Jon Ureña's Blog, page 34

We're Fucked, Pt. 93 (Fiction)

Check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better

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The heat drains from my cheeks, although my heart keeps pounding in my throat, and my nipples remain puffy and sensitive.

"I won't apologize for my arousal. I'm a woman, I need my breasts licked from time to time. Lately I have decreased my stress, as well as the anxiety and frustration of living, by indulging in plenty of orgasms, and my regal mommy has been more than obliging."

"Even in my diminished state," the blob begins, "I understand the biological urge to procreate by any means necessary. So does Jacqueline. She's a live wire, that one. Anyway, I'm glad someone's relationship is working out, although you have the emotional capacity of an iguana."

"You know, I could choose to get pissed off about that remark, but I'm a mature girl; I can admit my shortcomings. Yes, some accident of birth, in combination with growing up among aliens who lacked an understanding of love, has crippled my ability to connect with human beings. My neglectful upbringing also burdened me with a chronic sense of helplessness and desperation. I had accepted that some people are doomed to spend their lives alone because of what they're born into. But one morning, as I was sobbing in the bathroom, Jacqueline came in and wrapped me in her arms, breaking down the megalithic wall of anger and frustration around my heart, sheltering me from my icy despair. Ever since, mommy has taught me how to feel like a human being again."

The black bulk of goo shudders.

"Your words might have worked on me if they hadn't involved your kink."

"I put up with being conscious for a main reason: to anticipate the next time that Jacqueline will allow me to see the universe from a better perspective, that of me lying prone between her spread, thick thighs while she reclines on a heap of puffy toss pillows of faux fur. A four-strand platinum necklace graces her collarbones and glints in the ring lights of the cameras. Her fleshy breasts drift to the sides of her chest in creamy white mounds. As saliva dribbles from the corners of my mouth, I dig my fingers into mommy's thighs and I latch on to her dripping wet pussy with my mouth like a leech to a wound. My tongue slides along her hot, velvet-soft labia. I inhale the intoxicating fragrance of her arousal while I gulp greedily on her feminine nectar in a feast of tender, pink flesh. I caress her pearl-like clitoris with flicks of my tongue. My lips pucker around the engorged nub to suckle it as mommy's juices dribble down my chin. Jacqueline lets out little sighs. She runs her fingers through my hair while purring that I'm a good girl, which makes me forget how old and broken I am. My hands slide upwards over her toned abdomen until I reach her bountiful orbs of flesh. I squeeze them, pinching between my fingers those nipples of hers, turgid like swollen with milk, as she gasps and arches her back. I keep kneading her plump, pillowy boobs, and devouring her clit. The soft curls of her pubes are tickling the inside of my nostrils. I yearn to make mommy moan and squirm with pleasure, I yearn to propel her in a crescendo of rapture. A shudder rolls through Jacqueline, who whimpers and writhes against my tongue. Her quivering, silken thighs flex around my head as if to crush it, sealing my ears in a vice-like grip. After she digs her heels into my spine, she clamps a hand on my nape to thrust my face deeper into her muff. Her pussy spasms against my lips, so I flick my tongue furiously on her throbbing nub like a ravenous kitten, to milk every ounce of mommy's pleasure. I picture her face flushing crimson, her eyes glistening with unshed tears, as she cums savagely, anointing me by squirting her sticky nectar against the underside of my tongue like a warm shower in a tropical sun. Some of her essence spills out of my mouth down my chin and neck, but I guzzle the rest until its spout sputters empty. After I've licked her clean, I laze against her thick thighs, panting and bloated, my face coated in womanly cream. Oh mommy, drown me in amniotic fluid! I adore you more than anyone else in the cosmos could."

"You sure can ramble about pussy," the blob says with a hint of snark. "You first met Jacqueline after she changed."

"Changed? Are you suggesting that her twin monuments of human flesh were artificially enlarged? To be fair, I was doubtful at first, so I looked for the scars of plastic surgery. No scar tissue anywhere around the rosy globes of her breasts!"

"I know, real likely down to the DNA. This universe turned out to be disturbingly more intriguing than I imagined. Now here's a question: would you have become obsessed with a plain-looking Jacqueline?"

"Why, did that ex-wife of yours, who ruined your life as well as your ability to trust the opposite sex, look like a purulent troll?"

"I wouldn't go that far," says the black and viscous bulk of goo, "despite her rotten nature."

"Then I'll answer your insolent question with another one: who knows how much worse our loved ones could look until we ceased to love them? Speaking of nature's devious tricks, blame it for instilling the concept of beauty in our brains, a hardwired biological bias for the eye-catching that can override logic and reason, to entrap us into multiplying endlessly regardless of what's right for the ecosystem, or what's left of our sanity. What better example than the beautiful butterfly? Their iridescent coloration hides a fragile existence: they live to perpetuate their genetic material as winged sperm depositories. For a tiny female butterfly, mating is akin to getting gangbanged."

"That's enough philosophizing," the blob interjects.

"Those gaudy colors that we love are all too soon reduced to dust."

"Anyway, you've got it easy with Jacqueline. She turned out to be a better gal than I thought, far better than you deserve."

The hairs on my nape rise, and I shrug to contain a shiver. This gelatinous mound of blackness, that must be rotting from within as it examines me through dozens of eyeballs, has triggered my dread: I may sense my regal girlfriend distancing herself from me as if my babbling were a contagious disease.

"I know that. I'm terrified that one day she will discover my true nature, my sick soul. She'll be disgusted by my snaky hair, by the sweat that stains my armpits, by my rancid flesh, and by the dung that oozes out of my anus."

The viscous goo chuckles, which gives way to a gargling noise.

"It's way too late to stop the rot, buddy. You should just enjoy the fruits of your loathsome union."

"I'm a barren planet orbiting a sun, and astrometry suggests that the difference in our masses will end up flinging us apart."

"So you do understand that if someone you love were to betray and leave you, it could wreck you forever."

"Did I say anything to the contrary? If Jacqueline cheated on me and abandoned me, I would use Spike's revolver to blast my head off. You only became an unholy abomination."

---

Author's note: today's songs are "We Lived Alone" by Connie Converse, "She's a Rainbow" by The Rolling Stones, and "Dystopian Dream Girl" by Built to Spill.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and twenty-eight songs so far. Check them out.

Are you into the craze of AI-generated voices being forced to act out questionable scenes? Check out the audiochapter I produced for this unhinged conversation.

Do you enjoy AI-generated images, particularly those that involve naked ladies? No? Here's the link anyway.

Life update (03/18/2023)

Check out this entry on my personal page, where it looks better

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I have barely written anything this week; my old pal darkness itself has paid me a visit. When I wake up I want to go back to sleep. After I drag myself out of bed, I lack the energy and mental focus to do anything but vegetate around. Although I force myself to go outside for a walk and to read in some coffee shop, every sensation feels grating. I try to avoid landing my gaze on any human being. Both the present and future seem hopeless. I think often of how lovely it would be if I hadn't been born. So in general, the usual stuff that goes on when I end up depressed again. The only thing that has made me feel better is lying on a massage mat with my eyes closed while listening to ASMR through my noise-cancelling headphones.

I'm sure that the lack of a new chapter of my ongoing novel will be a tragedy for the five people or so that follow it, probably for sick reasons. I'm writing the stuff that I need to write; it just happens that I may be the only person who actually wants to read such a story.

I have been unemployed since January, and living on unemployment benefits that will last for eight more months. Honestly, I hope I don't get a job until then. For the last few years I have been working as an IT guy at a hospital. I hated that job, but I thought I could tolerate it, until I developed heart problems that get triggered by the stress I endure at the job. I have gone through two episodes of serious arrhythmia so far, and both landed me in the ER. Going back to work, possibly to any job, will initiate a countdown until the next time that my heart fails me again. I only work to earn money, of course; if I could get away with it, I would write for a living. In addition, having a job from now on not only will steal my time, my energy and my mental health, but it could also cause a stroke, an aneurysm or who knows what other nasty shit due to my heart issues.

