Jon Ureña's Blog
September 11, 2025
Life update (09/11/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
I’ve just come back from the Occupational Health and Safety dept of the hospital where I work. I went to explain my perilous current situation: I’m 52% percent disabled according to the provincial government, due to high-functioning autism (formerly Asperger’s) and an inoperable tumor in my pituitary gland for which I need life-long treatment. I have also been diagnosed with OCD, heart damage caused by the Moderna shot, and irritable bowel syndrome (which sounds negligible in comparison, but it invalidates me for jobs such as working at a line or being behind a counter, as I would take lots of breaks for the bathroom). I haven’t returned to the organization that determines the percentage of disability, so they would consider the OCD and the heart damage at least, because I suspect that they would reduce my original 52% merely for the fact that I’ve been working these past seven years, although not continuously because I can’t speak the regional language.
I told the doctor at the OH&S dept, who was also working on a temporary contract because she can’t speak the regional language, that my contract ends in two days, that I’ll return to the realms of unemployment, and that I’ll start collecting that amassed stipend. At any point I may get called to return to the job as a technician, but that job has caused me to end up in the ER due to stress three times: two with arrhythmia and one with supposed hemiplegic migraine but that I suspect was a minor stroke. I’m honestly terrified of working as a technician again, as experience shows me clearly how it will end. These last nine months I’ve been exclusively on a programming contract, being able to put on my headphones and just program away. Virtually zero stress. That experience illustrated that it’s not that I can’t handle a job, but that I’m utterly unsuited for the job as a computer technician, which involves horrid amounts of noise pollution at the office thanks to some fucking dickheads that seem to believe it’s a school playground, along with the need, required by the job itself, of having to interact with nurses and doctors to solve problems. Oh, and the week-long phone duties. Those are fun.
I’m not built to be a computer technician. I shouldn’t have to live in misery and under risk of my body breaking down again. Therefore, I’ll need to start collecting unemployment and look for protected jobs in the private sector. My main concern with that is that after I start collecting unemployment, which could last me half a year, if I get called to work as a technician (which might happen tomorrow; I could get called for a new contract before my current one ends) and I refuse it, they could remove my unemployment benefits. I suppose I’ll have to visit my general practitioner, and possibly a psychiatrist specialized in autism and possibly OCD, so they give me some reports.
Work issues aside, oh my, this world is fucked, huh? Just imagine: you’re a skinny Ukrainian émigré who settles for the very black city of Charlotte, get on a bus and sit surrounded by blacks, only to realize that a black criminal, released fourteen times previously by a system that tries to get blacks out of jail even when they repeatedly commit crimes, has plunged a knife in your throat, and you die surrounded by blacks who don’t give a shit that you were murdered, while the black criminal, as he leaves unimpeded, mumbles “Got the white girl.” The media doesn’t cover it. The politicians happily eat cake. Look at it, ethnic European man or woman, because that’s your future: living surrounded by people who despise you for ethnic reasons, who are supported by a system that encourages their homicidal hatred, and who will gleefully anticipate the removal of your entire kind. You know what you have to do: self-organize for your own interests before it’s too late. I would say, “vote for people who defend and prioritize your own kind,” but I don’t think that those can even get into power due to the demographic replacement that has been implemented, by design, these past twenty years or so.
A newspaper article from yesterday mentioned that in Spain, regarding people under five years of age, 4 out of 10 have at least one foreign-born parent. That’s foreign born, not of foreign origin, so likely the number of people of foreign origin in Spain under five years old is 6 out of 10, at least. I work in a building that houses the maternity ward of the hospital. It’s a parade of Africans (northern and sub-Saharan), Central and South Americans, and muslim women that look like they left Pakistan a week ago. Who designed this to happen?
Oh, and that Charlie Kirk guy, who debated people in public and said stuff that pisses off marxists? Just sniped dead in front of hundreds by a shooter that likely will never be found. Maybe the police should have been in the lookout for dancing people from the Levant. Happy 9/11, by the way! Remember those two towers that free-fell naturally, perfectly straight, into their own foundations, like no other buildings ever had? Wait, it was three buildings, right? Building 7 fell as well, from debris. What an auspicious day it was, huh? What did your young’uns engage in for the next few years, in patriotic fervor? Hitting Iraq, Afghanistan…? Toppling governments that didn’t have anything to do with the Bin, but had banking systems that needed to be fundamentally restructured, with a little help of a genocidal neighbor.
It’s all so horrifying. One one side you have brainwashed marxists, who will gleefully welcome being ethnically cleansed (and possibly even murder you if you don’t agree), and on the other you have so-called conservatives who mainly conserve the legacy of worshipping a jewish zombie, and who are mainly obsessed with preserving the hegemony of a certain genocidal country from the Levant, to whom even the so-called “America First” will enthusiastically syphon your money to. Those who are actually conservative and want to preserve Europe and the European peoples? Oh, they die unsuspiciously (about sixteen members of afD in Germany during these elections), or get persecuted by the government for reasons that surely have nothing to do with their political positions. Let’s see a map of the electoral results in France, my neighbor, during the last elections:
You see that splash of color in Paris in what is otherwise a red-painted land? Those are the people in power now. Paris, which happens to be a shit-smeared hellhole full of foreigners. You see, “democracy” is not a solution. It could have been if we had kept at it like the Greeks intended it: only ethnic natives who owned land held voting power. We’re in an era where marxists can import millions of foreigners to vote against your interests. You think voting is going to save you?
Oh, and by the way, stop with this fucking God nonsense. In my case, being autistic gives me the powers of that child who pointed at the emperor and laughed because he was parading around in the nude. But it’s so tiresome. A sky daddy who will let you into an otherworldly land after you die if you’ve been a good boy? Are you retarded? How did such appalling stupidity become so widespread? I had to scroll through hundreds of tweets or whatever they call them now, amidst videos of Kirk getting his carotid blown out, of people calling for prayers and appealing to this judge of mercy of theirs, who must spend his heavenly time gazing down upon this horror while masturbating. Where was this God of yours when jihadists shot out concert-goers at the Bataclan, stabbed out their eyes, and ripped out the fetuses from pregnant women? Wake the fuck up already, you bunch of children. You fucking toddlers.
Anyway, I’m out. Enjoy this world of yours. I want no part of it.
I’ve just come back from the Occupational Health and Safety dept of the hospital where I work. I went to explain my perilous current situation: I’m 52% percent disabled according to the provincial government, due to high-functioning autism (formerly Asperger’s) and an inoperable tumor in my pituitary gland for which I need life-long treatment. I have also been diagnosed with OCD, heart damage caused by the Moderna shot, and irritable bowel syndrome (which sounds negligible in comparison, but it invalidates me for jobs such as working at a line or being behind a counter, as I would take lots of breaks for the bathroom). I haven’t returned to the organization that determines the percentage of disability, so they would consider the OCD and the heart damage at least, because I suspect that they would reduce my original 52% merely for the fact that I’ve been working these past seven years, although not continuously because I can’t speak the regional language.
I told the doctor at the OH&S dept, who was also working on a temporary contract because she can’t speak the regional language, that my contract ends in two days, that I’ll return to the realms of unemployment, and that I’ll start collecting that amassed stipend. At any point I may get called to return to the job as a technician, but that job has caused me to end up in the ER due to stress three times: two with arrhythmia and one with supposed hemiplegic migraine but that I suspect was a minor stroke. I’m honestly terrified of working as a technician again, as experience shows me clearly how it will end. These last nine months I’ve been exclusively on a programming contract, being able to put on my headphones and just program away. Virtually zero stress. That experience illustrated that it’s not that I can’t handle a job, but that I’m utterly unsuited for the job as a computer technician, which involves horrid amounts of noise pollution at the office thanks to some fucking dickheads that seem to believe it’s a school playground, along with the need, required by the job itself, of having to interact with nurses and doctors to solve problems. Oh, and the week-long phone duties. Those are fun.
I’m not built to be a computer technician. I shouldn’t have to live in misery and under risk of my body breaking down again. Therefore, I’ll need to start collecting unemployment and look for protected jobs in the private sector. My main concern with that is that after I start collecting unemployment, which could last me half a year, if I get called to work as a technician (which might happen tomorrow; I could get called for a new contract before my current one ends) and I refuse it, they could remove my unemployment benefits. I suppose I’ll have to visit my general practitioner, and possibly a psychiatrist specialized in autism and possibly OCD, so they give me some reports.
Work issues aside, oh my, this world is fucked, huh? Just imagine: you’re a skinny Ukrainian émigré who settles for the very black city of Charlotte, get on a bus and sit surrounded by blacks, only to realize that a black criminal, released fourteen times previously by a system that tries to get blacks out of jail even when they repeatedly commit crimes, has plunged a knife in your throat, and you die surrounded by blacks who don’t give a shit that you were murdered, while the black criminal, as he leaves unimpeded, mumbles “Got the white girl.” The media doesn’t cover it. The politicians happily eat cake. Look at it, ethnic European man or woman, because that’s your future: living surrounded by people who despise you for ethnic reasons, who are supported by a system that encourages their homicidal hatred, and who will gleefully anticipate the removal of your entire kind. You know what you have to do: self-organize for your own interests before it’s too late. I would say, “vote for people who defend and prioritize your own kind,” but I don’t think that those can even get into power due to the demographic replacement that has been implemented, by design, these past twenty years or so.
A newspaper article from yesterday mentioned that in Spain, regarding people under five years of age, 4 out of 10 have at least one foreign-born parent. That’s foreign born, not of foreign origin, so likely the number of people of foreign origin in Spain under five years old is 6 out of 10, at least. I work in a building that houses the maternity ward of the hospital. It’s a parade of Africans (northern and sub-Saharan), Central and South Americans, and muslim women that look like they left Pakistan a week ago. Who designed this to happen?
Oh, and that Charlie Kirk guy, who debated people in public and said stuff that pisses off marxists? Just sniped dead in front of hundreds by a shooter that likely will never be found. Maybe the police should have been in the lookout for dancing people from the Levant. Happy 9/11, by the way! Remember those two towers that free-fell naturally, perfectly straight, into their own foundations, like no other buildings ever had? Wait, it was three buildings, right? Building 7 fell as well, from debris. What an auspicious day it was, huh? What did your young’uns engage in for the next few years, in patriotic fervor? Hitting Iraq, Afghanistan…? Toppling governments that didn’t have anything to do with the Bin, but had banking systems that needed to be fundamentally restructured, with a little help of a genocidal neighbor.
