0.34.0.1

Jack was not ADD - his ability to focus was not in question. With a minimum of relevant information Jack could grasp and recall the mitigating factors and consequences behind a precarious decision more quickly and adeptly than three men with a balance or even surplus of attention. It would be more appropriate to say that Jack was post-ADD, functionally unstuck in consciousness. Presented with an urgent scenario Jack’s field of awareness wrapped nimbly around the tangled constellation of advanced business topics at his disposal, and in this his active mental faculty became less and less about focus and more about the feverishly asymptotic pursuit of omniscience. Jack’s internal deliberation formed a fragile lattice-work of cogitation, both amazingly intricate and unfailingly brittle, from which he could be easily loosed by any sudden intrusion from the world - a new person, a door slam, a loud clap. His elaborate but hastily configured deck of neural connections then immediately fell, only to be rebuilt if the first card in the deck could be placed back in his hands, from which he could follow the still fresh connections back to the outer reaches of his previous mental diagram. Deprive him that first link, however, and Jack may as well have never started the conversation. Over-clocking the brain to produce such a complex process cost him the ability to log his mental activity; he lacked any ability to retrace the steps of his consciousness, to recall what thoughts had passed through his head only five seconds prior, to know with any certainty how much time had just transpired and whether time even worked like that. Without his spigot constantly flashing the current topic of discussion Jack might forget that he’d ever attended business school or that he’d ever owned a flashing spigot. His very vocabulary might leak out completely and leave him devoid of words, dribbling meaninglessly onto his soiled collar.

2.0.1.1b

But no, there was no religious sentiment to be mined from this smashed desk or polyfibrous carpeting - there were no real materials here to form any kind of ecology, nor any balance beyond that of perfunctory financial considerations and the practicalities of prefab construction.

2.0.1.1

Jack found nothing satisfying about being trapped in his office, his leg beneath the hulk of his now-overturned desk. His brain, flooded with pain and terror, occasionally became saturated, stopped processing the constant distress messages shooting up from the lower half of his body. It fired semi-randomly, assigned his consciousness to stumble down neural pathways looking for richer soil. This provided Jack a kind of introspection that his normal, untrapped life rarely afforded. His spigot, spring-loaded as it was with schedules, meeting notes and memos, served as a kind of third-party internal monologue, dictating his thoughts through a formula of maximum productivity. It made a very small part of him into corporate superhuman, making decisions in one day that would take a non-spigoted individual two weeks.

The spigot wasn’t flashing anything now; or actually it was gone - Jack couldn’t find it. Maybe it was just around the corner out of reach, or stabbed to the floor by the corner of the desk, smoldering in the crumbs of its own circuitry. But it wasn’t on him. So Jack was thinking about hiking in the Pocono Mountains when he was eight or nine, darting off secretly down a decidedly unregulated trail. This was all well and good until the grade of the hill became too much, not at all viable for the perfunctory tread of his plastic-soled runners. He succumbed to a furrow of dust and small weeds that accompanied his descent. At the bottom of the hill he found his head spinning with that distinctly metallic dizziness that he also felt now. His leg, likewise, trapped throbbing under an unlikely grouping of rocks. In this circumstance, eight years old and in the open air, there seemed to be a life lesson tucked into his minor disaster. As the pain subsided then he could hear the river trickling twenty yards away, birds noting his activities from the trees above. This felt like an impromptu zen, something a more holistic person might incorporate as a daily ritual or ambitious sacrament.

1.1.1.57

Dan in the corner is the Associate of Communications. Everybody in this office is an Associate of something - marketing, quality assurance, public relations. There used to be more Directors and Vice-Presidents but over time these positions were all migrated to the much more neutral language of Associate. This designation creates a wonderfully diffuse hierarchy for the company to work with, as the employees are presented less as subject experts and more as acquaintances and well-wishers of the nebulous business concepts in their charge. At any time an employee’s worth to the larger organization can be enthusiastically praised or summarily dismissed with just a small shift in rhetorical emphasis; a broad change in focus from advertising to consumer awareness and the Associate of Advertising has been successfully disassociated. That was Phil last month, now without association or context, presumably walking the frozen streets in a stupor. Tim was hired in his stead, previously a camp counselor and orienteering instructor, now sweating it out in the uncomfortable cubicle complex in the middle of the room, trying to figure out what consumers he’s aware of if any. He’s associated with their concerns still in title only, and this makes him understandably nervous.

1.0.1

“It’s fucking freezing outside.”

It’s February 23rd in Manitoba. This is the least necessary thing that’s ever been said. The office windows, encased by exposed brick sills and thick musty spider webs, are visibly straining against the cold. In these months, when the sun goes down right after lunch and the only view outside is lonely route 12 and its haphazard commercial residents, the windows serve mostly as a canvas for frozen water particles to explore the artistic potential of thermodynamics. Imperfect mandelbrots are weaved onto the thin glass plane separating the arctic Manitoba cold from the gusty heat of the furnace. The coat rack is overwhelmed by extra layers within the first half hour, leaving the secretary’s desk as the logical dumping ground for workers shedding the cocoons of their morning commute. Before the end of the morning she’s surrounded by discarded pelts of cotton and polyester, the skins of theoretical animals that the original settlers of this continent would have likely found disagreeable. There aren’t enough kleenex to support the deluge of nose fluids; workers are forced to scavenge the crunchy tissues they balled up behind their monitor earlier in the week. Some have resorted to using the printer paper, which folds at weird and unsatisfying angles along the nostrils and bridge of the face.