My new clock

January 12, 2009 / Uncategorized / 6 Comments »

Now that the New Year and birthday confetti has settled (I celebrated another 365 days on the planet last week) I have decided what my New Year’s wish for 2009 is. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a New Year’s wish, but there should be. Birthday candles and their wishes could perhaps get a leg up if there was a New Year wish to back it up.

I want two hours of gifted, nightly reading time. I want two hours that don’t use up any hours from the 24 we are given every day to accomplish life. I want it to start at 10:30 every night. At ten-thirty, a magical two-hour stretch of time called bookthirty would begin. When it ends two hours later, it would still be 10:30. I would then put my book on the nighttable, take off the pitiful reading glasses, turn out the light and snuggle into the covers with two hours of booktime waltzing in my head and it’s not after midnight.

• If I had bookthirty every night I could read all those books in my To Be Read stack. All of them.
• If I had bookthirty every night I wouldn’t have to wrestle with a reading hangover on mornings when I stayed up too late the night before reading.
• Bookthirty would allow me to read 20 or more additional books every year. Every year. More books. Can you imagine?
• Bookthirty would make me a better writer. Brilliant writers read lots of books.
• Bookthirty would make me a happier person. Unread books stacked around my bedroom make me sad. They call out to me. I call back to them, “Soon!” We all know I am lying.
• Bookthirty would make me a more rested individual, nicer to be around, a pleasure to know, and because books teach, wiser all the way around.
• Bookthirty would enable me to buy more books. My fellow writers, need I say more?

Whomever said “So many books, so little time” surely spoketh true words. Something must be done. I want a clock that can give me bookthirty, every night, from this day forward. And since I know how prone we are to use precious time for often ridiculous pursuits, I am more than willing to have bookthirty vanish if I begin to use it for watching a dumb movie, or even cleaning a toilet. It’s only for reading books. It will return to me the next night of course where I can redeem myself and use the two magical hours for the purpose with which they were granted to me. And of course, if I am so tired at 10:30 that I choose to relinquish bookthirty of an evening, well then, there’s always tomorrow.

I need that clock.

Who is with me?