I’m at a meeting at work (when AREN’T I at a meeting?).  My boss is droning on about how we need to be more like Navy SEALs/Samurais/Spartans; I forget what it is this time.  Corporate claptrap is invading my ears.  I’m in a dreamy haze, fighting to remember who I am, and knowing EXACTLY how Frodo felt in Return of the King.  The Powerpoint presentation begins, and I grab a pair of rollerball pens and hold them in my fists, tips up.  Slowly, I lower my heads toward the pens, sobbing all the while, unable to quell the urge to gouge my eyes out.  My eReader tumbles from my pocket, open to Echo.  Magic flash.  Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing bursts through the air, washing me in beautiful ’80s magic.  A bat-glider appears on my back.  I leap onto the conference table and start running towards the window.  No one says anything; they just stare dumbly at me, still caught in the Powerpoint soul-fog.  I crash out the fiftieth-story window elbow-first.  I utter the words, “actuate glider,” and soar into the heavens.  The bat-glider extends from my back in a series of cool-ass clanks, and suddenly I’m free.  A gorgeous, limitless panorama opens before me, and as I ride the thermals, I laugh wildly into a cloudless blue sky.

There IS an escape from Powerpoint.  It involves eighties hits and a bat-glider.  Get Echo Vol. 1 on Kindle here:  Vol. 1 on Kindle.  Vol. 2 on Kindle here:  Vol.2 on Kindle