Jon Ureña's Blog, page 35
February 8, 2023
We're Fucked, Pt. 87 (Fiction)
Check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better
---
"Shut your slimy, stinking piehole. Please return to that hellish dimension from whence you came, or else roll down a hillside to your doom. Leave me in peace and quiet."
"Or what, huh?" the blob retorts. "I'm not going anywhere until you listen to what I have to say, and I haven't even started."
I snort.
"Good! Stay stuck to that wall forever if you want. You're an interdimensional scab on a diseased surface. But you are alive, so at one point you'll fall asleep, and then I'll squeeze your fat guts between my thighs! Your squishy innards will drown in my wetness!"
The gooey mass squirms, stretching and contracting, as it emits a guttural retching noise, like that of a vacuum cleaner clogged with swallowed hairs and chunks of food waste. It makes me want to cover my ears. I realize that the blob is coughing up a lump of glop when the wad of black sputum flies out, hurtling across the office toward my face like a fist-sized, viscid stone from a slingshot.
My mind slows time down, turning the projectile into a shimmering blur that expands as it approaches its target. I picture a woman who, distracted texting, understood she was crossing the train tracks just as a freight train was bearing down on her, about to whomp the ghost out of her body. Her consciousness lingered for hours inside the slab of metal that crushed her brain, and then she sailed into the cosmos. As for me, I can't dodge the sputum, but I manage to close my eyes and turn my head away as I gasp.
The glob of gunk splatters on my right cheek with a thwack, as if I have been smacked across the face by a cold, wet hand. The impact makes me flinch back. A pungent fume, that must have trailed behind the gooey comet like a tail, penetrates my nostrils with the stench of acidic regurgitation mixed with that of rotten eggs boiled in dirty diapers.
Hunched over, I shriek as if someone were cutting my heart out with a knife. My knees threaten to buckle under the weight of my horror, because the blob has spurted acid at me, and I know what comes next: in a second my skin will sizzle and bubble, burning with a caustic fire that will sear my nerves. I will feel the right half of my face withering and ripping apart as it gets vaporized into carbon dioxide. The acid will eat into my tongue and right eye, will melt flesh and turn bone to mush until it reaches my brain. How long will it take for my mind to dissolve into chaos?
Have I fainted? My right cheek tingles with numbness as if I had been slapped hard. A chill has spread throughout my body, my skin is crawling, and waves of nauseous revulsion are breaking on the shore of my soul. That gunk clings to my right cheek, even to my upper lip like a viscous mustache. The gooey mass must be swarming with germs and parasites, but other than that, it feels like I've been sneezed on by a bronchitic clown.
The ringing in my ears subsides, and I hear an uproar like a drove of pigs oinking. That blob is chortling with glee at my misfortune.
"Bullseye from across the office!" he crows.
My right eye is gummed shut. I part that pair of eyelids with my trembling fingers, but I end up smearing my fingertips with cold glop, like dipped in molasses. I blink frantically; it stings as if I had squirted lemon juice into my right eye. Although my tear glands are overflowing with brine, I witness that the filthy slimeball is jiggling like jello, emitting wet squelches, wobbling his eyeballs, and dripping pints of putrid muck onto the carpet. A myriad of warty bumps, one of them butt-shaped, have sprouted all over the blob's body, making it resemble a rotten, oily cauliflower. His acidic laughter, that must have been festering in his septic bowels for centuries, is lancing my eardrums on its way to corrode my synapses. If only my mind could shrink to the size of an insect and take wing to escape the blob's cretinous cackles.
"Y-you wretched slime-gargoyle!" I cry out.
The blob coughs, spitting drops of goo, as he recovers from his fit.
"And you are a tasteless twerp," he barks in a mucus-choked voice. "While you're at it, scream for your mommy."
"I wish I were! What the fuck is wrong with you, apart from being the foulest lowlife in the entire universe? Don't you know a basic rule of etiquette? Never spit on a lady!"
The blob laughs like a broken-down garbage truck with bad brakes.
"What lady? I was aiming at a perverted freak!"
My fury burns with flames so intense that my skin must be glowing crimson. I have turned back into a teenager, and the imagined version of my mother is scolding me, looking down her nose, shaking her head, because I never loved the color pink, or baby-oil soap. Instead, a pagan blaze had kindled in my loins, one that threatened to burn for millennia.
My vision is blurring. When I force my vocal cords to obey, my voice comes out ragged.
"I'm sick, you ignorant blob of filth."
"Nope, just a kinky perv who needs a good spanking."
My hands ball into fists. A fire-red fog, the hot breath of primal rage, is spreading through my frontal cortex. I shut my eyes, then try to calm my heartbeat. Although I'm breathing through my mouth to reduce the sting in my nasal cavity, I'm tasting decay like rotting lettuce soaked in sweat.
Outside, the thunderstorm thunders on: a cosmic war with rain as bullets. Its torrential downpour is slapping at the windows like a madman trying to wake the dead. I feel cold, viscous sputum oozing down my neck.
That abyssal lord of pestilence has sullied the right half of my face, covering it with slimy gunk as disgusting as the one in which he keeps his eyes. I want to claw the sludge off with my fingernails before it dries and hardens into a crusty mask, but the prospect of soiling more of my skin with that goop makes me shudder. Should I wipe my face off with a sleeve? No, afterwards I'd have to burn my shirt.
I forgot that I always keep a pack of facial tissues next to my monitor; I never know when I'll need to clean up in a hurry. I wipe my fingertips. I run tissue after tissue across my right cheek with deliberate strokes. I swipe away the gunk that clings to my upper lip. I remove the slime stuck in my eyelashes and eyebrows. Am I clean now? I slide my knuckles along my right cheek; it's coated in a mucous film. I grab another tissue and I scrub the tacky half of my face to wipe all traces of that monster off. After I finish, I toss the balled-up tissue onto the heap of its brethren in my wastebasket. Likely I still stink like a septic tank, but at least I don't look like a slime-drenched sloth who has dunked her head in a bucket of rancid lube.
"Having your face covered in goo suited you better," the blob says. "Really brought out your eyes, as well as your inner monster." He chuckles. "Anyway, back to work! It's about time we get down to brass tacks."
My right cheek aches with the strain of my frenzied scrubbing. Spike's revolver, a relic of a bygone era when most households kept one on top of the TV as a phallic totem to ward off demons, is waiting next to my keyboard. The meticulous curves of that gleaming, silvery hunk of metal call out to me.
---
Author's note: today's song is "I Would Hurt a Fly" by Built to Spill.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and two songs so far. Check them out.
Are you a fan of goo? Then you may enjoy the pictures that a neural network generated regarding this chapter. Here's the link.
So Leire's nightmare continues during this sequence, a tale in two halves where both halves are hell.
---
"Shut your slimy, stinking piehole. Please return to that hellish dimension from whence you came, or else roll down a hillside to your doom. Leave me in peace and quiet."
"Or what, huh?" the blob retorts. "I'm not going anywhere until you listen to what I have to say, and I haven't even started."
I snort.
"Good! Stay stuck to that wall forever if you want. You're an interdimensional scab on a diseased surface. But you are alive, so at one point you'll fall asleep, and then I'll squeeze your fat guts between my thighs! Your squishy innards will drown in my wetness!"
The gooey mass squirms, stretching and contracting, as it emits a guttural retching noise, like that of a vacuum cleaner clogged with swallowed hairs and chunks of food waste. It makes me want to cover my ears. I realize that the blob is coughing up a lump of glop when the wad of black sputum flies out, hurtling across the office toward my face like a fist-sized, viscid stone from a slingshot.
My mind slows time down, turning the projectile into a shimmering blur that expands as it approaches its target. I picture a woman who, distracted texting, understood she was crossing the train tracks just as a freight train was bearing down on her, about to whomp the ghost out of her body. Her consciousness lingered for hours inside the slab of metal that crushed her brain, and then she sailed into the cosmos. As for me, I can't dodge the sputum, but I manage to close my eyes and turn my head away as I gasp.
The glob of gunk splatters on my right cheek with a thwack, as if I have been smacked across the face by a cold, wet hand. The impact makes me flinch back. A pungent fume, that must have trailed behind the gooey comet like a tail, penetrates my nostrils with the stench of acidic regurgitation mixed with that of rotten eggs boiled in dirty diapers.
Hunched over, I shriek as if someone were cutting my heart out with a knife. My knees threaten to buckle under the weight of my horror, because the blob has spurted acid at me, and I know what comes next: in a second my skin will sizzle and bubble, burning with a caustic fire that will sear my nerves. I will feel the right half of my face withering and ripping apart as it gets vaporized into carbon dioxide. The acid will eat into my tongue and right eye, will melt flesh and turn bone to mush until it reaches my brain. How long will it take for my mind to dissolve into chaos?
Have I fainted? My right cheek tingles with numbness as if I had been slapped hard. A chill has spread throughout my body, my skin is crawling, and waves of nauseous revulsion are breaking on the shore of my soul. That gunk clings to my right cheek, even to my upper lip like a viscous mustache. The gooey mass must be swarming with germs and parasites, but other than that, it feels like I've been sneezed on by a bronchitic clown.
The ringing in my ears subsides, and I hear an uproar like a drove of pigs oinking. That blob is chortling with glee at my misfortune.
"Bullseye from across the office!" he crows.
My right eye is gummed shut. I part that pair of eyelids with my trembling fingers, but I end up smearing my fingertips with cold glop, like dipped in molasses. I blink frantically; it stings as if I had squirted lemon juice into my right eye. Although my tear glands are overflowing with brine, I witness that the filthy slimeball is jiggling like jello, emitting wet squelches, wobbling his eyeballs, and dripping pints of putrid muck onto the carpet. A myriad of warty bumps, one of them butt-shaped, have sprouted all over the blob's body, making it resemble a rotten, oily cauliflower. His acidic laughter, that must have been festering in his septic bowels for centuries, is lancing my eardrums on its way to corrode my synapses. If only my mind could shrink to the size of an insect and take wing to escape the blob's cretinous cackles.
"Y-you wretched slime-gargoyle!" I cry out.
The blob coughs, spitting drops of goo, as he recovers from his fit.
"And you are a tasteless twerp," he barks in a mucus-choked voice. "While you're at it, scream for your mommy."
"I wish I were! What the fuck is wrong with you, apart from being the foulest lowlife in the entire universe? Don't you know a basic rule of etiquette? Never spit on a lady!"
The blob laughs like a broken-down garbage truck with bad brakes.
"What lady? I was aiming at a perverted freak!"
My fury burns with flames so intense that my skin must be glowing crimson. I have turned back into a teenager, and the imagined version of my mother is scolding me, looking down her nose, shaking her head, because I never loved the color pink, or baby-oil soap. Instead, a pagan blaze had kindled in my loins, one that threatened to burn for millennia.
My vision is blurring. When I force my vocal cords to obey, my voice comes out ragged.
"I'm sick, you ignorant blob of filth."
"Nope, just a kinky perv who needs a good spanking."
My hands ball into fists. A fire-red fog, the hot breath of primal rage, is spreading through my frontal cortex. I shut my eyes, then try to calm my heartbeat. Although I'm breathing through my mouth to reduce the sting in my nasal cavity, I'm tasting decay like rotting lettuce soaked in sweat.
Outside, the thunderstorm thunders on: a cosmic war with rain as bullets. Its torrential downpour is slapping at the windows like a madman trying to wake the dead. I feel cold, viscous sputum oozing down my neck.
That abyssal lord of pestilence has sullied the right half of my face, covering it with slimy gunk as disgusting as the one in which he keeps his eyes. I want to claw the sludge off with my fingernails before it dries and hardens into a crusty mask, but the prospect of soiling more of my skin with that goop makes me shudder. Should I wipe my face off with a sleeve? No, afterwards I'd have to burn my shirt.