It’s all so horrifying. One one side you have brainwashed marxists, who will gleefully welcome being ethnically cleansed (and possibly even murder you if you don’t agree), and on the other you have so-called conservatives who mainly conserve the legacy of worshipping a jewish zombie, and who are mainly obsessed with preserving the hegemony of a certain genocidal country from the Levant, to whom even the so-called “America First” will enthusiastically syphon your money to. Those who are actually conservative and want to preserve Europe and the European peoples? Oh, they die unsuspiciously (about sixteen members of afD in Germany during these elections), or get persecuted by the government for reasons that surely have nothing to do with their political positions. Let’s see a map of the electoral results in France, my neighbor, during the last elections:
You see that splash of color in Paris in what is otherwise a red-painted land? Those are the people in power now. Paris, which happens to be a shit-smeared hellhole full of foreigners. You see, “democracy” is not a solution. It could have been if we had kept at it like the Greeks intended it: only ethnic natives who owned land held voting power. We’re in an era where marxists can import millions of foreigners to vote against your interests. You think voting is going to save you?
Oh, and by the way, stop with this fucking God nonsense. In my case, being autistic gives me the powers of that child who pointed at the emperor and laughed because he was parading around in the nude. But it’s so tiresome. A sky daddy who will let you into an otherworldly land after you die if you’ve been a good boy? Are you retarded? How did such appalling stupidity become so widespread? I had to scroll through hundreds of tweets or whatever they call them now, amidst videos of Kirk getting his carotid blown out, of people calling for prayers and appealing to this judge of mercy of theirs, who must spend his heavenly time gazing down upon this horror while masturbating. Where was this God of yours when jihadists shot out concert-goers at the Bataclan, stabbed out their eyes, and ripped out the fetuses from pregnant women? Wake the fuck up already, you bunch of children. You fucking toddlers.
Anyway, I’m out. Enjoy this world of yours. I want no part of it.
September 3, 2025
Life update (09/03/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
I feel like I’m nearing a turning point in my life. My current contract as programmer in the public sector ends in ten days, and they can’t extend the contract for legal reasons. The moment this contract ends, they may call me to return to work as a technician, but working as a technician, the massive stress it causes me, which is unmanageable for me, has sent me to the ER three times (two with arrhythmia, another with a supposed hemiplegic migraine which I suspect may have been a minor stroke).
Honestly, I’m scared of returning to that routine, of not knowing what bullshit I’ll have to deal with every day, of having to pursue other coworkers or “users” to glean the necessary information to do my job, to deal with annoying nurses and arrogant doctors whom I’d rather ignore or punch in the face. I’ve become so adverse to that job, that these past few months I’ve grown incapable of looking at other coworkers in the eye. I don’t actually have to work with them, which is ideal, but they’re constantly around, and I’m an island of quiet among them, uncommunicative, isolated with his noise-canceling headphones on, wishing that nobody notices he’s there.
I’m getting increasingly anxious as the final day of my contract approaches. I imagine myself refusing the contract, then looking up jobs as a programmer. I don’t actually want to work as a programmer for other people, but that’s a skill I have and through which I could extract money. However, back in my twenties, I tried to work in the private sector as a programmer. About half of it, it feels, I worked as an unpaid intern, and all the jobs I had either ended because I couldn’t take it anymore (after my very first job, I almost killed myself, which years later spawned my novel My Own Desert Places), or because some woman in a non-technical position believed I wouldn’t fit in there. And yes, I specified the gender, because that was always the case: my male technical-minded coworkers didn’t have an issue with me nor the work that I did, but some female supervisor considered that all my technical contributions were irrelevant. What such people were doing leading teams of technicians is one of the disasters of the modern world.
I made the mistake of talking to my seventy-year-old mother about it. My father is technically around, but his brain is so fucked that for my entire life he may as well have not been. My mother said I need a therapist to control my stress. She barely remembers that I went to therapy from 16 to 30, with breaks in between, and it did fuck-all other than waste money and cause me permanent damage with wrong medications. I think the whole industry is a sham. The work as a technician causes me unmanageable stress because my brain configuration can’t manage that stress. No amount of “techniques” to manage stress that some therapist could teach me would help. I already control myself by swatting away intrusive thoughts every ten minutes. I’m simply not built for such a job. You don’t put a blind person directing traffic. An autistic fuck like me whose brain is incapable of handing social relationships shouldn’t be in a job that demands him to deal with so many people on the daily.
It’s more than the change of jobs, though. I simply want to escape. I’ve been looking up apartments in another province (Navarre). 120,000€ for a two bedroom apartment. Same kind of apartment would cost about 240,000€ up here. I’d love to live in such small towns. Vastly reduced criminality, lack of mass immigration, nature close by. It’s so fucking humiliating to leave my home at six in the morning and have to walk through an area colonized by arabs, then take the bus, half of whose commuters are foreigners, up to the other bus stop, and along the way see that the people exiting the downtown apartments, the priciest locations, are inexplicably Africans who look like they came here a year ago (I’m counting both North and Sub-Saharan). House prices go up about 9% every year. Who’s paying for it?
I have a nasty anecdote on the subject from back when I bothered to attend writing courses, about ten years ago: I was waiting in the streets for a class to start while a black guy, heavy African accent, was talking to some local about the apartment where the black guy was going to live. It seemed like the local had guided him to show it. The African pointed at the blinds in the window and said, “Of course, they give me the one with the worst blinds. That’s racism.” They gave this son of a bitch an apartment, which the locals need to pay in full, and this fucking parasite complains. One humiliation after another. Losing your spaces, your jobs, your homes, your schools… And I’m not even getting into crime. My own home was nearly broken into by a couple of arabs some years ago. And look at Great Britain with the mass rapes of minors, almost always ethnic European, by the usual suspects. But God forbid you tweet something unsavory about men in women’s clothing; the police will be on your ass the moment you land in the country. Funny thing is, I take the 7:10 bus straight to Donostia, and literally everyone is ethnic European. We’re office workers. Slaves to support the privileged classes. But I work in the hospital building that houses the maternity ward, and I get reminded of who is having the majority of children these days.
By the way, if any of what I’ve written bothered you (yes, you), you’re welcome to fuck off, because if at this point you still defend any of this, I don’t want anything to do with you.
I saw a video earlier today about the Japanese youth, how they are completely unmotivated, don’t want to buy homes, don’t want to start families, are completely risk adverse, and just get by trying to survive as unbothered as possible. We’re not, unfortunately, in Japan, but same thing could be said of the last couple of generations in the West. Why are you contributing to society, exactly? So it can shit on your face and tell you to enjoy it?
What else is there to say, really? I noticed that someone, earlier in the day, went through a couple dozen of the songs I produced with AI a year or so ago. Such fun activities I used to engage in, that I don’t imagine myself retaking anymore. Perhaps writing is one of them, but it’ll fully depend on whether my subconscious flips the switch again. Basically what I’m doing, when I’m not busy programming or reading manga, is daydreaming about a better life (being someone else), or noticing discreetly the attractive ladies on the bus or on my walk to and from the office. Bitter old Houellebecq said, “The physical bodies of young people, the only desirable possession the world has ever produced, were reserved for the exclusive use of the young, and the fate of the old was to work and to suffer.” While he likely meant that he wanted to fuck children, the point stands. I have a forty year old body, so what remains is to work and suffer. And masturbate. At least you can rely on those seconds of relief from time to time. If I was funkier, I’d get into proper drugs. I’d love to do Ayahuasca, which is illegal for reasons. Likely because such drugs would make people wake up and want to topple the government. And then, who’d issue digital IDs, CBDCs, and social credit scores?
Anyway, if you have boobs, give them a squeeze for me, will you? Man-boobs will do.
I feel like I’m nearing a turning point in my life. My current contract as programmer in the public sector ends in ten days, and they can’t extend the contract for legal reasons. The moment this contract ends, they may call me to return to work as a technician, but working as a technician, the massive stress it causes me, which is unmanageable for me, has sent me to the ER three times (two with arrhythmia, another with a supposed hemiplegic migraine which I suspect may have been a minor stroke).
Honestly, I’m scared of returning to that routine, of not knowing what bullshit I’ll have to deal with every day, of having to pursue other coworkers or “users” to glean the necessary information to do my job, to deal with annoying nurses and arrogant doctors whom I’d rather ignore or punch in the face. I’ve become so adverse to that job, that these past few months I’ve grown incapable of looking at other coworkers in the eye. I don’t actually have to work with them, which is ideal, but they’re constantly around, and I’m an island of quiet among them, uncommunicative, isolated with his noise-canceling headphones on, wishing that nobody notices he’s there.
I’m getting increasingly anxious as the final day of my contract approaches. I imagine myself refusing the contract, then looking up jobs as a programmer. I don’t actually want to work as a programmer for other people, but that’s a skill I have and through which I could extract money. However, back in my twenties, I tried to work in the private sector as a programmer. About half of it, it feels, I worked as an unpaid intern, and all the jobs I had either ended because I couldn’t take it anymore (after my very first job, I almost killed myself, which years later spawned my novel My Own Desert Places), or because some woman in a non-technical position believed I wouldn’t fit in there. And yes, I specified the gender, because that was always the case: my male technical-minded coworkers didn’t have an issue with me nor the work that I did, but some female supervisor considered that all my technical contributions were irrelevant. What such people were doing leading teams of technicians is one of the disasters of the modern world.
I made the mistake of talking to my seventy-year-old mother about it. My father is technically around, but his brain is so fucked that for my entire life he may as well have not been. My mother said I need a therapist to control my stress. She barely remembers that I went to therapy from 16 to 30, with breaks in between, and it did fuck-all other than waste money and cause me permanent damage with wrong medications. I think the whole industry is a sham. The work as a technician causes me unmanageable stress because my brain configuration can’t manage that stress. No amount of “techniques” to manage stress that some therapist could teach me would help. I already control myself by swatting away intrusive thoughts every ten minutes. I’m simply not built for such a job. You don’t put a blind person directing traffic. An autistic fuck like me whose brain is incapable of handing social relationships shouldn’t be in a job that demands him to deal with so many people on the daily.
It’s more than the change of jobs, though. I simply want to escape. I’ve been looking up apartments in another province (Navarre). 120,000€ for a two bedroom apartment. Same kind of apartment would cost about 240,000€ up here. I’d love to live in such small towns. Vastly reduced criminality, lack of mass immigration, nature close by. It’s so fucking humiliating to leave my home at six in the morning and have to walk through an area colonized by arabs, then take the bus, half of whose commuters are foreigners, up to the other bus stop, and along the way see that the people exiting the downtown apartments, the priciest locations, are inexplicably Africans who look like they came here a year ago (I’m counting both North and Sub-Saharan). House prices go up about 9% every year. Who’s paying for it?
I have a nasty anecdote on the subject from back when I bothered to attend writing courses, about ten years ago: I was waiting in the streets for a class to start while a black guy, heavy African accent, was talking to some local about the apartment where the black guy was going to live. It seemed like the local had guided him to show it. The African pointed at the blinds in the window and said, “Of course, they give me the one with the worst blinds. That’s racism.” They gave this son of a bitch an apartment, which the locals need to pay in full, and this fucking parasite complains. One humiliation after another. Losing your spaces, your jobs, your homes, your schools… And I’m not even getting into crime. My own home was nearly broken into by a couple of arabs some years ago. And look at Great Britain with the mass rapes of minors, almost always ethnic European, by the usual suspects. But God forbid you tweet something unsavory about men in women’s clothing; the police will be on your ass the moment you land in the country. Funny thing is, I take the 7:10 bus straight to Donostia, and literally everyone is ethnic European. We’re office workers. Slaves to support the privileged classes. But I work in the hospital building that houses the maternity ward, and I get reminded of who is having the majority of children these days.
