Pickle Zombie

His chair was too well oiled. Legs crossed upon it, having long removed the obtrusive arm rests, he leaned over and rested his chin in his hand and his elbow on his knee. The delicate balance of ball bearings beneath him reacted to the shifting weight of his torso and head and ignorantly combined it with the uneven plane of the floor to produce rotation both unexpected and unwelcome. Equal parts amused and irritated, he patiently awaited equilibrium only to reach out for the desk to halt the gravity-induced yaw just before it managed to arrange his eyes in the shadow of the lights before him.

A million tiny stained-glass windows set between him and a powerful electro-chemical lamp were the only source of light in the room, save a small constellation of power indicators and the soft blue glow of a plastic, backlit descendant of the typewriter. He craved the information the monitor was trying to impose upon him in the dark, the shore-bound waves of a sea of trillions of light switches rippling in the rain being danced for by a laser on a cog.

All of this passed through his head much as it did yours, and so in spite of his reflexes his concentration was hopelessly shattered. He missed the last few lines of dialogue to his idle musing, and lost the next several scrambling for a pause command. Once issued, he took but a moment to collect his thoughts and then took many more committing them to words, an exercise he had once taken for granted, and now struggled through as a failed Olympian, softened by years of apathy. He began thinking about his words too thoroughly, what poetry he did manage becoming laborious and mechanical.

Then a familiar battle with himself over choice of tense, quickly conceded, and a decision to stop as the old brothers of Delete and Backspace quickly become his most called-upon subjects.

Ja.