Jon Ureña's Blog, page 39
October 6, 2022
Life update (10/06/2022)
Read this entry on my personal page, where it looks better
---
This work week started with me being disturbed at seven in the morning, as I was trying to lose myself in the music that was playing through my headphones; a homeless-looking middle-aged man had gone out of his way to sit in front of me in a mostly empty train car and then reached over, attempting to touch me. I raised my voice at the prick to say something like, "hey, what the fuck are you doing?", which attracted the attention of the only woman sitting nearby (who was so young that she may have been a high school student, but I can't tell these days; many of the nurses I come across at work look like high school students).
The man babbled incoherently while staring at me as if I were about to punch him, which I would have loved to do, as I hate being touched in general, and in particular by random men. To be honest, I'd love to pummel into a paste plenty of people throughout any given week, but I don't want to get arrested. In the end I just stood up and walked away. I sat at the other end of the train car. The woman must have become the next target of the guy, or she simply wasn't comfortable, because she followed me and sat nearby. I did feel a bit better knowing that this (hot) young woman considered me a better option to sit next to than a rambling, homeless-looking man.
Ever since I bought these headphones, I've had a few cases of people trying to have a conversation with me or wanting to ask me for information while I'm wearing big headphones, often while being surrounded by people who are clearly not wearing headphones. Are people retarded? Do they enjoy going out of their way to inconvenience and bother strangers?
Regarding my current novel, for two days in a row I have sat in front of my notes for the next chapter, but I've been unable to write a single word. It's not due to "writer's block", which I don't believe exists (that supposed problem is about not knowing what to write, usually because of lack of planning or simply because nothing comes to you, which means that you shouldn't be writing anyway). I'm simply too mentally drained from work.
Getting anything done in the afternoons after work is always a struggle, but these two weeks I'll be lucky if I do anything productive, because I'm on phone duty. In our office you are only supposed to be on phone duty a week out of several, but they ended up exchanging my original schedule for that of one of my coworkers, because he'll have to drive around the province to solve thorny issues, and I don't have a car (nor can/should drive because of my neurological problems).
Our province has announced the next round of "vaccine boosting". Mostly pensioners are lining up to get jabbed, which will possibly boost their defenses against the biological weapon, and potentially cause them other permanent issues, including death (the latest booster gave me atrial fibrillation, a permanent heart issue). In any case, our hospital complex is the HQ that is supposed to handle the computer problems of way smaller clinics located in a twenty or so kilometer radius. That's a terrible idea, because every clinic should have at least one or two technicians of their own; the doctors and nurses who work in clinics complain constantly about that, as if we could do anything about it.
Although our bosses had been informed beforehand about which towns were going to open vaccination centers, in order to set up their systems, these past couple of days we've received frantic calls from random clinics where the nurses can't figure out how to organize themselves or use the computers they've found in storage to open their vaccination centers, which nobody had informed that were going to be opened. When we told them to talk to their supervisors so they would contact with our bosses (so they would explain, to begin with, why the hell they hadn't informed that a vaccination center would open in their clinic), a few of those nurses told me that they didn't know who was in charge.
Do you have any clue how hard/maddeningly absurd it is to have to solve the computer issues of PCs you can't connect to remotely? Those vaccination centers mostly use laptops, and they call us to figure out how to connect to the WiFi through USB devices. They are usually given written/printed instructions, but they lose them, or simply refuse to read them. Some can't seem to follow simple instructions.
We also receive calls from nurses and doctors who are trying to work remotely from home; just yesterday I got a call from someone who had been authorized to work from home, but "it doesn't work". As I was walking her through the process of entering her username and password, I ended up realizing that she wasn't reading the couple of sentences that clearly explained that she had to mark the checkbox to accept the terms and conditions, or else it wouldn't let her into the system. People blatantly refusing to read what's on the screen even as they are trying to explain to you the problem they have encountered is a common issue; it's like plenty of people are half-blind but refuse to admit it, or are simply that obscenely idiotic.
Apart from the constant annoyance of dealing with humans who want their problems to be solved right now, the act of interacting with people just squeezes my remaining energy, so I return home utterly drained. These past two days I had no choice but to give up on my attempts at writing. I got in bed, put my fancy headphones on, covered my head with the sheets, and allowed my brain to drift off into daydreams as I listened either to music or to ASMR. Lying in bed half-lost in elaborate hallucinations feels so good that I'm tempted to believe that those people sleep deprived for days in a row risk dying just because the process of existing in this world is unbearable unless you get those (hopefully) eight hours-long breaks in between.