On top of that, I was working regularly in that health organization because I was ranked first in the list of people to call when regular workers get sick or go on holiday. However, some political bullshit has given further importance to being able to speak Basque, the regional language, to the extent that I'm now ranked the eight. If I don't get called for the upcoming holidays in a couple of weeks, I'm unlikely to get any contract at all for the foreseeable future. Very few people who aren't native speakers of that horrid language (that was cobbled together artificially in the seventies, because different regions of the Basque Country could barely understand each other) can get the certification, and their horror stories involve ceasing to read or watch any movie/show in their spare time except in Basque. The instructors that teach the language in publically funded courses seem to always be political activists for whom the language is inextricably linked to fighting for the independence of this region, as well as communism.

In my case, reading and writing the stuff that I need to read and write is the only thing that has kept me alive so far; I didn't see myself living past eighteen years old, and I would have spared myself tons of horrors if I hadn't. In addition, I loathe that fucking language, Basque; as if I didn't find it ugly and useless to begin with, I have many bad memories of random adults related to the school reprimanding me for speaking in Spanish during recess, or even when I was walking around town in my free time. Joke's on them, though: about half of the time you hear anyone speak on the streets these days, you hear neither Spanish nor Basque. Well, joke's on all of us for that.

In summary, I may need to figure out what to do to earn money. I doubt I can go back to programming; I haven't learned any programming of note in years, and I'm far too old already (I'll turn thirty-eight in a couple of weeks) for an industry that recycles young programmers because they accept terrible wages.

Other than that, I'm loving the manga series Dungeon Meshi, about a group of D&D-like folks delving into a dungeon partly to eat every monster they come across. Well-realized and flawed characters, the way seemingly only the Japanese know how to do it anymore. Here's a video review by someone who does good job extolling the virtues of that story.

Anyway, back to the winter prediction: it's going to be cold, it's going to be grey, and it's going to last you for the rest of your life.

We're Fucked, Pt. 92 (Fiction)

Check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better

---

An electronic harp glissando startles me. My phone is vibrating on the desk, next to my revolver. I grab the phone and light up its touchscreen.

"Oh shit, mommy has written to me!" I utter in a merry voice as a smile spreads across my face. Then I remember that dozens of eyeballs are observing me from the occupied wall, where the blob hangs like a festoon of sludge. My smile curdles. "I-I mean, my actual mother sent me a text message from hell."

The blob snorts.

"I know you're dating Jacqueline, you doofus."

I shudder.

"Thank you for cutting that thread of deceit. I made myself feel ill."

I read the message contained in a canary-yellow speech bubble.

Are you okay, baby girl? I can't believe this thunderstorm! It must be setting records for the number of lightning strikes.

She's worried about my well-being! My heart swells with gratitude and warmth, then melts into the depths of my belly.

I had tuned out the noise of rain pounding on glass, a primordial drumbeat, as the torrential downpour lashes against the windows, sending cold drops streaming down the panes. Thunder is bellowing like a dragon. Engulfed in water, this office building, along with the rest of Donostia, has become a boat adrift amidst gale-driven spume in a tempest-tossed ocean.

I picture Jacqueline stepping out in her fuzzy slippers onto her privileged balcony up in the hills. She has donned a chiffon-and-satin kimono robe, black like the lustrous locks cascading down her shoulders, and embroidered with golden fleurs-de-lis. Her wrists are sheathed in bangles adorned with pink coral and turquoise gemstones. As she crosses her arms to counter the cold, the sleek collar of her robe slides over those magisterial breasts, that are bolstered by a heavy-duty bra whose taut front straps threaten to snap from their anchorages and allow the mommy mammaries, sprinkled with errant droplets of rainwater, to bounce under gravity's sway.

Goosebumps ripple along my arms. Damn it, I need to press my wet lips against Jacqueline's silky boob-flesh and feel it yield beneath my ravenous licks. Then I'd latch my mouth on to her breastplate-stiff nipples.

Anyway, the rain rages down in sheets, and a gust plays with Jacqueline's tresses, while my queen surveys her domain: a sodden dreamscape. Flashing rivers and tributaries of white electricity carve paths across the gloomy sky, probing for prey to blast apart below, in soaked passageways of citrine-yellow glow.

I'm typing a reply to Jacqueline's message when the wall-spanning lump of gunk, who resembles a sewage spill, interrupts me.

"Would you mind leaving the phone alone while we're talking? We were getting down to the meat of the matter."

"Yes, I do mind, you gelatinous blimp!" I hold up the phone towards him. "Are you kidding me? This is Jacqueline!"

My throat itches, and a coughing fit assaults me. My mouth is parched as if I had chewed down on sandpaper. I must have become dehydrated from vomiting and sweating and shouting.

"So disrespectful," the blob complains in a voice like the gurgling of a clogged pipe.

I clear my throat.

"Imagine that the police have caught on to my countless crimes and they're chasing me through the streets. Then I receive a message from Jacqueline. She doesn't know whether I'm alive or dead, or how many people I've stabbed along the way. Would you stop running to text her back? I would, because she's the most important person in the universe. Even if texting her became my last act before I got blasted in the face with a shotgun at point-blank range. So quit bitching and let me assuage the worries of my beloved."

The blob blows squelchy bubbles like a supersized snuffling pig.

I send my reply:

I'm fine, as fine as I can be in this nightmarish dimension and away from your loving embrace. I miss you so much, mommy. I wish I were kneeling at your feet and serving you with my mouth, my tongue, and whatever other body parts you'd prefer.

My tongue, a wrung-out piece of leather, flutters around my dry lips, attempting to moisten them. Water. Water can refresh every fiber of one's being.

A bottle of mineral, tear-colored water has been standing for days near a filled notebook and some printouts of code. The bottle's water level has sunk below halfway. When I put down my phone on the cluttered desk, I notice the desiccated carcass of a fly that's lying supine. It must have asphyxiated from the stench. The bristling legs, bent at obtuse angles, resemble burnt-black chenille stems. On the ventral plate of its exoskeleton, I glimpse the hint of a nipple.

I picture myself biting off the fly's membranous wings, which would crumble and sprinkle my taste buds with grit and bits of chitin. I look away in disgust, then take a deep breath. With my forefinger's nail, I tap the insect's corpse in case it revives. Nope, dead as dead. I pinch the fly by a wing and drop it in the mantle of vomit that has covered the heaped garbage in my wastebasket. The desecrated corpse gets swallowed up by sludge.

The water bottle beckons with its glistening liquid, clear as melted quartz. I grasp the bottle and unscrew its cap. I take a sip; the water, trapped in a cycle of despair, has turned tepid, stagnant. It tastes slightly chemical. I swill a mouthful around my oral cavity to rinse the residual taste of rot. After I swallow that water, I quaff the remainder of the bottle's contents, that cascade down my gullet. Refreshed, I exhale in relief.

The squelchy blubber starts spewing verbal sewage from his vantage point.

"Speaking of thirst, you have some nerve for lambasting me, murderously so, because I keep tabs on your sorry ass from another dimension. Weren't you stealing glances at Jacqueline up until you two started doing the nasty? Whenever she chose to exhibit that bouncy, motorboat-worthy rack of hers in a business setting, you turned into a slobbering creep-fuck. If you could have gotten away with it, you'd have gaped like a fish hooked on a line. Both of your coworkers would have noticed, but they were busy focusing on Visual Studio Code and Excel, respectively."

"Oh, so you even spied on us during office hours, you dickweed?"

"Mind you, I'm not disparaging your taste in women; Jacqueline became prime office bait."

"Thanks a bunch, asshole. You had the good sense to clarify that point. My revolver remains loaded, you know, and I might decide to drill holes in the blighted, blubbering face of your existence."

"You are one twisted cunt."