By the way, if any of what I’ve written bothered you (yes, you), you’re welcome to fuck off, because if at this point you still defend any of this, I don’t want anything to do with you.
I saw a video earlier today about the Japanese youth, how they are completely unmotivated, don’t want to buy homes, don’t want to start families, are completely risk adverse, and just get by trying to survive as unbothered as possible. We’re not, unfortunately, in Japan, but same thing could be said of the last couple of generations in the West. Why are you contributing to society, exactly? So it can shit on your face and tell you to enjoy it?
What else is there to say, really? I noticed that someone, earlier in the day, went through a couple dozen of the songs I produced with AI a year or so ago. Such fun activities I used to engage in, that I don’t imagine myself retaking anymore. Perhaps writing is one of them, but it’ll fully depend on whether my subconscious flips the switch again. Basically what I’m doing, when I’m not busy programming or reading manga, is daydreaming about a better life (being someone else), or noticing discreetly the attractive ladies on the bus or on my walk to and from the office. Bitter old Houellebecq said, “The physical bodies of young people, the only desirable possession the world has ever produced, were reserved for the exclusive use of the young, and the fate of the old was to work and to suffer.” While he likely meant that he wanted to fuck children, the point stands. I have a forty year old body, so what remains is to work and suffer. And masturbate. At least you can rely on those seconds of relief from time to time. If I was funkier, I’d get into proper drugs. I’d love to do Ayahuasca, which is illegal for reasons. Likely because such drugs would make people wake up and want to topple the government. And then, who’d issue digital IDs, CBDCs, and social credit scores?
Anyway, if you have boobs, give them a squeeze for me, will you? Man-boobs will do.
August 28, 2025
Life update (08/29/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
It’s been a few months since a switch flipped in my head and I suddenly didn’t feel like writing fiction anymore. I only act to satisfy my subconscious, so if she wishes to focus on anything else, that’s what I do. To a certain extent, I’ve felt relieved. I was under the pressure to perform, even though virtually nobody read my stuff. I suppose it’s related to the ingrained need to provide a service, a product, regularly, or else you’re worthless.
We men are the slaves of society: invisible drones intended to serve tirelessly until we grow too old, resented the moment we show weakness, abandoned the moment we break down. Our value tied to the quality of the last thing we provided, a value that depreciates very fast. If you cease providing, you may as well be trash that someone should pick up and throw away. Remembering all those years of writing chapters, the feeling I got when I posted the next one was something like, “I finally deserve to relax for a while.” And I always give my 110% on the things I care about, so I put an insane amount of hours into writing my stories, the sort of effort that wouldn’t be feasible if I had anything resembling a social life. I recall plenty of cases in which I could only finish a single paragraph in a whole writing session that may have taken three hours.
Was it worth it? Well, I don’t feel much in terms of accomplishment. It certainly wasn’t monetarily rewarding. It was also humiliating to see authors, some local whom I knew personally, that objectively were far worse writers than I, promoted in newspapers, called into radio shows, and seemingly being able to make a living through writing, while my stories only caused me trouble. I do have the memories, many of them far stronger than the lingering remains of stuff that has actually happened to me. It took me about three months to write My Own Desert Places, my first novel in English. I have a vivid memory of seeing the female main character walking down a cobbled street in Hondarribia, seen from behind, her brown hair swaying as she clutched a binder, heading to a writing course. She never existed. I remember going to a patisserie in Donostia along with a French secretary and a Paleolithic child, where we stuffed ourselves with delicious pastries. That never happened. I have grafted into my heart griefs of things that happened in my stories, of people lost to accidents, of dreams ruined, that make my eyes water whenever I recall them, even though none of that ever happened.
What does it all mean? I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m forty years old, I’m insufficient as a human being, my body is a disaster, my brain is an even worse disaster, and I’m beyond exhausted. I don’t want the life I’m living. I need a change of scenery. I want to be where nobody knows me, where I don’t feel responsible for any living soul, and I can simply sit alone in a room and be myself. But it seems all we’re meant to do in this shitty world is work and work for money that is worth less every passing month.
We used to enslave ourselves because at least you got something of value out of the pain: usually a family of your own. But I’ve never wanted to burden anyone with my genes. Even if I did, that would be a terrible idea, as I would be an incompetent father. But even if I could be a good father, nobody would want to have children with me. So I guess I’m just going through the motions until my body breaks down completely.
On a lighter note, I’m working daily on my programming project! I originally envisioned it as a browser-based platform to play adventure games, immersive sims, etc., in a chat format. Given that I’m a hedonist, it has turned into a complex, very powerful platform to create erotica, relying on large language models to act as the other characters. Got to enjoy my fetishes through it. Constantly coming up with ideas for it, to the extent that it never feels like I could take a break and show the current state. I plan to make a video about its features, with the faint hope that someone else will want to add code and content to the repository, content that I will be able to enjoy myself.
Anyway, thanks for reading, I guess.
It’s been a few months since a switch flipped in my head and I suddenly didn’t feel like writing fiction anymore. I only act to satisfy my subconscious, so if she wishes to focus on anything else, that’s what I do. To a certain extent, I’ve felt relieved. I was under the pressure to perform, even though virtually nobody read my stuff. I suppose it’s related to the ingrained need to provide a service, a product, regularly, or else you’re worthless.
We men are the slaves of society: invisible drones intended to serve tirelessly until we grow too old, resented the moment we show weakness, abandoned the moment we break down. Our value tied to the quality of the last thing we provided, a value that depreciates very fast. If you cease providing, you may as well be trash that someone should pick up and throw away. Remembering all those years of writing chapters, the feeling I got when I posted the next one was something like, “I finally deserve to relax for a while.” And I always give my 110% on the things I care about, so I put an insane amount of hours into writing my stories, the sort of effort that wouldn’t be feasible if I had anything resembling a social life. I recall plenty of cases in which I could only finish a single paragraph in a whole writing session that may have taken three hours.
Was it worth it? Well, I don’t feel much in terms of accomplishment. It certainly wasn’t monetarily rewarding. It was also humiliating to see authors, some local whom I knew personally, that objectively were far worse writers than I, promoted in newspapers, called into radio shows, and seemingly being able to make a living through writing, while my stories only caused me trouble. I do have the memories, many of them far stronger than the lingering remains of stuff that has actually happened to me. It took me about three months to write My Own Desert Places, my first novel in English. I have a vivid memory of seeing the female main character walking down a cobbled street in Hondarribia, seen from behind, her brown hair swaying as she clutched a binder, heading to a writing course. She never existed. I remember going to a patisserie in Donostia along with a French secretary and a Paleolithic child, where we stuffed ourselves with delicious pastries. That never happened. I have grafted into my heart griefs of things that happened in my stories, of people lost to accidents, of dreams ruined, that make my eyes water whenever I recall them, even though none of that ever happened.
What does it all mean? I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m forty years old, I’m insufficient as a human being, my body is a disaster, my brain is an even worse disaster, and I’m beyond exhausted. I don’t want the life I’m living. I need a change of scenery. I want to be where nobody knows me, where I don’t feel responsible for any living soul, and I can simply sit alone in a room and be myself. But it seems all we’re meant to do in this shitty world is work and work for money that is worth less every passing month.
We used to enslave ourselves because at least you got something of value out of the pain: usually a family of your own. But I’ve never wanted to burden anyone with my genes. Even if I did, that would be a terrible idea, as I would be an incompetent father. But even if I could be a good father, nobody would want to have children with me. So I guess I’m just going through the motions until my body breaks down completely.
On a lighter note, I’m working daily on my programming project! I originally envisioned it as a browser-based platform to play adventure games, immersive sims, etc., in a chat format. Given that I’m a hedonist, it has turned into a complex, very powerful platform to create erotica, relying on large language models to act as the other characters. Got to enjoy my fetishes through it. Constantly coming up with ideas for it, to the extent that it never feels like I could take a break and show the current state. I plan to make a video about its features, with the faint hope that someone else will want to add code and content to the repository, content that I will be able to enjoy myself.
Anyway, thanks for reading, I guess.
August 14, 2025
Life update (08/14/2025)
Three days ago, the youngest of my two cats, who is fourteen years old or so, started breathing weirdly, in a phlegm-y way. When I put my hand on his chest, it vibrated as he breathed. I hoped that it would pass on its own, but it was clearly getting worse.
I’m on vacation for a few more days (although I’ve done fuck-all of consequence, other than programming, playing the guitar, playing VR games, and masturbating), so I took the little guy to the vet. The X-rays didn’t show anything. They injected him with a corticosteroid, and told me that I’ll have to somehow make him swallow the same thing in pill form for the upcoming seven days. The vet, a nice-seeming younger woman, told me that the corticosteroid is mainly for relief, because the real cause is likely a polyp or a mass, and at his age, it will likely not be operable. If things don’t improve in the next few days, I’ll have to bring him to a proper clinic in Donostia, thirty kilometers away, so they can perform a CT scan and similar stuff.
He’s dying. I’ve already lost three cats and it haunts me weekly. I’m way too sensitive to handle the deaths of these little creatures that I’ve loved for years. To begin with, people having pets is insane; just a replacement for the biological urge of having children. It’s clear to me that nobody should raise any living being that’s unlikely to outlast them. I’ve loved my cats, but when I look back, I don’t store any memory of my dead pets that isn’t tainted by the fact that they died. In the case of two of them, also of how they died.
I can’t take this shit. The only relief that I get from my brain bombarding me with intrusive pains is when I’m playing the guitar, when I’m lost in a very engaging experience like a VR game, or jerking off. When any of those distractions ends, the flood returns, and I have to wade through everything painful that my brain refuses to let go of. The number of those private pains only grows as I get older. I suspect that due to the peculiar configuration that my neurons settled on shortly after birth thanks to the autism-related atypical pruning, memory-wise, my brain is a machine made to discard every good experience and etch in stone every bad one. Over the years, I’ve grown wary of attempting things, talking to people, etc., because I know I’ll just be adding more shit to the pile. A classical sign, I suppose, of Pure Obsessional OCD. I don’t know for how long I’ll be able to stand this.
For the last few months or so, I’ve avoided going outside other than to work, to buy whatever needed buying, and to play the guitar, and I play the guitar in the woods, so the population and general demographics are unlike what can be found in the rest of society. But today I had to bring my cat in a carrying case to a nearby clinic, where they refused to take him in due to overwork, so I had to take a bus downtown. Society has turned into such a horrid zoo. I don’t understand how people can look around and think that everything is fine, unless you’re one of the people who are benefiting from it. And us Europeans are the ones losing everything.