Unfortunately, my regular dreams would likely count as nightmares for most people. I've forgotten the details of last night's dream, but I know it involved walking around some ungraspable setting while trying to solve some problem under duress. I woke up exhausted, which is a wonderful way to start a workday.
Anyway, I'm at work, and I have written this shit between calls. I better get back to writing fiction soon; my psyche is a house of cards, and living vicariously through my fictional characters is the only thing that nowadays keeps it from collapsing.
---
This work week started with me being disturbed at seven in the morning, as I was trying to lose myself in the music that was playing through my headphones; a homeless-looking middle-aged man had gone out of his way to sit in front of me in a mostly empty train car and then reached over, attempting to touch me. I raised my voice at the prick to say something like, "hey, what the fuck are you doing?", which attracted the attention of the only woman sitting nearby (who was so young that she may have been a high school student, but I can't tell these days; many of the nurses I come across at work look like high school students).
The man babbled incoherently while staring at me as if I were about to punch him, which I would have loved to do, as I hate being touched in general, and in particular by random men. To be honest, I'd love to pummel into a paste plenty of people throughout any given week, but I don't want to get arrested. In the end I just stood up and walked away. I sat at the other end of the train car. The woman must have become the next target of the guy, or she simply wasn't comfortable, because she followed me and sat nearby. I did feel a bit better knowing that this (hot) young woman considered me a better option to sit next to than a rambling, homeless-looking man.
Ever since I bought these headphones, I've had a few cases of people trying to have a conversation with me or wanting to ask me for information while I'm wearing big headphones, often while being surrounded by people who are clearly not wearing headphones. Are people retarded? Do they enjoy going out of their way to inconvenience and bother strangers?
Regarding my current novel, for two days in a row I have sat in front of my notes for the next chapter, but I've been unable to write a single word. It's not due to "writer's block", which I don't believe exists (that supposed problem is about not knowing what to write, usually because of lack of planning or simply because nothing comes to you, which means that you shouldn't be writing anyway). I'm simply too mentally drained from work.
Getting anything done in the afternoons after work is always a struggle, but these two weeks I'll be lucky if I do anything productive, because I'm on phone duty. In our office you are only supposed to be on phone duty a week out of several, but they ended up exchanging my original schedule for that of one of my coworkers, because he'll have to drive around the province to solve thorny issues, and I don't have a car (nor can/should drive because of my neurological problems).
Our province has announced the next round of "vaccine boosting". Mostly pensioners are lining up to get jabbed, which will possibly boost their defenses against the biological weapon, and potentially cause them other permanent issues, including death (the latest booster gave me atrial fibrillation, a permanent heart issue). In any case, our hospital complex is the HQ that is supposed to handle the computer problems of way smaller clinics located in a twenty or so kilometer radius. That's a terrible idea, because every clinic should have at least one or two technicians of their own; the doctors and nurses who work in clinics complain constantly about that, as if we could do anything about it.
Although our bosses had been informed beforehand about which towns were going to open vaccination centers, in order to set up their systems, these past couple of days we've received frantic calls from random clinics where the nurses can't figure out how to organize themselves or use the computers they've found in storage to open their vaccination centers, which nobody had informed that were going to be opened. When we told them to talk to their supervisors so they would contact with our bosses (so they would explain, to begin with, why the hell they hadn't informed that a vaccination center would open in their clinic), a few of those nurses told me that they didn't know who was in charge.
Do you have any clue how hard/maddeningly absurd it is to have to solve the computer issues of PCs you can't connect to remotely? Those vaccination centers mostly use laptops, and they call us to figure out how to connect to the WiFi through USB devices. They are usually given written/printed instructions, but they lose them, or simply refuse to read them. Some can't seem to follow simple instructions.
We also receive calls from nurses and doctors who are trying to work remotely from home; just yesterday I got a call from someone who had been authorized to work from home, but "it doesn't work". As I was walking her through the process of entering her username and password, I ended up realizing that she wasn't reading the couple of sentences that clearly explained that she had to mark the checkbox to accept the terms and conditions, or else it wouldn't let her into the system. People blatantly refusing to read what's on the screen even as they are trying to explain to you the problem they have encountered is a common issue; it's like plenty of people are half-blind but refuse to admit it, or are simply that obscenely idiotic.
Apart from the constant annoyance of dealing with humans who want their problems to be solved right now, the act of interacting with people just squeezes my remaining energy, so I return home utterly drained. These past two days I had no choice but to give up on my attempts at writing. I got in bed, put my fancy headphones on, covered my head with the sheets, and allowed my brain to drift off into daydreams as I listened either to music or to ASMR. Lying in bed half-lost in elaborate hallucinations feels so good that I'm tempted to believe that those people sleep deprived for days in a row risk dying just because the process of existing in this world is unbearable unless you get those (hopefully) eight hours-long breaks in between.