"For now let's pretend that whoever I ogle at concerns you: I merely admired a natural wonder, mommy as a whole as well as the various parts that comprise her body, from her succulent lips and shapely ass to her jiggly jugs. I needed such dopamine kicks to mitigate my suicidal despair. And if I could have gotten away with it, I would have nibbled on Jacqueline's nipples in front of our piggish boss like the starving feral monkey I am. Full-on nip-snarf, chomp chomp!"

"You're closer to a rabid raccoon."

A harp glissando alerts me that Jacqueline has graced my phone with a fresh message. What took her so long, though? Was she diddling herself?

I hold the water bottle aloft and upside down. The last few drops run down its curved interior until they drip on my outstretched tongue. I put the bottle down on the desk and pick up my phone.

"Anyway," I continue for the blob's benefit, "I was forced to steal glances of mommy because I dreaded looking deep into those cobalt-blues of hers, and experiencing existential vertigo akin to gazing down from the top of Mount Everest into the depths of an abyss."

"Or the view through a microscope of a sperm cell's nucleus."

I sigh.

"Whatever. My point is that my legs could have started to wobble. I could have broken into sobs, or lost control of my bowels like a bum with diarrhea. If our secretary realized that she made me squirt and as a consequence she mocked me, I would have stabbed my eyes out with scissors. Jacqueline is a woman, while I'm an amalgamation of spiders that somehow retains a human form. For this disaster you can blame a certain goddess with webs between her thighs, from whose loins we spawned and into whose copious arms we'll return once we're done with this earthly farce, where we become entangled in the nets that we weave for each other."

"I should stop listening to your babbling."

I pull up Jacqueline's message.

What have I done to deserve such a devoted sweetheart, always so eager to pleasure mommy? I wish we were cuddling at home like kittens in a basket. Please let me know if you need me to rescue you from that office-hell. I'd hate for a lightning bolt to strike your pretty head; you would be of little use to me as a ghost.

Her voice as I remember it, along with her sweet talk, pours into me like kaleidoscopic honey. I glance bitterly at the conquered wall, where an oil-soaked bulk of jellylike matter flutters as he stares back with his multitude of gleaming eyes. I want Jacqueline to come get me before I shoot myself in the skull. I want her to save me from the blob, from this office, from my mother's dead eyes, from the apocalyptic horror show into which the cosmos vomited itself. Mommy and I would return to her cozy den. Inside, she would feed me kelp and raw clams, and afterwards we'd cuddle naked and warm under her downy comforter. She would press her snuggly, succulent tits against my face. Her heartbeat would echo in my head. I would breathe in her heady aroma as I fell into a languid trance, ready to sleep and never wake up. From a basement dungeon, in the flickering light of a lantern, I would watch a procession of gowned women emerge from violet clouds on wings of moonlight. Gone would be the stories and the pain and everything else to endure.

After I blink away the honey-haze, I start typing a reply to Jacqueline's message, but the blob breaks my flow by complaining.

"Sure, keep chatting with your girlfriend while ignoring me. Is that how you treat someone who sneaked into this reality to help you?"

"What, so you can attempt to capture me in a web of words that drip with putrefaction? You needy puddle of pus! How much of my time have you stolen already? I stuck around after hours to catch up on work!"

"There's more to life than one's job, Leire."

I clench my jaw through typing the rest of my response to Jacqueline.

I will return home as soon as I'm done with a last inescapable matter. The wet air, along with the bus ride, shall calm down my frenzied mind, so you can stay home taking care of our antediluvian marvel.

I'm tapping my foot while three animated dots reveal that my beloved is writing her reply.

Alright. We both miss you lots, baby. I have a big surprise for you tonight.

Spark-like tingles burst in my crotch. My heart rate rises as I tap letters on the phone screen.

"Enough, damn it!" the blob snaps. "XOXO and goodbye!"

My eyelids twitch.

"Get thee gone, wretched gloop! Go stalk an empty hallway!"

I send a text:

Does your surprise involve sex?

Oui, mon cher. Plenty of hot sweaty sex. But that alone wouldn't be much of a surprise, so I've got a special one. Now put down that phone and get back to work. I'll be waiting for you, sweetie.

As a parting gift, she attaches a round, yellow emoji that winks and blows a kiss.

A wave of heat suffuses my body. My mouth is flooding with saliva. My breasts grow tender, my nipples erect. As if possessed, my right hand drifts toward my pussy to rub it through my trousers and panties, but I halt the move halfway through even though I want my middle finger to circle around my moistened cleft, while the rest of my digits probe and knead in rhythmic massages. I yearn to scratch this primal itch, but if whenever I molest myself in the future, I suffer searing flashbacks of that many-eyed abomination, I may slit my wrists.

The blob clears his concealed throat.

"I get the feeling that I should be glad I can't read your messages. In my opinion, your sexual urges overpower your judgement."

I put the phone down on the desk, then I straighten my back and inhale slowly to steady my heartbeat.

"You should know by now that I'm solely motivated by carnal cravings and sordid perversions."

---

Author's note: the three songs for today are "My Dream Girl Don't Exist" by Neutral Milk Hotel, "Pictures" by Galaxie 500, and "Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste" by Galaxie 500.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this series. A hundred and twenty-five songs so far. Check them out.

Did you know that one particular AI service can produce humanlike voices? I forced them to act out this chapter! Check out the result.

Would you enjoy seeing AI-generated pictures of Leire's lovely mommy? Here's the link.

This has been the longest chapter since chapter 83. Just two years ago, I could churn out five thousand words-long chapters in a day, and now it takes me several days to produce two thousand words. Either my standards have grown or I have become dumber.

We're Fucked, Pt. 91 (Fiction)

Check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better

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Alberto, Alberto. Why did my brain tether to that name, from even before I met this oozy slimeball, the urge to fracture my knuckles against a skull, along with the need to scurry to a dark corner and rock back and forth while groaning?

And what's this attached file of sensorial records? A moment when my breath was coming out ragged, warmth had suffused my groin, and my pussy tingled for me to scrub out at least a patch of the crust of despair, like radioactive grime, that was smothering my mind. I unbuckled my belt, then pulled down my pants and panties. How am I supposed to know which session of self-love I'm recalling?

As I licked my lips, a solid object of rounded, waxy plastic, harder than a dildo, was gliding through the valley of my gooey folds. The monochrome landscape of my brain lit up in a vibrant pineapple yellow.

Lip balm? Why was I masturbating with a tube of lip balm? Ah, because it belonged to Jacqueline.

That evening, seated on my chair in this office, I discovered the discomfort of rubbing my little girlhood next to Spike, that horse-headed golem, while ropy threads of drool spilled from his chin. He stank like he'd been farting spoiled milk. Despite my horsey comrade's urging me to spare him the ordeal of watching me masturbate, I dug deeper between my thighs as the orgasmic pressure inside me welled up, until that dammed river rushed to release itself in a cataclysmic flood that drowned the world into nothingness.

My head buzzed with dopamine. As I caught my breath, slumped in my chair and covered in sweat, I found myself staring at a paper-thick screen that was hovering in front of me like a solid hologram. Its video feed featured me as if recorded from behind, at a downwards angle, by a surveillance camera. Someone out there, someone other than Jacqueline, had captured me on video with my bare thighs wide apart while I stroked my clitoris and moaned. I wanted to vomit.

My cheeks burn with shame as my heartbeat thunders. How did I come to lay blame at someone named Alberto? I have forgotten the details, but that name and the notion that some voyeur spied on me are twisted together in my mind like a tangle of inbred DNA.

I shake my fist at the night-black blob.

"You miserable sack of sewage! I'm going to smash you open and pour bleach into your festering guts!"

"What the hell is up with your moods, you volatile nutjob?"

"If there were any justice in this universe, and there isn't, those who ruin a lady's post-orgasmic afterglow would be executed!"

