Untitled First Novel Chapter 1. Waltzin’ Black He couldn’t sleep. He lay there wondering if there was a golden hour in which this simplest and hardest of acts could be accomplished with some ease. Either way he’d missed it. The tiredness had once again translated into an uneasy laziness, packaged up with guilt at another wasted evening. Remorse at all the little beginnings he could have made, all the opportunities to become something better than this, wasted. Escape velocity that was the name of the game. The dull, crushing pieces of his #life made that harder and harder to reach. As he lay thinking how he must have missed the boat again, he listened to the frantic scratching noises of the cat as she dashed about the room after enemies and prey both real and imagined. He knew in a moment she would sit by the side of the bed and watch him blankly and he’d fall deeper into the non-sleep, non-wakefulness fugue. The sheets smelt stale. He wondered if there was a reason why he was so bad at the basic acts of #life maintenance. If there was some deep, underlying flaw in his character that was the reason he was terrible at paying bills, even opening the letters containing the bills, doing the washing up at a respectable interval, making appointments with dentists, he tongued the little gulf where his temporary filling had fallen out months before as he thought this. Was it to do with some impractical filling system in his head that he had little to no control over? Some things, which he was sure other people regarded as of primary importance, just couldn’t be relied on to remain in his focus for any length of time. Often once they had fallen off the radar, so to speak, even ‘red’ letters failed to reignite his interest. What did his filling system regard as important then? Probably endless cycles of mundane introspection destined to repeat but not to prompt any action. The best of us lack all conviction. He vaguely remembered something he’d read about false enlightenment or some other existential concept. Something about the self endlessly analysing itself for all eternity upon reaching the barrier between Me and Not Me. A fractal of the mind, a thought exercise in futility. He wished he could remember more details and as he did so began to worry that the bulk of his thoughts went something like this, half remembered, semi-truths, giving him a false sense of wisdom that lacked any solid quality. He realised he was once again living through one of those chapters of his #life where most experience was internal. A broad malaise with no discernable centre, no core issue to be fought and overcome, had once again settled over him.