump. Without quite knowing how she did it, she reaches a hate level of six with seventy-three countries destroyed. Most games it's only in the twenties.

We'll make no distinction between the terrorists, secretaries, business men and women, moms and dads, friends and neighbors, Bush says instead of Game Over. The words don't make sense. We' ll make no distinction between the terrorists' secretaries? She cuts his voice off quickly, but can't pull herself away. Her husband crawls into bed. Just one more game, she assures him.

674 days, 9 hours, 23 minutes, 5 seconds

Jennifer Mee's hiccups are back! This fifteen-year-old from Florida hiccuped for five weeks straight. Then a few sporadic bouts. But two days back at school, then a nosebleed, then the hiccups started as bad as ever. She can't stop reading news about this story. When she was fifteen, the best she could do to get out of school was fake a nervous breakdown.

675 days, 12 hours, 9 minutes, 30 seconds

As she rises from bed, her mind still foggy, white fog outside the window, her glasses still on the desk across the room, the tan top of one water tower on a building a few streets away appears to be a breast, with a nipple.