I remember my maternal grandfather, who fought on Franco’s side. In the decades after, particularly during the last twenty or so years of his life, he went out as little a possible, because “out there, there’s only weird people.” If he had lived through the current ethnic cleansing, he would have killed himself. I’m no christian (the Roman Empire adopting Christianity was the biggest humiliation ritual imaginable, and we’ve been paying for it ever since. See recent examples of Trump, Mr. “America First”, groveling up to the “chosen people”), so I can’t support Franco such religious grounds, but those fucking communists had it coming. Regarding the christian thing, read Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. In summary, how could I look forward to anything in society when everything is deliberately going the wrong way, and it’s only going to get worse? I’m just glad that I won’t bring children to this disaster.
My cat is walking around, climbing furniture, and eating a bit, but he’s still breathing weird. Almost guaranteed, this is the decline that will end in his death. I suppose he has lived long enough. I doubt that his life has been particularly happy, given neuroses like overeating whenever he has the chance even though he pukes afterwards. But what can you do. I can’t even give myself a happy life.
I’m on vacation for a few more days (although I’ve done fuck-all of consequence, other than programming, playing the guitar, playing VR games, and masturbating), so I took the little guy to the vet. The X-rays didn’t show anything. They injected him with a corticosteroid, and told me that I’ll have to somehow make him swallow the same thing in pill form for the upcoming seven days. The vet, a nice-seeming younger woman, told me that the corticosteroid is mainly for relief, because the real cause is likely a polyp or a mass, and at his age, it will likely not be operable. If things don’t improve in the next few days, I’ll have to bring him to a proper clinic in Donostia, thirty kilometers away, so they can perform a CT scan and similar stuff.
He’s dying. I’ve already lost three cats and it haunts me weekly. I’m way too sensitive to handle the deaths of these little creatures that I’ve loved for years. To begin with, people having pets is insane; just a replacement for the biological urge of having children. It’s clear to me that nobody should raise any living being that’s unlikely to outlast them. I’ve loved my cats, but when I look back, I don’t store any memory of my dead pets that isn’t tainted by the fact that they died. In the case of two of them, also of how they died.
I can’t take this shit. The only relief that I get from my brain bombarding me with intrusive pains is when I’m playing the guitar, when I’m lost in a very engaging experience like a VR game, or jerking off. When any of those distractions ends, the flood returns, and I have to wade through everything painful that my brain refuses to let go of. The number of those private pains only grows as I get older. I suspect that due to the peculiar configuration that my neurons settled on shortly after birth thanks to the autism-related atypical pruning, memory-wise, my brain is a machine made to discard every good experience and etch in stone every bad one. Over the years, I’ve grown wary of attempting things, talking to people, etc., because I know I’ll just be adding more shit to the pile. A classical sign, I suppose, of Pure Obsessional OCD. I don’t know for how long I’ll be able to stand this.
For the last few months or so, I’ve avoided going outside other than to work, to buy whatever needed buying, and to play the guitar, and I play the guitar in the woods, so the population and general demographics are unlike what can be found in the rest of society. But today I had to bring my cat in a carrying case to a nearby clinic, where they refused to take him in due to overwork, so I had to take a bus downtown. Society has turned into such a horrid zoo. I don’t understand how people can look around and think that everything is fine, unless you’re one of the people who are benefiting from it. And us Europeans are the ones losing everything.
I remember my maternal grandfather, who fought on Franco’s side. In the decades after, particularly during the last twenty or so years of his life, he went out as little a possible, because “out there, there’s only weird people.” If he had lived through the current ethnic cleansing, he would have killed himself. I’m no christian (the Roman Empire adopting Christianity was the biggest humiliation ritual imaginable, and we’ve been paying for it ever since. See recent examples of Trump, Mr. “America First”, groveling up to the “chosen people”), so I can’t support Franco such religious grounds, but those fucking communists had it coming. Regarding the christian thing, read Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. In summary, how could I look forward to anything in society when everything is deliberately going the wrong way, and it’s only going to get worse? I’m just glad that I won’t bring children to this disaster.
My cat is walking around, climbing furniture, and eating a bit, but he’s still breathing weird. Almost guaranteed, this is the decline that will end in his death. I suppose he has lived long enough. I doubt that his life has been particularly happy, given neuroses like overeating whenever he has the chance even though he pukes afterwards. But what can you do. I can’t even give myself a happy life.
May 25, 2025
Life update (05/26/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
I’m back at work after two weeks of vacation that, as these things usually do, passed by way too fast. Most of my first week was spent in Barcelona, a trip originally intended for research but that caught me not caring much about writing. I’m glad I went, and I got some interesting experiences out of it, but when I returned home, I realized I didn’t really care to write about it. Right now, at about eight in the morning on a Monday, sitting at my office desk, I may as well point out a few things. First of all, Barcelona is a multiculti hellhole. I already expected it to be, but walking through Las Ramblas (don’t do that) exposed the multiculti dream, that as far as concerned has been thoroughly exposed: no “melting pot” (not that it was ever a good thing to begin with), but a fuckton of ethnicities competing for spaces, resources, and eventually, who rules. In a territory that was solely meant to be for the Catalan people, now increasingly less every passing day. Same thing is obviously happening throughout Europe, but it shocked me to witness it on such a grand scale in a huge city. I don’t know why anyone would want to live in such a city, by the way. As far as I’m concerned, they’re designed to drive you crazy.
Catalonia has a bad reputation for making most of its identity be about its regional language, which made me wary of going there, and while most things are indeed solely in Catalan, I had no trouble interacting with people in Spanish. That’s partly because plenty of the vendors I interacted with were foreigners, some of whom could barely care about Spanish, let alone the regional language. But anyway, walking down along Las Ramblas while Pakistani/Indian-type men (all of them were) constantly pestered passersby to eat at restaurants (that seemingly served regular food, but I have to assume they are Pakistani/Indian owned) was a chilling reminder that people from backwards places bring their backwards shit wherever they go.
Anyway, I visited churches, museums, the zoo, the top of the Tibidabo mountain… and instead of missing those sights, I found myself missing the attractive females I came across and whom I’ll never see again. The sporty, fresh-faced college-age woman who took the same elevator as me in the building where I briefly lived. The cute teenager wearing a cap and jeans who kept glancing my way with curiosity, for whatever reason, in the vivarium of the zoo, as well as at the mongoose enclosure. The woman who ran around the neighborhood wearing very tight, very short multicolored shorts. All those amazingly gorgeous tourists, isolated islands of blonde hair and blue eyes in an increasingly non-ethnic-European hole. Plenty of tourists who weren’t blonde and blue-eyed were also very attractive. Ultimately, attractive females are the most valuable “thing” in the world, and plenty of what any man (and some women) consumes on a regular basis, other than food, are substitutes for not having access to such a female.
The rest of my vacation was spent playing the guitar and programming. During this time, I was reminded of the fact that I don’t care about human beings or society in general. When I went out, I hurried to the mostly deserted wooded areas, while avoiding looking at anyone’s face. As I played the guitar, whenever any person approached, I got increasingly tense, which lessened as they left. It’s always been like this, but now, as a forty-year-old man going through some sort of middle-age crisis, it has become blatantly obvious that not only it’s going to be like that for the rest of my life, but that I’ll become increasingly crotchety about it as I grow older.
As the train carried me through the mostly deserted interior of Eastern Spain (about 70% of the country is unoccupied, mainly the interior plains, with the exception of the Zaragoza and Madrid areas), made me yearn to live in a quiet town somewhere in that isolation. I’m sick of having to share my spaces with so many people, even in a city like mine that isn’t remotely as fucked as Barcelona.
Don’t know what else to say. I hope I manage to return to writing my novel soon, but I’m not feeling it. I have been working hard at my programming project, mainly because it was a very compelling challenge, and just a couple of days ago, I managed to involve large language models in it, having them act as characters in a turn-based simulation. There’s a ton I can build upon that, but as the hardest part (by far) is already solved, I assume my interest is going to descend from there.
I’m tense about how I’m going to adapt to the office after this illuminating vacation. Working here as a programmer has illustrated that I absolutely do not, under any circumstance, want to return to working as a technician. I hate every aspect of it, and it’s completely ill-suited to my nature. But dropping that would likely mean having to find a completely different line of work at forty. But it’s not like I have any future here without knowing Basque; after the changes they made to the ranking system, I have been pushed down many places because of my lack of knowledge of that stupid language, so soon enough I would have found myself not being called for work anyway. Down the line of working as a technician, new visits to the ER await (three so far: two for arrhythmia and one for a hemiplegic migraine), and any of those visits may end up leaving me with permanent consequences. I suspect that at least one of them did.
Anyway, I guess that’s all for now.
I’m back at work after two weeks of vacation that, as these things usually do, passed by way too fast. Most of my first week was spent in Barcelona, a trip originally intended for research but that caught me not caring much about writing. I’m glad I went, and I got some interesting experiences out of it, but when I returned home, I realized I didn’t really care to write about it. Right now, at about eight in the morning on a Monday, sitting at my office desk, I may as well point out a few things. First of all, Barcelona is a multiculti hellhole. I already expected it to be, but walking through Las Ramblas (don’t do that) exposed the multiculti dream, that as far as concerned has been thoroughly exposed: no “melting pot” (not that it was ever a good thing to begin with), but a fuckton of ethnicities competing for spaces, resources, and eventually, who rules. In a territory that was solely meant to be for the Catalan people, now increasingly less every passing day. Same thing is obviously happening throughout Europe, but it shocked me to witness it on such a grand scale in a huge city. I don’t know why anyone would want to live in such a city, by the way. As far as I’m concerned, they’re designed to drive you crazy.
Catalonia has a bad reputation for making most of its identity be about its regional language, which made me wary of going there, and while most things are indeed solely in Catalan, I had no trouble interacting with people in Spanish. That’s partly because plenty of the vendors I interacted with were foreigners, some of whom could barely care about Spanish, let alone the regional language. But anyway, walking down along Las Ramblas while Pakistani/Indian-type men (all of them were) constantly pestered passersby to eat at restaurants (that seemingly served regular food, but I have to assume they are Pakistani/Indian owned) was a chilling reminder that people from backwards places bring their backwards shit wherever they go.
Anyway, I visited churches, museums, the zoo, the top of the Tibidabo mountain… and instead of missing those sights, I found myself missing the attractive females I came across and whom I’ll never see again. The sporty, fresh-faced college-age woman who took the same elevator as me in the building where I briefly lived. The cute teenager wearing a cap and jeans who kept glancing my way with curiosity, for whatever reason, in the vivarium of the zoo, as well as at the mongoose enclosure. The woman who ran around the neighborhood wearing very tight, very short multicolored shorts. All those amazingly gorgeous tourists, isolated islands of blonde hair and blue eyes in an increasingly non-ethnic-European hole. Plenty of tourists who weren’t blonde and blue-eyed were also very attractive. Ultimately, attractive females are the most valuable “thing” in the world, and plenty of what any man (and some women) consumes on a regular basis, other than food, are substitutes for not having access to such a female.
