Hal in the Pump Room (p. 53)
beers and bongs in some discreet Academy corner at night to short-circuit the up-and-down cycle […] or maybe occasionally a little Black Star, whenever there's a match- and demand-free weekend, to basically short out the whole motherboard and blow out all the circuits and slowly recover and be almost neurologically reborn and start the gradual cycle all over again… this circular routine, if your basic wiring's OK to begin with, can work surprisingly well throughout adolescence and sometimes into one's like early twenties, before it starts to creep up on you.
Context
Hal is getting secretly high in the Pump Room under the Lung, and the narrator zooms out to explain how E.T.A. kids manage their nervous systems generally: stimulation, release, recovery, repeat. The passage names its own shape — "this circular routine" — and then quietly adds the catch: the circle works fine right up until it doesn't. This is the institutional version of Erdedy's private wheel.