"Are you speaking in generalities? Before I made my entrance, you weren't diddling your kitty. I know that much."

"I swear, what is this fuckery that my life has sunk into?" I clench my teeth and shake my head. "Let's get one thing straight, shit-brain: I won't forgive, nor will I ever forget, how your gang of interdimensional stalkers have wrecked my routine, even though all I ever asked was to be left in peace. Do you have any idea how annoying it gets to be harassed by deformed, googly-eyed monstrosities that nobody else can see?"

"You think this is fun for me? I'm risking my existence by spending time in this dimension choked with decay and suffering."

"If you knew how much I despise you and everything you stand for... I warn you, my great-great-great-great-grandfathers hunted saber-toothed tigers and woolly rhinoceroses. Giant sloths as well, regretfully. My forebears slaughtered those noble, forever-lost beasts and tore off their skins to warm themselves."

"So did mine. You and I share an evolutionary line."

I level my index finger at the intruder.

"What excuse helped you sleep at night? Do you believe that privacy is a bourgeois concept? Fuck your surveillance state!"

The blob's gooey mass fidgets, squishing about, while his dozens of glistening eyeballs roll around as if to locate an answer written on the unspoilt walls. After he lets out an 'oh' of realization, his many pupils focus on my face with laserlike precision. My skin crawls.

"That's why you're freaking out." The blob chuckles. "I thought you were coming undone! To be fair, you are overdue."

"So you admit it!"

"What is this supposedly foul deed to which you believe I am confessing?" the blob asks in a sly tone.

"That you recorded me!"

"Someone recorded you while you were walking back home after finishing your shift? On the train? Wasting away in your apartment while dreaming of a different life?"

My nostrils flare, my eyelids twitch. I wish the blob had an asshole so that I could ram a fist up it.

"I was working overtime, right here!"

"Why would it bother you so much if someone secretly videotaped you while you wrote code? Could the way you press the keyboard keys offend somebody?"

"You know I was masturbating, you vile coagulate of pus, you abomination that feeds on human refuse!"

The blob bobs like a jellyfish, letting out a few giggles.

"That's right, you were rubbing your clit to completion in the office. Why not take care of business in the bathroom? I've jerked off there myself."

My blood is boiling.

"I'm going to bury you under an avalanche of lava!"

"Hey, a bit of friction is part of a woman's natural cycle. That's why nature gave us erectile tissue, right? Because we deserve some pleasure. Go ahead and rub it and feel more at home in this universe! But you've gotta do it behind locked doors or no one will respect you."

"Once you stop oozing goo, you might be in a position to offer constructive suggestions. For your information, I'm pretty sure I had locked the office from the inside, but that's beside the point with an interdimensional voyeur on the loose, isn't it? I won't apologize for doing my duty to liberate myself from the oppression of my inner demons. Anyway, is that why you recorded my sacred ceremony, to blackmail me?"

"I was looking out for you, Leire!"

"How the hell was that supposed to help me, you lumpy gob of mucoid secretions?"

"I manipulated reality to present that screen as a warning: someone else was and had been spying on you and your orgasms. I thought that such a revelation would awaken in you the urge to pay more attention to your deteriorating surroundings, but I keep on underestimating your imbecilic apathy. In short, you should be grateful."

"Shut up! You claim innocence, then?"

The blob groans.

"Get some antiseptic for your ears. I'm the one who showed you that screen so you'd realize what was happening, you big galoot. Why would I want a record of the silly faces you make while you're diddling yourself?"

I'm getting dizzy. I cross my arms as my brain struggles to digest this fresh information.

"S-so you have watched me as I played with myself?"

"I'm sorry to report that I've watched you do unspeakable things to yourself many times. Believe me, I avoid peeking into this realm, as well as into your life, to preserve my sanity. Yet, I have to check up on you. I peered into neutral territory only to find you slumped in your office chair, rubbing away frantically."

"My humiliation is complete!"

"I hope that when your ass finally gets fired, someone burns that goddamn chair; I know that you would allow the next programmer to occupy the seat that has absorbed the emissions of your near-daily self-pleasuring."

"That's right. Some people tag walls with graffiti; others paint landscapes, write novels or compose music. I bless upholstery with my sticky fluids. We all have our own little ways of changing the world."

"You are a true scumbag."

"Wait, what the fuck do you mean by having to check up on me?" I furrow my brows in rage. "That's like stealing someone's wallet and then blaming the victim because they didn't offer it to you first! Why would you spy on me anyway?"

"The 'why,' my dear degenerate, is why I'm here."

As the blob prolongs a silence laden with germs and decaying matter, my heart slows down. This Alberto the blob is just a fucking creep with a jumbled brain, one pus-filled annoyance, more of a disease than a person, but he refrains from running away in fear, maybe partly because he's stuck to a wall, even though he understands the extent of my depravity. Should I rage against any sentient mass that tolerates the filthy practices that plague my life? Should I run my tongue across his blobbish substance?

I sigh.

"Alright, I guess that as dozens of eyeballs floating in a wall-wide pool of demonic cum, you have transcended mere voyeurism."

---

Author's note: today's song is "Paper Thin Walls" by Modest Mouse.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this series. A hundred and twenty-two songs so far. Check them out.

The infamous Lip Balm Incident happened ages ago, back in chapter 18. What the hell has happened in the meantime?

Do you want to hear a state-of-the-art audio AI act out this masturbation-centric chapter? Check it out!

New page to track audiochapters

Hey, whoever you are! Do you enjoy AI-generated voices as much as I do? I doubt it, because only one of my readers has told me that she’s into this crap. In any case, I’ll continue producing audiochapters for the foreseeable future, so I needed a dedicated page to track them. You can find that page as “AI audio” in the menu (of my site), or through this link.

So far I have produced a total of thirty-eight minutes and ten seconds of voiced text from my ongoing novel We’re Fucked, which I love but keeps hemorrhaging readers. If you have listened to any of these audiochapters before and you have enjoyed them, you may want to listen to them again, as I have polished most of them, and exchanged a few clips.

We're Fucked, Pt. 90 (Fiction)

Check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better

---

When the blob stops cackling like a deranged donkey, I unclench my jaw and smack my lips.

"Anyway, I have sussed out your identity: you're Nergal, lord of waste water and excrement, king of the putrefying dead, who dwells in the sewers underneath reality. You brought about the deaths of billions throughout the ages. I'm one of the few souls attuned to the growth of decay; I know you had been lurking under my ass all these years, so I was waiting for you to rise up and stalk the world once more."

"Leire, shut the fuck up and listen. My name is Alberto Portuondo, and I'm a proctologist. I've never had any formal training in my chosen career, but I can recognize when a woman needs to squat."

"Proctologists are supposed to treat medical ailments like diarrhea, not resemble them," I say coolly. "On the topic of pretend jobs, I'm a self-employed dildo sharpener."

The blob gurgles as if choking on his own vomit, but then he chortles. His bulk spasms with mirth, churning like a sea of creamy quicksand, making his eyeballs bounce about. The underside of the mass oozes in elongating tongues that resemble black lava.

I step back in case the blob spurts a phlegm of rot that may splatter onto my face.

"I believe that everyone should strive to learn something new every day, and this evening I have discovered that I hate to watch an interdimensional puddle of gloop laugh."

"You should laugh more often, Leire, to better put up with your own crazy-assed nonsense."

"Oh, I cackle plenty myself. There's nothing funny about witnessing the disintegration of civilization every time I go outside, but I resort to humor in an effort to prevent further suicide attempts."

"Oof."

"As for you, obnoxious ball of pus," I say sternly, "there should be a law against impersonating proctologists. The audacity to masquerade as the unsung heroes of anal science! To perform that crucial but degrading job, those wretches train for years until they locate the anus. Such ass-obsessed perverts, who dream of slathering up human colons, help millions of assholes reach enlightenment by curing hemorrhoids, constipation, and anal fissures using only a pair of scissors, rubber gloves, and their own saliva. Proctologists are the butt-nuns of our times."