The rest of my vacation was spent playing the guitar and programming. During this time, I was reminded of the fact that I don’t care about human beings or society in general. When I went out, I hurried to the mostly deserted wooded areas, while avoiding looking at anyone’s face. As I played the guitar, whenever any person approached, I got increasingly tense, which lessened as they left. It’s always been like this, but now, as a forty-year-old man going through some sort of middle-age crisis, it has become blatantly obvious that not only it’s going to be like that for the rest of my life, but that I’ll become increasingly crotchety about it as I grow older.
As the train carried me through the mostly deserted interior of Eastern Spain (about 70% of the country is unoccupied, mainly the interior plains, with the exception of the Zaragoza and Madrid areas), made me yearn to live in a quiet town somewhere in that isolation. I’m sick of having to share my spaces with so many people, even in a city like mine that isn’t remotely as fucked as Barcelona.
Don’t know what else to say. I hope I manage to return to writing my novel soon, but I’m not feeling it. I have been working hard at my programming project, mainly because it was a very compelling challenge, and just a couple of days ago, I managed to involve large language models in it, having them act as characters in a turn-based simulation. There’s a ton I can build upon that, but as the hardest part (by far) is already solved, I assume my interest is going to descend from there.
I’m tense about how I’m going to adapt to the office after this illuminating vacation. Working here as a programmer has illustrated that I absolutely do not, under any circumstance, want to return to working as a technician. I hate every aspect of it, and it’s completely ill-suited to my nature. But dropping that would likely mean having to find a completely different line of work at forty. But it’s not like I have any future here without knowing Basque; after the changes they made to the ranking system, I have been pushed down many places because of my lack of knowledge of that stupid language, so soon enough I would have found myself not being called for work anyway. Down the line of working as a technician, new visits to the ER await (three so far: two for arrhythmia and one for a hemiplegic migraine), and any of those visits may end up leaving me with permanent consequences. I suspect that at least one of them did.
Anyway, I guess that’s all for now.
May 11, 2025
Life update (05/11/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
Two days from now I’ll be in Barcelona, on a days-long trip for which I’m not in the mood. It’s supposed to involve research for a writing project I’m supposedly working on, although I haven’t written anything in a month. Barcelona is a beautiful city. Unfortunately, it’s also a crime-ridden shithole. I expect to feel anxious from the moment I step outside of the rented apartment.
I haven’t been in the mood for much recently. I may actually be having a mid-life crisis, although I’m past the midpoint of my life; now forty, and very unlikely to live to eighty. I keep fantasizing about dropping everything and moving away to some cheap town, to a one-bedroom place near nature, where I could live in peace while working part-time at the most. If that ever happens, I’ll likely be in my late fifties, or sixties. Mainly, I want to get away from everything and everyone I’ve ever known. Unfortunately, due to my brain configuration, my intrusive thoughts keep reminding me of every terrible little thing that has ever happened to me. I can’t flee from that.
A song came to mind: Jackson C. Frank’s “Blues Run the Game.” Jackson was well-respected songwriter in the sixties and seventies. When he was twelve or thirteen, during music class in middle school, the school’s boiler exploded just under them. Jackson survived with half of his body burned. His girlfriend, Marlene, burned to death. In spirit, Jackson died that day, although it took his body decades to catch up. He wrote one song directly about his dead twelve-year-old girlfriend (“Marlene”), although obviously most of his songs are tinted by what happened. In the seventies, Jackson lived in England, and dated a then-famous musician named Sandy Denny. Shortly after they broke up and Jackson returned to the States, Sandy fell down the stairs of her home and died.
Jackson went crazy, likely out of PTSD and depression. He couldn’t find in himself to produce a new album, and he couldn’t get the first album reissued, as Paul Simon, who held the rights, wouldn’t do so. Jackson ended up homeless in NY. A fan sought him out and offered to house the songwriter and help him revitalize his career. As Jackson was waiting on a bench, some hoodlum shot out one of his eyes with a BB. Jackson died maybe one or two years later from a disease.
Here’s to you. Creating art can’t save anyone, but at least it captures what needs to survive.
Two days from now I’ll be in Barcelona, on a days-long trip for which I’m not in the mood. It’s supposed to involve research for a writing project I’m supposedly working on, although I haven’t written anything in a month. Barcelona is a beautiful city. Unfortunately, it’s also a crime-ridden shithole. I expect to feel anxious from the moment I step outside of the rented apartment.
I haven’t been in the mood for much recently. I may actually be having a mid-life crisis, although I’m past the midpoint of my life; now forty, and very unlikely to live to eighty. I keep fantasizing about dropping everything and moving away to some cheap town, to a one-bedroom place near nature, where I could live in peace while working part-time at the most. If that ever happens, I’ll likely be in my late fifties, or sixties. Mainly, I want to get away from everything and everyone I’ve ever known. Unfortunately, due to my brain configuration, my intrusive thoughts keep reminding me of every terrible little thing that has ever happened to me. I can’t flee from that.
A song came to mind: Jackson C. Frank’s “Blues Run the Game.” Jackson was well-respected songwriter in the sixties and seventies. When he was twelve or thirteen, during music class in middle school, the school’s boiler exploded just under them. Jackson survived with half of his body burned. His girlfriend, Marlene, burned to death. In spirit, Jackson died that day, although it took his body decades to catch up. He wrote one song directly about his dead twelve-year-old girlfriend (“Marlene”), although obviously most of his songs are tinted by what happened. In the seventies, Jackson lived in England, and dated a then-famous musician named Sandy Denny. Shortly after they broke up and Jackson returned to the States, Sandy fell down the stairs of her home and died.
Jackson went crazy, likely out of PTSD and depression. He couldn’t find in himself to produce a new album, and he couldn’t get the first album reissued, as Paul Simon, who held the rights, wouldn’t do so. Jackson ended up homeless in NY. A fan sought him out and offered to house the songwriter and help him revitalize his career. As Jackson was waiting on a bench, some hoodlum shot out one of his eyes with a BB. Jackson died maybe one or two years later from a disease.
Here’s to you. Creating art can’t save anyone, but at least it captures what needs to survive.
May 5, 2025
Life update (05/05/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
These days, my beloved guitar satisfies my emotional needs. I head to nearby wooded areas to play. This Saturday, I had walked to one of my favorite spots: in front of a huge tree, on a relatively unknown trail. As I was playing through Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher,” suddenly I heard someone hollering. I tensed up, but didn’t look up until someone threw his voice at me, interrupting someone who unequivocally was playing an instrument. I raised my gaze to the grotesque sight of a topless gypsy holding a dining room chair over his head. Of course this fucking mongoloid had to talk to me as I was playing the guitar. He asked if I played rumbas. I told him I didn’t know what that was. He then said that it was flamenco. I told him no. Shortly after, he hollered back to someone to following him, then continued on his way, likely to drink and leave the bottles and other litter there. A couple of other people, presumably gypsies although I couldn’t tell, followed in silence. One of them was a young woman. I got the feeling they felt a bit embarrassed. I finished Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher” to the best of my abilities, and then packed up my things and left.
People don’t learn from history; a well-known fact. If we did, we would have learned from the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire, and would have realized that some terrible mistakes should never be repeated: first, don’t convert to Christianity. Second, don’t share your civilization with barbarians. You may enjoy diversity on your plate, until someone shits on it, and then the whole plate is ruined. As for me, I’m not remotely a diversity enjoyer: I want everything in its right place.
Anyway, I suspect that such an encounter with one of the locusts of society would have dissuaded me for a while from playing outside, but the very next day, at about half past three in the afternoon, I picked up my guitar and headed to the deeper woods (in the opposite direction from the other woods). First I headed past the Roman foundries (a reminder that we used to be the city of Oiasso), but the place I picked to play, close to the river, obviously interfered sonically with my playing, so I picked up my things and ended up setting up shop on a raised area next to the foundries. I had only come across a pair of women on my way there, so I thought the afternoon would be quite tranquil. However, I found myself playing songs for older couples and families with children, who stopped to record the foundries, and also ventured deeper into the woods. These people were civilized, so the only interruption I got was three tweens clapping at me as they walked past. Guitar-playing impresses girls, I guess.
When I was in middle school, I remember an instance in which I had to read some essay in class, and I was so nervous, as usual, about speaking in public that my hand shook to the extent that you could hear the rustle of the paper I was holding. Now I casually play the guitar in front of strangers. I’m not entirely comfortable in front of people, of course; I never am even in the best of circumstances. But my concern is that someone may mess with me or even attack me. I don’t feel any genuine connection with human beings, so it’s quite similar to how I’d feel if a deer suddenly stopped to listen. I’d also worry that it may flip out and charge at me, offended at some aspect of my playing. Sadly we don’t have deers around.
Well. Five more days to go, and my vacation starts. I’m heading to Barcelona. Not really in the mood for it, but it’s writing-related, so I’ll have to endure through plenty of aspects of that city that no doubt will infuriate me.
These days, my beloved guitar satisfies my emotional needs. I head to nearby wooded areas to play. This Saturday, I had walked to one of my favorite spots: in front of a huge tree, on a relatively unknown trail. As I was playing through Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher,” suddenly I heard someone hollering. I tensed up, but didn’t look up until someone threw his voice at me, interrupting someone who unequivocally was playing an instrument. I raised my gaze to the grotesque sight of a topless gypsy holding a dining room chair over his head. Of course this fucking mongoloid had to talk to me as I was playing the guitar. He asked if I played rumbas. I told him I didn’t know what that was. He then said that it was flamenco. I told him no. Shortly after, he hollered back to someone to following him, then continued on his way, likely to drink and leave the bottles and other litter there. A couple of other people, presumably gypsies although I couldn’t tell, followed in silence. One of them was a young woman. I got the feeling they felt a bit embarrassed. I finished Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher” to the best of my abilities, and then packed up my things and left.
People don’t learn from history; a well-known fact. If we did, we would have learned from the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire, and would have realized that some terrible mistakes should never be repeated: first, don’t convert to Christianity. Second, don’t share your civilization with barbarians. You may enjoy diversity on your plate, until someone shits on it, and then the whole plate is ruined. As for me, I’m not remotely a diversity enjoyer: I want everything in its right place.
Anyway, I suspect that such an encounter with one of the locusts of society would have dissuaded me for a while from playing outside, but the very next day, at about half past three in the afternoon, I picked up my guitar and headed to the deeper woods (in the opposite direction from the other woods). First I headed past the Roman foundries (a reminder that we used to be the city of Oiasso), but the place I picked to play, close to the river, obviously interfered sonically with my playing, so I picked up my things and ended up setting up shop on a raised area next to the foundries. I had only come across a pair of women on my way there, so I thought the afternoon would be quite tranquil. However, I found myself playing songs for older couples and families with children, who stopped to record the foundries, and also ventured deeper into the woods. These people were civilized, so the only interruption I got was three tweens clapping at me as they walked past. Guitar-playing impresses girls, I guess.
