Jon Ureña's Blog, page 17
October 7, 2024
Life update (10/07/2024)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
For whatever reason, I’ve been thinking about my grandfathers. They are both long dead. Looking back, they were the kind of men who should have never been parents, and who due to their shortcomings, created all sorts of generational issues for their descendants.
I’m pretty sure that my grandfather on my mother’s side was autistic. He was that kind of extraordinarily introverted person with rigid thinking who had sensory issues and hated being bothered by anybody, even his kids. He fathered six or seven people, but didn’t raise them: he spent all day holed up in his study, clacking away at his typewriter. Not sure if his kids figured out what he was writing. If his kids were heard at all around his study, he’d stomp out at yell at them.
Apparently, at the end of his life, he confessed to one of his kids that he regretted the fact that he hadn’t been more open to people. I recall the last time he spoke to me: I had been dragged by my mother to her hometown, to hang out around her family, which annoyed me to no end as I couldn’t stand them. I was reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, which I never finished (too heavy for a seventeen-year-old), when I noticed my grandfather staring at me. A few seconds later he pointed out, “You’re reading, huh?” I lifted my gaze to his, to that pathetic smile of someone who wants to interact while having no clue how to do so. I told him, “Yes,” then lowered my gaze to my book again. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him looking around awkwardly as he rubbed his hands.
I didn’t like the guy. It’s no exaggeration to say that I exist because he was a complete shithead. He opposed my mother studying medicine, because he believed that women shouldn’t work. At the end of my mother’s first month as a nurse, he cashed her wages, and bought a book collection for himself, one large enough to fill most of the shelves of his long indoors balcony. My mother, outraged, skipped town. At the first town she ended up, she went searching for the first man who might support her, came across some doofus at a disco, got married and had children.
Regarding my grandfather on my father’s side, the situation was even nuttier. You see, until middle school, I spent the school breaks at my grandparents’, because both of my parents worked. I didn’t really interact with my grandparents (I can’t recall having talked more than five minutes total with either of them, if even that). My grandfather was the son of farmers from Valencia, and he got displaced as a child due to the Civil War. I remember him seated at their sofa, mumbling stupid stuff as he watched nature documentaries or cartoons. I spent most of my time at that home holed up in their guest room, seated at a desk to write or draw. At that point, I dreamed of becoming a cartoonist.
That grandfather was, let’s say, a bit peculiar. My primary school female classmates all knew him, and referred to him as “Jon’s grandpa.” One of the man’s hobbies was to hang out at the entrance of my primary school to approach little girls. He caressed their hair and told them what pretty princesses they were. This took place in the eighties and nineties, so he didn’t get in trouble; those were far more innocent times.
The last time he spoke to me, I came across him at a crossroads near his house. He looked sad and troubled; pretty sure he had already been diagnosed with the bone cancer that would eventually kill him. I remember him glancing at an African man passing us by, then saying, “Everything is changing so fast. I don’t know what’s happening.” I’m old enough to remember a time when meeting in this country a single person from South America was a novelty that prompted everyone to ask them questions. These days, half of the people you come across are ethnic aliens. Most of those accompanied by children are ethnic aliens. And we aren’t getting their “best and brightest” precisely.
Anyway, as my grandfather was lying in his deathbed from which he never stood up again, my parents told me a troubling anecdote: his caretaker had left for five minutes to buy some groceries, when my grandfather suddenly came with some bout of pain or something for which he would have to take the medicine. He called one of his children on the phone. The person told him, “Look at the row of medicine beside your bed. Take the one that says X.” My grandfather burst into tears, then cried out, “I can’t read!”
That man had organized his entire life around hiding the fact that he had never learned how to read. From the stuff he put on the TV, to the situations he involved himself in, if it included some text on the screen, sometimes he simply wandered away without a word. Imagine what sort of father he was; clearly he never taught his children anything. He must have gotten in his head that the shame of others learning that he was incapable of reading and writing was impossible to live with, even though it was understandable: he had been the son of impoverished farmers who couldn’t send him to school, and he endured the Civil War during his schooling years. Instead, due to the man’s choices, he produced a far bigger shame: that of a coward who hid from even his own children so they wouldn’t find out his secret.
In addition, that man allowed one of his sons, my father, to be physically abused for years. I never asked for the specifics, but my father’s uncle regularly beat him over the head, causing him obvious brain damage, if they committed any errors while assisting him as he played the accordion, or some shit.
Anyway, don’t know why I’ve thought about these two long-dead people recently. It’s not like they matter anymore. But the lessons I got from them, one that has been clear to me for a long time, is that some people simply shouldn’t have children; they have to recognize that in themselves and spare their descendants the pain. The world would be a far better place it people took that to heart.
EDIT: I fed this post to the Google thing that produces AI podcasts, and it came out well enough.
[check out the podcasts on my site]
For whatever reason, I’ve been thinking about my grandfathers. They are both long dead. Looking back, they were the kind of men who should have never been parents, and who due to their shortcomings, created all sorts of generational issues for their descendants.
I’m pretty sure that my grandfather on my mother’s side was autistic. He was that kind of extraordinarily introverted person with rigid thinking who had sensory issues and hated being bothered by anybody, even his kids. He fathered six or seven people, but didn’t raise them: he spent all day holed up in his study, clacking away at his typewriter. Not sure if his kids figured out what he was writing. If his kids were heard at all around his study, he’d stomp out at yell at them.
Apparently, at the end of his life, he confessed to one of his kids that he regretted the fact that he hadn’t been more open to people. I recall the last time he spoke to me: I had been dragged by my mother to her hometown, to hang out around her family, which annoyed me to no end as I couldn’t stand them. I was reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, which I never finished (too heavy for a seventeen-year-old), when I noticed my grandfather staring at me. A few seconds later he pointed out, “You’re reading, huh?” I lifted my gaze to his, to that pathetic smile of someone who wants to interact while having no clue how to do so. I told him, “Yes,” then lowered my gaze to my book again. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him looking around awkwardly as he rubbed his hands.
I didn’t like the guy. It’s no exaggeration to say that I exist because he was a complete shithead. He opposed my mother studying medicine, because he believed that women shouldn’t work. At the end of my mother’s first month as a nurse, he cashed her wages, and bought a book collection for himself, one large enough to fill most of the shelves of his long indoors balcony. My mother, outraged, skipped town. At the first town she ended up, she went searching for the first man who might support her, came across some doofus at a disco, got married and had children.
Regarding my grandfather on my father’s side, the situation was even nuttier. You see, until middle school, I spent the school breaks at my grandparents’, because both of my parents worked. I didn’t really interact with my grandparents (I can’t recall having talked more than five minutes total with either of them, if even that). My grandfather was the son of farmers from Valencia, and he got displaced as a child due to the Civil War. I remember him seated at their sofa, mumbling stupid stuff as he watched nature documentaries or cartoons. I spent most of my time at that home holed up in their guest room, seated at a desk to write or draw. At that point, I dreamed of becoming a cartoonist.
That grandfather was, let’s say, a bit peculiar. My primary school female classmates all knew him, and referred to him as “Jon’s grandpa.” One of the man’s hobbies was to hang out at the entrance of my primary school to approach little girls. He caressed their hair and told them what pretty princesses they were. This took place in the eighties and nineties, so he didn’t get in trouble; those were far more innocent times.
The last time he spoke to me, I came across him at a crossroads near his house. He looked sad and troubled; pretty sure he had already been diagnosed with the bone cancer that would eventually kill him. I remember him glancing at an African man passing us by, then saying, “Everything is changing so fast. I don’t know what’s happening.” I’m old enough to remember a time when meeting in this country a single person from South America was a novelty that prompted everyone to ask them questions. These days, half of the people you come across are ethnic aliens. Most of those accompanied by children are ethnic aliens. And we aren’t getting their “best and brightest” precisely.
Anyway, as my grandfather was lying in his deathbed from which he never stood up again, my parents told me a troubling anecdote: his caretaker had left for five minutes to buy some groceries, when my grandfather suddenly came with some bout of pain or something for which he would have to take the medicine. He called one of his children on the phone. The person told him, “Look at the row of medicine beside your bed. Take the one that says X.” My grandfather burst into tears, then cried out, “I can’t read!”
That man had organized his entire life around hiding the fact that he had never learned how to read. From the stuff he put on the TV, to the situations he involved himself in, if it included some text on the screen, sometimes he simply wandered away without a word. Imagine what sort of father he was; clearly he never taught his children anything. He must have gotten in his head that the shame of others learning that he was incapable of reading and writing was impossible to live with, even though it was understandable: he had been the son of impoverished farmers who couldn’t send him to school, and he endured the Civil War during his schooling years. Instead, due to the man’s choices, he produced a far bigger shame: that of a coward who hid from even his own children so they wouldn’t find out his secret.
In addition, that man allowed one of his sons, my father, to be physically abused for years. I never asked for the specifics, but my father’s uncle regularly beat him over the head, causing him obvious brain damage, if they committed any errors while assisting him as he played the accordion, or some shit.
Anyway, don’t know why I’ve thought about these two long-dead people recently. It’s not like they matter anymore. But the lessons I got from them, one that has been clear to me for a long time, is that some people simply shouldn’t have children; they have to recognize that in themselves and spare their descendants the pain. The world would be a far better place it people took that to heart.
EDIT: I fed this post to the Google thing that produces AI podcasts, and it came out well enough.
[check out the podcasts on my site]
October 5, 2024
Life update (10/05/2024)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
Despite what yesterday’s heavy post might imply, I’m in a good mood. It’s half past eight in the morning on a Saturday and I’m the sole technician on duty at work, but it just happens that when today’s shift ends, I’m going on an eight days-long break. Once I return from the break, I’ll only have to work for seven days longer until I go on vacation from the 23rd of October to the 28th of November. I’m going on vacation because I’ve been made aware recently that my company (which is the Basque health service) will no longer pay unspent vacations as long as one has worked for longer than six months (three months in some cases). I’ve been working since November of last year, so I’ve accumulated plenty of off days.
However, I’m covering for a shitty guy who for the last five years or so has only worked for a couple of months at the most before he went on another medical leave. Saying that he “worked” is very generous, because he’s utterly useless when he isn’t actively sabotaging the department. His problems, we all suspect, are of the mental variety. Not the fun kind either. Anyway, I’ve covered plenty of his leaves, and every single time, he has returned without informing anyone. I would come to the office only to find the motherfucker sitting at his desk pretending that he hadn’t just fucked over the one who was replacing him: after all, I won’t get paid for the day I come to work if he’s already there. It was even worse one time when he ended his medical leave on a Friday afternoon without bothering to check if he worked that Saturday, which I covered for him as we had no idea he had returned from his leave. My boss had to deal with HR; otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten paid for that Saturday.
