663 days, 6 hours, 46 minutes, 7 seconds

She wishes this was a watch and not a key chain. A Backwards Bush watch. People might think it a Swatch at first, those ornamental faces. Then they might look at the numbers and get totally confused as to what time it is. Okay already. Her wrists are too small to wear a Swatch anyway. She doesn't even use this as a key chain. Or not for keys, anyway. She can just picture what would have happened, last year, when she lost her keys in Duane Reade, the manager asking if there was anything unique about her key chain. Picture trying to explain what Bush's face was doing there. And why her husband wanted it returned to her.

664 days, 4 hours, 24 minutes, 9 seconds

She waits outside for him, while he drops off an umbrella borrowed from a friend. It's what women do. They wait. This is a woman friend. It's the first warm night, a March that feels more like May. They were married in March.

665 days, 9 hours, 48 minutes, 5 seconds

As she destroys 194 countries with the bouncing bush head before even going downstairs for breakfast, she's reminded of The War of the Roses. It's not a movie she'd have elected to see on her own, but her husband told her it had something to do with Shakespeare's plays. This was back when she believed him. A horrid divorce comedy, but the one image she remembers is the ex inviting her husband to dinner, making a meat dish which he enjoyed immensely. Then he asked where the dog was.

666 days, 12 hours, 26 minutes, 28 seconds

She takes a few minutes out to play the Bush Pong game. She pretends it's her cousin's head there.

666 days, 12 hours, 48 minutes, 4 seconds

822-2666. She can't tell you how many times a day her mother dialed this number. Her sister-in-law. Her closest friend. Sometimes it seemed like her only friend. It bothered her the way her brother spent money, though. It bothered her that Sally would always say something cost $5 or $7, when it was really $5.99 or $7.99. As if pennies never mattered to her. Her brother was like that, too, not caring how much things cost. He was a liquor salesman. They'd go out to dinner and he'd order wine that he poured in the bucket when no one was looking. He'd buy expensive clothes or furniture then throw a screaming fit when it broke or no one was wearing it. She and her husband rented their house every summer so they could pay off their mortgage. They scrimped and saved, then saved more. This is what they passed on to their daughter.

666 days, 12 hours, 54 minutes, 56 seconds

822-2666. Her aunt. Her uncle. Her cousin. She doesn't know which one it is who holds that pitchfork. Prodding her. Scaring her. The night she slept over, awakened when her uncle came home screaming. The two of them screaming for hours. She supposes her cousin is used to this. And her cousin, in the bed across the room, sleeps on as if to point up how ridiculous it is for her to be afraid, a real cry baby. No matter how well they ever played together, there would be memories of her cousin deserting her. She loved her aunt, though.

666 days, 13 hours, 23 minutes, 57 seconds

666-6666: Carmel again. The night they returned from Florida at two in the morning and had arranged to be met at Newark airport. No car. He insists they wait. No car. He calls, they say the driver was sent out. No driver. It's nearly three in the morning. Finally they end up sharing the one cab in sight with a woman who lives in Washington Heights. The cab's just about to pull out when a woman with a baby stops them. She lives right in the area. Please, can he drive her there first? They agree. She gets lost. The driver gets lost somewhere in New Jersey. The baby sleeps.

666 days, 13 hours, 30 minutes, 18 seconds

Carmel Car Service (her husband's cab of choice): 666-6666. Christmas, headed for the Newark airport, they had a driver working only his second or third day. Traffic was horrendous, over an hour just to get to the Lincoln Tunnel. Then the traffic on the Turnpike. Finally they get to the airport, with maybe a half hour to spare (and this was after 9/11). Don't worry, he assures her. Everyone else will be delayed as well. And just as he speaks these words the driver misses the turn for the terminal. He calls on his cell and learns the plane's leaving on time. They end up spending the night in an airport hotel. He has his new leather coat on and doesn't want to ruin it running through a crowd. She paid for half of it, as his Christmas present. 666. The Devil.

667 days, 9 hours, 28 minutes, 33 seconds

She gives up on the pedometer. Don't tell her friend. But first it didn't count enough steps, so the stride had to be reset. Then the weight was set wrong. Then she couldn't access anything but the steps, and the resets every day at midnight never took place. After last night's struggles with the BB clock, she thought maybe she'd give it another try. Then she saw it lying by itself on the desk, its empty face turned toward her.

667 days, 10 hours, 17 minutes, 57 seconds

Rumor has it that President Bush keeps one of these countdown key chains with him all the time, to remind him how much time he has left to accomplish all he's entitled to. Now, if he can just find his keys...

667 days, 10 hours, 31 minutes, 42 seconds

Bush to Dems: Opposition Wastes Time. They're picking fights with the White House instead of resolving monetary disputes for sending more troops to Iraq. "Members of Congress now face a choice: whether they will waste time and provoke an unnecessary confrontation, or whether they will join us in working to do the people's business," CBS News reports our president proclaiming. The clock is running. If senate doesn't approve the emergency funding by April 15 our men and women in uniform will face significant disruptions. So will their families. April 15th is a Sunday this year. Taxes aren't due until the 16th. 667 days, 10 hours, 23 minutes, 41 seconds.

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.