"No, stop meandering about the subject!"

"Listen to this impromptu ode to anal inspection: 'The doctor, a blob-faced butt-nun/ Whose talent lies in his uncanny knack/ For excavating human rectums,/ Approaches me with an insatiable urge./ He screws his speculum in hard,/ Filling my virginal bowels with disgust./ It hurts! My soul is coming loose!/ A thousand turds and rotting guts/ Hang out of my anus in a festering heap./ I must escape my prison or end as a ghost./ Twist up an ass-chute!/ Shove stuff up your rectum and pull it out/ All day long, so that when night falls,/ Your anus gleams like a starry sky.'"

The blob's fat form shudders.

"Your poetry is as horrendous as your mind!"

"It's part of an anally-oriented verse cycle. We should turn our disgusting natures into precious expressions of art."

"Alright, cut the crap," the blob grumbles. "Please tell me that you have retained my name. It's Alberto, not Nergal, nor any other of the made-up names that may be swirling around in your cracked cerebrum. Just Alberto, which, as far as it concerns you, means 'the one who is pure at heart, and the king of mercy.'"

"You're so vile and combative, added to that grating voice and oily appearance, that despite your lack of a dong, you must consider yourself a man. All the men in this part of the country should be named Jon; what dude is worth a second glance after that? And you think I would enjoy fraternizing with a blob of rotten ectoplasm, one that hailed from some hellish dimension to torment and enrage me?"

His dozens of eyeballs somehow lance me with a dismissive gaze.

"I assure you I'm quite the gentleman once you get to know me. Besides, back when I belonged to this reality where we're plagued with unrelenting ennui, I was as pretty as you. I even had two working hands, two pairs of eyelashes, and a big willy."

"Let's pretend that for now I'm buying that you're a bona fide Alberto, even though you don't strike me as such. I would love to prattle at length about the topic of identity, as well as the many indignities of having been born, but let me leave it at this: if I had to come up with a moniker that captured the absurdity of your existence, I would have settled for Kafka the Sloppy."

"You're too hung up on appearances."

"The runner-ups would have been Splat the Whale, Stinkerbell the Hiccupping Hellion, Oozie McDozie, Rip van Stinky, Drooling Dracul, Booger Baggins, Snot Gurgler, Scrotal Slide, Blowfish Bowel, Bubba Mubb, and Toxic Sludge Boy."

The blob snickers.

"These bodies we wear are ephemeral, you know."

"Also viscous and mutable, judging by how you're oozing down that wall. Stuffed as you are with hundreds of cubic meters of putrid blubber, I bet the closest you've ever gotten to feeling sexy is when you squirt glop at unsuspecting maidens."

"I get it, Leire: you make jokes to escape the pain. That's your coping mechanism. What else is left for you to do but whack off inside your little bubble of neurosis?"

"Maybe that applies for when I'm alone," I say bitterly. "Is there a need to be so cruel, though?"

"What matters is that now you know who I am. I'd like to say honestly that I enjoy seeing you again. Face-to-face, so to speak."

"I understand that you claim to be named Alberto. What does that have to do with me? I don't think I have ever interacted with any Alberto."

While his bulging bulk jiggles, matching the intensity of the peals of thunder outside, the blob gurgles as if drowning in an acid swamp. White light swims in dozens of moist, wobbling eyeballs that resemble the audience at a medieval beheading.

"You're fucking serious!" he snarls.

I anticipate a blast of noxious fumes, so I squint, and pinch my nose.

"Why do you insist that we're acquainted? Did we meet in a nightmare?"

"I'm your coworker!"

"Ah, you worked with me back in the day? No wonder I have forgotten you. To preserve my sanity and self-esteem, my mind has rubbed out most details of the jobs I held briefly and that caused me excruciating despair. A case of trauma-induced amnesia. However, I retain feelings of shame, and guilt, and that impression of being surrounded by monsters that resent my existence. There aren't many humans I could work alongside, or even look in the eye, without wanting to hurl myself under a truck. And riddle me this, you ill-fated lump of ooze: why would I need to be tortured with such feelings when the memories that engendered them are gone? Is that conducive to my survival, in an evolutionary sense?"

"No, no, I worked with you in this office! I sat on your left, on that chair that the redheaded intern occupies! I helped you troubleshoot complex bugs!"

I snap my head back.

"Are you sure you're not making this up, just to confuse me more? I write my own unit tests."

"Do you want me to spit in your face again?!"

I slap my cheeks to rouse myself from my daze.

"Okay, give me a moment. Let's see if I can dredge up some memory."

"This is a load of bullshit," the blob bitches.

I close my eyes. In the theater of my mind, I grab a handful of the oily putrescence that has colonized the opposite wall. Handful after handful, the slime seeps away to reveal an animated memory, a GIF image stuck in the folds of my brain like a fly in amber: I'm slumped in my swivel chair, at my workstation, but I'm looking up at the lanky man who's standing to my left.

He's in his late forties. His straight black hair, overdue for a cut, is streaked with ash gray. Under dwarven-thick eyebrows and steel-blue eyes, both his eyebags and laugh lines are pronounced. His stubble resembles fuzzy snow. The man's mouth moves as if he's talking to someone across the desk, likely our boss, but my brain failed to attach audio to this clip.

I recall why I tried to forget the guy even while he worked alongside me five days a week: whenever I primed myself and asked for help, often because I had run aground as I was navigating the Byzantine logic of his code, he eyed me like a derogatory basilisk, and I was forced to endure his snarky remarks and sour moods. 'Hey, do you mind telling me what the fuck you're doing with my code?' Sometimes he smacked his monitor. Worst of all: the volume of his voice hurt my delicate eardrums. With that walking ulcer around, I barely heard myself think. I wished that I could get away with wearing noise-canceling headphones during work hours, or at least punching him in the throat. When our boss told us one morning that the guy had quit suddenly, I breathed a sigh of relief. Thereafter, the silence at the office tasted like the sweetest ambrosia, except for Jacqueline's choice of music, but I have long absolved her of that sin.

I snap out of the GIF.

"Shit, you did work here! Your name was Alberto, then. What the fuck happened, dude? You should take better care of yourself, you're really bloated."

The blob lets out a grunt that sounded critical, as if I had committed a heinous faux pas.

"What, are you still pissed because I forgot?" I ask. "It's not my fault you weren't memorable. Or are you ashamed that you went full fatberg, so humongous that you're forced to enter rooms through another dimension?"

He deflates like a punctured blimp.

"You aren't playing with me, right?" the blob asks in a pitiful yet grotesque voice. "Do you remember me now?"

"Yes, yes! You're that gray-haired, worn-out coworker of ours, a crotchety prick who dragged Jacqueline and I into arguments about women because you hated your ex-wife, who cheated on you, stole half of your stuff, and left you to rot."

The blob's eyeballs shine like candles in a crypt as his bulk goes lake-still, except for the tears of melted rubber drooping from his bottom.

I allow him a few seconds of silence before yanking him out of his hole.

"You should have let go of that bitterness, man," I say grimly. "There are far worse things than living life alone."

---

Author's note: below is the list of songs for today, a total of sixteen (!).

-"Custom Concern" by Modest Mouse.
-"Mistaken for Strangers" by The National.
-"Apartment Story" by The National.
-"Gravity Rides Everything" by Modest Mouse.
-"This Is How It Always Starts" by Grandaddy.
-"Fake Plastic Trees" by Radiohead.
-"Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division.
-"Scorpion Hill" by PUP (also this live version; the whole set is great).
-"No Children" by The Mountain Goats.
-"Headless Horseman" by The Microphones.
-"Distance" by AJJ.
-"Whenever You Breathe Out, I Breathe In" by Modest Mouse
-"The Rat" by The Walkmen.
-"Happy" by The Wrens.
-"Silver" by Waxahatchee.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and twenty-one so far. Check them out.