Anyway, that shithead has been on a medical leave since October 31st of last year, and some nasty stuff happens if you spend more than a year off (I suspect that he would have to be monitored by social services), so we are all expecting the guy to appear shortly earlier. Likely on the 30th. By then, I’m on vacation, but if it turns out that the guy returns to work, two things may happen: if my boss doesn’t extend my contract, I’m simply paid for the unspent vacation, but my workplace may call me to work the following day for a new contract, so I wouldn’t enjoy any proper vacation in November (just that uneasy time in which I have no clue what’s going to happen). If my boss extends my contract (I’m not sure if there’s a valid reason for him to do so), I will get paid for my unspent vacation time, but because my vacation time is tied to the previous contract, I’ll have to return to work immediately. Best scenario for me is if the shithead remains on a medical leave, because I’ll get to enjoy a month of paid vacation without worrying about my work calling me back in.
I must mention that I hadn’t gone on vacation before. I mean ever. My work experience is full of holes; nobody would hire me for my curriculum vitae at this point, unless they’re looking for an experienced IT guy. I spent about half of my twenties as a sort of hikikomori, having given up on society and life. I had awful experiences at most of the jobs I endured back then as well, which convinced me that I wasn’t cut out for working full-time (or even part-time, in some places). I’m thirty-nine years old, and unless something weird happens this month, I’m about to enjoy my first periods of true relax without expecting the horrible calls one gets from such companies, like getting woken up any random workday, even on Saturdays, and asked if you can be at the office an hour later. If you refuse, they may erase you from the lists that you have taken exams to be featured in, so you have no choice but to agree.
Anyway, enough about work. Recently I’ve watched two impressive first episodes of new animes which I highly recommend. First of them is Uzumaki, based on the manga of the same name by horror legend Junji Ito, which was Ito’s attempt at figuring out how to make spirals as disturbing as possible. The trailer spoils some of the great images from the first episode, so it’s better to go in without knowing much. In fact, the following clip of the first episode is the only one that isn’t particularly spoilery in that regard.
Finally an anime adaptation does justice to Ito’s style, including the choice of black-and-white.
Then there’s Dandadan. All I knew of this manga is that it follows the adventures of a UFO nerd and a ghosts nerd, and that it was wild as heck. Apart from that, the author had belonged to the creative team led by Tatsuki Fujimoto, author of Fire Punch and Chainsaw Man. Last night I watched the first episode of Dandadan’s anime adaptation; it turned out to be one of the wildest first episodes of any anime I’ve ever seen. You can tell that loads of talented visual artists and animators have worked on it. Here’s the intro.
I have no idea why I haven’t read the manga already; after all, I consume an ungodly amount of isekai series, some that are barely passable, so I could have easily have made space for this one. With such a high-quality anime adaptation, though, I’d rather get through its first season without spoiling myself.
I have checked out very little anime this year. Shame on me. There’s always at least a couple of anime series worth following each season.
Apart from that, I’ve been very invested in developing my Python app neural-narrative, that allows the users to chat with characters controlled by large language models (right now only Hermes 70B and Hermes 405B are programmed in, because they’re uncensored and don’t sound like helpful assistants). I got the idea of doing this throughout my experience with roleplaying in Skyrim with Mantella, a system that also uses large language models so you can talk with the characters. However, Mantella’s system annoyed me with the fact that the bios of all the NPCs are mixed together when you’re talking with several at the same time, which meant that a character’s secrets ended up being known by everyone else. It became a bit ridiculous to hang out with Alva, a vampire from Morthal, only for every new person I spoke to when Alva was involved to immediately realize that she was a bloodsucker.
My system works quite well currently: handles talking with any number of characters at the same time, it generates random worlds, regions, areas, and locations, it suggests interesting situations and dilemmas inspired by your conversations, and lets you travel from place to place. It even generates a travel diary of sorts when you move from area to area, involving whatever followers you have brought along. I wouldn’t have developed this system so fast if I wasn’t relying often on the preview version of OpenAI’s Orion model, which is fucking insane: sometimes I just have to present it with relevant code from other sections of my app, tell the AI what elements I want a new page to include, and it generates a perfect system on the first try. I’ve only had it fail once at a programming task, in a way that wasn’t my mistake for not including enough references. I’m kind of glad that I’m not working as a programmer these days, even though I trained for it and was my original goal, because I can’t imagine what sort of future human programmers are going to have when large language models are bound to surpass them all in the next few years.
I originally intended to program this system in order to post wild stories on my site. It just happens that, one way or another, I always end up going for the kind of wild smut that I don’t want to show to others. The AI is fully uncensored and I love to take advantage of that. I’m trying to figure out a way for the system to suggest less formless stories. The inclusion of interesting situations and dilemmas generated by the AI is one of those ways I’m trying to work on that.
Despite what yesterday’s heavy post might imply, I’m in a good mood. It’s half past eight in the morning on a Saturday and I’m the sole technician on duty at work, but it just happens that when today’s shift ends, I’m going on an eight days-long break. Once I return from the break, I’ll only have to work for seven days longer until I go on vacation from the 23rd of October to the 28th of November. I’m going on vacation because I’ve been made aware recently that my company (which is the Basque health service) will no longer pay unspent vacations as long as one has worked for longer than six months (three months in some cases). I’ve been working since November of last year, so I’ve accumulated plenty of off days.
However, I’m covering for a shitty guy who for the last five years or so has only worked for a couple of months at the most before he went on another medical leave. Saying that he “worked” is very generous, because he’s utterly useless when he isn’t actively sabotaging the department. His problems, we all suspect, are of the mental variety. Not the fun kind either. Anyway, I’ve covered plenty of his leaves, and every single time, he has returned without informing anyone. I would come to the office only to find the motherfucker sitting at his desk pretending that he hadn’t just fucked over the one who was replacing him: after all, I won’t get paid for the day I come to work if he’s already there. It was even worse one time when he ended his medical leave on a Friday afternoon without bothering to check if he worked that Saturday, which I covered for him as we had no idea he had returned from his leave. My boss had to deal with HR; otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten paid for that Saturday.
Anyway, that shithead has been on a medical leave since October 31st of last year, and some nasty stuff happens if you spend more than a year off (I suspect that he would have to be monitored by social services), so we are all expecting the guy to appear shortly earlier. Likely on the 30th. By then, I’m on vacation, but if it turns out that the guy returns to work, two things may happen: if my boss doesn’t extend my contract, I’m simply paid for the unspent vacation, but my workplace may call me to work the following day for a new contract, so I wouldn’t enjoy any proper vacation in November (just that uneasy time in which I have no clue what’s going to happen). If my boss extends my contract (I’m not sure if there’s a valid reason for him to do so), I will get paid for my unspent vacation time, but because my vacation time is tied to the previous contract, I’ll have to return to work immediately. Best scenario for me is if the shithead remains on a medical leave, because I’ll get to enjoy a month of paid vacation without worrying about my work calling me back in.
I must mention that I hadn’t gone on vacation before. I mean ever. My work experience is full of holes; nobody would hire me for my curriculum vitae at this point, unless they’re looking for an experienced IT guy. I spent about half of my twenties as a sort of hikikomori, having given up on society and life. I had awful experiences at most of the jobs I endured back then as well, which convinced me that I wasn’t cut out for working full-time (or even part-time, in some places). I’m thirty-nine years old, and unless something weird happens this month, I’m about to enjoy my first periods of true relax without expecting the horrible calls one gets from such companies, like getting woken up any random workday, even on Saturdays, and asked if you can be at the office an hour later. If you refuse, they may erase you from the lists that you have taken exams to be featured in, so you have no choice but to agree.
Anyway, enough about work. Recently I’ve watched two impressive first episodes of new animes which I highly recommend. First of them is Uzumaki, based on the manga of the same name by horror legend Junji Ito, which was Ito’s attempt at figuring out how to make spirals as disturbing as possible. The trailer spoils some of the great images from the first episode, so it’s better to go in without knowing much. In fact, the following clip of the first episode is the only one that isn’t particularly spoilery in that regard.
Finally an anime adaptation does justice to Ito’s style, including the choice of black-and-white.
Then there’s Dandadan. All I knew of this manga is that it follows the adventures of a UFO nerd and a ghosts nerd, and that it was wild as heck. Apart from that, the author had belonged to the creative team led by Tatsuki Fujimoto, author of Fire Punch and Chainsaw Man. Last night I watched the first episode of Dandadan’s anime adaptation; it turned out to be one of the wildest first episodes of any anime I’ve ever seen. You can tell that loads of talented visual artists and animators have worked on it. Here’s the intro.
I have no idea why I haven’t read the manga already; after all, I consume an ungodly amount of isekai series, some that are barely passable, so I could have easily have made space for this one. With such a high-quality anime adaptation, though, I’d rather get through its first season without spoiling myself.
I have checked out very little anime this year. Shame on me. There’s always at least a couple of anime series worth following each season.
Apart from that, I’ve been very invested in developing my Python app neural-narrative, that allows the users to chat with characters controlled by large language models (right now only Hermes 70B and Hermes 405B are programmed in, because they’re uncensored and don’t sound like helpful assistants). I got the idea of doing this throughout my experience with roleplaying in Skyrim with Mantella, a system that also uses large language models so you can talk with the characters. However, Mantella’s system annoyed me with the fact that the bios of all the NPCs are mixed together when you’re talking with several at the same time, which meant that a character’s secrets ended up being known by everyone else. It became a bit ridiculous to hang out with Alva, a vampire from Morthal, only for every new person I spoke to when Alva was involved to immediately realize that she was a bloodsucker.
My system works quite well currently: handles talking with any number of characters at the same time, it generates random worlds, regions, areas, and locations, it suggests interesting situations and dilemmas inspired by your conversations, and lets you travel from place to place. It even generates a travel diary of sorts when you move from area to area, involving whatever followers you have brought along. I wouldn’t have developed this system so fast if I wasn’t relying often on the preview version of OpenAI’s Orion model, which is fucking insane: sometimes I just have to present it with relevant code from other sections of my app, tell the AI what elements I want a new page to include, and it generates a perfect system on the first try. I’ve only had it fail once at a programming task, in a way that wasn’t my mistake for not including enough references. I’m kind of glad that I’m not working as a programmer these days, even though I trained for it and was my original goal, because I can’t imagine what sort of future human programmers are going to have when large language models are bound to surpass them all in the next few years.
I originally intended to program this system in order to post wild stories on my site. It just happens that, one way or another, I always end up going for the kind of wild smut that I don’t want to show to others. The AI is fully uncensored and I love to take advantage of that. I’m trying to figure out a way for the system to suggest less formless stories. The inclusion of interesting situations and dilemmas generated by the AI is one of those ways I’m trying to work on that.
October 4, 2024
Life update (10/04/2024)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
For no apparent reason, my brain regularly reminds me of events from my long-gone youth, such as my middle school and high school years. Mainly I remember people whom I haven’t seen in more than twenty years. There’s this girl who invited me to hang out in middle school; she was autistically awkward, and seemed interested in me for unknown reasons. Last I knew of her was her receiving, during an arts and crafts class, a nasty gash that bisected her forehead and left a terrible scar presumably for the rest of her life. I never saw her again after middle school, but I remember her sadly from time to time; after all, if I could have cared for her, maybe she would have become my friend. In 2021, I wrote a poem about her. I don’t remember her name, so I can’t google her. I assume she killed herself.
