Yep, there it is again. Long-time readers will recognize this as the book I’ve been hopelessly hyping for the last . . . wait for it . . . two years. That’s right. This book was officially unleashed on the publishing world exactly two years ago today: October 29, 2007.

Happy Anniversary to me!

Well, “happy” is relative. Sure, the book wasn’t what anyone would ever even remotely consider a success. (When total expenses are one order of magnitude larger than total income, one does not generally place a checkmark in the “win” column.) But to be honest, I’m actually not here to complain. I’m here to grumble.

Just kidding. I’m actually here to reflect and get all philosophic on you. Then I’ll grumble.

Just kidding again. About the grumbling. So here’s the agenda for today’s post: philosophical rambling then a scary, scary time-related factoid you’ll be sorry you ever heard.

Let the rambling commence. You’ve been warned.

Ever notice how time just keeps moving faster? Think about summer breaks back when you were in grade school. When that very last school bell of the year rang, you flew out of the building like you were launched from a canon. If you were like me, you landed at home, turned on the TV, and then proceeded to sit there watching badly-dubbed monster flicks for the next three months. Oh, there was probably some sleeping in there and maybe a family vacation along the way but what you did didn’t matter. It just went on and on and on. It was bliss. (Bliss, that is, until you saw those first “Back to School” advertisements and the horrible reality that you still had at least ten more years of school ahead of you slapped you in the face.)

The next year went faster. The year after that, even faster. By the time you left middle school, you were wondering how two hundred and seventy days fit into two weeks. Because that’s what it started feeling like.

Here’s my theory. The human brain is incapable of storing time. It can record memories. You can recall events, dialog, places, and that bucket of ice cream you ate in August. But you can’t store time itself. There’s no way to sit there and think of a two hour movie and actually experience two hours. So your brain doesn’t store time but only stores the notion that time has passed. Most of us don’t feel any different today than we did a week, year, or decade ago. We know we’re older, but we can’t actually sense it. All we know is that it’s never not now, but that the years behind us keep piling up anyway.

So it is that two years for me have now passed in yet another blink and yet somehow October 29, 2011 feels thousands of miles away. I know that it too will be here in a blink, and I’ll forget 98% of the details between now and then, and you may actually read a “Happy Four Year Anniversary” post then. But I’m primary hoping you’ll be reading, “My latest book will be in book stores next week!” instead.

Wish me luck.

Oh, and now for that scary factoid I warned you about. Get this. If the television show Happy Days were to debut this year, it would be set in the year NINETEEN NINETY. No kidding.

I remember watching the show as a kid and looking back on all that “fifties stuff”. I might as well have been watching some Charles Dickens dramatization, it was that far back in human history for me. “The fifties!” I’d tell myself. My parents were kids in the fifties for Pete’s sake. I’m surprised they didn’t have dinosaurs walking around outside Arnold’s Drive-In.

And look at me now. It’s 2009 and a show like Happy Days today would be about 1990. We would see Adam Sandler join Saturday Night Live. We would leave the theaters in awe after watching Dances with Wolves. Half of us would be dancing to Ice, Ice Baby and the other half of us would be asking, Wait a minute, isn’t this that one song by Queen and David Bowie? Windows 3.0 was almost starting to look like a viable computing option. Almost.

I’m telling you: scary stuff.

Anyway, if you’ve made it this far into today’s post, congrats. You’re now eligible to win a copy of a two year old book. Leave a comment below and I’ll pick a random winner by next Thursday. If you’d like to leave a comment but opt-out of the fun, just sign your post, “I already have a copy of your book and/or I’m just not into well-written, humorous writing on the topic of food and weight management.”

I didn’t get to bed that night until six in the morning. Through a deadly combination of late night gaming and even later night calls from work, I didn’t fall asleep until the gray light of early morn began to appear outside my bedroom window. Fortunately, I still managed to get about five hours in, waking up at eleven or so. But by six o’clock that evening, I was all out of steam. I crashed hard until awoken at eight o’clock that night.

The phrase “Want to go to a movie?” woke me up. I blinked a few times, trying to figure out what day it was, then replied for confirmation, “What’s a mooty?” “A movie.” “Oh, well why didn’t you say so. Sure.”

It was October 17 and Where The Wild Things Are had just opened the day before. I remember the book, of course. We all do, of course. To quote (or at least paraphrase) Wayne Campbell, “If you lived in the suburbs you were issued it. It came in the mail with free boxes of Tide.”

The book told the story of a somewhat naughty boy named Max who, at the age of eleven, found out he was a wizard, and was taken by a half-giant named Hagrid to a wizarding school. Or something like that. Somehow or another, probably due to out-of-date maps on his Garmin, Max ended up on an island populated entirely by mutants. I can only imagine it was atomic test detonations that would give a bull oddly human feet and cause him to walk upright. I know that would certainly cause me to roar my terrible roar and gnash my terrible teeth.

After conducting some wild rumpasing then taking a snooze, Max got tired of the whole thing, hopped back in his boat, and headed home where he was greeted by a hot meal and an agent awaiting him to sign away the movie rights. Forty-six years later, we got the movie.

Max must be in his late fifties by now and I’m sure he looks back fondly on that fateful day amongst the Wild Things. They made his heart sing. In fact, they probably made everything groovy. Hopefully he was invited to the premiere. I wasn’t. But then again, I never am. It probably has something to do with my hair. Anyway, go check out this movie. You might like it. Or not. Your call, really.

I’ve heard that part of being a good writer is also being a good reader. Of course, if you follow that logic (and also happen to be a big fan of Pixar films) you might also conclude that part of being a good chef is also about being a good rat. But hey, some things weren’t meant to make sense. Like my blogging. But I digress.

Now I do like reading. And I do try to use it to make me a better writer. It’s a great way to discover adjectives I’d never thought of and I’ve also learned there’s a fine line between “paying homage to” and “plagiarizing.” But as much as I like to read, I just don’t end up with a lot of time for it. Therefore it takes me a fairly long time to get through even the shortest of books. I mean, take a look at how each and every day of my life pans out:

To compound the problem, I never read just one book at a time. Here’s what I’m going through at this very moment, in one form or another (reading, reading out loud, or listening to on audiobook):

• Notes from a Small Island
• Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
• The Hobbit
• Outliers
• Half-Assed: A Weight-Loss Memoir
• The Children of Hurin
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• In a Sunburned Country

Sidebar: I also just finished up two Neil Gaiman books on audio: Stardust and The Graveyard Book, both recommended. Now I need to rent the movie version of the former, which I’ve heard is actually pretty good.

So given this reading schedule, if I get through one page a day on any book, I’ll call that a blazing success.

How about you? Do you find time to read? Do you read more than one book at a time? Do you find yourself subconsciously plagiarizing others’ works when you write? Leave a comment below.