Did you know that a new artificial intelligence can create humanlike voices that pass the Turing test? I forced it to act out this chapter! Check out the result.

We're Fucked, Pt. 89 (Fiction)

Check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better

---

"So what's your game, you gloppy bag of pus who gets off on tormenting innocent people? Why are you making me waste precious time with your toxic oratory? You haven't eaten me yet; although you're clearly unhinged, you must have some sort of agenda. Am I facing the squid-god Proteus?"

"I'm no squid. And as you should have figured out by now, we know each other."

I snap my head back. I picture myself taking a shortcut at midnight through a grimy alley, that stinks of dog shit, urine, cigarette smoke, stale booze, and dime-store perfume. A rat scampers along a clogged storm drain. Some vermin is scrabbling in a trash can. Shards of broken glass glitter like slivers of moonstone. I'm stepping on yellowed papers and food wrappers when an orange-sized, black glob of snot drops in front of me and splatters on the piss-glazed cobblestones. The sticky substance has stained my shoes. I peer upward. Dozens of bulging eyeballs are observing me, glued to a gargantuan garland of slimy tar suspended between the graffitied brick walls, like a forgotten ornament for some holiday that honors a god of putrefaction and deformity.

My skin crawls. I want to shriek.

"I'm afraid that you must have mistaken me with someone else, you festering, foul-breathed abomination. It would explain why you thought that I wanted to be eaten. Perhaps a brain malfunction?"

"Oh, but you are. Didn't you hear me call you by name? I think I did it twice."

"Look, if you had checked the yearbooks in your high school's library, you would have realized that I was in middle school when blob-people made their debut."

The blob gurgles like a busted-up washing machine.

"Pay attention!"

"Alright, asshole. I'll listen to the sound waves you're generating with some mercifully hidden sphincter, if it means you'll leave me alone. Go ahead, try your best."

"Leire. That's your name."

I raise my hand to wipe the clammy sweat from my forehead.

"I'm struggling to remain sane despite your nauseating stench, but let me tell you: someone gave that name to me without my consent."

"Is this a matter of freedom again? Or do you just hate sharing your name with thousands of other women in this province alone?"

I resent the cum monster's derisive tone. Should I expect decency from someone who spat at my face, though?

I glare at one of the blob's glistening, moist eyeballs, that's drooping in the black goo like snot dribbling from a nostril. I want to gouge that eye out, then unhinge my jaw wide enough to cram the orb in my mouth. The eye would slime my lips and ooze onto my tongue. Maybe it tastes like rancid curry. I would sink my teeth into its fibrous sclera as if into a jawbreaker, and the released vitreous humor would shoot through my nose. I would keep chewing on that eyeball, and sucking up its viscous fluid, even as my jaws ached and my cheeks bulged like a puffer fish's. Such gluttonous cravings overwhelm me in moments of revulsion; one time I was about to lick a tied-up condom left on a park bench, before I snapped out of my daze. But who am I kidding? If I were ever able to fit melon-sized stuff in my mouth, I would have already died of joy, and asphyxiation, while deepthroating one of mommy's mammoth mammaries.

"What's with your creepy grin?" the blob gurgles.

"Nevermind. My point was that people are assigned names so they can be addressed by others, so those other humans know to whom they're referring when gossiping about you. Besides, how often have I wanted people to bother me? Before Jacqueline blessed my existence, my interests were always solitary. Therefore, the best name for me would have been none, and those knuckleheads who insisted on trying to address me would be forced to rely on expressions like, 'Hey, you!' Imagine the silly conversations they would be engaged in with each other as they criticized my personal habits, mocked my weaknesses, and debated the color of my undergarments, but doubted if they were talking about the same person! What an unhygienic lot! And over time, my lack of a name would become so awkward that I would be erased from the social memory of everyone around me, which would free me to spend my time contemplating the absurdity of my cosmic joke of a life. But yes, why choose the name Leire, with which thousands of females across the province are burdened? To whatever extent a name becomes the verbal attempt at manifesting one's destiny, weren't my parents setting me up for mediocrity by giving me a commonplace moniker instead of, say, Flower-Duster, or Unsliced Saliva's Fondness for Fishbones? Once your essence has been tainted at birth with such a clichéd alias as Leire, does it ever regain the power of flight? Why pursue a dream when you're doomed to become a mundane drone? To be fair, though, I'm warming up to the name Eide. A creative forest fae came up with it, maybe because she understood I had a penchant for being an untamed bohemian. Oh, I forgot: during a recent nightmare I was also christened as Gummo, but that rabbit bastard meant it as an insult. Besides, who would go by the name that an anthropomorphic bunny, or a fucking hamster for that matter, bestowed upon them? No, beyond that: who would want to associate with a cacodemon who came all over the pancakes they cooked for breakfast?"

The blob shifts about restlessly, squelching like a filled fleshlight.

"Astonishing ramblings by a half-wit!"

This interdimensional tapioca pudding, if such a slimeball is worthy of the name pudding, can undervalue me as much as he pleases; I'm a helium balloon soaring above the mountains. Explaining myself at length exhilarates me.

"I'm serious. To regain the joy of the naked, unsullied state, we must venture down a path that leads to our names' total evaporation."

"You moron, even if your parents hadn't named you, other people would refer to you by your relationship with others, as in, 'This guy over here is my son, that bitch is my ex-wife.' And eventually they would stick nicknames on you, the sort that your parents would have avoided for their beloved progeny. I can think of half a dozen such epithets. The Wretch, for example, or The Thirsty One, or even that old standby, The Cunt."

I guffaw to release the frustration and unease swirling inside my ribcage.

"Very funny, pus bag. Those who would push an unflattering identity on me will be dismembered, their pieces strewn along mommy's balcony to be gnawed upon by crows and other feathered scavengers."

As the blob oozes angrily, he glowers like a shit-faced T-rex in a sauna.

"How the fuck would someone without a name get by in modern society?! Unless you live in a cabin in the woods and subsist entirely on nuts and berries, you'd have to provide proper ID to open a bank account or apply for a job. And don't you think that the government would intervene if they had trouble collecting taxes from you?"

"I know, right? They would seize on my lack of a name as probable cause of terrorism. Those depraved cretins! Why do we let the state encroach upon our personal affairs? How far we have fallen since our fabled Paleolithic ancestors, whom I'm sure were freewheeling hedonists of great renown, roaming free in search of the perfect nipple. They never needed ID; they would simply paint a smudge of mud onto their foreheads and mumble into the trees, 'Here I am, a boob for you,' and any gal nearby would come crawling across the woods with her hair matted in clumps and her tongue out like a begging puppy. What a life of luxury they were blessed with by mommy Earth! Damn it, when was I asked if I wanted to partake in modern society?!"

The blob rolls his dozens of eyeballs so far back that they sink into the squirming goo, spin, then spring to the surface again. As films of black slime slide off the eyeballs, the sewage-colored irises dart about erratically like startled from a dream. When they focus on me, the wall-wide gelatinous bulk sags with a deflating groan that could be interpreted as a sigh, but that may have been a fart.

"I can't believe I have fallen so low as to entertain your lunacy," the blob moans. "It seems I have nothing better to do than listen to your absurd babble about names and nipples."

"You're just pissed because a big black squid's arguments don't stand for shit. Nobody else has ever complained about my eloquent sophistry. Why do you hate the truth? Is the mere existence of logic and evidence so unbearable to your warped little soul?"

"I might just be anti-nonsense."

I take a deep breath.

"I've spent decades searching for some sense in this absurd existence, so I expect the same consideration and intellectual openness from others. At least don't spit at me! But I see that, for you, I must simplify reality down to its rudimentary forms."

"Please do. This has gone on long enough."

"I'm indeed one of those unfortunate humans whose identity has been diminished to the name Leire. I'm also a thirty-year-old programmer without friends."