There’s also this guy I hung out with in high school. Name’s Urko, if I recall correctly. He invited me out a few times, but I only recall us sitting at a bench as he went on about PlayStation 2 games. I was a PC gamer through and through, and must have been heavily into Morrowind at the time. I doubt I ever said much to him. I didn’t really want to hang out with anyone, but I was in a period of my life, spurred on by my mother, in which I forced myself to behave like a “normal person,” and normal people were supposed to want to hang out with others, so that’s what I did. Also, life at home wasn’t good either, so I suppose I didn’t want to spent too much time there.
Last time I spoke to the guy, I was playing a basketball match in which that guy also participated. The guy ended up spraining his ankle, and was carried away. Later that week, he approached me and said something to the effect of, “I won’t hang out with you anymore. When I sprained my ankle, you didn’t even ask how I was doing. You don’t care at all, do you?” And he was right, I didn’t.
When I was a teenager, I had the terrible luck of meeting a malignant narcissist. I hung out with him and others for a year and a half or so, until I grew bored of the whole thing. Well, he didn’t accept the fact that life was pulling us in separate ways: from then on, until literally the year of his death in a car accident, the guy, for no apparent reason other than because “he doesn’t understand that friendship is the most important thing in the world,” he made it a life mission to poison every single social group I ended up in, which at that point was mainly the ones I was obligated to find myself in, as in school. He went out of his way (he didn’t attend classes in my city) to befriend people of my class, and even my brother. He approached my then girlfriend and started trying to get her to break up with me. He got really mad, to the extent that it disturbed a friend of his, when my girlfriend, bless her cheating heart, exposed him for having done stuff such as breaking into my email and hijacking my website. In his twenties, that bastard was rising in the ranks of the regional socialist party as a politician, and was the kind to exploit his power to hurt people as much as he could, while smiling to the face of those he was manipulating. When I saw his obituary in the paper, I burst out laughing. Served him right. Why not, here’s an article in Spanish about his death. David Martínez, who unfortunately shares a name with the protagonist of the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners series, was truly my nemesis: nobody has bothered to hinder my existence remotely to that extent since.
It’s always been a struggle for me to care about human beings. Given that I didn’t have the instinct for it, for most of my youth I took it as an intellectual, deliberate pursuit. You cared about people when you made yourself care for them; that’s how I thought it worked for others. Whenever someone approached me, I felt anxious, guarded. As they spoke, in my mind I kept repeating, “Please, stop talking to me.” I couldn’t wait to return to solitude and to my turbulent relationship with my subconscious (who is a motocross legend, as well as the love of my life).
It’s not remotely your run-of-the-mill introversion, of course: I was diagnosed with high-functioning autism (so-called Asperger’s) in my mid-twenties. Due to the cause of autism, which seems to be a non-uniform pruning of neural connections during development, my neurological make-up is different to virtually everyone else, even other autistic people. I read somewhere that on those machines that test neural activity, autists are more different from each other than non-autistic people are from each other, let alone autistic people from non-autistic people. In practice, that means that the things that soothe non-autistic people very well may be terrifying for autistic people. The things that make most people feel good may be jarring or extremely annoying to autists. They are societies of one forced to coexist with foreigners.
I can’t even count how many times someone, I’m tempted to say “some moron,” has suggested to me to behave in this or that way, assuming that my brain worked like theirs and therefore I would experience the same results (that’s assuming that those people weren’t genuine morons and had a proper handle on the mechanisms of their brains). In truth, autists become acutely aware from early on that they’re different from everyone else, and a significant part of their lives consists on adapting to other people’s often bizarre behaviors and needs, that are only the norm because they’re the majority. Many people seem to believe that everyone feels as they feel, although I’m not shocked given how naive if not straight-up retarded most people are when it comes to organizing society.
Maybe because I’ve had my brain functions disrupted by a hemiplegic migraine and by severe stress lately, I’ve been thinking about that troublesome organ of ours. One of the writers I used to admire the most (even though I haven’t read anything of his since my early twenties), John Fowles, author of mainly The Collector and The Magus, suffered a stroke, and afterwards he never wrote fiction again. He said that the stroke had robbed him of his imagination, and he simply didn’t have the drive anymore. He had written because his brain was configured to work like that, for him to want to write in the first place.
Studies about people whose brain hemispheres were surgically separated to prevent severe epilepsy have pretty much proven that free will is an illusion (check, for example, this article on the subject). I’ve always suspected as much, so I don’t believe in my own delusions: I do things because I’m urged to do them. In my spare time, if I feel like writing, I do so. If I feel like producing music or programming, I do those instead. You could say that it’s a lack of discipline or something, because one may give up on a hard task and instead waste his time unproductively, but I’d say that the very “want” of doing something hard instead of wasting one’s time is the urge your brain forces you to follow. I’m just glad that I haven’t been pressured by my brain into killing people or doing similarly troublesome things that would land me in prison. On a regular basis, I do imagine many, many things that would land me in prison, though.
All these things also prove that you’re just your brain. If part of it dies, there’s no “soul” to correct the missing part. I’m fairly certain that ghosts exist, but I’m inclined to believe that they’re some sort of electromagnetic phenomena produced by the brain while it was alive (I’ve come across studies on the matter recently), phenomena that may be preserved in specific objects or locations because of subatomic entanglement. Why won’t those wave functions collapse, who knows. Anyway, there’s no “other place” after death, Abrahamic or not, that will justify all the pain and horribleness of life. And unless the universe itself is a simulation, that may very well be, we only consider reasons regarding its existence because its configuration has allowed us to exist, meaning that for all we know there are uncountable universes out there in which nobody can consider such matters.
Why did I write all this garbage? It’s 9:17 in the morning, I’m at work, and I have nothing else to do. Why did you bother reading it? That’s the real question, ain’t it.
EDIT: the AI-generated Google podcast Deep Dive has quickly become my favorite podcast (not that I listen to many podcasts these days). I’ve fed it this post, and it has come up with the following podcast:
[check out the podcast on my site]
For no apparent reason, my brain regularly reminds me of events from my long-gone youth, such as my middle school and high school years. Mainly I remember people whom I haven’t seen in more than twenty years. There’s this girl who invited me to hang out in middle school; she was autistically awkward, and seemed interested in me for unknown reasons. Last I knew of her was her receiving, during an arts and crafts class, a nasty gash that bisected her forehead and left a terrible scar presumably for the rest of her life. I never saw her again after middle school, but I remember her sadly from time to time; after all, if I could have cared for her, maybe she would have become my friend. In 2021, I wrote a poem about her. I don’t remember her name, so I can’t google her. I assume she killed herself.
There’s also this guy I hung out with in high school. Name’s Urko, if I recall correctly. He invited me out a few times, but I only recall us sitting at a bench as he went on about PlayStation 2 games. I was a PC gamer through and through, and must have been heavily into Morrowind at the time. I doubt I ever said much to him. I didn’t really want to hang out with anyone, but I was in a period of my life, spurred on by my mother, in which I forced myself to behave like a “normal person,” and normal people were supposed to want to hang out with others, so that’s what I did. Also, life at home wasn’t good either, so I suppose I didn’t want to spent too much time there.
Last time I spoke to the guy, I was playing a basketball match in which that guy also participated. The guy ended up spraining his ankle, and was carried away. Later that week, he approached me and said something to the effect of, “I won’t hang out with you anymore. When I sprained my ankle, you didn’t even ask how I was doing. You don’t care at all, do you?” And he was right, I didn’t.
When I was a teenager, I had the terrible luck of meeting a malignant narcissist. I hung out with him and others for a year and a half or so, until I grew bored of the whole thing. Well, he didn’t accept the fact that life was pulling us in separate ways: from then on, until literally the year of his death in a car accident, the guy, for no apparent reason other than because “he doesn’t understand that friendship is the most important thing in the world,” he made it a life mission to poison every single social group I ended up in, which at that point was mainly the ones I was obligated to find myself in, as in school. He went out of his way (he didn’t attend classes in my city) to befriend people of my class, and even my brother. He approached my then girlfriend and started trying to get her to break up with me. He got really mad, to the extent that it disturbed a friend of his, when my girlfriend, bless her cheating heart, exposed him for having done stuff such as breaking into my email and hijacking my website. In his twenties, that bastard was rising in the ranks of the regional socialist party as a politician, and was the kind to exploit his power to hurt people as much as he could, while smiling to the face of those he was manipulating. When I saw his obituary in the paper, I burst out laughing. Served him right. Why not, here’s an article in Spanish about his death. David Martínez, who unfortunately shares a name with the protagonist of the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners series, was truly my nemesis: nobody has bothered to hinder my existence remotely to that extent since.
It’s always been a struggle for me to care about human beings. Given that I didn’t have the instinct for it, for most of my youth I took it as an intellectual, deliberate pursuit. You cared about people when you made yourself care for them; that’s how I thought it worked for others. Whenever someone approached me, I felt anxious, guarded. As they spoke, in my mind I kept repeating, “Please, stop talking to me.” I couldn’t wait to return to solitude and to my turbulent relationship with my subconscious (who is a motocross legend, as well as the love of my life).
It’s not remotely your run-of-the-mill introversion, of course: I was diagnosed with high-functioning autism (so-called Asperger’s) in my mid-twenties. Due to the cause of autism, which seems to be a non-uniform pruning of neural connections during development, my neurological make-up is different to virtually everyone else, even other autistic people. I read somewhere that on those machines that test neural activity, autists are more different from each other than non-autistic people are from each other, let alone autistic people from non-autistic people. In practice, that means that the things that soothe non-autistic people very well may be terrifying for autistic people. The things that make most people feel good may be jarring or extremely annoying to autists. They are societies of one forced to coexist with foreigners.
I can’t even count how many times someone, I’m tempted to say “some moron,” has suggested to me to behave in this or that way, assuming that my brain worked like theirs and therefore I would experience the same results (that’s assuming that those people weren’t genuine morons and had a proper handle on the mechanisms of their brains). In truth, autists become acutely aware from early on that they’re different from everyone else, and a significant part of their lives consists on adapting to other people’s often bizarre behaviors and needs, that are only the norm because they’re the majority. Many people seem to believe that everyone feels as they feel, although I’m not shocked given how naive if not straight-up retarded most people are when it comes to organizing society.
Maybe because I’ve had my brain functions disrupted by a hemiplegic migraine and by severe stress lately, I’ve been thinking about that troublesome organ of ours. One of the writers I used to admire the most (even though I haven’t read anything of his since my early twenties), John Fowles, author of mainly The Collector and The Magus, suffered a stroke, and afterwards he never wrote fiction again. He said that the stroke had robbed him of his imagination, and he simply didn’t have the drive anymore. He had written because his brain was configured to work like that, for him to want to write in the first place.
