Cranial yawned as he gawked at the monitor with bloodshot eyes, half-longing for the days when he was up this late because of illicit activities–the kind that get Marine Corps recruiters salivating, desperately hoping that you’ll fuck up, get caught, and have a judge that offers you a choice between prison or “service to your country.”
Sadly, he thinks as he twists his wedding ring around his finger, everything is mundane, nowadays. The speed’s been replaced with coffee, the late night hacking and phreaking somehow morphed into cage-cleaning for the chinchilla rescue that now occupies most of the computer room. Generally, he looks at the trade as more than fair, a really good deal in the flea market of life. But sometimes. . . .
Sometimes Cranial wishes for the past–just for a moment. As he spent the bulk of his computer time today installing a wireless network adapter into a mostly broken USB port, he fell onto one of those times. It wasn’t a long moment, but it was there–much like his blog used to be.
And then he decided, some things are better when traded in. So he deleted his old blog, that decrepit piece of work that had been only sporadically updated for the last few years, and decided that another reboot was in order. A few sips of coffee, a few moments editing a stylesheet, and then he could get to writing his latest story.
This one, he assured himself, nodding for emphasis. This one will actually sell.