Unfortunately, my regular dreams would likely count as nightmares for most people. I've forgotten the details of last night's dream, but I know it involved walking around some ungraspable setting while trying to solve some problem under duress. I woke up exhausted, which is a wonderful way to start a workday.
Anyway, I'm at work, and I have written this shit between calls. I better get back to writing fiction soon; my psyche is a house of cards, and living vicariously through my fictional characters is the only thing that nowadays keeps it from collapsing.
October 3, 2022
Random AI-generated images #9
Will Smith: “Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a… canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?”
Robot: “Yes. Can you?”
[link to this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
Robot: “Yes. Can you?”
[link to this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
We’re Fucked, Pt. 75: AI-generated images
If I were to travel back in time to meet my child self and told him that in the future, an artificial intelligence would generate images of whatever nonsense crossed my mind, my child self would ask, “Then why are you still miserable?” I would be rendered speechless, then I would punch my kid self in the face for being impertinent.
This time I have also enlisted the help of a newborn neural network trained exclusively on anime. Bring forth horrors beyond comprehension!
The following images are related to chapter 75 of my charmingly-named, ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
[link to this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
This time I have also enlisted the help of a newborn neural network trained exclusively on anime. Bring forth horrors beyond comprehension!
The following images are related to chapter 75 of my charmingly-named, ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
[link to this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
October 2, 2022
We're Fucked, Pt. 75 (Fiction)
Link to this entry on my personal page, where it looks better
---
Ahead of Jacqueline and I, the child born thousands of years ago is prancing on the asphalt footpath. My girlfriend chose and bought a modern costume for our girl: mid-calf leather boots, skinny pants, a wool sweater, and a lemonade-pink scarf. However, she may as well be wearing her leather tunic the way she's bopping and swaying to the long-lost song she's humming, making her twin loose braids bounce and the tail of her scarf flop around. Maybe she's mimicking the beastly gait or mating dance of one of the many species, like the giant tapir, the woolly rhinoceros and the saber-toothed tiger, that were blown apart by superbolides, drowned in the floods, were buried under tons of mud and ripped-out trees, had their DNA cooked and mutated, starved after their food sources vanished, turned into vampires through a bite from some vampire-creature, or froze to death during the roughly 1,300 years-long plunge into glacial conditions. A phantom of catastrophes that may come again.
We crest the hill. The path turns on level ground, leading towards a playground and its recreational equipment, which gleams silver in the moonlight. Twin human-sized contraptions depict the structure of the atom; metallic hula hoops represent the orbitals of the electrons, but the nucleus is missing. Beyond that equipment, a play tower is constituted of four poles, a slide, and a perforated vertical panel that resembles a grater.
In a grassy area adjoined to the playground, a venerable tree's trunk is as wide as an obese person's waist, but it supports a humongous, leafy canopy that resembles a mushroom cloud. The breeze is bullying its leaves around as their cast shadows on the grass and across the path form a labyrinthine maze. Maybe the tree is several hundred years old. Perhaps it was a sapling during the Ice Age, and then survived the heat of the cataclysm, outlasted soaring flood waters and the twitches of volcanos, in pursuit to yield fronds of fine lace. But who would place a playground next to a radioactive tree?
Our child gawks at the playground equipment. As she wriggles with excitement, she jabs her index finger at the metallic hula hoops and utters a few words that suggest that she's begging for permission to play. I doubt that the girl has caught on yet that nodding means yes, but smiles must have been a universal currency even back in frigid times, because as soon as Jacqueline shows off her pearly whites, our dainty lambkin darts ahead to the playground. Her twin braids sway in rhythm with her confident strides, those of someone unable to conjure up dangers more metaphysical than delinquents throwing cherry bombs, or dragons that spit poison.
When the child steps onto the rubber tarmac, its springy nature distracts her. She looks the surface over, which is painted in three distinct wavy shapes, red, green, and blue. Squandering this much paint in coloring a floor must be a sign of high civilization.
Our girl forgets about the tarmac, and leaps onto the closest atom-like structure. From up close I realize that the builders have created surfaces for the two inclined orbitals by attaching sturdy nylon nets. I wouldn't know how to play with this equipment, but our adopted daughter exercises her monkey nature by balancing herself on the netting and by swinging like a pendulum between the orbital rings. Although the metallic hula hoops must be hand-burning cold in this November night, the child clutches on to the top of the vertical orbital and pulls herself up while giggling.