Studies about people whose brain hemispheres were surgically separated to prevent severe epilepsy have pretty much proven that free will is an illusion (check, for example, this article on the subject). I’ve always suspected as much, so I don’t believe in my own delusions: I do things because I’m urged to do them. In my spare time, if I feel like writing, I do so. If I feel like producing music or programming, I do those instead. You could say that it’s a lack of discipline or something, because one may give up on a hard task and instead waste his time unproductively, but I’d say that the very “want” of doing something hard instead of wasting one’s time is the urge your brain forces you to follow. I’m just glad that I haven’t been pressured by my brain into killing people or doing similarly troublesome things that would land me in prison. On a regular basis, I do imagine many, many things that would land me in prison, though.
All these things also prove that you’re just your brain. If part of it dies, there’s no “soul” to correct the missing part. I’m fairly certain that ghosts exist, but I’m inclined to believe that they’re some sort of electromagnetic phenomena produced by the brain while it was alive (I’ve come across studies on the matter recently), phenomena that may be preserved in specific objects or locations because of subatomic entanglement. Why won’t those wave functions collapse, who knows. Anyway, there’s no “other place” after death, Abrahamic or not, that will justify all the pain and horribleness of life. And unless the universe itself is a simulation, that may very well be, we only consider reasons regarding its existence because its configuration has allowed us to exist, meaning that for all we know there are uncountable universes out there in which nobody can consider such matters.
Why did I write all this garbage? It’s 9:17 in the morning, I’m at work, and I have nothing else to do. Why did you bother reading it? That’s the real question, ain’t it.
EDIT: the AI-generated Google podcast Deep Dive has quickly become my favorite podcast (not that I listen to many podcasts these days). I’ve fed it this post, and it has come up with the following podcast:
[check out the podcast on my site]
October 1, 2024
Song “Schizosaurus Rex” (Paisley Underground version) from Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 4
In case you don’t know, this year I’ve been exploiting the amazing AI service Udio to produce songs. I’ve already made and released two full albums based on a strange story I wrote back in 2021, named Odes to My Triceratops. It follows the adventures and misadventures of a trio of friends who live in a town lost in the map. The main dude is a songwriter named William Griffin, who’s passionate and sensitive, if a bit unhinged. Another character is William’s next-door neighbor Claire Javernick, a blind redhead. Then we have Lorenzo, who’s a sentient triceratops for no justifiable reason. You can download the first two albums of this story through this link.
So yeah, a fresh new song directly to your ears, this one in the style of the relatively obscure Paisley Underground movement, which is a sort of garage psychedelic rock with a Californian vibe. I’m very fond of how this tune turned out.
[check out the song itself on my site]
Lyrics below:
A beast from the deep,
The monster under your bed.
Eyes red like the setting sun,
Claws the size and weight
Of a heavy human soul.
It can’t die; it only transforms.
It can’t be stopped,
Unless it decides to stop.
I have a portal to hell inside my throat.
It hurts, but I’m getting used to the pain.
Still, I don’t know whom I hate more:
The world, or myself.
This isn’t the story of how I died.
This is the story of how I met a girl,
We fell in love, and she betrayed me.
She didn’t do it on purpose;
She was just a dumb kid.
Besides, the darkness drove her crazy,
Almost as crazy as me.
I ain’t a poet, couldn’t hope to be,
But I’m the only person left:
A castaway in a plastic kayak,
Drifting down the River Styx
Past skeletons clinging to rocks,
Reaching out for a bite to eat.
You and I, love, we shared our lives,
We did the best we could,
But the best we could
Was a steaming pile of dogshit.
Someday I’ll make it to that faraway shore
Where eagles soar on golden wings.
There, I’ll sit and rest in my blue suit.
I’ll watch as time goes by,
Not aging a day, not losing a thing.
The memories will blur and fade
Until all I have left is me.
So yeah, a fresh new song directly to your ears, this one in the style of the relatively obscure Paisley Underground movement, which is a sort of garage psychedelic rock with a Californian vibe. I’m very fond of how this tune turned out.
[check out the song itself on my site]
Lyrics below:
A beast from the deep,
The monster under your bed.
Eyes red like the setting sun,
Claws the size and weight
Of a heavy human soul.
It can’t die; it only transforms.
It can’t be stopped,
Unless it decides to stop.
I have a portal to hell inside my throat.
It hurts, but I’m getting used to the pain.
Still, I don’t know whom I hate more:
The world, or myself.
This isn’t the story of how I died.
This is the story of how I met a girl,
We fell in love, and she betrayed me.
She didn’t do it on purpose;
She was just a dumb kid.
Besides, the darkness drove her crazy,
Almost as crazy as me.
I ain’t a poet, couldn’t hope to be,
But I’m the only person left:
A castaway in a plastic kayak,
Drifting down the River Styx
Past skeletons clinging to rocks,
Reaching out for a bite to eat.
You and I, love, we shared our lives,
We did the best we could,
But the best we could
Was a steaming pile of dogshit.
Someday I’ll make it to that faraway shore
Where eagles soar on golden wings.
There, I’ll sit and rest in my blue suit.
I’ll watch as time goes by,
Not aging a day, not losing a thing.
The memories will blur and fade
Until all I have left is me.
September 30, 2024
Life update (09/30/2024)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
Last night, I was looking for someone in an unspecified South American country. This took place in a dream, by the way. A guy, whom I somehow knew was the leader of some notorious gang or cartel, told me that he would lead me to the person I was looking for. Although I was aware that he would probably try to kill me, I hoped to get the upper hand on him. I spent what seemed to be hours navigating very detailed, bizarre locations in this dream South American country; one of those experiences that make you wonder if through dreaming one accesses some parallel realm. Anyway, the dream ended without a resolution, because my phone alarm sounded. Six in the morning, time to go to work.
It’s so disturbing to dream for hours, looking at strange locations through a good set of eyes, only to wake up and find my right eye screwed up. As I mentioned in previous posts, I few days ago I suffered a retinal tear that sent me to the ER, and that they got lasered shortly after. I’m now supposedly recovering from the surgery. My vision, however, is quite diminished: a frayed lock of fibers keeps dancing in front of my vision, and the rest is dotted with the vitreous gel equivalent of dust motes. Imagine having a lock of hair trapped inside your eyeball and you being unable to do anything about it but shift your gaze around to try to keep it at the edges of your vision. I have some level of OCD, so this garbage is driving me nuts. I’m tempted to just wear an eyepatch. I suspect that such floaters don’t casually go away even after weeks or months, and that now I’ll be forced to tolerate this disruption permanently.
On top of that, I spoke with my general practitioner on the phone to tell him that for what seems to be months, I haven’t felt right in the head: I’m confused often, I make bizarre errors at work, sometimes I confuse the order of letters as I’m writing (even though I’m not dyslexic), and from time to time I feel pressure in the area of my right eye and temple. My right eye, by the way, is the one that has suffered a torn retina, and I can’t tell if that was a coincidence. I was told that my confusion and such would pass after my regrettable episode of hemiplegic migraine, but it hasn’t been the case. To be honest, though, I can’t be sure for how long I’ve been suffering these symptoms: these last five or six months have been an utter nightmare at work, as I was tasked with coordinating the replacement of about 940 printers, which forced me to endure high levels of stress weekly. I haven’t been fully myself for a long time.
In general, I feel like I’m falling apart. My general practitioner told me that he would put me in contact with some neurologist, and from there, perhaps I’ll get an MRI done to discard possible faulty blood vessels, or brain damage. Neither of them would surprise me.
Anyway, this afternoon I hope to start ordering my notes for the next chapter of my ongoing novel. Thankfully, my artistic endeavors make me feel like I’m progressing somewhere other than the grave.
Last night, I was looking for someone in an unspecified South American country. This took place in a dream, by the way. A guy, whom I somehow knew was the leader of some notorious gang or cartel, told me that he would lead me to the person I was looking for. Although I was aware that he would probably try to kill me, I hoped to get the upper hand on him. I spent what seemed to be hours navigating very detailed, bizarre locations in this dream South American country; one of those experiences that make you wonder if through dreaming one accesses some parallel realm. Anyway, the dream ended without a resolution, because my phone alarm sounded. Six in the morning, time to go to work.
It’s so disturbing to dream for hours, looking at strange locations through a good set of eyes, only to wake up and find my right eye screwed up. As I mentioned in previous posts, I few days ago I suffered a retinal tear that sent me to the ER, and that they got lasered shortly after. I’m now supposedly recovering from the surgery. My vision, however, is quite diminished: a frayed lock of fibers keeps dancing in front of my vision, and the rest is dotted with the vitreous gel equivalent of dust motes. Imagine having a lock of hair trapped inside your eyeball and you being unable to do anything about it but shift your gaze around to try to keep it at the edges of your vision. I have some level of OCD, so this garbage is driving me nuts. I’m tempted to just wear an eyepatch. I suspect that such floaters don’t casually go away even after weeks or months, and that now I’ll be forced to tolerate this disruption permanently.
On top of that, I spoke with my general practitioner on the phone to tell him that for what seems to be months, I haven’t felt right in the head: I’m confused often, I make bizarre errors at work, sometimes I confuse the order of letters as I’m writing (even though I’m not dyslexic), and from time to time I feel pressure in the area of my right eye and temple. My right eye, by the way, is the one that has suffered a torn retina, and I can’t tell if that was a coincidence. I was told that my confusion and such would pass after my regrettable episode of hemiplegic migraine, but it hasn’t been the case. To be honest, though, I can’t be sure for how long I’ve been suffering these symptoms: these last five or six months have been an utter nightmare at work, as I was tasked with coordinating the replacement of about 940 printers, which forced me to endure high levels of stress weekly. I haven’t been fully myself for a long time.
In general, I feel like I’m falling apart. My general practitioner told me that he would put me in contact with some neurologist, and from there, perhaps I’ll get an MRI done to discard possible faulty blood vessels, or brain damage. Neither of them would surprise me.
Anyway, this afternoon I hope to start ordering my notes for the next chapter of my ongoing novel. Thankfully, my artistic endeavors make me feel like I’m progressing somewhere other than the grave.
September 27, 2024
Ended up in the hospital (as a patient), Pt. 5
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
It feels like I’ve just posted an entry of this series, but here comes the next one! The previous entry recounted how I had ended up in the ER with a diagnosis of hemiplegic migraine. As they performed tests on these poor eyes of mine, to discard possible damage, they did in fact find damage in my right eyeball: my vitreous gel had detached. The doctor wasn’t sure whether that had happened years, months, or weeks earlier. Anyway, she told me that I should be careful, because it could develop into retinal tears or retinal detachment.
Yesterday I started feeling that another migraine was coming. Given that I no longer experience regular migraines since I started taking beta-blockers for my poor heart, this was probably yet another episode of the dreaded hemiplegic migraine. I experienced a weird pressure behind my right eyeball as well as in that temple, and I felt some nausea. I also made bizarre errors at work that I can’t explain; in the worst case, I accidentally mixed the data of a user I was creating with my own data, which left me unable to access the intranet. I still don’t know how that happened, because as far as I know, it should have been impossible.
