The TV is telling us all about the products. All about the products, all about the products. The TV is telling us all about them and I’m sitting here watching, sitting here watching. My mind is moving so slowly, so very slowly. I’m very turgid, it occurs to me. I’m very stagnant in myself. It’s as if I’m stuck in a swamp – my very own personal swamp. ‘it’s the swamp of me’, I think to myself. My whole body seems to be in slow motion – I go to move my arm but it takes forever. The movement seems to go on and on. It stretches out in time; it has no beginning and no end. I wish I’d never started. I go to think about something but the thought isn’t happening in the way it is supposed to happen. Nothing happens in the way it is supposed to happen any more. Of course I’ve always wanted to be a hero. Naturally I have. Everyone always wants to be a hero don’t they? It’s so very ignominious otherwise, it’s so humiliating. It’s so extraordinarily humiliating to be forever crawling about on the floor in your own filth, never able to get up. ‘Make the effort, make the effort’, I tell myself, but I know I won’t. I never do. I have a long history of not making the effort. Wanting to be better than you are doesn’t make you any better, does it? Wanting to be something doesn’t make you into that thing. That just makes you bitter. Bitter not better. Thinking that way just makes you hate yourself. I have to watch all about the products on the TV. About the products, about the products, about the products. I try to move my arm to change the channel but I can’t. I’m learning about the products. I feel as if an elephant is sitting on me. It’s the elephant of my own obscene laziness – it sits on me every day and that’s no life for anyone. It’s a squalid existence. ‘How lazy can a man be?’ I find myself wondering. ‘How far can you push it?’ ‘Is there any limit to how far a person will go in trying to find excuses for their appalling cowardice in the face of life’s perennial challenge?’ I ask, hoping that the question itself will in some way exempt me from culpability in this regard. I’m always trying to distance myself from my own culpability you see. As we all do of course, as we all do. I know I’m not special in this regard. Or at the very least I try to tell myself that I’m not special. ‘How appallingly squalid existence can be,’ I think to myself, and as I have this thought I know that I have no one to thank for it but myself. ‘Is there any way that I could get used to it, so that it wouldn’t seem so bad?’ I think for the ten-thousandth time. Is there any way around this predicament of mine? I’m surrounded by my own thoughts, at the same time as being deeply repelled by their offensive and sordid nature. I’m so lazy that I can’t even move, I realize. My mental and physical paralysis is complete. The moment of realization drags on and on, but it’s not a nice moment. It’s not a moment that I can honestly say that I am enjoying…