October 26th—Got all excited about the clock thing last night and built an early prototype! I did it in a hurry, though, and I wrote too big and ran out of space for numbers halfway through. Jane tried to be supportive. “Maybe you can just have every number count twice,” she said. Then how will they know which “six o’clock” it is, for instance? I asked. “They … they’d just have to know, I guess. From context?” she suggested. I really liked how supportive she was trying to be, but I knew this was too lazy to be a real solution. Alice would have known what to say.
November 5th—Stuff with Jane getting a little tense. She keeps wanting to push the relationship forward. She says that we’ve been together “forever.” I said that maybe it feels that way, but that I kept track of it on the calendar and it’s actually been less than five months. She just stared at me. Then to change the subject I told her this new idea I was excited about: we’d choose a date in the future to make things official, and then every year after that, that day on the calendar would be like our own personal holiday—for just the two of us. Good idea, right? “You’d never remember it,” she said.
November 6th—Things with Jane getting better. I think we’re going to work this out. I love Jane. That’s all that matters.
November 11th—They sacrificed Jane today. Really happy for the Sun God.
November 12th—Cold.
November 13th—Dark.
November 18th—Turns out those berries aren’t poison. So, now I’m the guy who discovered that.
November 23rd—Alice came by and said she felt bad about the Jane stuff, and that I should hang out with her and her friends. Then it turned out her friends included this new guy she’s seeing who—get this—invented the diary. Anyway, to be the mature one, I said, “Oh, that’s great, I use that almost every day.” Guess what he says: “Oh, really? I invented that for girls.” What a dick. Then he said, “So, what else have you done?” and I said I have been totally distraught about Jane being sacrificed (I kind of exaggerated, but whatever) but that I plan on pulling it together soon and working on something new, maybe something with clocks. He said: “Well, you know what tomorrow is?” I said, yes, November 24th. He said, “No, tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life.” And everyone said, “Awwww” and I was like Are you kidding me?! Do you know how long it took me to get people to stop talking like that?
December 1st—I think the key to feeling better is to really just focus on work. Starting tomorrow, I am going to choose a new project to work on every day. It doesn’t have to be clocks; it just has to be something. Let’s go!!!!
December 23rd—It seems like Alice and Diary Guy are really close this week. Really happy for them. Hard to see other people so happy this week for some reason. Ahhhh. Going to focus on work.
December 25th—Why do I feel so lonely today?
December 26th—Why am I so fat?
December 30th—I told everyone I’m ending the year early. I know it was impulsive, but I just had to do it. I was ready for everyone to make fun of me, but it turned out people were way cooler about it than I thought they would be. “That’s great,” “About time,” “Just what I need.” It was actually the most praise I got since I invented the calendar in the first place.
This year just got away from me somehow. Looking back, I realize how much I got sidetracked and how many months slipped by that I can’t even remember. The one nice thing is seeing how I used to be so worked up about Alice, and now I realize I really don’t care at all anymore. We’re going to be friends in the New Year, and I’m really looking forward to that. And the Jane thing ended the right way, I think—better than some long, drawn-out breakup.
So this year wasn’t everything I hoped it would be, and I didn’t get all the months in that I wanted, but I know next year is going to be totally different. When the New Year starts, I’m going to wake up at dawn every day and get to work—see, I’d love to put a number on “dawn,” that’s why I think this new clock thing could be really big. I have so many ideas for it. For example: I either want seconds to be timed to a blink of an eye so people don’t have to say “in the blink of an eye”—they can just say “one second”—or I want to double the length of a second so people don’t always say, “Can you give me two seconds?!” They can just say “one second.” I have a lot of ideas like that.
December 31st—So many parties going on tonight. On a Tuesday?! Not complaining, just saying.
January 1st—Woke up at sun-past-mountain with a headache. So much for the “dawn” thing. But I still feel good.
The Ghost of Mark Twain
It was a dreary day in midtown Manhattan.
A middle-school teacher had requested a meeting at the offices of an editor of Bantam Scholastic Classics politely and persistently for sixty consecutive days. The editor finally agreed to the meeting, even though the subject line in each email, “Regarding the Language in Huckleberry Finn,” gave him reason to assume the teacher’s agenda was to discuss what he considered to be the most tiresome topic in all of literature.
“Hi. How are you? Please, have a seat.”
“Thank you.”
“Water?”