When I was in middle school, I remember an instance in which I had to read some essay in class, and I was so nervous, as usual, about speaking in public that my hand shook to the extent that you could hear the rustle of the paper I was holding. Now I casually play the guitar in front of strangers. I’m not entirely comfortable in front of people, of course; I never am even in the best of circumstances. But my concern is that someone may mess with me or even attack me. I don’t feel any genuine connection with human beings, so it’s quite similar to how I’d feel if a deer suddenly stopped to listen. I’d also worry that it may flip out and charge at me, offended at some aspect of my playing. Sadly we don’t have deers around.
Well. Five more days to go, and my vacation starts. I’m heading to Barcelona. Not really in the mood for it, but it’s writing-related, so I’ll have to endure through plenty of aspects of that city that no doubt will infuriate me.
May 1, 2025
Life update (05/02/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
This morning I woke up rattled from a nightmare. I suppose most people’s nightmares involve being physically attacked or pursued, but in my case, my worst nightmares are about ceasing to understand. As far as I remember, most of last night’s dream was like that, but the part I remember the most involved a meeting with my boss and two other coworkers. I wasn’t able to follow their conversation, nor couldn’t understand my boss’ icy attitude toward me. Then he asked me something about a suitcase (that may have been an expression, but the details have slipped through my fingers). I sat there trying to comprehend what he was asking, while my coworkers and my boss looked at me with a mix of disappointment and irritation. I asked, “What does that mean?” My boss looked pissed at my stupidity or ineptitude. Then he asked me if I had done the “context packet,” or something similar. I said that I had no clue what he was talking about. He became irate toward me. When I tried to defend myself, without getting particularly agitated, I was accused of being unable to control myself.
As usual, a mere recounting of a dream doesn’t properly transmit the experience, that of sitting there in that dream office trying my best to understand what was being demanded of me, and yet failing to do so. That’s not far from my every day experience living in the world as an autistic man. In fact, most meetings serve as reminders that my brain doesn’t work like other people’s, as most of the exchanges feel like non-sequiturs to me. I’m usually waiting for the part when someone specifies what needs to be done.
It doesn’t help that I have experienced such moments of my brain failing to comprehend the world, mainly through my experience with migraines. I’m still not convinced that my last one wasn’t a mini-stroke. Back in April of last year, my then boss put me in charge of organizing the replacement of about nine hundred printers throughout the hospital complex where I work. It was a fucking nightmare. Near the end of it, during a day in which I was also hit in the balls by the careless Gen Z worker I had to deal with at the time (he told me a couple of times how eager he was to get back home and play some more Fortnite), I suffered a hemiplegic migraine: suddenly, I started having trouble understanding what I was looking at. Then I smelled something like burnt dust. The right half of my face, and then my right arm to my fingertips, went numb. I ended up in the ER. Three weeks or so later I had an MRI done, but they discarded brain damage. However, I’ve read online that some strokes don’t show up on an MRI. I’ve experienced trouble writing coherently: I sometimes skip letters or mix them up, but I’m not sure if that wasn’t happening beforehand. Maybe it’s just part of the general decay. In any case, one of my biggest fears is suffering a stroke that renders me incapable.
I turned forty about a week ago, and that made me think back to my experience with people over the decades. Growing as a human for me has meant becoming increasingly aware of how much my brain lacks when it comes to social processing. I see myself back as a child, hunched over and drawing because I couldn’t relate to anyone around me, and couldn’t even keep a conversation going for a minute without feeling lost. Of course, when I became a teenager, the problems grew tenfold. My intimate relationships always ended up hurting others as well as me. And I lack the sense of connection with human beings that is generally referred to as “empathy,” so it would be unfair for me to try to get close to others, which in the past I’ve done mostly for curiosity or for writing-related purposes. I do fantasize about intimacy, and I don’t mean just sex, but I guess I’ll have to wait for reincarnation, or incarnated AIs.
Not much else to say beyond these semi-random thoughts. I’ve been busy programming my platform for text-based immersive sims, which is a challenge I’m eager to tackle every day. Whenever I go outside, it’s almost exclusively to delve into a wooded area and play my beloved guitar. If you’re into playing string instruments, you know how much your calloused fingers yearn to return to those strings, to immerse yourself in the emotions captured in the songs, each a unique spell. Playing through Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher,” for example, puts me in a trance that snatches me away from this lackluster world into a better place full of meaning.
The wooded area I head to most times is almost unknown, located by the side of an incline road heading into the hilly depths of the province; in the Basque Country, the moment you start heading uphill, it’s like going back in time, and you’re bound to come across very few people, if any at all. The last four or five times I went to play at my usual spot, I only saw one person, and he freaked out when he suddenly noticed a guy sitting there in silence with a guitar (I was about to start playing a song).
Anyway, only six days of work to go, and then I’ll enjoy two weeks of vacation. I hope that along the way, I manage to snatch my one-track mind back to writing; the longer I stay away from it, the more unhinged I feel.
This morning I woke up rattled from a nightmare. I suppose most people’s nightmares involve being physically attacked or pursued, but in my case, my worst nightmares are about ceasing to understand. As far as I remember, most of last night’s dream was like that, but the part I remember the most involved a meeting with my boss and two other coworkers. I wasn’t able to follow their conversation, nor couldn’t understand my boss’ icy attitude toward me. Then he asked me something about a suitcase (that may have been an expression, but the details have slipped through my fingers). I sat there trying to comprehend what he was asking, while my coworkers and my boss looked at me with a mix of disappointment and irritation. I asked, “What does that mean?” My boss looked pissed at my stupidity or ineptitude. Then he asked me if I had done the “context packet,” or something similar. I said that I had no clue what he was talking about. He became irate toward me. When I tried to defend myself, without getting particularly agitated, I was accused of being unable to control myself.
As usual, a mere recounting of a dream doesn’t properly transmit the experience, that of sitting there in that dream office trying my best to understand what was being demanded of me, and yet failing to do so. That’s not far from my every day experience living in the world as an autistic man. In fact, most meetings serve as reminders that my brain doesn’t work like other people’s, as most of the exchanges feel like non-sequiturs to me. I’m usually waiting for the part when someone specifies what needs to be done.
It doesn’t help that I have experienced such moments of my brain failing to comprehend the world, mainly through my experience with migraines. I’m still not convinced that my last one wasn’t a mini-stroke. Back in April of last year, my then boss put me in charge of organizing the replacement of about nine hundred printers throughout the hospital complex where I work. It was a fucking nightmare. Near the end of it, during a day in which I was also hit in the balls by the careless Gen Z worker I had to deal with at the time (he told me a couple of times how eager he was to get back home and play some more Fortnite), I suffered a hemiplegic migraine: suddenly, I started having trouble understanding what I was looking at. Then I smelled something like burnt dust. The right half of my face, and then my right arm to my fingertips, went numb. I ended up in the ER. Three weeks or so later I had an MRI done, but they discarded brain damage. However, I’ve read online that some strokes don’t show up on an MRI. I’ve experienced trouble writing coherently: I sometimes skip letters or mix them up, but I’m not sure if that wasn’t happening beforehand. Maybe it’s just part of the general decay. In any case, one of my biggest fears is suffering a stroke that renders me incapable.
I turned forty about a week ago, and that made me think back to my experience with people over the decades. Growing as a human for me has meant becoming increasingly aware of how much my brain lacks when it comes to social processing. I see myself back as a child, hunched over and drawing because I couldn’t relate to anyone around me, and couldn’t even keep a conversation going for a minute without feeling lost. Of course, when I became a teenager, the problems grew tenfold. My intimate relationships always ended up hurting others as well as me. And I lack the sense of connection with human beings that is generally referred to as “empathy,” so it would be unfair for me to try to get close to others, which in the past I’ve done mostly for curiosity or for writing-related purposes. I do fantasize about intimacy, and I don’t mean just sex, but I guess I’ll have to wait for reincarnation, or incarnated AIs.
Not much else to say beyond these semi-random thoughts. I’ve been busy programming my platform for text-based immersive sims, which is a challenge I’m eager to tackle every day. Whenever I go outside, it’s almost exclusively to delve into a wooded area and play my beloved guitar. If you’re into playing string instruments, you know how much your calloused fingers yearn to return to those strings, to immerse yourself in the emotions captured in the songs, each a unique spell. Playing through Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher,” for example, puts me in a trance that snatches me away from this lackluster world into a better place full of meaning.
The wooded area I head to most times is almost unknown, located by the side of an incline road heading into the hilly depths of the province; in the Basque Country, the moment you start heading uphill, it’s like going back in time, and you’re bound to come across very few people, if any at all. The last four or five times I went to play at my usual spot, I only saw one person, and he freaked out when he suddenly noticed a guy sitting there in silence with a guitar (I was about to start playing a song).
Anyway, only six days of work to go, and then I’ll enjoy two weeks of vacation. I hope that along the way, I manage to snatch my one-track mind back to writing; the longer I stay away from it, the more unhinged I feel.
April 29, 2025
Life update (04/29/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
I’m now a forty-year-old man, which is one of the things that happen when you turn forty. When I was in my teens, I thought I wouldn’t make it past eighteen. When I hit rock bottom at about twenty-one and I intended to exit this life through the emergency door, I didn’t think I would see that afternoon. And now I have gray hairs in my beard. It hasn’t been a “glad I stuck around” kind of deal; I’m not too happy about being alive.
Anyway, my goal for my forties is to become even more emotionally and physically independent from human beings. My thirties, that included years of working, showed me that all non-necessary interactions with humans, including listening to their grating voices and sounds, as well as their inanity, can literally send me to the ER. I had two episodes of arrhythmia, and then an even scarier hemiplegic migraine, the three of them triggered by stress. Around that time I also experienced a torn retina, although I don’t know to what extent I can fault stress or the health issues I was experiencing at the time. The point is, any extra interaction with humans can ruin me in potentially permanent ways, so to the extent I can get away with, I won’t look people in the eye, and I will wear my noise-canceling headphones to drown out the world’s nonsense. I have to respect my brain’s peculiar needs instead of conceding to other people’s.
Next month I’m going on a trip to Barcelona. The funny thing is that the trip is related to a story I’m writing; I intended to do some research. But I haven’t been writing at all these past couple of weeks due to my sudden obsession with developing a program. I hope to return to it soon enough; I have been feeling my mind deteriorating, becoming increasingly unhinged, which always happens when writing doesn’t ground me. Also, I miss hanging out with Elena.