I forgot that I always keep a pack of facial tissues next to my monitor; I never know when I'll need to clean up in a hurry. I wipe my fingertips. I run tissue after tissue across my right cheek with deliberate strokes. I swipe away the gunk that clings to my upper lip. I remove the slime stuck in my eyelashes and eyebrows. Am I clean now? I slide my knuckles along my right cheek; it's coated in a mucous film. I grab another tissue and I scrub the tacky half of my face to wipe all traces of that monster off. After I finish, I toss the balled-up tissue onto the heap of its brethren in my wastebasket. Likely I still stink like a septic tank, but at least I don't look like a slime-drenched sloth who has dunked her head in a bucket of rancid lube.
"Having your face covered in goo suited you better," the blob says. "Really brought out your eyes, as well as your inner monster." He chuckles. "Anyway, back to work! It's about time we get down to brass tacks."
My right cheek aches with the strain of my frenzied scrubbing. Spike's revolver, a relic of a bygone era when most households kept one on top of the TV as a phallic totem to ward off demons, is waiting next to my keyboard. The meticulous curves of that gleaming, silvery hunk of metal call out to me.
---
Author's note: today's song is "I Would Hurt a Fly" by Built to Spill.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and two songs so far. Check them out.
Are you a fan of goo? Then you may enjoy the pictures that a neural network generated regarding this chapter. Here's the link.
So Leire's nightmare continues during this sequence, a tale in two halves where both halves are hell.
February 3, 2023
We're Fucked, Pt. 86 (Fiction)
Check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better
---
"Will you stop laughing already?" the blob demands in a voice viscous as dripping sludge.
My chest and back are heaving, my facial muscles are contracted in a rigid grin that bares my teeth, while tears jump from my eyes. A piggish snort interrupts the guffawing, and after a few dry gasps, I manage to straighten up.
"The abomination talked." I wipe away the tears with my thumbs, including the little beads stuck in my lashes. "Of course it talked. That's just my luck."
"I'm neither an 'it' nor an 'abomination.' I'm a sentient being, an intelligent lifeform, just like you."
"Of all the slimy blobs in this world of horrors, I had to come across one that mastered the art of speech. What an inauspicious fate."
"You are as rude as usual," the blob says gruffly.
Blood is rushing to my head, making it throb and ache. Simulations bubbling up from my subconscious are crowding up behind the shut sphincter of my mind, competing for my attention; I get a glimpse of myself sinking my fingers with a glugging sound into the squidgy goo, which looks like the oozing viscera of a decomposing whale, to seize whatever passes for this gutter-mouthed freak's neck and throttle it while screaming obscenities. I clench my fists, and the tendons in my hands creak in anticipation. I also picture myself hurling a mountain-sized iceberg at this monstrosity to pulverize it.
This is what I have become: a grown woman talking to a gargantuan glob of black sludge stuck to a wall. And yet that blob has the gall to call me rude. At which of those bulging eyeballs should I glower as they bob back and forth in that viscous, wobbly mass? If eyes are windows into the soul, I'm facing one sordid, abject fiend who has earned every curse that may be heaped upon him.
I fold my arms and force myself to take measured breaths.
"I resent your tone, sir," I say through a tight throat that feels scraped raw, "as I resent the rotten stench emanating from your bloated body."
"I stink, huh?"
"It reeks of decaying garbage. No, it's more like the stink of rotten eggs mixed with raw sewage. A putrefying miasma I wouldn't be able to wash off even if I jumped in a pool of acid."
"The fact that you can breathe is a small mercy in this world of filth you call home."
"Are you speaking from experience?" I chuckle nervously. "You must have spawned from filth yourself. I swear, if there were a contest for the most hideous creature on Earth, you would be one of the frontrunners. But I will spare myself from imagining such a pageant so I can retain what little self-control I possess. Your appearance is an affront to human dignity."
"Alright, trash-talker. You don't have a clue how hard and unpleasant it was to manifest over here."
A peal of thunder ripping across the sky makes me snap my head upright, and drowns out the blob's words. Goosebumps erupt down my arms while the rumble crackles as if some heavenly douchebags were setting off firecrackers.
"Who invited you anyway?" I demand to know. "And who would invite in an intergalactic vagrant who knows nothing of etiquette?"
"What makes you think I need your permission?"
Sweat trickles down my nose. My heart is hammering so hard I'm afraid it will tear free from my chest and fall to the carpet with a splat. My carotids must be swollen and purple.
"You are a parasite," I growl through gritted teeth. "An invader. A sewer-dwelling species from some unheard-of dimension. Do the countless worms twitching in your flesh take note of the venom in my voice?"
"They do indeed, and they're getting a kick out of it. As are the trillions of germs swimming in your intestinal flora."
"Don't you dare speak to me of my digestive system. I will gut you like a fish and flay you alive!"
The blob's bulging eyeballs, plump blisters about to burst in spurts of pus, quiver as he sniggers. It makes me picture a chorus of gargling frogs.
"Leire, you're a bully. A bully with no sense of proportion and a pathetic personality to boot. You excel at bullying others as well as yourself."
My forehead is moist, my hair sticks to my face, and my shirt clings to my back and breasts. I tremble with the impulse to hurl a chair or a bookcase at the interdimensional, septic abomination who continues to spew his invective even as I struggle to contain my wrath.
This is why I don't socialize, why I've kept to myself for most of my life: this world of misery is filled with nauseating vermin who delight in humiliating me. I thought I had left behind me the hostility oozing from every corner, the spiteful whispers of untold monsters, but now I'm confronted with an invader whose rudeness and perversion outstrip my own. A real piece of shit, so to speak.
I need to bury my face in mommy's breasts.
---
Author's note: today's song is "Angela Surf City" by The Walkmen (as well as this live version).
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and one songs so far. Check them out.
This chapter kicks off a new sequence titled "A Monstrous Ignoramus." The previous sequence kind of did me in; I don't want to end up again in a situation in which I will only upload a chapter every couple of weeks, but given how obsessive I am, that means posting short chapters more often. Whenever I get down to editing the chapters together into an epub file, I'll merge plenty of them anyway.
In other news, I've been hooked on beta blockers due to my heart issues. My hands and feet are perpetually cold, my heart rate rarely goes above 60, and I feel somewhat physically detached from my surroundings, although not mentally, which is perfect; the serotonin reuptake inhibitors I used to take ages ago turned me into a zombie. These days I would probably come off as even more boring than usual, but thankfully I haven't talked to anyone in person (other than waiters, servers or whatever they prefer to call themselves these days) ever since my last contract ended. Beta blockers apparently also work to prevent migraines (they terrify me), and help with anxiety in general. Perhaps I should have been taking them all along. What other drugs should I become dependent on?
---
"Will you stop laughing already?" the blob demands in a voice viscous as dripping sludge.
My chest and back are heaving, my facial muscles are contracted in a rigid grin that bares my teeth, while tears jump from my eyes. A piggish snort interrupts the guffawing, and after a few dry gasps, I manage to straighten up.
"The abomination talked." I wipe away the tears with my thumbs, including the little beads stuck in my lashes. "Of course it talked. That's just my luck."
"I'm neither an 'it' nor an 'abomination.' I'm a sentient being, an intelligent lifeform, just like you."
"Of all the slimy blobs in this world of horrors, I had to come across one that mastered the art of speech. What an inauspicious fate."
"You are as rude as usual," the blob says gruffly.
Blood is rushing to my head, making it throb and ache. Simulations bubbling up from my subconscious are crowding up behind the shut sphincter of my mind, competing for my attention; I get a glimpse of myself sinking my fingers with a glugging sound into the squidgy goo, which looks like the oozing viscera of a decomposing whale, to seize whatever passes for this gutter-mouthed freak's neck and throttle it while screaming obscenities. I clench my fists, and the tendons in my hands creak in anticipation. I also picture myself hurling a mountain-sized iceberg at this monstrosity to pulverize it.
This is what I have become: a grown woman talking to a gargantuan glob of black sludge stuck to a wall. And yet that blob has the gall to call me rude. At which of those bulging eyeballs should I glower as they bob back and forth in that viscous, wobbly mass? If eyes are windows into the soul, I'm facing one sordid, abject fiend who has earned every curse that may be heaped upon him.
I fold my arms and force myself to take measured breaths.
"I resent your tone, sir," I say through a tight throat that feels scraped raw, "as I resent the rotten stench emanating from your bloated body."
"I stink, huh?"
"It reeks of decaying garbage. No, it's more like the stink of rotten eggs mixed with raw sewage. A putrefying miasma I wouldn't be able to wash off even if I jumped in a pool of acid."
"The fact that you can breathe is a small mercy in this world of filth you call home."
"Are you speaking from experience?" I chuckle nervously. "You must have spawned from filth yourself. I swear, if there were a contest for the most hideous creature on Earth, you would be one of the frontrunners. But I will spare myself from imagining such a pageant so I can retain what little self-control I possess. Your appearance is an affront to human dignity."
"Alright, trash-talker. You don't have a clue how hard and unpleasant it was to manifest over here."
A peal of thunder ripping across the sky makes me snap my head upright, and drowns out the blob's words. Goosebumps erupt down my arms while the rumble crackles as if some heavenly douchebags were setting off firecrackers.
"Who invited you anyway?" I demand to know. "And who would invite in an intergalactic vagrant who knows nothing of etiquette?"
"What makes you think I need your permission?"
Sweat trickles down my nose. My heart is hammering so hard I'm afraid it will tear free from my chest and fall to the carpet with a splat. My carotids must be swollen and purple.
"You are a parasite," I growl through gritted teeth. "An invader. A sewer-dwelling species from some unheard-of dimension. Do the countless worms twitching in your flesh take note of the venom in my voice?"
"They do indeed, and they're getting a kick out of it. As are the trillions of germs swimming in your intestinal flora."
"Don't you dare speak to me of my digestive system. I will gut you like a fish and flay you alive!"
The blob's bulging eyeballs, plump blisters about to burst in spurts of pus, quiver as he sniggers. It makes me picture a chorus of gargling frogs.
"Leire, you're a bully. A bully with no sense of proportion and a pathetic personality to boot. You excel at bullying others as well as yourself."
My forehead is moist, my hair sticks to my face, and my shirt clings to my back and breasts. I tremble with the impulse to hurl a chair or a bookcase at the interdimensional, septic abomination who continues to spew his invective even as I struggle to contain my wrath.
This is why I don't socialize, why I've kept to myself for most of my life: this world of misery is filled with nauseating vermin who delight in humiliating me. I thought I had left behind me the hostility oozing from every corner, the spiteful whispers of untold monsters, but now I'm confronted with an invader whose rudeness and perversion outstrip my own. A real piece of shit, so to speak.
I need to bury my face in mommy's breasts.
---
Author's note: today's song is "Angela Surf City" by The Walkmen (as well as this live version).
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and one songs so far. Check them out.
This chapter kicks off a new sequence titled "A Monstrous Ignoramus." The previous sequence kind of did me in; I don't want to end up again in a situation in which I will only upload a chapter every couple of weeks, but given how obsessive I am, that means posting short chapters more often. Whenever I get down to editing the chapters together into an epub file, I'll merge plenty of them anyway.
In other news, I've been hooked on beta blockers due to my heart issues. My hands and feet are perpetually cold, my heart rate rarely goes above 60, and I feel somewhat physically detached from my surroundings, although not mentally, which is perfect; the serotonin reuptake inhibitors I used to take ages ago turned me into a zombie. These days I would probably come off as even more boring than usual, but thankfully I haven't talked to anyone in person (other than waiters, servers or whatever they prefer to call themselves these days) ever since my last contract ended. Beta blockers apparently also work to prevent migraines (they terrify me), and help with anxiety in general. Perhaps I should have been taking them all along. What other drugs should I become dependent on?