"How very pleasant to meet you, Miss D-D-Dumb-Dumb-Dumb."

"You bloated, pustulating turd!"

That bizarre bastard bursts into laughter, cackle after cackle. As the ghastly racket resounds, the mound of sludge shakes and ripples like the belly of an obese man who has gorged himself on a vatful of lard, and with each gargle and snort, the squelchy mass threatens to eject several gallons of its rotten innards into space.

---

Author's note: today's songs are "Never Ending Math Equation" by Modest Mouse, and "Peacebone" by Animal Collective.

I keep a playlist with all the songs I've mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and five songs so far. Check them out.

Do ya know that some artificial intelligences can create images out of whatever prompt you send them? Well, do ya, punk? It just happens that I sent one of those AIs lots of sentences from this chapter. Check out the results.

Did you know that some neural networks can produce human-like voices? I exploited the best of those cutting-edge services to generate an audiochapter for this entry. Here's the link.

This chapter was the most fun to write in quite a while, and the audiochapter that I produced from it turned out fantastic.

We're Fucked, Pt. 88: AI-generated audiochapter

Thanks to the revolutionary new AI from Eleven Labs, convincing fake humans acted out chapter 88 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.

[Listen to this audiochapter on my personal page]

We're Fucked, Pt. 88 (Fiction)

Check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better

---

I savor the cool, metallic heft of the revolver, this time gripped in my expendable hand. The overhead lights shine on the firearm's thick barrel, that begs to be fondled. I rest the pad of my left forefinger against the curve of the trigger; a pull of its mechanism will spark a cathartic crescendo of madness and mayhem. I picture a muzzle flare followed with the eruption of gun smoke and sparkling debris. I anticipate the wave of ecstasy that will course through my nervous system as the bullet shoots off, slicing through the air like a tiny comet, to inaugurate the great purge of all things gross.

A gust of wind rattles the windowpanes, accompanied by the rumble of distant thunder. Does the revolver remain loaded after the earlier stunt that tore my right hand off? With my left forefinger, I slide forward awkwardly the cylinder release latch and hold it firmly, then with my right thumb I push the cylinder open. The six chambers are filled with greenish-yellow bullets designed for optimal penetration, and the percussion cap of each one bears the mark of the horseman along with his motto in golden lettering: "To end everything so that it can begin anew." I picture my equine companion during our last hunt near the city of Cologne back in 1745, when we chased a white-tailed deer as it bolted in the moonlight across a dark road.

I close my eyes and raise the revolver's cylinder to my nostrils. I sniff a round, inhaling the metallic tang of its metalwork mingled with that of steel. I imagine myself sucking the bullet in through my nose to figure out what a vacuum cleaner feels like.

"Is this your attempt to intimidate me?" the blob sneers.

"Oh, no way. I'm just fiddling around with this old thing that was bequeathed to me. A twenty-five caliber Desert Eagle chambered with .357 Magnum rounds."

"You have no clue what you're talking about."

With a flick of my left wrist, I snap the revolver's cylinder closed; it locks snugly against the frame with a click. I glare at the greasy goober, who is uglier than a boil on a homeless man's butt cheek. He expects me to fire back with an irate retort, but instead I should squeeze the trigger and blow away that mucus-spewing blancmange before my sanity dissolves like an ice cube on the tongue of a polar bear.

"Do not mock me," I growl. "Who are you to speak to me thus? My father? What did you ever do to deserve the privilege of pissing on me, you bloated sewage slug? What have you achieved in your pitiful life besides spreading putridity? For your information, ever since I was twelve I have known that firearms kill people and animals; the cops taught me how to load and fire guns during a summer camp for disturbed children. Afterwards I patronized shooting ranges to hone my aim. I went shooting in a deserted lot near my apartment to vent my wrath upon vermin and scavenging crows." I draw a deep breath. "My grandfather, Arachne collect his soul, used to tell me that one day the government would organize a giant database to contain the fingerprints, retinal scans, DNA sequences, medical records, financial data, and online browsing habits of every man, woman, and child. They would track your transactions and the places you've traveled. They would track who has visited your home and with whom you had sex. They would know which toilet paper brand you prefer, and how often you masturbate. Despite the government's excuses that these programs would provide security against terrorism and international crime, the dossiers would be exploited to spy on law-abiding citizens for political ends. If they couldn't confiscate your privacy through legal channels, they would manufacture emergencies as pretexts for suspending constitutional rights. They intend to create a panopticon society in which people's behavior is monitored from every street corner and every shop front, from inside every home. If you dared to utter anything deemed inappropriate, they would label you and your family as subversives. They would come in the night while we slept: jackbooted thugs in black riot gear would smash down our doors, storm our homes, then drag us from our beds while we kicked and screamed and pissed ourselves. They'd shove us into boxcars, like livestock or slaves, and seal the doors shut with locks and chains. When the train reached its destination, each boxcar would be uncoupled and rolled toward some industrial complex, where we'd be forced at gunpoint to disembark into a cattle chute. Once we had been identified by a biometric scanner, those labeled as genetic undesirables would be herded into killing pens, and their offspring taken to undergo de-individualization and de-genitalization procedures. Healthy boys would be conditioned through pharmacology and cognitive-behavioral therapy to become docile. Healthy girls would be bred. The rest of the captives, the lucky ones, would be given numbered jumpsuits and put to work in assembly lines under the supervision of armed guards. Those who resisted would be gunned down and incinerated. The workers would slave away until they dropped dead of exhaustion, disease, and malnutrition, or until the state euthanized them." I swallow a lump in my throat. "I have the right to defend myself against tyrants, so I have kept this revolver close at hand for decades, and I will shoot any creature or inanimate object that could harbor hostile intent toward me or my loved ones. What, you think that a perverted freak like me would suffer a crisis of conscience, or that I would be intimidated by an animated heap of diarrhea like you? Hah! I have always fantasized about taking vengeance and inflicting maximum torment. Whenever necessary, I wouldn't mind killing anyone, including myself. In fact, I yearn to kill someone. I feel that such a sacrifice might liberate the demonic energy that rages within me like a wildfire. I long for the freedom and catharsis of destruction. Everything must end so that it can begin anew."

The blob's dozens of eyeballs glow like those of a frog that has swallowed a lit matchstick.

"That's not at all disturbing. You can't kill me anyway, dickhead."

My chest heaves as my heart beats wildly. A bead of sweat slides down my cheek and drops from my chin. I must stink like a pungent blend of sour milk and sweaty gym socks. I want to wipe myself down with a towel soaked in rubbing alcohol.

"You're a shapeless pimple that needs to be squeezed dry," I mumble.

"A few bullets and your silly threats. Please! You should know by now that they're only going to make me laugh."

It pours through me in waves, this violent longing for carnage and debauchery, a mélange uniquely mine, the product of being both a masochist and a fetishist; yet, my shoulders slump, and I feel like a broken car battery. My revolver has become more cumbersome than driftwood.

"I'm inclined to believe you. Someone this slippery and revolting must be as inescapable as the heat death of the universe." I put the revolver down on the desk with a clunk. "But don't expect me to apologize for the threats, because that's my default setting. Even when I go for a walk on the beach, I feel like punching someone or hurling garbage at other beachgoers, so I would blast you with a nuclear bomb if I could."

---

Author's note: today's song is "Untrustable" by Built to Spill.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and three songs so far. Check them out.

Some neural networks out there are eager to generate all sorts of wild images for us, such as the ones in this post.

My mother has caught the virus from my sister, and I have spoken with my mother in person recently. I suppose that I'm about to experience how it feels when that damnable pathogen makes a playground out of your body. I'm vaccinated, which gave me permanent heart damage, so I hope that at the very least it has made me less vulnerable to the disease.