Speaking of hanging out with non-existing people: I still have daily daydreams about going on time-travel-related adventures with a certain Alicia Western. Most days I don’t even open the ebook reader or my tablet; I just close my eyes and run scenarios in my head. In one of the most recent daydreams, I introduced Alicia to the wonders of augmented reality through a headset made in the 2030s. The headset comes included with an advanced AI named Hypatia, that helps Alicia with her mathematical research.
I don’t know if I intended to say anything else. Barely anyone reads my posts anyway, so this is pure self-expression.
I’m now a forty-year-old man, which is one of the things that happen when you turn forty. When I was in my teens, I thought I wouldn’t make it past eighteen. When I hit rock bottom at about twenty-one and I intended to exit this life through the emergency door, I didn’t think I would see that afternoon. And now I have gray hairs in my beard. It hasn’t been a “glad I stuck around” kind of deal; I’m not too happy about being alive.
Anyway, my goal for my forties is to become even more emotionally and physically independent from human beings. My thirties, that included years of working, showed me that all non-necessary interactions with humans, including listening to their grating voices and sounds, as well as their inanity, can literally send me to the ER. I had two episodes of arrhythmia, and then an even scarier hemiplegic migraine, the three of them triggered by stress. Around that time I also experienced a torn retina, although I don’t know to what extent I can fault stress or the health issues I was experiencing at the time. The point is, any extra interaction with humans can ruin me in potentially permanent ways, so to the extent I can get away with, I won’t look people in the eye, and I will wear my noise-canceling headphones to drown out the world’s nonsense. I have to respect my brain’s peculiar needs instead of conceding to other people’s.
Next month I’m going on a trip to Barcelona. The funny thing is that the trip is related to a story I’m writing; I intended to do some research. But I haven’t been writing at all these past couple of weeks due to my sudden obsession with developing a program. I hope to return to it soon enough; I have been feeling my mind deteriorating, becoming increasingly unhinged, which always happens when writing doesn’t ground me. Also, I miss hanging out with Elena.
Speaking of hanging out with non-existing people: I still have daily daydreams about going on time-travel-related adventures with a certain Alicia Western. Most days I don’t even open the ebook reader or my tablet; I just close my eyes and run scenarios in my head. In one of the most recent daydreams, I introduced Alicia to the wonders of augmented reality through a headset made in the 2030s. The headset comes included with an advanced AI named Hypatia, that helps Alicia with her mathematical research.
I don’t know if I intended to say anything else. Barely anyone reads my posts anyway, so this is pure self-expression.
April 23, 2025
Neural Pulse, Pt. 11 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
In an electric flash and crackle, my muscles seized, and my vision flared white. As I crumpled backward like a dead weight, my left arm and the side of my head slammed into the control panel. My brain thrummed with electricity. It reeked of burning.
In the whiteness, the silhouette of a spacesuit materialized, looming over me. Several shadows clamped onto my arms with claws. One shadow dug its knees into my abdomen and crushed my face between its palms. I tried to scream, but only a ragged whimper escaped my throat. The tangle of shadows obscured my sight, swallowing me. A shadow snatched my hair and pulled; hundreds of points on my scalp prickled tight. Another shadow smothered my nose and mouth.
When I could feel my arms again, I lashed out at the shadows, thrashing as I braced myself against the control panel and the seat. I lunged for a silhouette—Mara’s spacesuit—but she sidestepped, and I plummeted onto the cockpit floor. A blow to the crown of my head plunged me into a murky confusion.
My wrists were bound behind my back—duct tape, I glimpsed, as Mara, crouched by my knees, finished wrapping my ankles. She straightened and hobbled backward. She stepped on the electroshock lance lying discarded on the floor and slipped, but the oxygen recycler clipped to the back of her suit arrested her fall as it struck the hatch.
Gauges of different shapes bulged on her belt like ammunition magazines. The suit’s chest inflated and deflated rhythmically. Mara unlatched her helmet and pulled it off, revealing her ashen face: mouth agape with baby-pink lips; livid, doubled bags under her eyes; strands of black hair plastered to her forehead with sweat. She leaned back against the hatch, gasping through her mouth, the corners glistening with saliva as she scrutinized me with intense, glazed eyes.
The cockpit reeked of sweat and burnt fuses. The shadows had congealed into a mass of human-shaped silhouettes, their hatred addling my brains, boiling me in a cauldron. Mara’s outline, as if traced with a thick black marker, pulsed and expanded.
No more anticipating how to defend myself, because I have you trapped. Thanks to you, the station doesn’t know we came down to the planet. With the tools of the xenobiologist you murdered, I will rip out your tongue, gouge out your eyes, bore into your face.
Mara crouched, setting her helmet on the floor. Exhaustion contorted her actress-like features, as if some illness burdened her with insomnia and pain.
“I thought I was marooned on this planet. I could have just called the station for rescue, but they’d fire me for nothing, and my pride would rather I suffocated than admit I needed help. Now I know—when we found the artifact, I should have tied you up then. Because you, being you, would just stick your nose right up to an alien machine that, for all you knew, could have detonated the outpost. And to understand what drove you to kill that xenobiologist, I imitated you. I stuck my nose up to that thing, and I saw my reflection. Now I know. Unfortunately, I know.” She regarded me like a comatose patient and waved a gloved palm. “Can you hear me? Did I scramble your brain?”
“I hear.”
My voice emerged as a rasp. I coughed. My mouth tasted of metal.
“And you understand?”
I nodded.
The black veil obscuring the cockpit stirred, rippling. Concentrated energy, like the air crackling before a storm. With Mara’s every gesture, the shadows shifted. Their bony claws crushed my thighs, cinching around my spine through suit, skin, and flesh.
A bead of sweat trickled down Mara’s forehead. She rubbed her face, swallowed. Her pupils constricted.
“Is that what you think? That I’ve convinced myself I’ve subdued you? That you’ll fool me until I let you go? That then you’ll finally strangle me? And even if the station calls it murder, no one will bother investigating, because most people who knew me would thank you for killing me.”
“I’m not thinking. When I try, my brain protests.”
Mara hunched down opposite me, reaching out to study the blow on my head, but halfway there her features pinched. She drew herself up, crossing her arms.
“I heard you telling me to come closer. Because you’ll break free, dig your nails into my corneas, and rip my jaw apart.”
My guts roiled; acid surged up my throat.
“You think I think things like that?”
“I feel this second consciousness… it betrays your thoughts as clearly as if you spoke them aloud. Maybe I’ll never understand how the artifact interfered with our minds, not just our language, but it’s a trick.”
I pushed my torso off the floor, sliding my back up the side of a seat inch by inch, trying not to provoke her, until my stomach settled. My head ached where she’d struck me. The throbbing in my skull clouded and inflamed my thoughts.
“You saw him. Jing. What I did.”
“I saw someone down there. I’d need dental records or DNA to be sure, but I trust elimination. I thought you’d claim it was an accident.”
“It was. I attacked the shadows. You feel them, don’t you?”
Mara took a deep breath.
“They’re pawing at me, trying to suffocate me. Products of my own besieged brain, I know, but I can hardly call them pleasant.”
“I wanted to keep it from affecting you. But at least now you understand.”
“Make no mistake. That xenobiologist is lying with his face beaten to a pulp in the second sublevel of an alien outpost because you are you.”
I pressed my lips together, erecting a wall against escaping words. I looked away from Mara’s eyes, concentrating on deepening my breaths. The muscles in my forearms were taut. Pain flared in my constricted wrists. This woman had fired an electroshock lance at me, beaten me, bound me, and now she was assaulting my character.
With her boot-tip, Mara nudged her helmet; it wobbled like a small boat.
“Although the jolts in my neurons, the shadows, and this other consciousness intruding in my mind unnerve me, the effect isn’t so different from how I’ve always felt around people. The two consciousnesses will learn to get along.”
“If you’re not exaggerating,” I said gravely, “I am truly sorry, Mara.”
She pushed damp strands of hair from her forehead and scrubbed it with the back of her glove, smudging it with dust. The corners of her lips sagged as if weights hung from them.
“Thanks for the sympathy.”
“Were you afraid I planned to do the same thing to you as I did to Jing?”
“Can you blame me for removing the opportunity?”
She limped heavily over to my seat and sat down sideways. As she leaned an elbow on the control panel, a shadow shoved my torso against the seat I leaned on; my lungs emptied. I shuddered, sinking into black water.
Mara had said we imagined the shadows, even if they affected us. I writhed onto my back, pushing with my heels until my head touched the cockpit hatch. My wrists throbbed, crushed tight. A shadow pressed down on my chest like someone sitting there, yet no physical presence had stopped me from moving. The artifact had hijacked my senses.
Mara regarded me from above, pale and cold like a queen enthroned.
“I wouldn’t have killed you,” I said. “You’re my friend.”
“Am I?”
Between the pulses of my headache, I tried to decipher her expression.
“To me, you are.”
“I like you. I tolerate you. But often, being around you feels like rolling in nettles, Kirochka.”
“Almost everything irritates you.”
“You’re incapable of seeing people as anything other than reflections of yourself. What you instinctively feel is right, you impose as right for everyone.” She shook her head, then leaned forward, her tone hardening as if she were tired of holding back. “You insist you have to drag me away from my interests, my studies, as if imitating your actions and hobbies would somehow make me impulsive and reckless too. Admit it or not, you think the rest of humanity are just primitive creatures evolving towards becoming you.” She jabbed a finger at her chest. “I need time to myself, Kirochka. Solitude. Reading. Designing one of my machines, or building it. You think people need to be prevented from thinking.”
Exhaustion was crushing me. I imagined another version of myself laughing, suggesting a drink or a movie, assuming Mara’s mood could be cured by a few laps in the pool. But my vision blurred. I blinked, swallowed to make my vocal cords obey.
“We’ve had good times.”
“The best were when I was enduring idiots and tolerating awful music.”
“You showed them you’re smart. Got half the tracking team to stop calling you ‘black dwarf’.”
“Yes, because those morons’ gossip was costing me sleep. You think I need to prove anything to them? They can believe whatever they want.”
Shadows crouched nearby, focusing their hatred on me, clawing at my skin, crushing my flesh with bony grips. They tormented me like chronic pain, but while Mara and I talked, I kept the torture submerged.
“Things went well for you, for a while, with that man you met. I don’t take credit, but would you have met him dining alone?”
The woman, deflated, blinked her glazed eye, rubbing it as if removing grit.
“You’re right. I miss things by focusing on research instead of acting like a savage. But I assure you, Kirochka, we’re too different for me ever to consider you a friend. Sooner or later, we’d stop tolerating each other.”
“We can bridge the differences.”
“You talk to fill silences. You pressure people for attention. You live for interaction. I could never sustain a friendship with someone like that.”
“Do you use me to get things?”
“Everyone uses everyone, if only to feel better about themselves. I just refrain from feeding illusions.” She drew herself up, as if recalling an injustice, and rebuked me with her eyes. “Besides, I didn’t stop running because I was lazy. I barely eat, and nobody’s chasing me in my apartment. Running bores me to death.”