January 30, 2023
We're Fucked, Pt. 85: AI-generated images
I hope you like slimy blobs; otherwise this whole sequence must have been damn near unbearable. I have become a fan of blobs myself. Maybe when I die I will get reincarnated as one. I despise goblins, though.
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
January 29, 2023
We're Fucked, Pt. 85 (Fiction)
Check out this chapter in my personal page, where it looks better
---
Darkness had washed over me like a foggy, polluted river. I had heard the keening cries of the naiads, I had felt their icy fingers glide along my naked skin, and shortly after, even verbs and nouns had been swept away. But the world returns in a torrent of sights and sounds and scents, dazzling me with white light.
My knees wobble, and I stumble like a toddler. I'm standing on my feet although I was lying on the carpet.
A dull pounding pulses at my temples. Rain is pelting the windows, and deeper in that white noise I discern sounds like those of wind blowing through the ruins of ancient temples. A siren howls in the distance. Thunder booms. On the ceiling, a flourescent tube is flickering with a buzz and a crackle as it emits a fitful glow.
The putrid stench of corruption has penetrated my clothes, has oozed through my pores to infiltrate my body. My blood must be turning into a sludgy sap that will clog my veins and arteries, that will bloat my belly and mar my skin with scabby lesions. I will gasp my last breath while black slime oozes out of my mouth, then I will succumb to septicemia and end up like a bag of filth and offal left to rot in an alley.
Sweat has bathed my body in cold dread. I'm sticky, sticky, sticky. My hair is matted to my forehead. My skin sticks to my clothes, my clothes stick to me. I'm sinking in crude oil.
I want to duck under a showerhead and let it spray my hair and face with ice-cold water. I imagine myself gasping for breath while the cascade streams down my chest and breasts and trickles between my thighs, raking them with the icy bristles of its flow. Goosebumps will erupt all over my skin, and my nipples will harden to firm peaks. The chill will make me shiver uncontrollably, as well as yearn for the merciful embrace of death. I envision myself kneading and massaging my clit as the pussy juices slick my fingers.
After I step, sopping wet, out of the shower, I'll gargle with mouthwash to get rid of the acrid taste of puke. But what if trying to wash myself only spreads the slime and makes it stickier? No matter how hard I scrub, even if I scour my body with bleach, I'll never clean this alien ooze off my hair, skin, and private parts. I will remain forever contaminated by the blob's nauseating exudate.
I'm swaying on my feet, my heart is racing, and the edges of my vision have gone fuzzy. A tremor of hysteria shakes my whole being. My consciousness is struggling to escape from its chrysalis of flesh and bone; I'll end up staring down at the back of my head as if from a hovering camera in a third-person videogame. Although this may be the right time for a panic attack, I better flush my system of these filthy thoughts.
I groan with anguish. When I hunch over and attempt to hold my head, I bonk my right temple with a chunk of metal. It hurts, but the pain drives out the demons of panic. What the hell am I holding? Ah, the revolver remains grasped in my right hand as if fused. That forefinger, curled around the trigger, feels stiff like a dried piece of tree fungus.
Wait, my right hand is okay?! I still feel the aftershock of the revolver's kickback that tore my hand off as if it were a twig in a typhoon. The severed ends of tendons and ligaments had dangled from the bloody stump of my wrist. Also, how the hell am I standing? A burning pain, the sizzling trail of a red-hot soldering iron, had seared down my spine from the nape to the coccyx, as if someone were chopping up my spinal cord with hedge clippers.
If I could evoke such pain through daydreams, over the years I would have given myself countless traumas, and maybe an early-onset stroke. Was that a hallucination, an illusion brought on by the blob's vile ichor?
I had taken a break from programming to speak on the phone with Jacqueline, my beloved queen, the most precious gemstone in my crown. Knowing that in a few hours I would return to her arms justified wasting the afternoon at the office. But I cut the conversation short, I willingly stopped the flow of Jacqueline's melodic voice, because this bloated lump of glop, this wretched pile of protoplasm from which dangle tentacles of viscous discharge, oozed out of some cosmic sewer to intrude upon my life and plunge me into madness. My vision is swimming with phantasmic eyeballs whose moist scleras, white like milky quartz, gleam in the fluorescent light, and that stare unblinkingly because their eyelids must have been bitten off by ravenous frogs. If this revolting blight had a mouth, it would suck the flesh off my bones.
The office has become a bubble sliced off from the universe, a bubble filled with static and a dense miasma, kept inflated by a steady supply of insanity, and that has trapped me with the other inhabitant of this space: an alien abomination. I must be crazy to withstand the presence of this intruder, that looks as if a titanic demon had followed a no-fap regime for centuries, until one day, high on bath salts, as his bulging balls threatened to burst, he pumped out the load of rotten, gelatinous cum all over a wall. He then threw at the gooey splatter, like sprinkles, several serial killers' collections of gouged-out eyeballs. That demon likely ended up in heaven for having fulfilled his purpose: unleashing a massive discharge of jizz.
This defilement of our white-walled office shan't be forgiven. I'm going to exorcise the demonic emission in a swift and violent way, with my loaded revolver. Wait, didn't a couple of bullets from my weapon already reach and mutilate their target?
The sight of the silvery revolver in my clenched fist should make me feel invulnerable, as if I could solve the ills of the world with well-aimed shots, yet I feel like I grabbed a venomous snake by the tail. A chill rushes through my spine. This damn gun is an instrument of chaos! Maybe the skull and bones engraved in the frame, between the grip and the cylinder, were a warning. I should have known better than to trust a horse's offering, but this thing was too shiny and beguiling to pass up.
Have I become a slave to this inanimate object, a traitorous implement that must be scorned and banished to outer space? I shamble to my workstation and stretch out my trembling right arm to part ways with the weapon. A blaze of adrenaline has been pouring into my clitoris, and long ago reached a peak, but it must have come to a lull: even though my nethers are desperate for friction, my sense of self-preservation allows me to place the revolver beside my keyboard and mouse.
A numbness pervades my right hand as if a serpent were twisting tightly around that forearm. My pale skin is growing wrinkles now that I've hit my thirties. A single thwack of a butcher knife would chop off those four thin fingers. When I order them to wiggle for me, I fear that through my daredevil antics I have severed the connection between brain and hand, but those four fingers flex and straighten out, obeying me like whipped hounds.
I bring my hand to my puckered lips and kiss its clammy, dead-white palm. I kiss its smooth back, then the knuckles one by one. I lick its nails. The hand must have been starved for affection, because it shivers as I suck on its index finger, that grows slippery under my tongue. I love you, right hand! I never thought of proclaiming it to you. Until I met Jacqueline, and for about twenty years, you were the only one that loved me, on whom I could rely to assuage my loneliness. You were also the only one who could beat me at board games. For all you gave and gave, I never asked what you wanted, what you needed, or what you dreamed of. Maybe I didn't care enough to know.
A flood of tears gushes down my cheeks. What did I ever do to deserve to have hands? I'm a slug writhing in the gutter where life has left me. I'm a fiend, an outcast cursed with the stigmata of filth and failure, who must be sacrificed to avert an apocalypse. I'm a dick. A freak. A freakish dick freak. My family died because of me. I should give this revolting blob a big hug, cradling its oozing flesh, and thank it for providing me with another dose of the crushing, suffocating burden of self-loathing.
What the hell am I saying?! Why would I conjure up empathy for this monstrous heap of goo sent forth from some galactic abyss? I'm the victim of a psychic assault! My brain is being conquered by tentacles entwined around it like the vines of a strangler fig. Although I should have donned an industrial-strength hazmat suit merely to gaze upon this menace, let alone withstand the oozing filth's neurotoxin, I must summon the courage to fight back. Will I grab that abomination with my bare hands, shove it into an airtight container and drag it to the nearest incinerator? Should I toss it into a boiling cauldron, to be boiled alive in its own foul juices? Is it edible? Will I dine on its fricasseed eyeballs?
A faint hum, the pulse of millions of microscopic parasites swarming in the black blubber, resonates within me as I pick up a noise coming from the infested wall, that oily and carnal mass: a deep, rhythmic chugging. Intermittent spasms of frantic activity ripple over the blob. Will it blow a colossal fart with the aim of ruining my sanity? No, the sputtering makes me picture a clogged gutter that has gained sentience and is trying to speak through muck and gunk.
My muscles are tensed, my ears pricked up. I'm assaulted by the din of the blob's gurgling snores, like those of a hibernating beast snuffling and blowing mucus in its slumber, about to cough itself awake.
A full-body tremor overtakes me, followed by a shot of rage that ignites like gasoline. My teeth grind as my head spins.
"F-fuck off, you slime-coated turd!" I shout, hoarse from vomiting. "Prepare yourself for obliteration!"
I grab a pen. I fling myself towards the target with a single stride, as well as a frenzy-fueled fury, and hurl my ink-tipped missile. The pen hits an eyeball sideways, a few centimeters over its cornea, and clings to some oily membrane as if glued. I hold my breath. The writing implement slides down the slick curve of the cornea and drops into a puddle of gloop.
That eyeball's pupil, dark as a bottomless hole, contracts to glare at me.
"Yeah, just throw random shit at me, why don't you," the blob says in a viscous and dank voice, like wet concrete. "And fuck you for making me come down here, Leire."
I shake, I quiver, I shake worse. My vision blurs. Am I about to faint, apart from pissing myself?
A surge of laughter wells up within me and racks my body as I burst into a maniacal cackle.
---
Author's note: the songs for today are "Cosmic Dancer" by T. Rex, and "Sympathy for the Devil" by The Rolling Stones.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Ninety-nine songs so far. Check them out.
Do you want to see moments from this chapter depicted by a fancy neural network? Then visit this link.
This chapter concludes the sequence titled "Cumlord of the Abyss," which is only the first half of the "saga" (I don't know how else to call linked sequences) involving this bizarre blob.
I don't think I have ever written a series of chapters this hard to put together; they required lots of freewrites (virtually one for each paragraph) that included detailed descriptions of hard to picture stuff. Plenty of outlandish references. The process wasn't altogether joyful. Of course, I'm obsessive to a pathological degree (autism and OCD is a nasty combination), so it took me entire writing sessions to get through two or three paragraphs. I vastly prefer scenes that mostly feature two characters shooting the shit with each other.
Anyway, the next chapter will kick off a new sequence, titled "A Monstrous Ignoramus." It will feature lots of insane dialogue, to which I always look forward.
---
Darkness had washed over me like a foggy, polluted river. I had heard the keening cries of the naiads, I had felt their icy fingers glide along my naked skin, and shortly after, even verbs and nouns had been swept away. But the world returns in a torrent of sights and sounds and scents, dazzling me with white light.
My knees wobble, and I stumble like a toddler. I'm standing on my feet although I was lying on the carpet.
A dull pounding pulses at my temples. Rain is pelting the windows, and deeper in that white noise I discern sounds like those of wind blowing through the ruins of ancient temples. A siren howls in the distance. Thunder booms. On the ceiling, a flourescent tube is flickering with a buzz and a crackle as it emits a fitful glow.
The putrid stench of corruption has penetrated my clothes, has oozed through my pores to infiltrate my body. My blood must be turning into a sludgy sap that will clog my veins and arteries, that will bloat my belly and mar my skin with scabby lesions. I will gasp my last breath while black slime oozes out of my mouth, then I will succumb to septicemia and end up like a bag of filth and offal left to rot in an alley.
Sweat has bathed my body in cold dread. I'm sticky, sticky, sticky. My hair is matted to my forehead. My skin sticks to my clothes, my clothes stick to me. I'm sinking in crude oil.