Life update (02/11/2023)

Check out this entry on my personal page, where it looks better

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A couple of days ago I had my yearly check up with my usual endocrinologist. Back in my mid-twenties, after my body started doing stuff that a man shouldn't be able to, I got an MRI done. It discovered a pituitary tumor. I was likely born with it. In retrospect, it should have been discovered back when I was still a child; after all, gynecomastia isn't something that just happens. If my parents hadn't been generally neglectful, I would have been spared the permanent effects of becoming an adult in a boddy riddled with hormonal imbalances.

If you want to know how that's like, I guess you can check out the videos of the adults that were put in feminizing/masculinizing hormone therapy back when they could barely understand what would be done to them or why, only to regret it later (and be censored for it). In my case, whatever defect in my DNA, or poison in my environment, created the tumor, was the one responsible for this alteration, which may be worse because I never consented to anything. In all cases mentioned, the person ends up fucked for life.

Obviously there are sex differences in brain anatomy (quick google: "On average, males and females showed greater volume in different areas of the cortex, the outer brain layer that controls thinking and voluntary movements. Females had greater volume in the prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, superior temporal cortex, lateral parietal cortex, and insula. Males, on average, had greater volume in the ventral temporal and occipital regions. Each of these regions is responsible for processing different types of information"), and due to my hormonal imbalances, my brain must be more female than the average guy's. I guess that may explain in part why I feel comfortable writing female characters.

Anyway, my hormones have been under control for the last eleven years or so thanks to the medication I have to take two times a week. And ever since I'm producing healthy levels of testosterone, I want to fuck everything that moves and that may remotely be considered female (slight exaggeration).

Going back to the initial topic: I have no problem using public transport, but my elderly father offered to drive me to the hospital for my scheduled visit. I never got a driver's license, and likely never will. Partly because I was born with so-called high-functioning autism; my mind makes me lose myself in daydreams in which I don't recall entering, and when I "wake up" from them, I'm surprised that I didn't fall through an open manhole or get hit by a car along the way. In addition, and worse, either I was born with or developed OCD (often comorbid with autism). This OCD of mine generates a myriad of intrusive thoughts, plenty of which involve violence either towards others or myself. If I were to drive a car, I would find myself having to drive out of my mind the urge to veer into oncoming traffic or drive straight into a wall.

I suppose that I'm something of a barely restrained public menace. Sometimes when I'm about to grab my coffee, my brain presents me with vivid sequences of me tipping the cup so that it spills the hot coffee all over my or someone else's skin. Unfortunately that actually happened, although just once: as I was about to take my coffee from the counter, one of those intrusive "animations" came up, and next thing I knew, my thumb had slid in such a way that I ended up spilling the coffee all over a customer's lap. He was surprisingly cool about it.

I've dropped valuable stuff that I was holding because my mind got filled with images of me dropping it. I've never held a baby because I don't want to live with the consequences of possibly dropping them; back when I was a teenager, a cousin nearly booted me out from her apartment because I didn't want to hold her spawn, and she stormed out offended while saying, "you better change your mind about that!"

I nearly bit off the nipple of a girlfriend of mine because at that very moment the enticing prospect flashed, vividly rendered, through my brain. I still remember the gasp she let out. I miss sucking on tits.

Of course, because I live in an increasingly chaotic Europe (it will last at the most one or two generations), whenever I go out I have to endure vivid sequences of me defending myself from attacks due to the proximity of some group of shady, malicious-looking, military-aged men from some remote shithole, and it doesn't help that I've seen in person shit done by such men, have been harassed by some, and my apartment was nearly broken into in the middle of the day by, again, such people.

Anyway, I wouldn't have been able to drive myself to the hospital. As my elderly father attempted to find a parking space, I told him, "you don't need to park, I'll just get out. And don't wait for me, because afterwards I'll walk somewhere to get a cup of coffee." My father stopped the car almost immediately and let me out. He didn't say anything. A couple of hours later, I was reading in a coffee shop when my father called. He asked where I was, because he didn't see me leave the hospital. I reminded him that I had told him not to wait for me. He said that he had told me that when I left the doctor's office, I should call him to pick me up. He hadn't.

The situation with my father, as in general with the rest of my family, is more peculiar than that of most people's families (and so is my own personal situation). My father was regularly beaten as a child to an extent that it gave him notorious brain damage. I've never had anything resembling a normal conversation with him. In his early seventies, he's now a frail-looking, stooped old man whose head wobbles constantly like a bobblehead doll due to whatever damage was done back in the day. For most effects and purposes, I didn't have a father figure growing up, resulting in all the damage that does to someone.

I thought about growing old. I'll be thirty-eight in a couple of months. I've never felt older than eighteen or twenty. I'm appalled by how fast my body has broken down, including my heart ever since a certain jab.

I have never felt fully human, but the older I get, the less I want to interact with human beings in any capacity. Far more often than not, whenever I listen to other people's opinions I'm disturbed by what comes out of their mouths, as well as their notions of what is good or preferable. A few times I thought I was fine with someone as a person, only for them to open up and for me to realize that I had only fabricated in my mind a version of this person, one that never existed. And due to autism plus OCD and the way they wired my brain, I simply don't feel the need to be in the presence of other humans. In fact, doing so repels me: I feel like I'm surrounded by wild, barely predictable animals. Truly, if it wasn't because I can't afford it, and because I wouldn't know how to organize myself to do so, I would live far, far away from civilization, or at least far enough where I would still have access to the internet.

Apparently a significant portion of the world's population cannot generate images in their brains. I read that somewhere. My mind deals more in images than in words, and I'm constantly aware that language is a very imperfect tool to translate what pops in my mind as images. But due to the conditions I was born with, my mind is a regular whirlpool of images, mostly negative ones, many of them bad memories, that pop up without my control and that force me to deal with them. Two nights ago I barely slept three hours or so, and the rest of the time I kept swatting back the visual sequences that my brain kept presenting to me. For example, how many times do I have to picture the face of agony that my beloved first cat made when she was mortally wounded by a dog? How many times do I have to recall the moments in which I realized that a girlfriend of mine was cheating and was trying to get rid of me? How many times do I have to see the faces of children mocking me for one reason or another? Most of the memories aren't traumatic per se, but they still leave a foul taste in my mouth.

I have to be careful with the experiences I expose myself to, because any new memory (and they are almost always bad; my brain seems very reluctant to retain positive memories) will visit me for years, possibly for the rest of my life, and I suppose there's a point in any human in which he'll have no choice but to go "fuck this" and jump off a bridge.

It's not all bad regarding mental images, though; for years I've found solace in very elaborate daydreams that I can run whenever I want, and that rescue me from the harsh surroundings. One of them starts when three people from the future discover that they all came from an isolated group of Icelanders from the Middle Ages, who were about to starve from a little ice age. The future people, who researched time travel, rescue their ancestors and bring them to the Americas. They provide some future technology, artificial intelligence and such to give them a major edge, but they also give them the task of becoming the sentinels of the New World for when Europeans come and unwittingly kill most of the population through disease, and ruin the treasures of the past through Christianity. An elaborate fantasy that despite how much I've worked mentally on many of the characters, will never become a written story, because daydreams are terrible story material; stories are about tension and struggle (and usually end with a definite win or loss), daydreams are about winning as often as possible.

I can't come up with a proper segue into the following topic, but the fact is that I feel like I've been dead for years and years, maybe since my early twenties. Ever since, I've slowly been erasing myself from the world. The way Patricia Highsmith put it (someone else who was autistic), the artistic life is a "long and lovely suicide." You are mining from yourself raw material to construct valuable artifacts out of it, and you do so, if you are lucky, for as long as your body lasts, but someone who is interested in the world and in living doesn't sit in front of a screen (or stand in front of a canvas) for hours upon hours to escape from reality. And there's a good chance that giving in to the impulse to escape from reality through writing, painting, etc. actually prevents you from learning to cope or even appreciate the whole of reality. But fuck reality; it's just an inferior version of whatever goes on in the mind anyway.