Gosh. Like the mosquito in a nudist camp, I'm not sure where to begin. Let's start with the first sentence of paragraph four:

Nathan was a shift worker of the nocturnal persuasion.

Let's be real. What you mean to say is

Nathan worked the night shift.

That's what any reasonable editor would expect you to say. Likewise most, if not all, teachers in creative writing workshops. As well as the majority of your prospective readers. While it’s not necessarily a bad thing for the writing to call attention to itself, for the most part, if it does intrude on the reader’s suspension of disbelief, it’s best if it’s because said reader has paused to think, “I wish I’d written that.” The wording you've chosen here comes off instead as a self-indulgent attempt to sound "writerly" that will impress no one other than editors of little magazines that are even more pretentious than your word choice. While I'm not arguing against complexity in the written word, I will suggest that good writing is specifically not a process of recasting simple ideas in a blanket of needless verbiage. Unfortunately, from my perspective, this seems to be your guiding principle and primary method.

Linguistic density is no crime, understand. The English language, given the myriad traditions that have flowed into it, is capable of producing the precise word, whatever the need, and usually without requiring a plethora of adverbs and adjectives. Many of those words will be unfamiliar to the casual reader. The late William F. Buckley never wrote an article or essay that didn't call for the reader to keep a dictionary and thesaurus close at hand, both of which usually proved necessary. He never used a word that wasn't called for; nor did he construct sentences that intentionally obscured their meaning. He challenged his readers and, at the same time, educated them.

Here's your opening paragraph:

Underneath a burrow of lamentable killers of aspirations lay the breathing dead. A breed of men--obsequious to false substance--vegetated in the temporary numbing of reality, the pain to be confronted, the love left to gain beyond the veil that negates the fortitude of will, and the many intricacies their souls have been devoid of. These men were not always strangers to what they unknowingly longed for. While their deficiencies drove the acceleration of the loss in their character, the perversion of their rationalization isolated them further into a heavy abyss of anguish. The concoctions they consumed for their depreciative state, if not moderated, beget compounding cycles into the acceleration of the ugly demise in which they dwelled.

You have a natural facility for the use of words, I'll grant you. There's a kind of Post Modern sensibility that concerns itself with surface structures, resulting in a kind of musical flow. But I defy anyone to read this two or three times and figure out what you are actually talking about. Reading further would suggest that the setting is a bar and that this paragraph is talking about alcoholism and it's destructive effects, though that's a reach, given that nowhere is such a concern mentioned. Coming to it cold, I have no idea what's going on.

My problem, you might say. Maybe. But if you grant that the first and only task a writer faces is the ability to connect and communicate with their readers, it's actually your problem as well. Obscurity that results from grappling with a difficult subject can certainly be warranted. So let’s peel away the words and look at the underlying elements those words are intended to convey.

The first sentence of paragraph two:

Among the dead that spoke, as they wet their frayed nerves to better thread the needle to sew their lives, symphonies of memory served the catalyst of their consumption.

This would seem to suggest that the patrons of this bar drink to forget. Again, just a guess. We also encounter Nathan, who keeps to himself, preferring social media to real life encounters. He hates his job (the previously referenced night shift) but it seems to pay him sufficiently that he is willing to endure it. Besides, it allows him to follow his true passion: getting drunk.

We also glean from news reports that a hurricane is forming off shore. Towards the end of the chapter we encounter his buddy, Wayne, who may or may not be also a roommate. It's left unclear. By the end, we realize that, despite myriad warnings all around them, neither Nathan nor Wayne is inclined to take the weather warnings seriously. Why this is true, we don't know.

As a general set-up, these elements are fine. Impending threats, both within and without, leave you with numerous options in the selection of plot points. However, what is missing is a sense of Nathan's conflict. Thus far, he has been presented with no circumstances that require him to either make a decision or take an action. Nothing has intruded onto the placid surface of the statue quo, and so, by the end of the chapter, no story has yet presented itself. In short, so far, nothing happens. It's all that stuff happening business that actually constitutes the story part, as events require your characters to react and actually do things. You'll want to get on that as soon as possible.

What has presented itself are numerous examples of the kind of tortured constructions I've already mentioned. Too many to list. I'll leave with one. When Nathan returns home and encounters Wayne, this is offered:

Wayne, disheveled and groggy-eyed, sat up and interjected into Nathan's attention.

Again, taking a simple concept and making it complex is not the path to good writing. It's not clear here if you intend this to refer to actions on Wayne's part (as in He interjected the stray comment here and there.) or if the focus of attention is Nathan (as in Nathan noticed Wayne, who looked disheveled and groggy-eyed.) Careful attention to the power of the simple declarative sentence, with its subject-verb-object construction, can go a long way to clarifying your intentions, and simplifying the task for your readers.