I want to duck under a showerhead and let it spray my hair and face with ice-cold water. I imagine myself gasping for breath while the cascade streams down my chest and breasts and trickles between my thighs, raking them with the icy bristles of its flow. Goosebumps will erupt all over my skin, and my nipples will harden to firm peaks. The chill will make me shiver uncontrollably, as well as yearn for the merciful embrace of death. I envision myself kneading and massaging my clit as the pussy juices slick my fingers.
After I step, sopping wet, out of the shower, I'll gargle with mouthwash to get rid of the acrid taste of puke. But what if trying to wash myself only spreads the slime and makes it stickier? No matter how hard I scrub, even if I scour my body with bleach, I'll never clean this alien ooze off my hair, skin, and private parts. I will remain forever contaminated by the blob's nauseating exudate.
I'm swaying on my feet, my heart is racing, and the edges of my vision have gone fuzzy. A tremor of hysteria shakes my whole being. My consciousness is struggling to escape from its chrysalis of flesh and bone; I'll end up staring down at the back of my head as if from a hovering camera in a third-person videogame. Although this may be the right time for a panic attack, I better flush my system of these filthy thoughts.
I groan with anguish. When I hunch over and attempt to hold my head, I bonk my right temple with a chunk of metal. It hurts, but the pain drives out the demons of panic. What the hell am I holding? Ah, the revolver remains grasped in my right hand as if fused. That forefinger, curled around the trigger, feels stiff like a dried piece of tree fungus.
Wait, my right hand is okay?! I still feel the aftershock of the revolver's kickback that tore my hand off as if it were a twig in a typhoon. The severed ends of tendons and ligaments had dangled from the bloody stump of my wrist. Also, how the hell am I standing? A burning pain, the sizzling trail of a red-hot soldering iron, had seared down my spine from the nape to the coccyx, as if someone were chopping up my spinal cord with hedge clippers.
If I could evoke such pain through daydreams, over the years I would have given myself countless traumas, and maybe an early-onset stroke. Was that a hallucination, an illusion brought on by the blob's vile ichor?
I had taken a break from programming to speak on the phone with Jacqueline, my beloved queen, the most precious gemstone in my crown. Knowing that in a few hours I would return to her arms justified wasting the afternoon at the office. But I cut the conversation short, I willingly stopped the flow of Jacqueline's melodic voice, because this bloated lump of glop, this wretched pile of protoplasm from which dangle tentacles of viscous discharge, oozed out of some cosmic sewer to intrude upon my life and plunge me into madness. My vision is swimming with phantasmic eyeballs whose moist scleras, white like milky quartz, gleam in the fluorescent light, and that stare unblinkingly because their eyelids must have been bitten off by ravenous frogs. If this revolting blight had a mouth, it would suck the flesh off my bones.
The office has become a bubble sliced off from the universe, a bubble filled with static and a dense miasma, kept inflated by a steady supply of insanity, and that has trapped me with the other inhabitant of this space: an alien abomination. I must be crazy to withstand the presence of this intruder, that looks as if a titanic demon had followed a no-fap regime for centuries, until one day, high on bath salts, as his bulging balls threatened to burst, he pumped out the load of rotten, gelatinous cum all over a wall. He then threw at the gooey splatter, like sprinkles, several serial killers' collections of gouged-out eyeballs. That demon likely ended up in heaven for having fulfilled his purpose: unleashing a massive discharge of jizz.
This defilement of our white-walled office shan't be forgiven. I'm going to exorcise the demonic emission in a swift and violent way, with my loaded revolver. Wait, didn't a couple of bullets from my weapon already reach and mutilate their target?
The sight of the silvery revolver in my clenched fist should make me feel invulnerable, as if I could solve the ills of the world with well-aimed shots, yet I feel like I grabbed a venomous snake by the tail. A chill rushes through my spine. This damn gun is an instrument of chaos! Maybe the skull and bones engraved in the frame, between the grip and the cylinder, were a warning. I should have known better than to trust a horse's offering, but this thing was too shiny and beguiling to pass up.
Have I become a slave to this inanimate object, a traitorous implement that must be scorned and banished to outer space? I shamble to my workstation and stretch out my trembling right arm to part ways with the weapon. A blaze of adrenaline has been pouring into my clitoris, and long ago reached a peak, but it must have come to a lull: even though my nethers are desperate for friction, my sense of self-preservation allows me to place the revolver beside my keyboard and mouse.
A numbness pervades my right hand as if a serpent were twisting tightly around that forearm. My pale skin is growing wrinkles now that I've hit my thirties. A single thwack of a butcher knife would chop off those four thin fingers. When I order them to wiggle for me, I fear that through my daredevil antics I have severed the connection between brain and hand, but those four fingers flex and straighten out, obeying me like whipped hounds.
I bring my hand to my puckered lips and kiss its clammy, dead-white palm. I kiss its smooth back, then the knuckles one by one. I lick its nails. The hand must have been starved for affection, because it shivers as I suck on its index finger, that grows slippery under my tongue. I love you, right hand! I never thought of proclaiming it to you. Until I met Jacqueline, and for about twenty years, you were the only one that loved me, on whom I could rely to assuage my loneliness. You were also the only one who could beat me at board games. For all you gave and gave, I never asked what you wanted, what you needed, or what you dreamed of. Maybe I didn't care enough to know.
A flood of tears gushes down my cheeks. What did I ever do to deserve to have hands? I'm a slug writhing in the gutter where life has left me. I'm a fiend, an outcast cursed with the stigmata of filth and failure, who must be sacrificed to avert an apocalypse. I'm a dick. A freak. A freakish dick freak. My family died because of me. I should give this revolting blob a big hug, cradling its oozing flesh, and thank it for providing me with another dose of the crushing, suffocating burden of self-loathing.
What the hell am I saying?! Why would I conjure up empathy for this monstrous heap of goo sent forth from some galactic abyss? I'm the victim of a psychic assault! My brain is being conquered by tentacles entwined around it like the vines of a strangler fig. Although I should have donned an industrial-strength hazmat suit merely to gaze upon this menace, let alone withstand the oozing filth's neurotoxin, I must summon the courage to fight back. Will I grab that abomination with my bare hands, shove it into an airtight container and drag it to the nearest incinerator? Should I toss it into a boiling cauldron, to be boiled alive in its own foul juices? Is it edible? Will I dine on its fricasseed eyeballs?
A faint hum, the pulse of millions of microscopic parasites swarming in the black blubber, resonates within me as I pick up a noise coming from the infested wall, that oily and carnal mass: a deep, rhythmic chugging. Intermittent spasms of frantic activity ripple over the blob. Will it blow a colossal fart with the aim of ruining my sanity? No, the sputtering makes me picture a clogged gutter that has gained sentience and is trying to speak through muck and gunk.
My muscles are tensed, my ears pricked up. I'm assaulted by the din of the blob's gurgling snores, like those of a hibernating beast snuffling and blowing mucus in its slumber, about to cough itself awake.
A full-body tremor overtakes me, followed by a shot of rage that ignites like gasoline. My teeth grind as my head spins.
"F-fuck off, you slime-coated turd!" I shout, hoarse from vomiting. "Prepare yourself for obliteration!"
I grab a pen. I fling myself towards the target with a single stride, as well as a frenzy-fueled fury, and hurl my ink-tipped missile. The pen hits an eyeball sideways, a few centimeters over its cornea, and clings to some oily membrane as if glued. I hold my breath. The writing implement slides down the slick curve of the cornea and drops into a puddle of gloop.
That eyeball's pupil, dark as a bottomless hole, contracts to glare at me.
"Yeah, just throw random shit at me, why don't you," the blob says in a viscous and dank voice, like wet concrete. "And fuck you for making me come down here, Leire."
I shake, I quiver, I shake worse. My vision blurs. Am I about to faint, apart from pissing myself?
A surge of laughter wells up within me and racks my body as I burst into a maniacal cackle.
---
Author's note: the songs for today are "Cosmic Dancer" by T. Rex, and "Sympathy for the Devil" by The Rolling Stones.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Ninety-nine songs so far. Check them out.
Do you want to see moments from this chapter depicted by a fancy neural network? Then visit this link.
This chapter concludes the sequence titled "Cumlord of the Abyss," which is only the first half of the "saga" (I don't know how else to call linked sequences) involving this bizarre blob.
I don't think I have ever written a series of chapters this hard to put together; they required lots of freewrites (virtually one for each paragraph) that included detailed descriptions of hard to picture stuff. Plenty of outlandish references. The process wasn't altogether joyful. Of course, I'm obsessive to a pathological degree (autism and OCD is a nasty combination), so it took me entire writing sessions to get through two or three paragraphs. I vastly prefer scenes that mostly feature two characters shooting the shit with each other.
Anyway, the next chapter will kick off a new sequence, titled "A Monstrous Ignoramus." It will feature lots of insane dialogue, to which I always look forward.
January 21, 2023
We’re Fucked, Pt. 84: AI-generated images
Even when you’re approaching the edge of absurdity, you can remain sure that a neural network will generate some intriguing pictures out of it.
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
January 20, 2023
We're Fucked, Pt. 84 (Fiction)
Check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better
---
The smooth, clawlike trigger presses against the pad of my forefinger. I tighten that digit slowly, then squeeze. The hammer falls with a snick as the firing pin strikes the primer. A ring of sparks, like those churned out when a lighter's wheel grinds against the flint, spreads outward from the gap between the frame and the cylinder, then the revolver's muzzle blows a puff of cigarette-adjacent smoke that scatters in the air.
My heart throbs violently as I stare dumbfounded at the sleek frame of my weapon, that gleams alabaster white under the fluorescent fixtures. Shit, why didn't the revolver spit out a bullet? Is it jammed? Did the firing pin come damaged? Should I have oiled some mechanism? Maybe I should have carried the revolver to the woods, high up on Mount Jaizkibel, and tried it out against a tree trunk. As far as I know, revolvers should just work; I'm not holding a particle accelerator.
I pull the trigger, which causes the hammer to spring back. Once the cylinder rotates to align its next chamber with the barrel, the hammer snaps forward and clunks as if the bullet primer had been struck by a mallet, yet the revolver remains dead like rusted machinery.
I must overcome the revolting monstrosity that dares to pollute my space with its filth. I have to make this fucking gun shoot!
I clutch the revolver in a white-knuckled grip, then I squeeze and squeeze and squeeze the trigger. The cylinder clacks as it rotates and rotates chambering bullet after bullet. Although the hammer falls with dull snaps as the firing pin punches into live rounds of ammunition, it may as well be striking ghost bullets.
Are my hands shaking? No, the revolver is trembling like a tuning fork, a vibration that gets transmitted through my palms and up my arms, then races along my spine. The weapon starts emitting an ominous, high-pitched whirring sound; I picture an electrical panel bursting with frayed wires that would zap like a moth even the gloved electrician tasked to repair the mess.
I flip the revolver around and peer down its bore, a black hole encircled by the metallic ring of the muzzle. It offers me a top-down view of a turbulent, undulating pool of brass-colored liquid metal, whose waves spread in alternating crests and troughs as they slam against the walls of the chamber. The bullet must have cohered to a quantum state.
Should I wrap my lips around the barrel and blow? No, whenever the bullet snaps out of its state and becomes a solid projectile, I better be aiming my revolver at the wobbling mass of tarry putrefaction instead of my own face. I turn the quivering gun toward the audience of glistening sclerae, sewage-colored irises and deep black pupils.
I shake the revolver. With my left hand I smack the barrel as if it were a disobedient mutt. A drop of sweat dangles from my nose.
"Damn you, bullet! Quit your insolent game of quantum tag and collapse to an eigenstate already!"
While the revolver vibrates madly, its electric whirring worsens to a keening squeal. A tingling sensation like a static shock shoots up my right arm, then from the trigger a snakey white bolt of electricity, outlined in lilac, crackles as it arcs to lick my forefinger.
