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.