This morning, as I finished writing the latest entry of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked, a conspicious black filament suddenly appeared in my right eye’s vision. When I shifted my gaze, it moved like thin kelp in the sea. I’m familiar with floaters from my previous detached vitreous gel, but this was a new artifact in my deteriorating vision. And, as I came to learn, just the beginning. The vision of my right eye worsened: the couple of blurry dots turned into a myriad, the thin kelp-like fibers became a tangled mass right in the center of my vision. Soon enough, it felt like I was looking through the water of a fish tank that hasn’t been cleaned in a while. This wasn’t a migraine, but a physical defect in my eye, one that was worsening by the minute.
I hurried to the ER. A couple of tests later, they confirmed that I’ve developed a tear in my right retina, and it was necessary to patch it up with laser to block further deterioration. The doctor was young, in his early twenties. He didn’t explain basically anything about the procedure or what steps I should take to recover from it. He didn’t even give me a report, which I’m pretty sure they’re obligated to do. Anyway, he sat me in front of some contraption with a built-in laser, he numbed my right eyeball with some drops, and pressed some crystal thing to my cornea. Shortly after, I learned how it feels to have a laser stitch the inside of your eyeball. Every flash of red light was accompanied with a gnawing sensation in the middle of a very delicate organ. Manly tears of pain streamed down my face. If I had retained a sense of humor at that moment, I might have imagined myself receiving a demon eye from Kishirika Kishirisu. Alas, I wasn’t in the mood, because my body has been breaking down steadily, in strange ways, these last three or so years. I’m exhausted and pissed off.
Worse yet, although the laser, with its biting, burning ways, has likely prevented further deterioration, what I can see from my right eyeball at the moment (my pupil is still dilated, and I’m not wearing that contact lens) suggests that the floaters that had seeped in from my retina or whatever have found a permanent residence there, and the vision of that eyeball is permanently fucked.
After that young doctor finished messing with my eyeball, he left me seated at the waiting room, right after telling me that I should have no problem going to work (I’m working the afternoon shift). The guy disappeared. After I regained some sense of self, I looked for him again, but couldn’t find him. I wanted to know if I could put on the contact lens, and if I needed to do something specific to recover from the ordeal. A nurse informed me that my right eyeball should be able to tolerate a contact lens. She also pulled me aside and cleaned the residue from the sticky numbing drops, which apparently looked like white splotches. So on top of the humiliation that my right eyeball subjected me to, I must have looked as if someone came in my face. I’m living my best possible life.
Anyway, I’m at work right now. I have informed my boss that I’m not supposed to lift weights nor do any strange movements for about two weeks, which could be a problem; we are sometimes told to move computers and printers around, or at least crawl under tables to push the ends of cables into wall sockets. Now I can only anticipate in what bizarre way my health will deteriorate in the upcoming years, until get tired of this shitty life and jump off a bridge. By the way, my health issues, from my heart to my eyeballs to my other balls (found a lump in there), apart from a markedly subdued mood and occasional disorientation, started when I got pricked in the shoulder with an experimental treatment for some world-wide disaster that shan’t be named. My heart started acting up that same day. It’s a good thing I won’t have children, because I probably lack swimmers at this point.
Anyway, fuck off and all that jazz.
EDIT: I fed this post to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of your material, and they came up with a particularly compelling Deep Dive. Thanks for cheering me up, guys.
[check out the AI-generated podcast if you want]
It feels like I’ve just posted an entry of this series, but here comes the next one! The previous entry recounted how I had ended up in the ER with a diagnosis of hemiplegic migraine. As they performed tests on these poor eyes of mine, to discard possible damage, they did in fact find damage in my right eyeball: my vitreous gel had detached. The doctor wasn’t sure whether that had happened years, months, or weeks earlier. Anyway, she told me that I should be careful, because it could develop into retinal tears or retinal detachment.
Yesterday I started feeling that another migraine was coming. Given that I no longer experience regular migraines since I started taking beta-blockers for my poor heart, this was probably yet another episode of the dreaded hemiplegic migraine. I experienced a weird pressure behind my right eyeball as well as in that temple, and I felt some nausea. I also made bizarre errors at work that I can’t explain; in the worst case, I accidentally mixed the data of a user I was creating with my own data, which left me unable to access the intranet. I still don’t know how that happened, because as far as I know, it should have been impossible.
This morning, as I finished writing the latest entry of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked, a conspicious black filament suddenly appeared in my right eye’s vision. When I shifted my gaze, it moved like thin kelp in the sea. I’m familiar with floaters from my previous detached vitreous gel, but this was a new artifact in my deteriorating vision. And, as I came to learn, just the beginning. The vision of my right eye worsened: the couple of blurry dots turned into a myriad, the thin kelp-like fibers became a tangled mass right in the center of my vision. Soon enough, it felt like I was looking through the water of a fish tank that hasn’t been cleaned in a while. This wasn’t a migraine, but a physical defect in my eye, one that was worsening by the minute.
I hurried to the ER. A couple of tests later, they confirmed that I’ve developed a tear in my right retina, and it was necessary to patch it up with laser to block further deterioration. The doctor was young, in his early twenties. He didn’t explain basically anything about the procedure or what steps I should take to recover from it. He didn’t even give me a report, which I’m pretty sure they’re obligated to do. Anyway, he sat me in front of some contraption with a built-in laser, he numbed my right eyeball with some drops, and pressed some crystal thing to my cornea. Shortly after, I learned how it feels to have a laser stitch the inside of your eyeball. Every flash of red light was accompanied with a gnawing sensation in the middle of a very delicate organ. Manly tears of pain streamed down my face. If I had retained a sense of humor at that moment, I might have imagined myself receiving a demon eye from Kishirika Kishirisu. Alas, I wasn’t in the mood, because my body has been breaking down steadily, in strange ways, these last three or so years. I’m exhausted and pissed off.
Worse yet, although the laser, with its biting, burning ways, has likely prevented further deterioration, what I can see from my right eyeball at the moment (my pupil is still dilated, and I’m not wearing that contact lens) suggests that the floaters that had seeped in from my retina or whatever have found a permanent residence there, and the vision of that eyeball is permanently fucked.
After that young doctor finished messing with my eyeball, he left me seated at the waiting room, right after telling me that I should have no problem going to work (I’m working the afternoon shift). The guy disappeared. After I regained some sense of self, I looked for him again, but couldn’t find him. I wanted to know if I could put on the contact lens, and if I needed to do something specific to recover from the ordeal. A nurse informed me that my right eyeball should be able to tolerate a contact lens. She also pulled me aside and cleaned the residue from the sticky numbing drops, which apparently looked like white splotches. So on top of the humiliation that my right eyeball subjected me to, I must have looked as if someone came in my face. I’m living my best possible life.
Anyway, I’m at work right now. I have informed my boss that I’m not supposed to lift weights nor do any strange movements for about two weeks, which could be a problem; we are sometimes told to move computers and printers around, or at least crawl under tables to push the ends of cables into wall sockets. Now I can only anticipate in what bizarre way my health will deteriorate in the upcoming years, until get tired of this shitty life and jump off a bridge. By the way, my health issues, from my heart to my eyeballs to my other balls (found a lump in there), apart from a markedly subdued mood and occasional disorientation, started when I got pricked in the shoulder with an experimental treatment for some world-wide disaster that shan’t be named. My heart started acting up that same day. It’s a good thing I won’t have children, because I probably lack swimmers at this point.
Anyway, fuck off and all that jazz.
EDIT: I fed this post to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of your material, and they came up with a particularly compelling Deep Dive. Thanks for cheering me up, guys.
[check out the AI-generated podcast if you want]
We’re Fucked, Pt. 127 (Fiction)
[check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better]
After an hiatus of nine months, mostly so I could tell the story of a motocross legend, my ongoing story, as long as a trilogy of novels, has returned. I wouldn’t blame if you if you’ve forgotten all about it. You can read any of its chapters on here, or listen to the existing audiochapters on here. I won’t continue producing audiochapters, though, because I have my fingers in too many pies. Anyway, let’s get rolling.
---
In the tomblike blackness, as if I were descending into the bowels of the earth, I keep inhaling oxygen to sustain the biological machinery of my aging body, even though every breath fills my throat and lungs with the stench of ammonia and rotten meat, a stink so overwhelming that it could knock out a woolly mammoth.
A click of a switch, followed by a whirring and the faint whooshing of air. With a buzz, fluorescent bulbs flare to life, bathing the subterranean lair in a bright glow.
“Here’s why I’m constantly up to my neck in bills,” my boss says.
At the center of the square-shaped room sits a hulking mass of metal: a shiny aluminum cylinder. No, not a cylinder, because a person-wide opening curves into the device, a path blocked now by an orange gate barrier that may have been pilfered from the streets. From the top of the machine grows a cluster of industrial piping, electrical wiring, and conduits resembling the ruptured guts of a mechanical beast.
A vibration disturbs the air like a low-frequency hum. From the opening of the spiral, through the gate barrier, danger leaks as a tangible yet invisible force; I sense the glare of a cosmic intelligence beyond my understanding.
The sight of Ramsés’ face, this swine in the guise of a man, with his middle-aged features, unkempt mustache, receding hairline, and lack of resemblance to Jacqueline or anyone I’d like to stare at, would have made me want to push him down a flight of stairs. Now, though, I’m glad he was born: he has led me to the one thing I couldn’t be arsed to search for properly.
“Hell yeah,” I say, and rub my palms. “I hate to admit it, boss, but you’ve done a great service for the universe.”
I grasp at the slippery reins of my sanity like a drowning woman clawing at pieces of driftwood. Alright, how can I destroy this reality-shattering device? The engraving of a skull and crossbones flashes in my mind: my trusty revolver, now stored in my work desk. I feel a pang of longing for its wood and steel to remind me of the glory days when I was still the main character and not the slave of others’ whims. Hey, Spike, my deformed, castrated pal, apart from wanting your own head blown into inhuman sludge, is this why you brought your revolver along? But I lack enough bullets to blast this spirally cylinder into nothing. Besides, I can’t forget the feeling of my hand being torn off that one time I relied on gunfire to defeat my foes, back when Alberto oozed from the wall in all his blobby, seething depravity to ruin my evening with apocalyptic tidings.
The stench is burning holes into my sinuses, and the hostility emanating from the machine thrums through my bones, but I approach the silvery-white shell, which reflects my blurry likeness like a liquid mirror. After rubbing my chin, I kick the device to gauge its solidity. Clang.
I was thinking of asking my boss if he had a chainsaw at the ready, when his hand, thick and beefy, wraps around my biceps, gripping tightly. He pulls me backward. Once I wriggle free, I’m tempted to punch Ramsés’ jaw with the force of my pent-up frustration and despair, which would atomize his teeth and ignite the meat of his face and pop his eyes. However, the fiend’s scraggly face, a map of the terrain of the damned, has contorted into a scowl, like a gorilla’s after I punted one of his relatives.