A deafening bang rocks the office, shaking the air around me and vibrating my eardrums, which makes my ears ring. From the barrel's mouth erupts a puff of smoke, followed by a glowing, ember-colored blast that trails a stream of flickering sparks like red dwarf stars.
The revolver kicks against the palm of my right hand like a rearing horse trying to tear itself free from the reins. Its force shoots through my wrist with a sharp sting, then my forearm complains as if a white-hot shard of pain had ripped across the slow-twitch fibers.
The bullet hurtles down the barrel and flies out of the muzzle. It streaks across the office until it plows into the blob's bloated blubber with a hollow thwack, piercing that oozing mound of black mucus like a hypodermic syringe stabbing a vein, to explode deep within the amorphous heap of putrescence. The flabby mass heaves and wobbles from the impact. Its jiggly flesh is rippling as if slapped by a giant, while the white reflections of light that mount the oily, concentric waves waver and distort. Those bulging eyeballs bob and roll about in the gunk, jostling each other. The blob lets out, as if from a mouth entombed in a quagmire, an unearthly bellow of anguish, deep and guttural. A hole bursts open in that deformed belly, a hole with a slimy rim that splays out like a black and gooey flower, and that reveals the blob's gelatinous innards: a slithery mass of vermicular guts that squish and wriggle. A belch of foul gas rushes out and swirls around me; it stinks of rotten meat, vomit, farts, and sushi. The abomination erupts in a frothing gush of gloop, spewing mucous intestines in all directions, that as they break apart into globules of tapioca-like goop, they splatter over the carpet, the desk, the monitors, my clothes, and my face, in a caustic snowfall.
A gunshot blast rips apart the air around me, and its concussive wave beats upon my eardrums like a wrecking ball smashing into a brick wall. My ears pop, my brain quakes. A billowing cloud of powder smoke wafts from the muzzle, followed by a blossom of yellow-orange flame.
My right hand explodes with stabbing aches as the revolver's kickback snaps apart my phalanges and metacarpals. The shooting pain surges up my forearm, reverberating to my elbow, while the shockwave ripples tendons and muscles along my arm until the force slams into my shoulder, where the joint dislocates with a crunch.
A bullet cleaves its way through the air. The blob is twisting and thrashing, its blubbery skin frothing and flailing like the sea in a stormy gale, and the hole in its mass is spurting slime-laced foam, when the bullet plunges like a meteorite into the sclera of an eyeball. The outer layers of the globe, white as a boiled egg, tear off, giving way under pressure, and out squirts a tongue of pulpy, pinky-gray jelly.
An ear-splitting gunshot punches my eardrums, sounding as loud as if the revolver's barrel had been ripped open by dynamite. The muzzle flares a vivid yellow-orange, then a vortex of gunpowder-laden smoke rolls out along with a jet of fire, in an eruption of shrapnel-like debris.
My right arm has gone numb except for a stinging, tearing pain. Bone fragments poke out of my hand like spikes, and the fingers, seized rigid, are curled in a claw around the revolver's grip. Blood spills from the wounds, dripping in long strings. The recoil of this gunshot jerks my wrist with a grinding wrench and makes it crack like a twig. That force also knocks me off my feet, launching me backward.
A bullet cuts through the air while leaving a trail of silver smoke in its wake, until it slams like a train into a wall a couple of meters away from my boss' office door. The brick behind the lily-white paint bursts into a pinwheel of shimmering dust, into a shower of chips, splinters and shards.
An explosion rocks the office as if a howitzer had fired an artillery round in front of me. The rippling roar shakes my bones and makes the windows rattle, penetrates my eardrums in a spike of pain and tears them apart. A red flower of flame spurts from the muzzle of my revolver as if from a flamethrower.
The fingers of my right hand are curled and rigid, like the legs of a dead tarantula, around the grip of my weapon, and my wrist is drooping at the joint, when the revolver's kickback tears my hand off. Still clutching the handgun, my severed hand flies toward the ceiling. Blood jets out from the stump of my wrist in a crimson stream.
A corona of red flame is spiralling around the bullet as it hurtles toward the ceiling, slicing through a cloud of gunpowder smoke. The bullet smashes against a ceiling fixture, that shatters in a puff of white haze and a cascade of sparks and glass shards. A cracked flourescent tube tumbles down like an icicle.
My ears are ringing when a shockwave emanates from the runaway revolver in a rush of superheated air. The reverberating force pounds my skull, slams into my chest, ripples through my limbs, and scatters papers, pens and paperclips around the office. A horizontal mushroom cloud expands from the gun's muzzle and ignites into a licking white flame.
Flung backward through the air, I'm sick with whirling vertigo as my mind spins like a top in a cyclone. Jagged bones, along with pinkish-tan tendons and ligaments pulled to shreds, protrude from the degloved and bloody flesh at the end of my right forearm.
A scarlet tail corkscrews after a bullet that is whizzing across the office like a fiery comet. It wallops a hung picture frame, perforating a hole in a photograph of Bunnyman and I at a birthday party. Cracks have spread out from the impact point and crisscrossed over each other in a spiderweb of glittery fractures.
An immense power is released in a single pulse. Its shockwaves resound through my cranium with an infrasonic warble that bends my bones like rubber bands. My teeth rattle, my eyeballs throb, a fountain of blood spurts from my nose. A nova-like flash lights up my field of vision, then from the muzzle of the revolver bursts a star-speckled spiderweb.
A bullet breaks the air around it apart into a glowing rainbow, while the projectile's path deforms into outward-undulating ripples of lilac-colored distortion like those cast by a mirage, turning the contour of a ceiling fixture sinusoidal. The bullet busts through a windowpane, catches an upward gust, ascends like an accelerating rocket, drills a hole in the night sky, and shatters a solar panel of a space station orbiting high above the Earth.
I slam into the backrest of a swivel chair, knocking it over, then I crash to the floor, hitting the back of my head hard. The blow sends a jarring jolt of pain through my vertebrae; I feel my spine crack, crunch, and snap. My legs fly straight back like a ragdoll's, and when they fall to the carpet, I lie sprawled out flat on my back in a tangle of limbs.
My brain feels swollen as if someone were pumping embalming fluid into my skull. My chest heaves, gasping for air. The smell of gunpowder smoke has mingled with the coppery scent of blood and the blob's putrefying stench.
White light wavers in my foggy vision while in front dances a swarm of red specks. But the maelstrom of a black hole yawns at the center of my gaze, and light itself falls in a spiral down that drain, which leads to an endless night.
I'm floating in the silence of the void.
---
Author's note: the song for today is "Goin' Against Your Mind" by Built to Spill (which also sounds great live).
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Ninety-seven songs so far. Check them out.
Have you had trouble picturing today's nonsense? I paid a neural network to depict plenty of moments from this chapter. Here's the link.
This chapter was by far the hardest to write of a sequence that by itself has been the hardest to write in recent memory. I'm tempted to pull an "Inio Asano after Oyasumi Punpun" and never do this kind of shit again.
---
The smooth, clawlike trigger presses against the pad of my forefinger. I tighten that digit slowly, then squeeze. The hammer falls with a snick as the firing pin strikes the primer. A ring of sparks, like those churned out when a lighter's wheel grinds against the flint, spreads outward from the gap between the frame and the cylinder, then the revolver's muzzle blows a puff of cigarette-adjacent smoke that scatters in the air.
My heart throbs violently as I stare dumbfounded at the sleek frame of my weapon, that gleams alabaster white under the fluorescent fixtures. Shit, why didn't the revolver spit out a bullet? Is it jammed? Did the firing pin come damaged? Should I have oiled some mechanism? Maybe I should have carried the revolver to the woods, high up on Mount Jaizkibel, and tried it out against a tree trunk. As far as I know, revolvers should just work; I'm not holding a particle accelerator.
I pull the trigger, which causes the hammer to spring back. Once the cylinder rotates to align its next chamber with the barrel, the hammer snaps forward and clunks as if the bullet primer had been struck by a mallet, yet the revolver remains dead like rusted machinery.
I must overcome the revolting monstrosity that dares to pollute my space with its filth. I have to make this fucking gun shoot!
I clutch the revolver in a white-knuckled grip, then I squeeze and squeeze and squeeze the trigger. The cylinder clacks as it rotates and rotates chambering bullet after bullet. Although the hammer falls with dull snaps as the firing pin punches into live rounds of ammunition, it may as well be striking ghost bullets.
Are my hands shaking? No, the revolver is trembling like a tuning fork, a vibration that gets transmitted through my palms and up my arms, then races along my spine. The weapon starts emitting an ominous, high-pitched whirring sound; I picture an electrical panel bursting with frayed wires that would zap like a moth even the gloved electrician tasked to repair the mess.
I flip the revolver around and peer down its bore, a black hole encircled by the metallic ring of the muzzle. It offers me a top-down view of a turbulent, undulating pool of brass-colored liquid metal, whose waves spread in alternating crests and troughs as they slam against the walls of the chamber. The bullet must have cohered to a quantum state.
Should I wrap my lips around the barrel and blow? No, whenever the bullet snaps out of its state and becomes a solid projectile, I better be aiming my revolver at the wobbling mass of tarry putrefaction instead of my own face. I turn the quivering gun toward the audience of glistening sclerae, sewage-colored irises and deep black pupils.
I shake the revolver. With my left hand I smack the barrel as if it were a disobedient mutt. A drop of sweat dangles from my nose.
"Damn you, bullet! Quit your insolent game of quantum tag and collapse to an eigenstate already!"
While the revolver vibrates madly, its electric whirring worsens to a keening squeal. A tingling sensation like a static shock shoots up my right arm, then from the trigger a snakey white bolt of electricity, outlined in lilac, crackles as it arcs to lick my forefinger.
A deafening bang rocks the office, shaking the air around me and vibrating my eardrums, which makes my ears ring. From the barrel's mouth erupts a puff of smoke, followed by a glowing, ember-colored blast that trails a stream of flickering sparks like red dwarf stars.
The revolver kicks against the palm of my right hand like a rearing horse trying to tear itself free from the reins. Its force shoots through my wrist with a sharp sting, then my forearm complains as if a white-hot shard of pain had ripped across the slow-twitch fibers.
The bullet hurtles down the barrel and flies out of the muzzle. It streaks across the office until it plows into the blob's bloated blubber with a hollow thwack, piercing that oozing mound of black mucus like a hypodermic syringe stabbing a vein, to explode deep within the amorphous heap of putrescence. The flabby mass heaves and wobbles from the impact. Its jiggly flesh is rippling as if slapped by a giant, while the white reflections of light that mount the oily, concentric waves waver and distort. Those bulging eyeballs bob and roll about in the gunk, jostling each other. The blob lets out, as if from a mouth entombed in a quagmire, an unearthly bellow of anguish, deep and guttural. A hole bursts open in that deformed belly, a hole with a slimy rim that splays out like a black and gooey flower, and that reveals the blob's gelatinous innards: a slithery mass of vermicular guts that squish and wriggle. A belch of foul gas rushes out and swirls around me; it stinks of rotten meat, vomit, farts, and sushi. The abomination erupts in a frothing gush of gloop, spewing mucous intestines in all directions, that as they break apart into globules of tapioca-like goop, they splatter over the carpet, the desk, the monitors, my clothes, and my face, in a caustic snowfall.
A gunshot blast rips apart the air around me, and its concussive wave beats upon my eardrums like a wrecking ball smashing into a brick wall. My ears pop, my brain quakes. A billowing cloud of powder smoke wafts from the muzzle, followed by a blossom of yellow-orange flame.
My right hand explodes with stabbing aches as the revolver's kickback snaps apart my phalanges and metacarpals. The shooting pain surges up my forearm, reverberating to my elbow, while the shockwave ripples tendons and muscles along my arm until the force slams into my shoulder, where the joint dislocates with a crunch.
