"“I was in a testy mood. I’d been inside my head all day — some days that just happens. You get lost doing just one task, and suddenly you look up and it’s dark out, but you still don’t want to leave your headspace, and the she comes up behind you with a 150 KHz marine emergency blow horn and lets off one big parp that has you shitting out your eyes, ears, and nostrils, and when you turn around, you discover that your evil co-workers were videoing the entire prank, and you get furious and you scream for everybody to fuck off and die. “Aw shucks, it was only a joke,” but the fact remains that because of that one loud parp you’ll never be able to parse C++ code again because you fried those dendrites that dictate logic patterns, and in a flash you see yourself as a future object of pity, forced to work at a TacoTime outlet, feeding disrespectful larvae of the middle classes while taking soiled orange PVC trash bags out to the back alley, where you see a grease storage drum, and wistfully remember that earlier, more charmed portion of your life when you once knew the chemicals and procedures necessary to convert restaurant grease into clean-burning planet-friendly ethanol, and that was just one of the many feats your brain was capable of, back before the parping, back before people whispered when they saw you walking their way, hoping they wouldn’t have to make small talk with you, back before they dumbed themselves down to the verbal level of Pebbles Flintstone to make you understand them."