“I wanted the company.”
Mara shook her head. Her tired gaze roamed the cockpit, as if seeing through the walls.
“When you called a few hours ago, I thought you wanted to drag me out drinking with you and the other pilots. I considered pretending I’d fallen asleep with the sound nullifier on. I should have.”
I contorted like a snake, sliding my back up the hatch. I leaned the oxygen recycler back, resting my head against the cool metal. Judging by the ache, when I undressed, my arms would be covered in lurid bruises.
“I consider you a friend. You listen when I need it. My professional peers, the ones who think they’re my friends, even my boyfriend—they’d tell me to shut up for ruining the mood.”
“When have you ever listened to me?”
“I want to. But I have to pry the words out of you.”
“Maybe that should have told you something, Kirochka.”
“That you hate me.”
She sighed, the effort seeming immense, like lifting a great weight.
“I don’t like human beings. I would have chosen to be anything else.”
Flashes on the communications monitor distracted me. Though Mara was still speaking, her words faded to a murmur beneath my notice. The headache pulsed, reddening my vision. Why did the monitor alert snag my attention? I snapped fully alert. It meant an incoming call.
---
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “Body Betrays Itself” by Pharmakon.
In an electric flash and crackle, my muscles seized, and my vision flared white. As I crumpled backward like a dead weight, my left arm and the side of my head slammed into the control panel. My brain thrummed with electricity. It reeked of burning.
In the whiteness, the silhouette of a spacesuit materialized, looming over me. Several shadows clamped onto my arms with claws. One shadow dug its knees into my abdomen and crushed my face between its palms. I tried to scream, but only a ragged whimper escaped my throat. The tangle of shadows obscured my sight, swallowing me. A shadow snatched my hair and pulled; hundreds of points on my scalp prickled tight. Another shadow smothered my nose and mouth.
When I could feel my arms again, I lashed out at the shadows, thrashing as I braced myself against the control panel and the seat. I lunged for a silhouette—Mara’s spacesuit—but she sidestepped, and I plummeted onto the cockpit floor. A blow to the crown of my head plunged me into a murky confusion.
My wrists were bound behind my back—duct tape, I glimpsed, as Mara, crouched by my knees, finished wrapping my ankles. She straightened and hobbled backward. She stepped on the electroshock lance lying discarded on the floor and slipped, but the oxygen recycler clipped to the back of her suit arrested her fall as it struck the hatch.
Gauges of different shapes bulged on her belt like ammunition magazines. The suit’s chest inflated and deflated rhythmically. Mara unlatched her helmet and pulled it off, revealing her ashen face: mouth agape with baby-pink lips; livid, doubled bags under her eyes; strands of black hair plastered to her forehead with sweat. She leaned back against the hatch, gasping through her mouth, the corners glistening with saliva as she scrutinized me with intense, glazed eyes.
The cockpit reeked of sweat and burnt fuses. The shadows had congealed into a mass of human-shaped silhouettes, their hatred addling my brains, boiling me in a cauldron. Mara’s outline, as if traced with a thick black marker, pulsed and expanded.
No more anticipating how to defend myself, because I have you trapped. Thanks to you, the station doesn’t know we came down to the planet. With the tools of the xenobiologist you murdered, I will rip out your tongue, gouge out your eyes, bore into your face.
Mara crouched, setting her helmet on the floor. Exhaustion contorted her actress-like features, as if some illness burdened her with insomnia and pain.
“I thought I was marooned on this planet. I could have just called the station for rescue, but they’d fire me for nothing, and my pride would rather I suffocated than admit I needed help. Now I know—when we found the artifact, I should have tied you up then. Because you, being you, would just stick your nose right up to an alien machine that, for all you knew, could have detonated the outpost. And to understand what drove you to kill that xenobiologist, I imitated you. I stuck my nose up to that thing, and I saw my reflection. Now I know. Unfortunately, I know.” She regarded me like a comatose patient and waved a gloved palm. “Can you hear me? Did I scramble your brain?”
“I hear.”
My voice emerged as a rasp. I coughed. My mouth tasted of metal.
“And you understand?”
I nodded.
The black veil obscuring the cockpit stirred, rippling. Concentrated energy, like the air crackling before a storm. With Mara’s every gesture, the shadows shifted. Their bony claws crushed my thighs, cinching around my spine through suit, skin, and flesh.
A bead of sweat trickled down Mara’s forehead. She rubbed her face, swallowed. Her pupils constricted.
“Is that what you think? That I’ve convinced myself I’ve subdued you? That you’ll fool me until I let you go? That then you’ll finally strangle me? And even if the station calls it murder, no one will bother investigating, because most people who knew me would thank you for killing me.”
“I’m not thinking. When I try, my brain protests.”
Mara hunched down opposite me, reaching out to study the blow on my head, but halfway there her features pinched. She drew herself up, crossing her arms.
“I heard you telling me to come closer. Because you’ll break free, dig your nails into my corneas, and rip my jaw apart.”
My guts roiled; acid surged up my throat.
“You think I think things like that?”
“I feel this second consciousness… it betrays your thoughts as clearly as if you spoke them aloud. Maybe I’ll never understand how the artifact interfered with our minds, not just our language, but it’s a trick.”
I pushed my torso off the floor, sliding my back up the side of a seat inch by inch, trying not to provoke her, until my stomach settled. My head ached where she’d struck me. The throbbing in my skull clouded and inflamed my thoughts.
“You saw him. Jing. What I did.”
“I saw someone down there. I’d need dental records or DNA to be sure, but I trust elimination. I thought you’d claim it was an accident.”
“It was. I attacked the shadows. You feel them, don’t you?”
Mara took a deep breath.
“They’re pawing at me, trying to suffocate me. Products of my own besieged brain, I know, but I can hardly call them pleasant.”
“I wanted to keep it from affecting you. But at least now you understand.”
“Make no mistake. That xenobiologist is lying with his face beaten to a pulp in the second sublevel of an alien outpost because you are you.”
I pressed my lips together, erecting a wall against escaping words. I looked away from Mara’s eyes, concentrating on deepening my breaths. The muscles in my forearms were taut. Pain flared in my constricted wrists. This woman had fired an electroshock lance at me, beaten me, bound me, and now she was assaulting my character.
With her boot-tip, Mara nudged her helmet; it wobbled like a small boat.
“Although the jolts in my neurons, the shadows, and this other consciousness intruding in my mind unnerve me, the effect isn’t so different from how I’ve always felt around people. The two consciousnesses will learn to get along.”
“If you’re not exaggerating,” I said gravely, “I am truly sorry, Mara.”
She pushed damp strands of hair from her forehead and scrubbed it with the back of her glove, smudging it with dust. The corners of her lips sagged as if weights hung from them.
“Thanks for the sympathy.”
“Were you afraid I planned to do the same thing to you as I did to Jing?”
“Can you blame me for removing the opportunity?”
She limped heavily over to my seat and sat down sideways. As she leaned an elbow on the control panel, a shadow shoved my torso against the seat I leaned on; my lungs emptied. I shuddered, sinking into black water.
Mara had said we imagined the shadows, even if they affected us. I writhed onto my back, pushing with my heels until my head touched the cockpit hatch. My wrists throbbed, crushed tight. A shadow pressed down on my chest like someone sitting there, yet no physical presence had stopped me from moving. The artifact had hijacked my senses.
Mara regarded me from above, pale and cold like a queen enthroned.
“I wouldn’t have killed you,” I said. “You’re my friend.”
“Am I?”
Between the pulses of my headache, I tried to decipher her expression.
“To me, you are.”
“I like you. I tolerate you. But often, being around you feels like rolling in nettles, Kirochka.”
“Almost everything irritates you.”
“You’re incapable of seeing people as anything other than reflections of yourself. What you instinctively feel is right, you impose as right for everyone.” She shook her head, then leaned forward, her tone hardening as if she were tired of holding back. “You insist you have to drag me away from my interests, my studies, as if imitating your actions and hobbies would somehow make me impulsive and reckless too. Admit it or not, you think the rest of humanity are just primitive creatures evolving towards becoming you.” She jabbed a finger at her chest. “I need time to myself, Kirochka. Solitude. Reading. Designing one of my machines, or building it. You think people need to be prevented from thinking.”
Exhaustion was crushing me. I imagined another version of myself laughing, suggesting a drink or a movie, assuming Mara’s mood could be cured by a few laps in the pool. But my vision blurred. I blinked, swallowed to make my vocal cords obey.
“We’ve had good times.”
“The best were when I was enduring idiots and tolerating awful music.”
“You showed them you’re smart. Got half the tracking team to stop calling you ‘black dwarf’.”
“Yes, because those morons’ gossip was costing me sleep. You think I need to prove anything to them? They can believe whatever they want.”
Shadows crouched nearby, focusing their hatred on me, clawing at my skin, crushing my flesh with bony grips. They tormented me like chronic pain, but while Mara and I talked, I kept the torture submerged.
“Things went well for you, for a while, with that man you met. I don’t take credit, but would you have met him dining alone?”
The woman, deflated, blinked her glazed eye, rubbing it as if removing grit.
“You’re right. I miss things by focusing on research instead of acting like a savage. But I assure you, Kirochka, we’re too different for me ever to consider you a friend. Sooner or later, we’d stop tolerating each other.”
“We can bridge the differences.”
“You talk to fill silences. You pressure people for attention. You live for interaction. I could never sustain a friendship with someone like that.”
“Do you use me to get things?”
“Everyone uses everyone, if only to feel better about themselves. I just refrain from feeding illusions.” She drew herself up, as if recalling an injustice, and rebuked me with her eyes. “Besides, I didn’t stop running because I was lazy. I barely eat, and nobody’s chasing me in my apartment. Running bores me to death.”
“I wanted the company.”
Mara shook her head. Her tired gaze roamed the cockpit, as if seeing through the walls.
“When you called a few hours ago, I thought you wanted to drag me out drinking with you and the other pilots. I considered pretending I’d fallen asleep with the sound nullifier on. I should have.”
I contorted like a snake, sliding my back up the hatch. I leaned the oxygen recycler back, resting my head against the cool metal. Judging by the ache, when I undressed, my arms would be covered in lurid bruises.
“I consider you a friend. You listen when I need it. My professional peers, the ones who think they’re my friends, even my boyfriend—they’d tell me to shut up for ruining the mood.”
“When have you ever listened to me?”
“I want to. But I have to pry the words out of you.”
“Maybe that should have told you something, Kirochka.”
“That you hate me.”
She sighed, the effort seeming immense, like lifting a great weight.
“I don’t like human beings. I would have chosen to be anything else.”
Flashes on the communications monitor distracted me. Though Mara was still speaking, her words faded to a murmur beneath my notice. The headache pulsed, reddening my vision. Why did the monitor alert snag my attention? I snapped fully alert. It meant an incoming call.
---
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “Body Betrays Itself” by Pharmakon.