A bullet cleaves its way through the air. The blob is twisting and thrashing, its blubbery skin frothing and flailing like the sea in a stormy gale, and the hole in its mass is spurting slime-laced foam, when the bullet plunges like a meteorite into the sclera of an eyeball. The outer layers of the globe, white as a boiled egg, tear off, giving way under pressure, and out squirts a tongue of pulpy, pinky-gray jelly.
An ear-splitting gunshot punches my eardrums, sounding as loud as if the revolver's barrel had been ripped open by dynamite. The muzzle flares a vivid yellow-orange, then a vortex of gunpowder-laden smoke rolls out along with a jet of fire, in an eruption of shrapnel-like debris.
My right arm has gone numb except for a stinging, tearing pain. Bone fragments poke out of my hand like spikes, and the fingers, seized rigid, are curled in a claw around the revolver's grip. Blood spills from the wounds, dripping in long strings. The recoil of this gunshot jerks my wrist with a grinding wrench and makes it crack like a twig. That force also knocks me off my feet, launching me backward.
A bullet cuts through the air while leaving a trail of silver smoke in its wake, until it slams like a train into a wall a couple of meters away from my boss' office door. The brick behind the lily-white paint bursts into a pinwheel of shimmering dust, into a shower of chips, splinters and shards.
An explosion rocks the office as if a howitzer had fired an artillery round in front of me. The rippling roar shakes my bones and makes the windows rattle, penetrates my eardrums in a spike of pain and tears them apart. A red flower of flame spurts from the muzzle of my revolver as if from a flamethrower.
The fingers of my right hand are curled and rigid, like the legs of a dead tarantula, around the grip of my weapon, and my wrist is drooping at the joint, when the revolver's kickback tears my hand off. Still clutching the handgun, my severed hand flies toward the ceiling. Blood jets out from the stump of my wrist in a crimson stream.
A corona of red flame is spiralling around the bullet as it hurtles toward the ceiling, slicing through a cloud of gunpowder smoke. The bullet smashes against a ceiling fixture, that shatters in a puff of white haze and a cascade of sparks and glass shards. A cracked flourescent tube tumbles down like an icicle.
My ears are ringing when a shockwave emanates from the runaway revolver in a rush of superheated air. The reverberating force pounds my skull, slams into my chest, ripples through my limbs, and scatters papers, pens and paperclips around the office. A horizontal mushroom cloud expands from the gun's muzzle and ignites into a licking white flame.
Flung backward through the air, I'm sick with whirling vertigo as my mind spins like a top in a cyclone. Jagged bones, along with pinkish-tan tendons and ligaments pulled to shreds, protrude from the degloved and bloody flesh at the end of my right forearm.
A scarlet tail corkscrews after a bullet that is whizzing across the office like a fiery comet. It wallops a hung picture frame, perforating a hole in a photograph of Bunnyman and I at a birthday party. Cracks have spread out from the impact point and crisscrossed over each other in a spiderweb of glittery fractures.
An immense power is released in a single pulse. Its shockwaves resound through my cranium with an infrasonic warble that bends my bones like rubber bands. My teeth rattle, my eyeballs throb, a fountain of blood spurts from my nose. A nova-like flash lights up my field of vision, then from the muzzle of the revolver bursts a star-speckled spiderweb.
A bullet breaks the air around it apart into a glowing rainbow, while the projectile's path deforms into outward-undulating ripples of lilac-colored distortion like those cast by a mirage, turning the contour of a ceiling fixture sinusoidal. The bullet busts through a windowpane, catches an upward gust, ascends like an accelerating rocket, drills a hole in the night sky, and shatters a solar panel of a space station orbiting high above the Earth.
I slam into the backrest of a swivel chair, knocking it over, then I crash to the floor, hitting the back of my head hard. The blow sends a jarring jolt of pain through my vertebrae; I feel my spine crack, crunch, and snap. My legs fly straight back like a ragdoll's, and when they fall to the carpet, I lie sprawled out flat on my back in a tangle of limbs.
My brain feels swollen as if someone were pumping embalming fluid into my skull. My chest heaves, gasping for air. The smell of gunpowder smoke has mingled with the coppery scent of blood and the blob's putrefying stench.
White light wavers in my foggy vision while in front dances a swarm of red specks. But the maelstrom of a black hole yawns at the center of my gaze, and light itself falls in a spiral down that drain, which leads to an endless night.
I'm floating in the silence of the void.
---
Author's note: the song for today is "Goin' Against Your Mind" by Built to Spill (which also sounds great live).
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Ninety-seven songs so far. Check them out.
Have you had trouble picturing today's nonsense? I paid a neural network to depict plenty of moments from this chapter. Here's the link.
This chapter was by far the hardest to write of a sequence that by itself has been the hardest to write in recent memory. I'm tempted to pull an "Inio Asano after Oyasumi Punpun" and never do this kind of shit again.
January 14, 2023
Life update (01/14/2023)
Check out this entry on my personal page, where it looks better
---
It's a quarter to midnight over here and today I've gone through a surreal nightmare. Granted, most experiences feel like surreal nightmares when your neurological makeup is as screwed up as mine.
I woke up at seven to get on a taxi to get on a train straight to Vitoria-Gasteiz, the capital of Álava, a neighboring province, because I had to take a bullshit public exam that would determine if in three years or so, for a period of about eight months, they would keep calling me to work as an IT guy at some hospital (usually the main hospital at Donostia).
Whenever I travel somewhere new or that I don't visit often, I love the sights on the way. There's a curious mountain somewhere between my city and Vitoria-Gasteiz that looks like hundreds of meters of gray bones sticking out of the ground. The surroundings are flat, and the couple of neighboring towns look quiet and peaceful. I wonder how it would be like to live in such places.
There's a sequence in my beloved previous novel, "My Own Desert Places", when the main guy/girl and his/her love interest take a trip to Asturias. I wrote that sequence in a single Sunday (I have no clue how I managed to write so quickly back then; I wrote the novel in a couple of months). Along the way, the protagonist slowly loses her mind, with hilarious slash disturbing results. I felt pretty much the same on the way back home today, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Anyway, I reached Vitoria-Gasteiz, which is a pretty cool city. At least the architecture is intriguing, but my experience, as usual, went something like this: "What a nice and spacious avenue. But why is that retard blasting the morning news so loudly?" "What a picturesque little shop that sells antiques. Oh, that man just hacked up a phlegm and spat it onto the pavement." "Look at that lovely, centuries-old plaza. But why do these people have to speak so loud?" In short, human beings are the worst part of every single fucking experience. Just imagine how lovely a sudden lack of human beings would be. Or at least if they had learned to keep quiet and reproduce responsibly along the way.
I ate a greasy combo plate at some restaurant that turned out to serve huge portions, but whose patrons were, expectedly, obnoxiously loud. I was seated next to a woman in maybe her mid to late thirties whose husband looked like he was in his late forties or early fifties. They had three young boys who wouldn't stop annoying each other. The mother looked exasperated. At one point she leaned towards one of her boys and said something like, "do not snatch the toy out of my hand like that. Do you understand me? If you want it ask for it. Say, 'can you please give me the toy?' Do not forcefully grab it from my hand," in a voice that sounded like she resented the kid. A bit later, the youngest of her crotch goblins started bawling. The mother went, "I wish I had come alone, that I had left you three at home so I could have a good time for a change," or something to that effect. The husband wasn't around to witness these interactions.
I will never become pregnant no matter what kind viscous experiment I may partake in, but if I were a woman, I think that one of my worst fears would be to have children only to years later resent having to spend my precious time dealing with them. I've been near a few women when they gave off that impression (another one I remember was a tired-looking woman in her thirties who was writing on a notebook at a coffee shop only for her son to topple her cup, then wander away non-chalantly as the mother was berating him. The woman then started crying softly), and it made me sad. I wanted to stand up and tell those women to shoot their kids in the face and then ride into the sunset with me. I would become their new son if they so pleased. I tend to fantasize about having sex with virtually every moderately attractive woman I come across.
I was dealing with acid reflux and lots of gas when five in the afternoon came around. I joined a few dozen people at some local college to subject myself to the harrowing experience of having to pass some bullshit exam. Turns out that whoever was in charge of choosing the questions for this exam was an idiot, incompetent, or both: about forty percent of the questions were only tangentially related to anything we do at work as IT guys for hospitals. For example, they asked shit like "what is the Spanish authority that provides guidelines to audit the security of information systems?" Bitch, we have nothing to do with network security nor audits. Those are engineers at a completely different job. I don't recall even reading about most of that stuff in the books they told us to buy for this exam.
As if the infuriatingly ridiculous questions weren't enough, the dickhead they put in charge of my classroom only informed us of the remaining time when there were only fifteen minutes left. I didn't even have time to reread all the questions I had left unanswered. In all the other exams, the examiners started informing us of the remaining time with forty-five minutes left. This, along with the questions they chose for the exam, is the kind of shit that happens when both the jury and the examiners are chosen by lottery.
When I got out of that campus, it was dark outside. I was sure that I had flunked the exam. Seated at a coffee table in the mostly deserted train station, because I had to wait an hour until my train back home arrived, I felt utterly miserable. It's not the kind of miserable that someone as broken as me felt back in the day; I'm fully aware that I'm not built for this world, that most of the sensory information it provides on a daily basis feels like nails on a chalkboard, and that I will never feel comfortable among human beings. I have long ceased to fight against any of that. I was just exhausted, defeated, and wanted to go home.
The ride was a blur of pitch-blackness outside, me wanting to have sex with the stylish fake blonde that was seated in front of me, and me wondering how such sexual encounter would work, given that I had spent the last hour and a half holding my farts.
When I got home at about eleven at night, I found out that I actually passed the exam. Barely. So instead of writing an utterly miserable entry, I've written this crap because I feel a bit better. Tomorrow I'll go back to focusing on writing my novel, which is the only thing that truly matters in this world as far as I'm concerned, at least until I finish it and move on to the next thing.
---
It's a quarter to midnight over here and today I've gone through a surreal nightmare. Granted, most experiences feel like surreal nightmares when your neurological makeup is as screwed up as mine.
I woke up at seven to get on a taxi to get on a train straight to Vitoria-Gasteiz, the capital of Álava, a neighboring province, because I had to take a bullshit public exam that would determine if in three years or so, for a period of about eight months, they would keep calling me to work as an IT guy at some hospital (usually the main hospital at Donostia).
Whenever I travel somewhere new or that I don't visit often, I love the sights on the way. There's a curious mountain somewhere between my city and Vitoria-Gasteiz that looks like hundreds of meters of gray bones sticking out of the ground. The surroundings are flat, and the couple of neighboring towns look quiet and peaceful. I wonder how it would be like to live in such places.
There's a sequence in my beloved previous novel, "My Own Desert Places", when the main guy/girl and his/her love interest take a trip to Asturias. I wrote that sequence in a single Sunday (I have no clue how I managed to write so quickly back then; I wrote the novel in a couple of months). Along the way, the protagonist slowly loses her mind, with hilarious slash disturbing results. I felt pretty much the same on the way back home today, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Anyway, I reached Vitoria-Gasteiz, which is a pretty cool city. At least the architecture is intriguing, but my experience, as usual, went something like this: "What a nice and spacious avenue. But why is that retard blasting the morning news so loudly?" "What a picturesque little shop that sells antiques. Oh, that man just hacked up a phlegm and spat it onto the pavement." "Look at that lovely, centuries-old plaza. But why do these people have to speak so loud?" In short, human beings are the worst part of every single fucking experience. Just imagine how lovely a sudden lack of human beings would be. Or at least if they had learned to keep quiet and reproduce responsibly along the way.