“Leire, what the hell are you doing?! You see an object you don’t understand, and the first thought you have is to break it?! Are you a chimpanzee?!”
My hand clenches around the ballpoint pen as if it were a dagger. The notion of impaling one of Ramsés’ eyeballs seems like a beautiful dream.
“Nah, I wasn’t planning on wrecking your stupid pipe thing, I just wanted to, you know, tap on it? Maybe I detected a kink that would be fixed by a whack on the side. Now seriously: I’ve finally found the cause of my misfortunes, the culprit to this whole ‘shredding reality’ business, and it’s been in the basement of my workplace all along! I should have known, given how this place has sucked up my soul ever since I foolishly allowed myself to be employed here. Anyway, once I find a way to obliterate this heinous contraption, this spiraling gate into insanity, the universe will be safe. Well, relatively safe, until the next asshole erects their own death machine. So let’s figure out how to acquire nitroglycerine.”
“Fuck’s sake, Leire, what are you blathering about?”
I sigh.
“Listen, boss, I can tell you haven’t grown so weary of life that you’ve been fiddling with, perhaps even fondling, an interdimensional end-of-the-world machine fully aware of the lethal stakes. You simply haven’t been notified by otherworldly monstrosities that tolerating this thing’s existence would lead to the irreversible and terminal cancerization of our fucking shithole of a world. Still, I must lay some blame on you, sir, as an accessory to this shitfest, whether through incompetence, naivete, or willful ignorance, if not sheer fucking stupidity, as long as you feel the machine’s malevolent aura attempting to smother our minds with its diabolical power. I shan’t have my newfound family squashed by a collapsing space-time continuum, so I must prevent the end of the universe, the death of everything, the grand finale of reality!”
Ramsés’ brow furrows as his jaw clenches, and I expect a torrent of insults and threats to gush from his mouth. Instead, he strokes the edge of his graying moustache, that unsanitary ornament made out of curly, coarse fibers that I wish to rip off strand by strand. His nostrils flare as he sucks in a breath to speak.
“I should have known you’re so demented that you wouldn’t think twice before assaulting delicate, irreplaceable hardware. Leire, I’m going to tell you a little story.”
“Oh my, is it story time? Can’t we skip it?”
“No, damn it. I need you to understand something about the machine.”
“Isn’t this chimpanzee too dumb to learn?”
My boss scrunches his greasy, perverted mug in annoyance. He pats his jacket, fishes out a cigarette, clamps it between his teeth, and lights it up. Then he takes a drag so deep that the tip glows red.
“Shut your trap and listen. This story starts back in the eighties or early nineties, when the internet was still a network of text terminals for academics. I was a kid then, if you can picture that. We used to visit relatives on my mother’s side, traveling out of province. In that family’s foyer hung a painting that terrified me even before I heard the adults talk about it. As soon as I stepped through the doorway, a malicious glare coming from the painting stabbed me through as if saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing in my house? Get out!’ I only dared to glance at the picture once, but in that brief look, I burned it into my memory.” My boss exhales smoke, then continues. “The painting depicted an elderly, bearded fisherman garbed in a canary-yellow raincoat. He faced the viewer, standing in a wooden dinghy surrounded by choppy seas and a stormy sky. The image seemed hyperrealistic, as if I could reach out and touch that rough water. The family that had chosen such an unsettling painting as the centerpiece of their foyer spoke of strange occurrences attached to it: a stench of rotten fish coming from the entrance, footsteps pacing up and down the hallway at night. I didn’t enjoy staying over. Anyway, one evening, as my brother and I were playing on the SNES in our cousins’ bedroom, the lights shut off. Far faster than it would have been possible, the stench of rotten fish swarmed the room. I heard the adults hurrying to the entrance, where they flipped the circuit breaker. I don’t recall how the rest of the evening transpired, but from that day on, I knew the painting was haunted.”
“Wow. This turned out to be an intriguing tale.”
“Sure. But as I grew older, I learned that the smell of rotten fish can be caused by circuit failure, as can a sudden power outage. Some heat-resistant chemical coatings release such stink before burning up. And strong electromagnetic fields mess with people’s brains, make them feel as if they’re being watched. You see what I’m getting at?”
“That you gaslit yourself into believing that you didn’t experience a paranormal event, just because you couldn’t handle the truth? Maybe the painting was haunted. Have you thought of that?”
Ramsés’ frown deepens.
“I told you I did.”
“It could have been both electricity and a ghost. Poltergeists love fucking with electrical systems. Anyway, I see far weirder stuff on the daily. Cultures across all ages have spoken of ghosts, and depicted them in similar ways. Doesn’t that count as evidence?”
“That may be the case, but it’s irrelevant to my point.”
“What did your tale have to do with this spiraling death machine, then?”
My boss throws his hands up.
“Oh, who knows!”
“Sure, we can waste time with anecdotes. After all, there’s no hurry to destroy that thing, not when the universe is about to be torn apart. Why don’t we find the painting, burn it with gasoline, then piss on its ashes? Not that we’d need to bother, because the world will be ending soon.”
Ramsés flicks his cigarette, sending a clump of ash to the floor.
“I suppose I must spell it out for you: the machine’s electromagnetic field messes with your already screwed-up head. You’re hypersensitive to it. Don’t bother me with this nonsense about the end of the world. Take a seat and calm down.”
---
Author’s note: today’s songs are “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails, and “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead. I keep a playlist with the myriad songs I’ve mentioned throughout this series. Check it out.
I’ve missed you, Leire, you fucking nutcase. I hope I can get back in the groove of this story soon.
By the way, Ramsés’ story is straight out of my childhood. The original experience is even wilder when it comes to what my relatives told about how the painting changed.
Speaking of spirals, the anime adaptation of Junji Ito’s masterpiece about obsession and spirals premieres tomorrow. Check out the clip below:
[check out the post on my site for what remains of it]
After an hiatus of nine months, mostly so I could tell the story of a motocross legend, my ongoing story, as long as a trilogy of novels, has returned. I wouldn’t blame if you if you’ve forgotten all about it. You can read any of its chapters on here, or listen to the existing audiochapters on here. I won’t continue producing audiochapters, though, because I have my fingers in too many pies. Anyway, let’s get rolling.
---
In the tomblike blackness, as if I were descending into the bowels of the earth, I keep inhaling oxygen to sustain the biological machinery of my aging body, even though every breath fills my throat and lungs with the stench of ammonia and rotten meat, a stink so overwhelming that it could knock out a woolly mammoth.
A click of a switch, followed by a whirring and the faint whooshing of air. With a buzz, fluorescent bulbs flare to life, bathing the subterranean lair in a bright glow.
“Here’s why I’m constantly up to my neck in bills,” my boss says.
At the center of the square-shaped room sits a hulking mass of metal: a shiny aluminum cylinder. No, not a cylinder, because a person-wide opening curves into the device, a path blocked now by an orange gate barrier that may have been pilfered from the streets. From the top of the machine grows a cluster of industrial piping, electrical wiring, and conduits resembling the ruptured guts of a mechanical beast.
A vibration disturbs the air like a low-frequency hum. From the opening of the spiral, through the gate barrier, danger leaks as a tangible yet invisible force; I sense the glare of a cosmic intelligence beyond my understanding.
The sight of Ramsés’ face, this swine in the guise of a man, with his middle-aged features, unkempt mustache, receding hairline, and lack of resemblance to Jacqueline or anyone I’d like to stare at, would have made me want to push him down a flight of stairs. Now, though, I’m glad he was born: he has led me to the one thing I couldn’t be arsed to search for properly.
“Hell yeah,” I say, and rub my palms. “I hate to admit it, boss, but you’ve done a great service for the universe.”
I grasp at the slippery reins of my sanity like a drowning woman clawing at pieces of driftwood. Alright, how can I destroy this reality-shattering device? The engraving of a skull and crossbones flashes in my mind: my trusty revolver, now stored in my work desk. I feel a pang of longing for its wood and steel to remind me of the glory days when I was still the main character and not the slave of others’ whims. Hey, Spike, my deformed, castrated pal, apart from wanting your own head blown into inhuman sludge, is this why you brought your revolver along? But I lack enough bullets to blast this spirally cylinder into nothing. Besides, I can’t forget the feeling of my hand being torn off that one time I relied on gunfire to defeat my foes, back when Alberto oozed from the wall in all his blobby, seething depravity to ruin my evening with apocalyptic tidings.
The stench is burning holes into my sinuses, and the hostility emanating from the machine thrums through my bones, but I approach the silvery-white shell, which reflects my blurry likeness like a liquid mirror. After rubbing my chin, I kick the device to gauge its solidity. Clang.
I was thinking of asking my boss if he had a chainsaw at the ready, when his hand, thick and beefy, wraps around my biceps, gripping tightly. He pulls me backward. Once I wriggle free, I’m tempted to punch Ramsés’ jaw with the force of my pent-up frustration and despair, which would atomize his teeth and ignite the meat of his face and pop his eyes. However, the fiend’s scraggly face, a map of the terrain of the damned, has contorted into a scowl, like a gorilla’s after I punted one of his relatives.
“Leire, what the hell are you doing?! You see an object you don’t understand, and the first thought you have is to break it?! Are you a chimpanzee?!”
My hand clenches around the ballpoint pen as if it were a dagger. The notion of impaling one of Ramsés’ eyeballs seems like a beautiful dream.
“Nah, I wasn’t planning on wrecking your stupid pipe thing, I just wanted to, you know, tap on it? Maybe I detected a kink that would be fixed by a whack on the side. Now seriously: I’ve finally found the cause of my misfortunes, the culprit to this whole ‘shredding reality’ business, and it’s been in the basement of my workplace all along! I should have known, given how this place has sucked up my soul ever since I foolishly allowed myself to be employed here. Anyway, once I find a way to obliterate this heinous contraption, this spiraling gate into insanity, the universe will be safe. Well, relatively safe, until the next asshole erects their own death machine. So let’s figure out how to acquire nitroglycerine.”
“Fuck’s sake, Leire, what are you blathering about?”
I sigh.
“Listen, boss, I can tell you haven’t grown so weary of life that you’ve been fiddling with, perhaps even fondling, an interdimensional end-of-the-world machine fully aware of the lethal stakes. You simply haven’t been notified by otherworldly monstrosities that tolerating this thing’s existence would lead to the irreversible and terminal cancerization of our fucking shithole of a world. Still, I must lay some blame on you, sir, as an accessory to this shitfest, whether through incompetence, naivete, or willful ignorance, if not sheer fucking stupidity, as long as you feel the machine’s malevolent aura attempting to smother our minds with its diabolical power. I shan’t have my newfound family squashed by a collapsing space-time continuum, so I must prevent the end of the universe, the death of everything, the grand finale of reality!”
Ramsés’ brow furrows as his jaw clenches, and I expect a torrent of insults and threats to gush from his mouth. Instead, he strokes the edge of his graying moustache, that unsanitary ornament made out of curly, coarse fibers that I wish to rip off strand by strand. His nostrils flare as he sucks in a breath to speak.