I sense a presence to my left. I find myself staring at the most ravishing woman of the Holocene, who looks back at me with a pair of gleaming cobalt-blue eyes. Jacqueline's face is tinted peach orange in the lamplight, fitting for the succulent fruit whose juice sweetens my life. Her raven-black hair shimmers with dark cerulean highlights. Her nose, the cupid's bow of her upper lip and the fullness of her lower one are shading the right half of her face. Her long eyelashes flutter, then the corners of her mouth rise in an affectionate smile.
In front of such beauty, I feel like a cockroach. Yet, I speak.
"Not going to lie, Jacqueline: this playground is kind of shit."
She breathes out through her mouth, which forms a white cloud, then she laughs.
"You silly idiot. I brought you here because of the trees! The playground at the end of the street is far better, and it offers a lovely panorama of the outskirts of our city."
"Just how many luxuries have you been able to afford through your debauchery?!"
Jacqueline closes her eyes and giggles as her shoulders tremble. When she pulls herself together, she cocks her head at me and smirks.
"Hey, do you think that I invest all the money I make at work in a retirement fund? Every little bit contributes to provide a safe life away from the tumult. I've always loved peace and quiet. Did I tell you that I used to dream of buying land in one of the many hills further into the province, large and green enough to grow crops and raise animals? Wouldn't you have loved to grow up in such a place? Once I got used to the notion that I would never have children, I gave up on that dream, but... look at us now. Haven't I won the lottery with you, baby?"
A shiver runs down my spine; she must have knocked at a fissure in my porcelain-ice psyche. My neck trembles, and I consider averting my gaze before the warmth gathered behind my eyes escapes through my lacrimal glands in liquid form.
Jacqueline drapes an arm around my shoulders, pulls me closer and rests her head on mine. I swallow saliva to loosen my throat, but my voice comes out thin.
"I'm tempted to assert that my company is like contracting a plague."
"I know you think so, honey."
The warmth that emanates from her body, as well as her hair brushing my face, takes me back to the nights that I have spent under Jacqueline's sheets, nestled between the ample globes of her bosom. That goddess consumes my maladaptive vulnerabilities with the sheer exuberance of those tits. Hasn't the temperature kept dropping since we got out of her Audi? I want to finger myself under a blanket.
Our child is draped face down over the top of the vertical orbital, balancing herself while she expels puffs of vapour that rise around her head.
My eyelids are growing heavier, my brain turning into a sponge. A big yawn overwhelms me, and Jacqueline copies it.
"Careful," she says in a sleepy voice, "you are going to unhinge your jaw if you open your mouth that wide."
"My jaw will never go unhinged. It's the only sane part of me."
Jacqueline snorts. She touches my lower lip with the tip of her index finger.
"And that mouth of yours looks like it was made to eat bonbons."
She giggles at her own words, although the pastry-adjacent reference has brought up recent trauma. She lowers that hand to mine and interlaces our fingers. The breeze has chilled the back of my left hand, but its palm and fingers now feel snug in Jacqueline's grasp.
I want to sneak along Jacqueline's inner thighs and climb through to enter her honey labyrinth headfirst. What delicious feelings would tighten around my nape.
"You are a queen bee, Jacqueline," I say to my sublime beloved.
"Then you should be a ladybug."
I want to scoff at such notion, but I sigh instead. If Jacqueline were to study every detail of my skin, apart from dirt and grime and insect bites, she would recognize the traces of sunburns and countless bruises. The lines and furrows are engraved there by decades of sadness; the blue-gray discoloration is due to postorgasmic trauma after determined self-diddling.
"I'm not the least bit ladylike. In fact, I'm feeling more like a slug right now. But I would like us to make love in a hive and then emerge with thousands of childish faces crawling all over my body."
"I... need some time to process that imagery."
"I devoured a decade's worth of pastries, so I'm afraid that I won't be able to have sex tonight. I'm going to pass out as soon as I lie down. However, you can take advantage of my unconscious self however you see fit."
"Oh, don't tell me that, darling, because I will take you up on the offer."
"Give me a stamp and I'll make it official."
Jacqueline turns to me and lifts my chin with her free hand. Her cobalt-blues leer at me through their eyelashes while her warm breath caresses my lips. It smells faintly of sugar and jam.
"What I will do tonight is hold you in my arms and entwine my legs with yours. Soon enough you'll start drooling and snoring against my neck."
My blood grows hotter. After I close my eyes, the lustful urge becomes a comforting lullaby, a hymn for my heart to sing while the blood pours through my body.