I ate a greasy combo plate at some restaurant that turned out to serve huge portions, but whose patrons were, expectedly, obnoxiously loud. I was seated next to a woman in maybe her mid to late thirties whose husband looked like he was in his late forties or early fifties. They had three young boys who wouldn't stop annoying each other. The mother looked exasperated. At one point she leaned towards one of her boys and said something like, "do not snatch the toy out of my hand like that. Do you understand me? If you want it ask for it. Say, 'can you please give me the toy?' Do not forcefully grab it from my hand," in a voice that sounded like she resented the kid. A bit later, the youngest of her crotch goblins started bawling. The mother went, "I wish I had come alone, that I had left you three at home so I could have a good time for a change," or something to that effect. The husband wasn't around to witness these interactions.
I will never become pregnant no matter what kind viscous experiment I may partake in, but if I were a woman, I think that one of my worst fears would be to have children only to years later resent having to spend my precious time dealing with them. I've been near a few women when they gave off that impression (another one I remember was a tired-looking woman in her thirties who was writing on a notebook at a coffee shop only for her son to topple her cup, then wander away non-chalantly as the mother was berating him. The woman then started crying softly), and it made me sad. I wanted to stand up and tell those women to shoot their kids in the face and then ride into the sunset with me. I would become their new son if they so pleased. I tend to fantasize about having sex with virtually every moderately attractive woman I come across.
I was dealing with acid reflux and lots of gas when five in the afternoon came around. I joined a few dozen people at some local college to subject myself to the harrowing experience of having to pass some bullshit exam. Turns out that whoever was in charge of choosing the questions for this exam was an idiot, incompetent, or both: about forty percent of the questions were only tangentially related to anything we do at work as IT guys for hospitals. For example, they asked shit like "what is the Spanish authority that provides guidelines to audit the security of information systems?" Bitch, we have nothing to do with network security nor audits. Those are engineers at a completely different job. I don't recall even reading about most of that stuff in the books they told us to buy for this exam.
As if the infuriatingly ridiculous questions weren't enough, the dickhead they put in charge of my classroom only informed us of the remaining time when there were only fifteen minutes left. I didn't even have time to reread all the questions I had left unanswered. In all the other exams, the examiners started informing us of the remaining time with forty-five minutes left. This, along with the questions they chose for the exam, is the kind of shit that happens when both the jury and the examiners are chosen by lottery.
When I got out of that campus, it was dark outside. I was sure that I had flunked the exam. Seated at a coffee table in the mostly deserted train station, because I had to wait an hour until my train back home arrived, I felt utterly miserable. It's not the kind of miserable that someone as broken as me felt back in the day; I'm fully aware that I'm not built for this world, that most of the sensory information it provides on a daily basis feels like nails on a chalkboard, and that I will never feel comfortable among human beings. I have long ceased to fight against any of that. I was just exhausted, defeated, and wanted to go home.
The ride was a blur of pitch-blackness outside, me wanting to have sex with the stylish fake blonde that was seated in front of me, and me wondering how such sexual encounter would work, given that I had spent the last hour and a half holding my farts.
When I got home at about eleven at night, I found out that I actually passed the exam. Barely. So instead of writing an utterly miserable entry, I've written this crap because I feel a bit better. Tomorrow I'll go back to focusing on writing my novel, which is the only thing that truly matters in this world as far as I'm concerned, at least until I finish it and move on to the next thing.
January 10, 2023
Life update (01/10/2023)
Check out this entry on my personal page, where it looks better
---
Today I have travelled to the hills of Donostia for a cardiology appointment. I had sought a second opinion because the first doctor that treated me had performed an echocardiogram then failed to share the results (he was already ending the visit when I reminded him), had gotten annoyed at me when I told him the objective fact that I had never experienced heart issues until the very same day I received the latest "booster vaccine" (he told me, "[manufactured virus of unspecified origin] vaccines have nothing to do with heart issues, erase that from your mind"), and in general behaved like a prick.
This second doctor looked close to retirement, and was cold and abrasive. He simultaneously seemed to believe that patients shouldn't research their symptoms on their own ("because Google mostly lies") and that details about cardiological afflictions and their treatments should be common knowledge.
He told me that acid reflux likely triggered my latest episode of arrhythmia, that I possibly have some esophageal hernia too close to the left ventricle of my heart. It may be the reason why I felt like some pressure was coming up my esophagus, only to "inflate" in the general area of my heart, and then break out into an arrhythmia the moment the pressure deflated. However, he told me that I shouldn't bother to get my esophagus looked at, because the treatment would be the same. Or some shit like that, I'm not sure on that point.
He clarified that I can lift weights, but not heavily (low weights, high repetitions), and that I should focus on cardio instead (I hate cardio). I also shouldn't consume alcohol, caffeine, carbonated beverages or even too cold stuff (like ice cream) preferably ever again. I can't think of anything that has kept me running as much as caffeine has for the last couple of decades, so I don't know how I'll handle that.
What infuriated me was the following (paraphrased) exchange:
Doctor: "When was the first time you experienced such issues with your heart?"
Jon: "Well, the last doctor who wanted an answer to that question got pissed at me when I told him, but here it goes: my heart was healthy until the day I received the latest "booster vaccine," as I was burning up a fever, and I have experienced palpitations ever since."
Doctor: "[Manufactured virus of unspecified origin] is known to damage the electrical functions of the heart, and therefore the vaccine does as well."
Jon: "The other doctor told me that these vaccines are unrelated to heart issues."
The doctor leaned forward.
Doctor: "That's what they are saying because they don't want to discourage people from getting it. But of course the vaccine can cause permanent heart damage, because the virus itself is known to attack such tissues. I have treated, for example, many young women that come from other doctors because they are experiencing what is called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS); other doctors have told them that it was anxiety related, but these women could tell that the only factor that changed in their lives was getting jabbed."
I would like to put the following text in all caps, but it would look ugly as hell, so I'll use italics instead:
Even though these vaccines don't prevent contagion, don't prevent transmission, don't prevent mutation, that at the most (supposedly) they make the symptoms less severe, even groups that aren't at risk (such as young people) have been mandated to receive them, despite the fact that a sizeable percentage of them will develop permanent health issues as a consequence, issues that could cause their deaths. In addition, some doctors, by lying about the dangers, are deliberately stealing their patients' right to make an informed decision regarding whether or not they should get jabbed.
In case you didn't know, Musk divulged emails from some big shot at Pfizer that used government channels to push for censorship of other doctors that stated that the index of mortality regarding this virus in young people was less than zero percent, and that therefore they shouldn't get vaccinated. So many people's heads should roll, but I'll be extremely surprised if any of them end up defending themselves in a courtroom.
Anyway, my doctor emphasized that I should never get a [manufactured virus of unspecified origin] vaccine again. I suspect that the next time some people order us all into lockdown with whatever excuse, I'd need some signed exemption, or else I would likely lose my job.
This doctor prescribed me three different drugs: one to handle my acid reflux (that I should take every day before dinner), a beta blocker that is supposed to reduce blood pressure (and that could make me seriously dizzy on top of how out of it I generally am, partly thanks to the drug I take for my pituitary tumor), and flecainide in case I find myself out in the wild when the next arrhythmia hits. If my heart rhythm doesn't revert in four hours after taking flecainide, I should visit the ER.
In the end, this new doctor was a bit of a prick, but an honest prick, and that's the best kind. In addition, he didn't fucking charge me for the visit.
I'm unemployed as of last Friday, and I have nothing going on until this Saturday, when I'll have to travel to Vitoria-Gasteiz and pass some bullshit exam. Hopefully in the meantime I'll manage to make enough progress with my novel.
---
Today I have travelled to the hills of Donostia for a cardiology appointment. I had sought a second opinion because the first doctor that treated me had performed an echocardiogram then failed to share the results (he was already ending the visit when I reminded him), had gotten annoyed at me when I told him the objective fact that I had never experienced heart issues until the very same day I received the latest "booster vaccine" (he told me, "[manufactured virus of unspecified origin] vaccines have nothing to do with heart issues, erase that from your mind"), and in general behaved like a prick.
This second doctor looked close to retirement, and was cold and abrasive. He simultaneously seemed to believe that patients shouldn't research their symptoms on their own ("because Google mostly lies") and that details about cardiological afflictions and their treatments should be common knowledge.
He told me that acid reflux likely triggered my latest episode of arrhythmia, that I possibly have some esophageal hernia too close to the left ventricle of my heart. It may be the reason why I felt like some pressure was coming up my esophagus, only to "inflate" in the general area of my heart, and then break out into an arrhythmia the moment the pressure deflated. However, he told me that I shouldn't bother to get my esophagus looked at, because the treatment would be the same. Or some shit like that, I'm not sure on that point.
He clarified that I can lift weights, but not heavily (low weights, high repetitions), and that I should focus on cardio instead (I hate cardio). I also shouldn't consume alcohol, caffeine, carbonated beverages or even too cold stuff (like ice cream) preferably ever again. I can't think of anything that has kept me running as much as caffeine has for the last couple of decades, so I don't know how I'll handle that.
What infuriated me was the following (paraphrased) exchange:
Doctor: "When was the first time you experienced such issues with your heart?"
Jon: "Well, the last doctor who wanted an answer to that question got pissed at me when I told him, but here it goes: my heart was healthy until the day I received the latest "booster vaccine," as I was burning up a fever, and I have experienced palpitations ever since."
Doctor: "[Manufactured virus of unspecified origin] is known to damage the electrical functions of the heart, and therefore the vaccine does as well."
Jon: "The other doctor told me that these vaccines are unrelated to heart issues."
The doctor leaned forward.
Doctor: "That's what they are saying because they don't want to discourage people from getting it. But of course the vaccine can cause permanent heart damage, because the virus itself is known to attack such tissues. I have treated, for example, many young women that come from other doctors because they are experiencing what is called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS); other doctors have told them that it was anxiety related, but these women could tell that the only factor that changed in their lives was getting jabbed."
I would like to put the following text in all caps, but it would look ugly as hell, so I'll use italics instead:
Even though these vaccines don't prevent contagion, don't prevent transmission, don't prevent mutation, that at the most (supposedly) they make the symptoms less severe, even groups that aren't at risk (such as young people) have been mandated to receive them, despite the fact that a sizeable percentage of them will develop permanent health issues as a consequence, issues that could cause their deaths. In addition, some doctors, by lying about the dangers, are deliberately stealing their patients' right to make an informed decision regarding whether or not they should get jabbed.
In case you didn't know, Musk divulged emails from some big shot at Pfizer that used government channels to push for censorship of other doctors that stated that the index of mortality regarding this virus in young people was less than zero percent, and that therefore they shouldn't get vaccinated. So many people's heads should roll, but I'll be extremely surprised if any of them end up defending themselves in a courtroom.
Anyway, my doctor emphasized that I should never get a [manufactured virus of unspecified origin] vaccine again. I suspect that the next time some people order us all into lockdown with whatever excuse, I'd need some signed exemption, or else I would likely lose my job.
This doctor prescribed me three different drugs: one to handle my acid reflux (that I should take every day before dinner), a beta blocker that is supposed to reduce blood pressure (and that could make me seriously dizzy on top of how out of it I generally am, partly thanks to the drug I take for my pituitary tumor), and flecainide in case I find myself out in the wild when the next arrhythmia hits. If my heart rhythm doesn't revert in four hours after taking flecainide, I should visit the ER.
In the end, this new doctor was a bit of a prick, but an honest prick, and that's the best kind. In addition, he didn't fucking charge me for the visit.
I'm unemployed as of last Friday, and I have nothing going on until this Saturday, when I'll have to travel to Vitoria-Gasteiz and pass some bullshit exam. Hopefully in the meantime I'll manage to make enough progress with my novel.
