Meanwhile, in a room without a roof...

…and, for one perfect, joyful hour, I truly knew what it was to feel alive.

Every one of my problems fell away, each trial, pain, ordeal and indignity of modern life, and I lost myself in bliss unlike any I’d ever known.

I managed, for sixty glorious minutes, to forget that I was nothing more than another cog in an unspeakably horrifying machine, an identity-less drone in a hideous, dystopian world beyond any understanding or control. I felt, if briefly, like a real live human being.

I felt hope.

And then “Happy Hour” ended, and back to work I went…