"Yeah, squeeze your tits against my comparatively puny ones until I can barely breathe," I say in a weak voice. "That's the optimal state of this world."
Our child squeals with joy. How can anybody distil so much fun out of a misguided representation of an atom, one that was turned into playground equipment?
A gentle breeze brings the scent of damp leaves, and flutters my hair.
"Isn't it such a nasty thing to do to someone, Jacqueline," I say, "to present them with a child from a Paleolithic forest for whom they are responsible, at least until she turns eighteen? All the baggage, rules, duties, chores, sexual hangups, eating disorders and seclusion-seeking behaviors, without anyone asking if you're ready for that kind of commitment."
I melt into the sound of her chuckles. She rests her forehead against my temple, then she nuzzles my ear.
"Oh, I'm not mad," she whispers. "Not at all. But don't you think it's about time we name our daughter?"
Jacqueline's half-lidded eyes are sparkling, and the warmth in her smile suggests that she would push me out of the way of an incoming truck even if it would flatten her instead. My knees weaken and my heartbeat quickens. Now that we have a daughter, our relationship has become more serious.
"I-I suppose that any child would have a hard time growing up if her parents can't be bothered to name her. Why don't we just call her Child? Capitalize it, pretend it's a name."
Jacqueline giggles, then shakes her head.
"Leire, we can't do that!"
"Why not? We'll always know we are referring to her. We don't have more children running around."
"Do you think we'll keep her cooped up in the apartment forever? What if other people find out that this child that somehow belongs to us is called Child? We would get a visit from Child Services in no time!"
My mind has devolved, and I barely discern solid thoughts in the fog. I rub my temples.
"Sorry. Only the most rudimentary notions are rising from the dark matter inside my cranium."
Jacqueline squeezes my hand.
"That's alright, darling. Coming to the park after the day you've had was asking a lot of you."
"So our girl needs a proper name, but what kind would fit a prehistoric painter?"
"This morning I've been researching names on the phone, and I think I've come across a good one."
"Great, because my brain would love to settle for nonsensical ones. But please, no clichés. I wouldn't be able to handle that."
"'Alicia' goes out of the window, then?"
"Unless you want me to vomit. Besides, we'd have to give her the full-on hippie treatment. She'd wear a flower crown and a headband made of wheat stalks."
"What do you thing about 'Leire'?"
"Too common. Also, that's my name."
"Then how about 'Sylvie'? It seems to originate from the Latin word for forest. And Silvanus was the Roman god of the woodlands and fields. Wouldn't it be an appropriate name for our forest fae?"
"Oh, I love it!"
"I thought you would. Let's announce it to the recipient."
We step onto the rubber tarmac to approach our girl, who's dangling upside down from the top of the vertical orbital. Her eyes are shining like glassy marbles, maybe a combination of the blood pooling in her head and the cold breeze, that is also whipping her hanging twin braids.
When the child notices us, her expression turns attentive; a moment ago she was a cat pawing at a mouse toy, but now she has found herself the target of the whims of two of those bipedal giants that although they feed her and keep her warm, still frighten her with their size, and one day might flip out and stomp her to death. However, the child's scarf unwinds further, covering her face like a funeral shroud. Both of her hands are busy; she shakes her head and lets out noises of frustration that resemble those of a dog having a fit while being teased with a rolled-up newspaper. She ends up clambering down from the metallic orbital. With her legs splayed, she perches herself on the netting and gazes at us.
"Hey, little one," Jacqueline says as she stands in front of our child so that the words will reach her directly, echoing through her mind. "Your other mommy and I have decided to take care of you forever and ever, so we will give you a name: it's Sylvie."
"We'll also keep you away from ovens," I say, "just in case."
The girl tilts her head sideways.
"Now, how will I make you understand..." Jacqueline wonders. "Oh, I know." She perks up and points at herself. "Jacqueline." She points at me, which causes a burst of warmth to flow down to my groin. "Leire." She points at our adopted daughter. "Sylvie."
The girl furrows her brow and squints, then her mouth opens in disbelief. She utters a word soup full of vowel sounds and gurgling consonants, but the tone alone spells out her disapproval.
"She hates it," Jacqueline says, crestfallen.
I put a hand on her shoulder.
"The name is good."
Our child speaks in a loud, dollish voice.
"Nairu!"
Jacqueline and I exchange a look. When we stare back at the girl, she's smiling as if our confusion amused her.
She points at Jacqueline. "Akedin." She points at me. "Eide." She points at herself. "Nairu!"
Jacqueline has blushed, but I shake my head at our girl.