“I should have known you’re so demented that you wouldn’t think twice before assaulting delicate, irreplaceable hardware. Leire, I’m going to tell you a little story.”
“Oh my, is it story time? Can’t we skip it?”
“No, damn it. I need you to understand something about the machine.”
“Isn’t this chimpanzee too dumb to learn?”
My boss scrunches his greasy, perverted mug in annoyance. He pats his jacket, fishes out a cigarette, clamps it between his teeth, and lights it up. Then he takes a drag so deep that the tip glows red.
“Shut your trap and listen. This story starts back in the eighties or early nineties, when the internet was still a network of text terminals for academics. I was a kid then, if you can picture that. We used to visit relatives on my mother’s side, traveling out of province. In that family’s foyer hung a painting that terrified me even before I heard the adults talk about it. As soon as I stepped through the doorway, a malicious glare coming from the painting stabbed me through as if saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing in my house? Get out!’ I only dared to glance at the picture once, but in that brief look, I burned it into my memory.” My boss exhales smoke, then continues. “The painting depicted an elderly, bearded fisherman garbed in a canary-yellow raincoat. He faced the viewer, standing in a wooden dinghy surrounded by choppy seas and a stormy sky. The image seemed hyperrealistic, as if I could reach out and touch that rough water. The family that had chosen such an unsettling painting as the centerpiece of their foyer spoke of strange occurrences attached to it: a stench of rotten fish coming from the entrance, footsteps pacing up and down the hallway at night. I didn’t enjoy staying over. Anyway, one evening, as my brother and I were playing on the SNES in our cousins’ bedroom, the lights shut off. Far faster than it would have been possible, the stench of rotten fish swarmed the room. I heard the adults hurrying to the entrance, where they flipped the circuit breaker. I don’t recall how the rest of the evening transpired, but from that day on, I knew the painting was haunted.”
“Wow. This turned out to be an intriguing tale.”
“Sure. But as I grew older, I learned that the smell of rotten fish can be caused by circuit failure, as can a sudden power outage. Some heat-resistant chemical coatings release such stink before burning up. And strong electromagnetic fields mess with people’s brains, make them feel as if they’re being watched. You see what I’m getting at?”
“That you gaslit yourself into believing that you didn’t experience a paranormal event, just because you couldn’t handle the truth? Maybe the painting was haunted. Have you thought of that?”
Ramsés’ frown deepens.
“I told you I did.”
“It could have been both electricity and a ghost. Poltergeists love fucking with electrical systems. Anyway, I see far weirder stuff on the daily. Cultures across all ages have spoken of ghosts, and depicted them in similar ways. Doesn’t that count as evidence?”
“That may be the case, but it’s irrelevant to my point.”
“What did your tale have to do with this spiraling death machine, then?”
My boss throws his hands up.
“Oh, who knows!”
“Sure, we can waste time with anecdotes. After all, there’s no hurry to destroy that thing, not when the universe is about to be torn apart. Why don’t we find the painting, burn it with gasoline, then piss on its ashes? Not that we’d need to bother, because the world will be ending soon.”
Ramsés flicks his cigarette, sending a clump of ash to the floor.
“I suppose I must spell it out for you: the machine’s electromagnetic field messes with your already screwed-up head. You’re hypersensitive to it. Don’t bother me with this nonsense about the end of the world. Take a seat and calm down.”
---
Author’s note: today’s songs are “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails, and “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead. I keep a playlist with the myriad songs I’ve mentioned throughout this series. Check it out.
I’ve missed you, Leire, you fucking nutcase. I hope I can get back in the groove of this story soon.
By the way, Ramsés’ story is straight out of my childhood. The original experience is even wilder when it comes to what my relatives told about how the painting changed.
Speaking of spirals, the anime adaptation of Junji Ito’s masterpiece about obsession and spirals premieres tomorrow. Check out the clip below:
[check out the post on my site for what remains of it]
September 24, 2024
Life update (09/24/2024)
[check out this post on my personal site, where it looks better]
Today I’ve gotten yet another proof of the fact that I’m one of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet. Allow me to explain the situation so you can point at my retarded self and laugh.
I’ve been working IT at a hospital complex since 2018. I will never be on a permanent contract for this organization, because I can’t speak Basque. But I replace workers when they go on medical leaves, on vacation, or when the bosses call in reinforcements for some project or general disaster (my longest uninterrupted period of work in my life happened during the covid heights). I’ve never taken vacation days, in this job or any other. I was under the impression that I got paid for those days, because it said so on my paysheets. And I’m not one to go on trips like your average Instagram girl, or do anything in particular during the holidays. After all, my sole purpose with working is to earn as much money as possible, so I gladly sacrificed vacation days to add more money to my bank account. There’s also something in my personality that highly dislikes inconveniencing people and making things difficult for others, which would happen by throwing my vacation days into the mix. That, admittedly, is a bizarre thing for my brain to feel when I spend part of my weeks daydreaming about murdering people.
As you may see coming, my coworkers started mentioning to me recently that if I didn’t spend my vacation days, I wouldn’t get reimbursed for them. I don’t know why this year, after six years working here, is the first time I’m hearing about this. Before I started this whole months-long project of replacing nearly a thousand printers in the whole hospital complex, my boss mentioned that he wasn’t sure if I would get paid for the unspent vacation days, but that he would consult with HR. He never returned to me on that subject. And I suspect now that he was always aware that I couldn’t reimburse my vacation days, and the fact that I never take vacation days was part of the fact why he assigned the printer project to me, because the bulk of it would get done during the summer. I stupidly, stupidly didn’t insist on him telling me whether or not my vacation days would get reimbursed.
Today I visited the appropriate departments, and I got the appropriate bewildered looks that anyone would offer to someone who says that he hasn’t taken vacation days in six years even though he doesn’t know if he has gotten reimbursed for them. You see, I am a dumb motherfucker, after all. I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, given that I’m autistic and such dysfunction isn’t precisely uncommon, but every time something like this happens, it makes me wonder if I really should try to pretend that I can live like a normal person, at least when it comes to working.
Anyway, I learned that I have the right to take five days off for personal reasons, four days off because they didn’t count properly last year’s vacations, three days off because of the Saturdays I’ve worked this month, and 21 days of regular vacations. So I suppose that I will spend most of the two following months writing, programming, molesting myself, and possibly traveling a bit.
That’s all I wanted to say. Bye, bitches.
Today I’ve gotten yet another proof of the fact that I’m one of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet. Allow me to explain the situation so you can point at my retarded self and laugh.
I’ve been working IT at a hospital complex since 2018. I will never be on a permanent contract for this organization, because I can’t speak Basque. But I replace workers when they go on medical leaves, on vacation, or when the bosses call in reinforcements for some project or general disaster (my longest uninterrupted period of work in my life happened during the covid heights). I’ve never taken vacation days, in this job or any other. I was under the impression that I got paid for those days, because it said so on my paysheets. And I’m not one to go on trips like your average Instagram girl, or do anything in particular during the holidays. After all, my sole purpose with working is to earn as much money as possible, so I gladly sacrificed vacation days to add more money to my bank account. There’s also something in my personality that highly dislikes inconveniencing people and making things difficult for others, which would happen by throwing my vacation days into the mix. That, admittedly, is a bizarre thing for my brain to feel when I spend part of my weeks daydreaming about murdering people.
As you may see coming, my coworkers started mentioning to me recently that if I didn’t spend my vacation days, I wouldn’t get reimbursed for them. I don’t know why this year, after six years working here, is the first time I’m hearing about this. Before I started this whole months-long project of replacing nearly a thousand printers in the whole hospital complex, my boss mentioned that he wasn’t sure if I would get paid for the unspent vacation days, but that he would consult with HR. He never returned to me on that subject. And I suspect now that he was always aware that I couldn’t reimburse my vacation days, and the fact that I never take vacation days was part of the fact why he assigned the printer project to me, because the bulk of it would get done during the summer. I stupidly, stupidly didn’t insist on him telling me whether or not my vacation days would get reimbursed.
Today I visited the appropriate departments, and I got the appropriate bewildered looks that anyone would offer to someone who says that he hasn’t taken vacation days in six years even though he doesn’t know if he has gotten reimbursed for them. You see, I am a dumb motherfucker, after all. I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, given that I’m autistic and such dysfunction isn’t precisely uncommon, but every time something like this happens, it makes me wonder if I really should try to pretend that I can live like a normal person, at least when it comes to working.
Anyway, I learned that I have the right to take five days off for personal reasons, four days off because they didn’t count properly last year’s vacations, three days off because of the Saturdays I’ve worked this month, and 21 days of regular vacations. So I suppose that I will spend most of the two following months writing, programming, molesting myself, and possibly traveling a bit.
That’s all I wanted to say. Bye, bitches.
September 16, 2024
Life update (09/16/2024)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
---
Who’s back at work? I am! After five days of a blissful medical leave to recover from a hemiplegic migraine, I’m back at the environment that put me in the ER to begin with.
As part of the fact that I’m autistic, looking at people in the eyes and acting like a more-or-less normal human being is always a struggle, and something I have to do deliberately; turns out that people don’t take it well if you remain silent when they address you. Shortly after I entered the office, I sensed the glances of “as soon as he looks at me, I’ll ask about what happened to him.” I never engage those. And the social worker slash computer technician, whose political opinions she had expressed over the months with the certainty that everyone shares them, asked me, “You’re back, so you’re okay now, right?” I could barely be arsed to shrug in her direction. What do you care? And more importantly, why do I need to pretend that I want to talk to you, when I don’t even want you here? Does my paycheck cover that?
It’s hard to deal with anything in a job that clashes with my basic nature, and that risks causing me brain and heart damage due to the mounting stress that I’m unable to handle. Merely being outside of a room in which I’m the only person present causes me stress. The very presence of human beings, that feel like wild animals to me, causes me stress. Being in charge of coordinating the replacement of nearly a thousand printers, which has involved having to negotiate with supervisors and users that love to cause problems and complain if they have the opportunity, has chipped away at my sanity little by little, and I don’t have the tools to prevent that other than not working here. I’m basically a ticking bomb until the next time I end up in the ER, with a body that will grow increasingly unable to recover from the attacks of arrhythmia and migraines.
This medical leave has put a spotlight on the fact that the only reason I’m miserable most of the time is because of my job. Otherwise, I was in a good mood, programming away at my little project, reading manga and such. I even found myself laughing at times. But it’s not like I can quit; I’m a middle-aged man with no real alternative that would pay the same, and programming jobs are getting harder to land due to AI (not that I blame AI for it, as I use it extensively for programming myself). Hell, even before I started working as an IT guy at a hospital, I wasn’t getting hired because I was too old and my curriculum was too spotty; it’s not a good idea to put down on that document, “I lost my will to engage in society, and at times even to live, so I spent long stretches of time barely leaving my parents’ apartment once every couple of weeks. I also collected pee bottles.”
