17 June 2012
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. He supposed it could be his job, the kind of profession he’d fallen into as a younger man as it had allowed him a certain flexibility. The ability to just get up and leave had always appealed, although to be fair he would often find excuses to stay in increasingly intolerable circumstances. He’d been raised a devout Socialist. Although raised suggested a certain lack of personal responsibility he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. He had been lucky enough to have parents that had given him the intellectual tools to make his own moral and personal judgements and so he supposed his personal beliefs, his framework of understanding the world, was as much his fault as theirs. What he knew in his heart of hearts was right and noble and true had begun to feel increasingly distant though. It wasn’t that he’d begun to question or turn his back on those things, not at all, it was more a growing sensation that he was drifting away from them, as though he was moving further and further from the light, sinking into some murky depth to what end and for what purpose he did not know. He’d always felt that the way he made his money was a betrayal. He never even made that much money which in a way made the betrayal deeper. He’d sold out for pennies. He’d worked as a salesman before even going to university. It was easy enough for him to fall into a cycle of such jobs, the decor might be different but they all boiled down to the same thing. Making imaginary wheels turn imaginary wheels. A prospect had said to him once “If something needs to be sold it can’t be any good. Anything good sells itself.” He was right. Was that why they sold the world to you so damn hard every damn day? The self made man. Consumer paradise. Just one more item, just one more purchase and you will be happy, just one more product and you’ll be content. The clockwork agony of bliss. But then, he thought, he wasn’t much better at the simple things when he was out of work. He’d spent a sizeable chunk of his earlier twenties on the dole. He’d tell women he’d meet he was an out of work actor, there was a dirty kind of glamour to that kind of poverty. The truth was he’d always felt he’d been raised to fight in battles already lost and so he’d struggled to find a point in it all. Idealism always leaves the door open for Nihilism. Drugs had helped for a while, he’d quite by chance fallen in with a clique of like minded, dilettantes he supposed, the drugs had been the common thread that held them together. When inevitably the group had scattered in the wind he’d gradually realised that the drugs weren’t really the same without his comrades and so he lost them also. He realised as the familiar train of thought went through his head that he was probably in the shallow end of sleep now. Melancholy reflection would inevitably be followed by flashes of petty little guilts and petty little shames, the memories themselves insignificant and not even that shocking except for their vividness. Lies he’d told, people he’d treated badly, things left unsaid. Thankfully these little sucker punches from his subconscious where getting fewer and further between as he got older. On reflection he wasn’t sure if this was a good or a bad thing. Did this happen to everyone? Was part of getting comfortable in your own skin letting go, without even really thinking about it, of the nasty bits of baggage you’d accumulated. Or did he just care less and less as time went on? Was that why he never fell for anyone anymore? Not like he had as a younger man, but then even that always tended to accumulate yet more dross anyway. Maybe it was just a survival mechanism. Maybe you could only endure so much hurt before it stopped mattering. He realised this was the same theory he had about Pills. He’d decided that everyone had their own secret limit to the number you could take before they just stopped working like they had. You burned out on joy just as easy as you burned out on misery, maybe easier. What did that leave though? He opened his eyes. There she was. Staring at him as predicted. Soon she’d come and sit on top of the duvet on his feet unless she was sulking about something again in which case she would spend the night at the top of the stairs. Sometimes when unusual difficult to place noises woke him she’d be at the top of the stairs above his bed looking startled at things only she could see. He didn’t like that, the embarrassing fear of the unknown. He realised he’d better turn the lamp off and get serious about the sleep that may or may not come. If you don’t know honey, honey then you don’t. The words drifted through his head as he got comfortable. He was thinking about her now. Better not dwell, he thought, some wounds heal best in the dark. He tried to convince himself that he could stomach another day of drudgery, tried to tell himself that tomorrow would be better and brighter, that he would accomplish more in the scattered hours of freedom he had than he had in the evening just past. What did he do with all his time? Where did it go? If he parcelled up all the separate elements what would it look like? How would you even begin to express it in an abstract but understandable form. A pie chart of experiences? A graph of emotional states, how would you define the X and the Y? He realised as these vague and half formed ideas swam through his head that he was picturing the street he’d lived on four years ago in a half remembered town far away. Why had his thoughts taken him there? He was somewhere else now anyway, somewhere ethereal, a garden wall in the backstreet of a childhood so far away as to seem alien. You’d need more than an X and a Y axis anyway, sometimes when you were happy you were sad, sometimes there was a certain comfortableness in sadness. What would you do with the information anyway? It would probably just be another string to the bow of neurosis and self doubt. He’d decided about a decade ago that you could only really be truly and deeply, depressed if you actually truly and deeply loved yourself. You had no other frame of reference. It was only the disparity between the happiness you felt you were owed and what you had that caused any kind of ongoing bleakness. He’d decided once you ‘got over yourself’ you could get on with being basically ok. It was this kind of glib logic which had at one time given him a grim sort of comfort that if he thought about too closely he realised was running out of steam. He felt the solid and reliable weight of the cat as she hopped onto the bed and made her way to her usual place on his feet. Casual grace mixed with an earthy ungainliness. He was glad she hadn’t decided to bite his toes. Friends were often alarmed at the sudden and unpredictable switch between tenderness and violence she often demonstrated. He worried that maybe he hadn’t raised her properly. He hoped she was ok. Then he felt foolish for thinking like that at all. There was a dull far of drone outside, probably a plane. He always hoped that the familiar noise would resolve itself into something more exciting, something to violently rip him out of the mundane, a dramatic crash, a planet killing meteorite, the end of the world. It was the same excitement he felt at news of the sabre rattling of World Powers. A submarine sunk of the coast of South Korea, a mysterious rocket la
La Folie à deux - Part One Chapter One • Opuss № I