"What the hell, child of the woods? Back at the cursed patisserie, I taught you that whole thing of pointing at yourself to share your name, but the two words you uttered to call yourself didn't sound anything like 'Nairu'! And why do you keep calling me Eide although you can pronounce the R of the name you gave yourself?"
An impish grin widens across Nairu's face. She clutches the top of the diagonal orbitals, installed at both sides of her body, and she swings back and forth while giggling like a loon.
I sigh. Our adopted child was born during the Ice Age; for all we know, her birth was celebrated with a drumming ritual during which the proud parents slapped each other's faces with dead birds, then they danced and beat their backsides to an inhumane rhythm, thus bestowing upon the infant a life of madness, a love of the absurd, and a hatred toward civilization. So I guess 'Nairu' fits this girl just fine.
"She may be trying to pull a fast one on us, and that word means 'booger' in her ancient language. In that case she played herself, because we will honor her choice. Won't we, mommy?"
Jacqueline's shoulders droop. She shoots me an awkward smile.
"Well, there goes my research."
I walk up to the playground equipment, then I reach to wrap the tail of our daughter's scarf around her neck.
"Welcome to our deranged little family, Nairu."
Her face breaks into a joyous smile. She claps her hands and chortles.
The corners of my mouth are fighting against my self-control to curl into a smile. This child is the most endearing little creature that I've ever met. I want to slide through her pupils until I reach the back of her brain, where I'd dissolve and become an indistinguishable part of her soul.
How would it be to exist as someone who can hoot with laughter like that? How does it feel to live a life that lacks a looming black cloud hanging over it?
---
Author's note: the two songs for today are "I Found a Reason" by The Velvet Underground, and "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned so far throughout this novel: this is the link.
Although it may seem otherwise, this chapter still hasn't finished the current sequence. I clearly have no clue when it comes to figuring out how many words rendering a bunch of notes is going to take: I originally believed that this story, which is already about 180,000 words long, would be a novella. I'm likely the only person on earth that cares about this, though.
Perhaps three months ago I enjoyed a two weeks-long break from my office job. One of the (very few) special tasks I managed to complete was visiting the park depicted in the current sequence (as well as the previous patisserie). I walked around and took some photos until I had a good notion of how being present there felt like, something you can't properly garner through photos and videos, unfortunately.
Another thing that writing does, at least for people whose brains work as weirdly as mine, is create memories that feel stronger and more meaningful than those of stuff you've actually lived through. So now that park in the hills of Donostia will forever be for me the place where I had a good time as Leire, Jacqueline and their little nugget. I also retain many bittersweet memories of the events depicted in my previous novel. Does this phenomenon happen to people other than writers?
---
Ahead of Jacqueline and I, the child born thousands of years ago is prancing on the asphalt footpath. My girlfriend chose and bought a modern costume for our girl: mid-calf leather boots, skinny pants, a wool sweater, and a lemonade-pink scarf. However, she may as well be wearing her leather tunic the way she's bopping and swaying to the long-lost song she's humming, making her twin loose braids bounce and the tail of her scarf flop around. Maybe she's mimicking the beastly gait or mating dance of one of the many species, like the giant tapir, the woolly rhinoceros and the saber-toothed tiger, that were blown apart by superbolides, drowned in the floods, were buried under tons of mud and ripped-out trees, had their DNA cooked and mutated, starved after their food sources vanished, turned into vampires through a bite from some vampire-creature, or froze to death during the roughly 1,300 years-long plunge into glacial conditions. A phantom of catastrophes that may come again.
We crest the hill. The path turns on level ground, leading towards a playground and its recreational equipment, which gleams silver in the moonlight. Twin human-sized contraptions depict the structure of the atom; metallic hula hoops represent the orbitals of the electrons, but the nucleus is missing. Beyond that equipment, a play tower is constituted of four poles, a slide, and a perforated vertical panel that resembles a grater.
In a grassy area adjoined to the playground, a venerable tree's trunk is as wide as an obese person's waist, but it supports a humongous, leafy canopy that resembles a mushroom cloud. The breeze is bullying its leaves around as their cast shadows on the grass and across the path form a labyrinthine maze. Maybe the tree is several hundred years old. Perhaps it was a sapling during the Ice Age, and then survived the heat of the cataclysm, outlasted soaring flood waters and the twitches of volcanos, in pursuit to yield fronds of fine lace. But who would place a playground next to a radioactive tree?