January 7, 2023
Life update (01/07/2023)
Check out this entry on my personal page, where it looks better
---
My latest job contract has ended, so I'm currently unemployed. I always used to feel relief whenever I found myself jobless, because that meant spending far more time away from people, and conserving my energy to write. However, in three days I have a check up scheduled with a cardiologist (a new one, because I wanted a second opinion), and next saturday I will travel to Vitoria-Gasteiz on train for a public exam that I have been preparing (and dreading) for months, although in the end it will only determine for less than a year (whenever the results come into effect in this weird system they have set up) whether or not they will call me to work at some hospital as an IT guy.
Ten days from now I'll have to visit my previous cardiologist for another check up; when I first met him, he got pissy when I told him the objective fact that I had never experienced heart issues until the very day I got the latest "booster vaccine" (I have experienced palpitations and weird electrical sensations since, which progressed into two episodes of atrial fibrillation that landed me in the ER). The guy told me that the [manufactured virus of unspecified origen] vaccines are unrelated to heart issues, even though journals of colleges of cardiology say otherwise. After he performed an echocardiogram on me, he was already ending the visit when I had to remind him that he hadn't told me about the results. He said that my left ventricle was too big, and that I should never ever drink alcohol again (I don't drink). I don't trust the prick.
Yesterday I woke up exhausted and with a headache. By four in the afternoon I wanted to go to sleep, so I took a nap. I woke up at half past six. I wasted the rest of the day visiting shady websites to watch grim videos of pedestrians getting hit by vehicles (mostly in Russia, because they have cameras in their cars, and also because they're nuts), and of other ghastly occurrences such as people getting electrocuted or getting involved in deadly firefights. Sometimes I become entranced by such moments in which, for example, a woman is absentmindedly crossing the train tracks, only to lift her gaze toward her impending death in the form of a rushing hunk of machinery: someone was living their normal life only to suddenly switch and become something else entirely, whether that means dead or crippled in some way for the rest of their lives.
I also watched a few videos of a paraplegic woman from Ontario who has to stimulate her sphincter digitally to poo, and who was so horrified by that propect that she convinced her mother to do it for her from her paralysis at thirteen years old until she moved out.
I have been using VR porn for a few years. Regarding masturbation, nothing so far has beat being able to choose the environment, the "doll," what she's wearing, how she sounds like, the pose, and the rhythm, etc. It tricks my mind so well that I have consistenly had better orgasms through VR porn than those I remember from having actual sex, with the added bonus that I don't have to deal with a flesh-and-bone person. Last time, I loaded a room with a Christmas tree and jingles playing, to make it festive, and as the woman I chose a slim, doll-faced blonde who moaned in French. She mounted my avatar in cowgirl. After I came down from the blissful break from reality and I took my headset off carefully to avoid staining it with cum, I got reminded of the most recent reason why I chose that look for the doll.
Back in summer I visited Hendaye, a French commune within walking distance (I live in the border). It was the first time in my life that I walked around in that town, even though my parents used to drive through it every year to go to the beach. The experience was haunting, partly because it felt like I was traversing through memories, and because the layout of the town itself feels ancient and the town in general uninhabited.
Anyway, as I was approaching their local train station, I lifted my gaze and found myself staring back at a woman in her thirties, perhaps late thirties. She was blonde and slim, and wearing a modest summer dress. Beautiful pale gray eyes. She gave me the impression some women give off: as if yesterday they were in their late tens, only to blink and find themselves aged and not knowing how that happened. But what impacted me the most was that she looked sad, with the kind of haunted resignation that often yearns for an easy way out. The poor woman was likely wary of me, a 6'15 tall, bearded, broad, crazy-looking guy.
I'll likely never see that woman again, not that it would particularly matter if I did. But the thing is: although VR porn takes care wonderfully of a man's sexual urges, I still find myself going to sleep and having to run some elaborate scenario in my mind, complete with settings and clothing and dialogue, of me or an avatar getting to know some woman and ending up cuddling in bed with her. You can't recreate hugs and cuddles through VR, I'm afraid. And it must be important to me, given that I regularly rely on such simulations just to fall asleep, and the protagonist of my current novel, Leire, got infatuated with her lover, Jacqueline (who's also French, but that's likely a coincidence), because the latter hugged and comforted the protagonist after she was found crying.
I was born with a very similar mind to that of writer Patricia Highsmith; after I read a single one of her books (I don't recall which), it became obvious to me that she was autistic and likely had OCD as well. I went straight to reading a biography of hers (Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith, by an author who was clearly infatuated with her), which solidified my certainty. Patricia died before doctors were detecting most cases of autism, but a friend of hers diagnosed Patricia post-mortem as having had Asperger's.
Famously, Patricia worked at a retail store for maybe a few weeks. One of her clients was a beautiful blonde with a regal demeanour. I doubt that Patricia talked to this woman more than once, but it was love (or more accurately, obsession) at first sight. She figured out where this lady lived, and without this woman's knowledge, Patricia observed her from a distance. The woman was married and had kids. Years later, Patricia mentioned this woman as the love of her life, and even became the subject of her novel and later movie The Price of Salt (also named Carol). Autistic people, even more when they also have OCD as comorbidity, can build up in their minds such elaborate fantasies that they overwhelm reality to the extent that the person no longer sees any point in interacting with anyone or anything else.
I also have a savior complex of some kind. It's part of why my mind tortures me with memories of girls I knew growing up and whose troubles I didn't manage to fix (of a couple, I wonder if they are even alive), why my favorite manga is Asano's Oyasumi Punpun, maybe also partly why I sometimes go down the rabbit hole of watching pedestrians getting obliterated by vehicles, and why the moment last night when I rested my head on a pillow and closed my eyes, I pictured myself walking around in Hendaye and coming across a softly crying blond, slim woman who told me about her woes and who then later sobbed in my arms, before inviting me to her apartment to give each other warmth under a blanket throughout the night.
Too bad I'm an old, crazy, dead-eyed loon.
---
My latest job contract has ended, so I'm currently unemployed. I always used to feel relief whenever I found myself jobless, because that meant spending far more time away from people, and conserving my energy to write. However, in three days I have a check up scheduled with a cardiologist (a new one, because I wanted a second opinion), and next saturday I will travel to Vitoria-Gasteiz on train for a public exam that I have been preparing (and dreading) for months, although in the end it will only determine for less than a year (whenever the results come into effect in this weird system they have set up) whether or not they will call me to work at some hospital as an IT guy.
Ten days from now I'll have to visit my previous cardiologist for another check up; when I first met him, he got pissy when I told him the objective fact that I had never experienced heart issues until the very day I got the latest "booster vaccine" (I have experienced palpitations and weird electrical sensations since, which progressed into two episodes of atrial fibrillation that landed me in the ER). The guy told me that the [manufactured virus of unspecified origen] vaccines are unrelated to heart issues, even though journals of colleges of cardiology say otherwise. After he performed an echocardiogram on me, he was already ending the visit when I had to remind him that he hadn't told me about the results. He said that my left ventricle was too big, and that I should never ever drink alcohol again (I don't drink). I don't trust the prick.
Yesterday I woke up exhausted and with a headache. By four in the afternoon I wanted to go to sleep, so I took a nap. I woke up at half past six. I wasted the rest of the day visiting shady websites to watch grim videos of pedestrians getting hit by vehicles (mostly in Russia, because they have cameras in their cars, and also because they're nuts), and of other ghastly occurrences such as people getting electrocuted or getting involved in deadly firefights. Sometimes I become entranced by such moments in which, for example, a woman is absentmindedly crossing the train tracks, only to lift her gaze toward her impending death in the form of a rushing hunk of machinery: someone was living their normal life only to suddenly switch and become something else entirely, whether that means dead or crippled in some way for the rest of their lives.
I also watched a few videos of a paraplegic woman from Ontario who has to stimulate her sphincter digitally to poo, and who was so horrified by that propect that she convinced her mother to do it for her from her paralysis at thirteen years old until she moved out.
I have been using VR porn for a few years. Regarding masturbation, nothing so far has beat being able to choose the environment, the "doll," what she's wearing, how she sounds like, the pose, and the rhythm, etc. It tricks my mind so well that I have consistenly had better orgasms through VR porn than those I remember from having actual sex, with the added bonus that I don't have to deal with a flesh-and-bone person. Last time, I loaded a room with a Christmas tree and jingles playing, to make it festive, and as the woman I chose a slim, doll-faced blonde who moaned in French. She mounted my avatar in cowgirl. After I came down from the blissful break from reality and I took my headset off carefully to avoid staining it with cum, I got reminded of the most recent reason why I chose that look for the doll.
Back in summer I visited Hendaye, a French commune within walking distance (I live in the border). It was the first time in my life that I walked around in that town, even though my parents used to drive through it every year to go to the beach. The experience was haunting, partly because it felt like I was traversing through memories, and because the layout of the town itself feels ancient and the town in general uninhabited.
Anyway, as I was approaching their local train station, I lifted my gaze and found myself staring back at a woman in her thirties, perhaps late thirties. She was blonde and slim, and wearing a modest summer dress. Beautiful pale gray eyes. She gave me the impression some women give off: as if yesterday they were in their late tens, only to blink and find themselves aged and not knowing how that happened. But what impacted me the most was that she looked sad, with the kind of haunted resignation that often yearns for an easy way out. The poor woman was likely wary of me, a 6'15 tall, bearded, broad, crazy-looking guy.
I'll likely never see that woman again, not that it would particularly matter if I did. But the thing is: although VR porn takes care wonderfully of a man's sexual urges, I still find myself going to sleep and having to run some elaborate scenario in my mind, complete with settings and clothing and dialogue, of me or an avatar getting to know some woman and ending up cuddling in bed with her. You can't recreate hugs and cuddles through VR, I'm afraid. And it must be important to me, given that I regularly rely on such simulations just to fall asleep, and the protagonist of my current novel, Leire, got infatuated with her lover, Jacqueline (who's also French, but that's likely a coincidence), because the latter hugged and comforted the protagonist after she was found crying.
I was born with a very similar mind to that of writer Patricia Highsmith; after I read a single one of her books (I don't recall which), it became obvious to me that she was autistic and likely had OCD as well. I went straight to reading a biography of hers (Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith, by an author who was clearly infatuated with her), which solidified my certainty. Patricia died before doctors were detecting most cases of autism, but a friend of hers diagnosed Patricia post-mortem as having had Asperger's.
Famously, Patricia worked at a retail store for maybe a few weeks. One of her clients was a beautiful blonde with a regal demeanour. I doubt that Patricia talked to this woman more than once, but it was love (or more accurately, obsession) at first sight. She figured out where this lady lived, and without this woman's knowledge, Patricia observed her from a distance. The woman was married and had kids. Years later, Patricia mentioned this woman as the love of her life, and even became the subject of her novel and later movie The Price of Salt (also named Carol). Autistic people, even more when they also have OCD as comorbidity, can build up in their minds such elaborate fantasies that they overwhelm reality to the extent that the person no longer sees any point in interacting with anyone or anything else.
I also have a savior complex of some kind. It's part of why my mind tortures me with memories of girls I knew growing up and whose troubles I didn't manage to fix (of a couple, I wonder if they are even alive), why my favorite manga is Asano's Oyasumi Punpun, maybe also partly why I sometimes go down the rabbit hole of watching pedestrians getting obliterated by vehicles, and why the moment last night when I rested my head on a pillow and closed my eyes, I pictured myself walking around in Hendaye and coming across a softly crying blond, slim woman who told me about her woes and who then later sobbed in my arms, before inviting me to her apartment to give each other warmth under a blanket throughout the night.
Too bad I'm an old, crazy, dead-eyed loon.
January 2, 2023
We’re Fucked, Pt. 83: AI-generated images
Working on this sequence of my novel has meant that for weeks I have spent at least an hour every day feeling queasy, thanks to my fruitful imagination. So congratulations to me, I guess.
[Check out this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
[Check out this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