Even though I have to deal with background despair daily due to the state of the world and how it will progressively encroach into my life (my home was nearly broken into a few years ago or so by a couple of imported arabs, for one), when I’m alone in a room, left to my own devices, none of that matters anymore. For everything else, I have manga, my fantasies, and my right hand.
As Jack said at the end of Chinatown, “As little as possible.” I can’t stand the current world. I don’t care about people. I will do whatever benefits me, and as little as possible of anything else.
---
Who’s back at work? I am! After five days of a blissful medical leave to recover from a hemiplegic migraine, I’m back at the environment that put me in the ER to begin with.
As part of the fact that I’m autistic, looking at people in the eyes and acting like a more-or-less normal human being is always a struggle, and something I have to do deliberately; turns out that people don’t take it well if you remain silent when they address you. Shortly after I entered the office, I sensed the glances of “as soon as he looks at me, I’ll ask about what happened to him.” I never engage those. And the social worker slash computer technician, whose political opinions she had expressed over the months with the certainty that everyone shares them, asked me, “You’re back, so you’re okay now, right?” I could barely be arsed to shrug in her direction. What do you care? And more importantly, why do I need to pretend that I want to talk to you, when I don’t even want you here? Does my paycheck cover that?
It’s hard to deal with anything in a job that clashes with my basic nature, and that risks causing me brain and heart damage due to the mounting stress that I’m unable to handle. Merely being outside of a room in which I’m the only person present causes me stress. The very presence of human beings, that feel like wild animals to me, causes me stress. Being in charge of coordinating the replacement of nearly a thousand printers, which has involved having to negotiate with supervisors and users that love to cause problems and complain if they have the opportunity, has chipped away at my sanity little by little, and I don’t have the tools to prevent that other than not working here. I’m basically a ticking bomb until the next time I end up in the ER, with a body that will grow increasingly unable to recover from the attacks of arrhythmia and migraines.
This medical leave has put a spotlight on the fact that the only reason I’m miserable most of the time is because of my job. Otherwise, I was in a good mood, programming away at my little project, reading manga and such. I even found myself laughing at times. But it’s not like I can quit; I’m a middle-aged man with no real alternative that would pay the same, and programming jobs are getting harder to land due to AI (not that I blame AI for it, as I use it extensively for programming myself). Hell, even before I started working as an IT guy at a hospital, I wasn’t getting hired because I was too old and my curriculum was too spotty; it’s not a good idea to put down on that document, “I lost my will to engage in society, and at times even to live, so I spent long stretches of time barely leaving my parents’ apartment once every couple of weeks. I also collected pee bottles.”
Even though I have to deal with background despair daily due to the state of the world and how it will progressively encroach into my life (my home was nearly broken into a few years ago or so by a couple of imported arabs, for one), when I’m alone in a room, left to my own devices, none of that matters anymore. For everything else, I have manga, my fantasies, and my right hand.
As Jack said at the end of Chinatown, “As little as possible.” I can’t stand the current world. I don’t care about people. I will do whatever benefits me, and as little as possible of anything else.
September 9, 2024
Life update (09/09/2024)
A couple of days ago, I must have been having a really bad, anxiety-filled dream at about five in the morning, because I lunged forward only to find the wall in my way. I banged my head hard enough that I ended up with a bruise. That side of my head still feels weird.
I don’t know if that episode meant anything. Today I’ve gotten through an absolutely awful Monday for which I was already exhausted when it started. I’m close to finishing the replacement of about 940 printers in the hospital complex where I work, an operation that has made me consider going on a medical leave for depression a couple of times, not to mention fantasize about quitting or just never returning to this job. Last week, my boss told me that he wanted to put me in charge, along with another coworker, of replacing every single computer in the hospital complex. That’s about five times if not more the amount of printers. He had the gall to say that, after all, the whole deal of replacing the printers wasn’t that big of a task. Containing myself, I said, “No, it has been an utter nightmare.” Nothing will stop my boss from forcing me to replace all the computers unless I’m not employed there, so my fantasizing about not working as an IT guy at a hospital has multiplied.
It’s not just the act of replacing the printers: anything printer related gets sent my way. This last week we’ve had a pandemonium at the ER because the printers worked intermittently, and we discovered that something is wrong with the membership of some active directory groups, it seems just for a few groups of printers in the ER as far as we have detected. Well, I had the bigwigs at the ER berating me, suggesting that nothing of that kind happened before we changed the printers. The matter remains unresolved. There are lingering issues, not like that one, but that I dread listening about almost every day, because I have no idea how to solve them, and nobody can help. I want to quit and not work for a long, long while. Hopefully for the rest of my life, but obviously that isn’t feasible.
When my shift ends, I take a bus, then a train, then another bus home. Society has turned into a zoo, and it gets worse by the year. A few days ago I was thinking about the detachment I have felt for many years about the place I live in, and this world in general, and I’ve gotten to the conclusion that after you reached a point in which only your cowardice stopped you from dying, and afterwards you’ve yearned so many times to go to sleep and not wake up again, you exist in a different plane than the vast majority of human beings. I don’t understand how my coworkers relate to each other, or care about each others’ stuff, or organize plans and outings and such in their private lives. Most months I do the same stuff. When I go out, I usually walk to some solitary places in the woods nearby, because there’s nothing else for me out there. And what used to be a haven has also become tainted, but I don’t want to go into details. It just makes me angry.
I got my fantasies, of course. I survive thanks to daydreaming, some purely mind-based and some applied, plenty of them sexual. There’s also the works of art of other people, who are usually Japanese. Give me another derivative story about some isekai-d guy getting kicked out of a band of adventurers, and then delving into dungeons on his own to get stronger, and I’m as happy as I can be. Often I’ve been on the verge of losing my stop on the train because of how easily I disappear into such stories. I’ve honestly fantasized about getting hit by a truck, because at least that would be an ironic death for someone like me. I would die with a smile on my face, thinking of the zany adventures I’d have in another world.
Maybe I’m depressed again, who knows. I’m certainly disoriented, generally out of it, lethargic, on the verge of imploding at times. I feel like I’m operating on a regular basis at the edge of my capabilities as a human being for no real reward other than money, that every passing day is worth less. And I’ve started to worry about my the state of my brain, because I feel that it’s deteriorating. Something feels wrong. It doesn’t help that my eyes have been acting up for a while; sometimes when I whip my gaze around, I get flashes of darkness. I had a campimetry done a month or so ago, and the doctor told me that the results were odd. They put me up for another check-up in six months. The only thing related to my optic nerves that I know could be an issue is the pituitary tumor with which I was born or that I developed as a child; but I take chronic medication for it, without which the tumor may grow enouth to press against the optic nerve. I don’t know much other than the fact that I don’t feel right. Most days, just walking around feels like a struggle in the sense that I’m so out of it that I may end up bumping into people without noticing, and it doesn’t seem like it’s getting better.
There’s a quote from Ham on Rye, Bukowski’s best book, that says “I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn’t let me.” That’s how I’ve felt most of my life, and I feel it very acutely these days. Anyway, I’m going to bed, to lose myself in dreams that despite being saturated in anxiety, are still better than my life.
I don’t know if that episode meant anything. Today I’ve gotten through an absolutely awful Monday for which I was already exhausted when it started. I’m close to finishing the replacement of about 940 printers in the hospital complex where I work, an operation that has made me consider going on a medical leave for depression a couple of times, not to mention fantasize about quitting or just never returning to this job. Last week, my boss told me that he wanted to put me in charge, along with another coworker, of replacing every single computer in the hospital complex. That’s about five times if not more the amount of printers. He had the gall to say that, after all, the whole deal of replacing the printers wasn’t that big of a task. Containing myself, I said, “No, it has been an utter nightmare.” Nothing will stop my boss from forcing me to replace all the computers unless I’m not employed there, so my fantasizing about not working as an IT guy at a hospital has multiplied.
It’s not just the act of replacing the printers: anything printer related gets sent my way. This last week we’ve had a pandemonium at the ER because the printers worked intermittently, and we discovered that something is wrong with the membership of some active directory groups, it seems just for a few groups of printers in the ER as far as we have detected. Well, I had the bigwigs at the ER berating me, suggesting that nothing of that kind happened before we changed the printers. The matter remains unresolved. There are lingering issues, not like that one, but that I dread listening about almost every day, because I have no idea how to solve them, and nobody can help. I want to quit and not work for a long, long while. Hopefully for the rest of my life, but obviously that isn’t feasible.
When my shift ends, I take a bus, then a train, then another bus home. Society has turned into a zoo, and it gets worse by the year. A few days ago I was thinking about the detachment I have felt for many years about the place I live in, and this world in general, and I’ve gotten to the conclusion that after you reached a point in which only your cowardice stopped you from dying, and afterwards you’ve yearned so many times to go to sleep and not wake up again, you exist in a different plane than the vast majority of human beings. I don’t understand how my coworkers relate to each other, or care about each others’ stuff, or organize plans and outings and such in their private lives. Most months I do the same stuff. When I go out, I usually walk to some solitary places in the woods nearby, because there’s nothing else for me out there. And what used to be a haven has also become tainted, but I don’t want to go into details. It just makes me angry.
I got my fantasies, of course. I survive thanks to daydreaming, some purely mind-based and some applied, plenty of them sexual. There’s also the works of art of other people, who are usually Japanese. Give me another derivative story about some isekai-d guy getting kicked out of a band of adventurers, and then delving into dungeons on his own to get stronger, and I’m as happy as I can be. Often I’ve been on the verge of losing my stop on the train because of how easily I disappear into such stories. I’ve honestly fantasized about getting hit by a truck, because at least that would be an ironic death for someone like me. I would die with a smile on my face, thinking of the zany adventures I’d have in another world.
Maybe I’m depressed again, who knows. I’m certainly disoriented, generally out of it, lethargic, on the verge of imploding at times. I feel like I’m operating on a regular basis at the edge of my capabilities as a human being for no real reward other than money, that every passing day is worth less. And I’ve started to worry about my the state of my brain, because I feel that it’s deteriorating. Something feels wrong. It doesn’t help that my eyes have been acting up for a while; sometimes when I whip my gaze around, I get flashes of darkness. I had a campimetry done a month or so ago, and the doctor told me that the results were odd. They put me up for another check-up in six months. The only thing related to my optic nerves that I know could be an issue is the pituitary tumor with which I was born or that I developed as a child; but I take chronic medication for it, without which the tumor may grow enouth to press against the optic nerve. I don’t know much other than the fact that I don’t feel right. Most days, just walking around feels like a struggle in the sense that I’m so out of it that I may end up bumping into people without noticing, and it doesn’t seem like it’s getting better.
There’s a quote from Ham on Rye, Bukowski’s best book, that says “I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn’t let me.” That’s how I’ve felt most of my life, and I feel it very acutely these days. Anyway, I’m going to bed, to lose myself in dreams that despite being saturated in anxiety, are still better than my life.