Our child gawks at the playground equipment. As she wriggles with excitement, she jabs her index finger at the metallic hula hoops and utters a few words that suggest that she's begging for permission to play. I doubt that the girl has caught on yet that nodding means yes, but smiles must have been a universal currency even back in frigid times, because as soon as Jacqueline shows off her pearly whites, our dainty lambkin darts ahead to the playground. Her twin braids sway in rhythm with her confident strides, those of someone unable to conjure up dangers more metaphysical than delinquents throwing cherry bombs, or dragons that spit poison.
When the child steps onto the rubber tarmac, its springy nature distracts her. She looks the surface over, which is painted in three distinct wavy shapes, red, green, and blue. Squandering this much paint in coloring a floor must be a sign of high civilization.
Our girl forgets about the tarmac, and leaps onto the closest atom-like structure. From up close I realize that the builders have created surfaces for the two inclined orbitals by attaching sturdy nylon nets. I wouldn't know how to play with this equipment, but our adopted daughter exercises her monkey nature by balancing herself on the netting and by swinging like a pendulum between the orbital rings. Although the metallic hula hoops must be hand-burning cold in this November night, the child clutches on to the top of the vertical orbital and pulls herself up while giggling.
I sense a presence to my left. I find myself staring at the most ravishing woman of the Holocene, who looks back at me with a pair of gleaming cobalt-blue eyes. Jacqueline's face is tinted peach orange in the lamplight, fitting for the succulent fruit whose juice sweetens my life. Her raven-black hair shimmers with dark cerulean highlights. Her nose, the cupid's bow of her upper lip and the fullness of her lower one are shading the right half of her face. Her long eyelashes flutter, then the corners of her mouth rise in an affectionate smile.
In front of such beauty, I feel like a cockroach. Yet, I speak.
"Not going to lie, Jacqueline: this playground is kind of shit."
She breathes out through her mouth, which forms a white cloud, then she laughs.
"You silly idiot. I brought you here because of the trees! The playground at the end of the street is far better, and it offers a lovely panorama of the outskirts of our city."
"Just how many luxuries have you been able to afford through your debauchery?!"
Jacqueline closes her eyes and giggles as her shoulders tremble. When she pulls herself together, she cocks her head at me and smirks.
"Hey, do you think that I invest all the money I make at work in a retirement fund? Every little bit contributes to provide a safe life away from the tumult. I've always loved peace and quiet. Did I tell you that I used to dream of buying land in one of the many hills further into the province, large and green enough to grow crops and raise animals? Wouldn't you have loved to grow up in such a place? Once I got used to the notion that I would never have children, I gave up on that dream, but... look at us now. Haven't I won the lottery with you, baby?"
A shiver runs down my spine; she must have knocked at a fissure in my porcelain-ice psyche. My neck trembles, and I consider averting my gaze before the warmth gathered behind my eyes escapes through my lacrimal glands in liquid form.
Jacqueline drapes an arm around my shoulders, pulls me closer and rests her head on mine. I swallow saliva to loosen my throat, but my voice comes out thin.
"I'm tempted to assert that my company is like contracting a plague."
"I know you think so, honey."
The warmth that emanates from her body, as well as her hair brushing my face, takes me back to the nights that I have spent under Jacqueline's sheets, nestled between the ample globes of her bosom. That goddess consumes my maladaptive vulnerabilities with the sheer exuberance of those tits. Hasn't the temperature kept dropping since we got out of her Audi? I want to finger myself under a blanket.
Our child is draped face down over the top of the vertical orbital, balancing herself while she expels puffs of vapour that rise around her head.
My eyelids are growing heavier, my brain turning into a sponge. A big yawn overwhelms me, and Jacqueline copies it.
"Careful," she says in a sleepy voice, "you are going to unhinge your jaw if you open your mouth that wide."
"My jaw will never go unhinged. It's the only sane part of me."
Jacqueline snorts. She touches my lower lip with the tip of her index finger.
"And that mouth of yours looks like it was made to eat bonbons."
She giggles at her own words, although the pastry-adjacent reference has brought up recent trauma. She lowers that hand to mine and interlaces our fingers. The breeze has chilled the back of my left hand, but its palm and fingers now feel snug in Jacqueline's grasp.
I want to sneak along Jacqueline's inner thighs and climb through to enter her honey labyrinth headfirst. What delicious feelings would tighten around my nape.
"You are a queen bee, Jacqueline," I say to my sublime beloved.
"Then you should be a ladybug."
I want to scoff at such notion, but I sigh instead. If Jacqueline were to study every detail of my skin, apart from dirt and grime and insect bites, she would recognize the traces of sunburns and countless bruises. The lines and furrows are engraved there by decades of sadness; the blue-gray discoloration is due to postorgasmic trauma after determined self-diddling.
