Excerpt from Every Hour Wounds (2005)

[ARCHIVE: I think this was the first proto-blogprove I wrote. I just came up with starting sentence and went from there. If memory serves me right, I got it from Scrubs. Michael J. Fox was guesting as a doctor who suffered from OCD, and this coin thing came up as habit he used to help focus his mind and hone his hand coordination. In retrospect, it was ballsy of me to title the short after a fictional book written so soon in its near-future.]

Bruce passed the coin between his hands, keeping himself busy. He found that he didn't like the in-between moments, so he would always find something to occupy his mind. He had wondered before if it was a form of ADHD, but he his mind wasn't at all like they showed in the commercials. There was no rapid uncontrollable change in thought, no constant channel changing. He just didn't like to feel like he waas doing nothing.

When he was younger he would people-watch, if there were enough people passing by. He would just stare across the street, barely focusing on what was really happening, and think Barbara Adams, age fifty-nine. Married once, right out of high school. On the way to pick up cat-food for the two baby strays she found on her back porch... Leon "Less-Than-Jake" Jacobson, age seventeen. bassist for the unnamed five-man garage band on his block. Walking to the mall, hoping to run into gril from his English class there 'on accident.' and so forth. But after fifteen years of his average desk job, receiving average pay for average work, Bruce had lost the map to his imagination. He no longer had strong opinions about politics or religion, never saw ads for a movie that would make him want to go to the multiplex, didn't give a thought to the teenage punks that would joyously cause a ruckus and cut in line at the Orange Julius because really, it wasn't worth the effort. Something in his soul, something that was vivid and saturated had been beated into submission and paved over with dull grey concrete.

When he lost the ability to think up his own stories, he read others' instead. So he would open up a dog-eared, browning paperback and whittle away the hours. Then he lost interest in these stories as well. True, humanity had been around for only several tens of thousands of years, but already it seemed to have run out of ideas, and really every John Grisham novel was the same when you boiled it down. So Bruce began buying little mind puzzles to fiddle with. The two pieces of metal rod, bent into each other, but the package said they could be removed from each other, so it must be possible. When he fould that he had stopped even paying attention to what movements his hands were making, he stopped buying the doo-dads. A quarter did a fine job of that, and he didn't have to spent five dollars to get one.

So Bruce stared vacantly ahead, passing the coin between his hands.

[There was another "future excerpt" story before this one, but it was only a single paragraph.]