"I'm not the least bit ladylike. In fact, I'm feeling more like a slug right now. But I would like us to make love in a hive and then emerge with thousands of childish faces crawling all over my body."
"I... need some time to process that imagery."
"I devoured a decade's worth of pastries, so I'm afraid that I won't be able to have sex tonight. I'm going to pass out as soon as I lie down. However, you can take advantage of my unconscious self however you see fit."
"Oh, don't tell me that, darling, because I will take you up on the offer."
"Give me a stamp and I'll make it official."
Jacqueline turns to me and lifts my chin with her free hand. Her cobalt-blues leer at me through their eyelashes while her warm breath caresses my lips. It smells faintly of sugar and jam.
"What I will do tonight is hold you in my arms and entwine my legs with yours. Soon enough you'll start drooling and snoring against my neck."
My blood grows hotter. After I close my eyes, the lustful urge becomes a comforting lullaby, a hymn for my heart to sing while the blood pours through my body.
"Yeah, squeeze your tits against my comparatively puny ones until I can barely breathe," I say in a weak voice. "That's the optimal state of this world."
Our child squeals with joy. How can anybody distil so much fun out of a misguided representation of an atom, one that was turned into playground equipment?
A gentle breeze brings the scent of damp leaves, and flutters my hair.
"Isn't it such a nasty thing to do to someone, Jacqueline," I say, "to present them with a child from a Paleolithic forest for whom they are responsible, at least until she turns eighteen? All the baggage, rules, duties, chores, sexual hangups, eating disorders and seclusion-seeking behaviors, without anyone asking if you're ready for that kind of commitment."
I melt into the sound of her chuckles. She rests her forehead against my temple, then she nuzzles my ear.
"Oh, I'm not mad," she whispers. "Not at all. But don't you think it's about time we name our daughter?"
Jacqueline's half-lidded eyes are sparkling, and the warmth in her smile suggests that she would push me out of the way of an incoming truck even if it would flatten her instead. My knees weaken and my heartbeat quickens. Now that we have a daughter, our relationship has become more serious.
"I-I suppose that any child would have a hard time growing up if her parents can't be bothered to name her. Why don't we just call her Child? Capitalize it, pretend it's a name."
Jacqueline giggles, then shakes her head.
"Leire, we can't do that!"
"Why not? We'll always know we are referring to her. We don't have more children running around."
"Do you think we'll keep her cooped up in the apartment forever? What if other people find out that this child that somehow belongs to us is called Child? We would get a visit from Child Services in no time!"
My mind has devolved, and I barely discern solid thoughts in the fog. I rub my temples.
"Sorry. Only the most rudimentary notions are rising from the dark matter inside my cranium."
Jacqueline squeezes my hand.
"That's alright, darling. Coming to the park after the day you've had was asking a lot of you."
"So our girl needs a proper name, but what kind would fit a prehistoric painter?"
"This morning I've been researching names on the phone, and I think I've come across a good one."
"Great, because my brain would love to settle for nonsensical ones. But please, no clichés. I wouldn't be able to handle that."
"'Alicia' goes out of the window, then?"
"Unless you want me to vomit. Besides, we'd have to give her the full-on hippie treatment. She'd wear a flower crown and a headband made of wheat stalks."
"What do you thing about 'Leire'?"
"Too common. Also, that's my name."
"Then how about 'Sylvie'? It seems to originate from the Latin word for forest. And Silvanus was the Roman god of the woodlands and fields. Wouldn't it be an appropriate name for our forest fae?"
"Oh, I love it!"
"I thought you would. Let's announce it to the recipient."
We step onto the rubber tarmac to approach our girl, who's dangling upside down from the top of the vertical orbital. Her eyes are shining like glassy marbles, maybe a combination of the blood pooling in her head and the cold breeze, that is also whipping her hanging twin braids.
When the child notices us, her expression turns attentive; a moment ago she was a cat pawing at a mouse toy, but now she has found herself the target of the whims of two of those bipedal giants that although they feed her and keep her warm, still frighten her with their size, and one day might flip out and stomp her to death. However, the child's scarf unwinds further, covering her face like a funeral shroud. Both of her hands are busy; she shakes her head and lets out noises of frustration that resemble those of a dog having a fit while being teased with a rolled-up newspaper. She ends up clambering down from the metallic orbital. With her legs splayed, she perches herself on the netting and gazes at us.
"Hey, little one," Jacqueline says as she stands in front of our child so that the words will reach her directly, echoing through her mind. "Your other mommy and I have decided to take care of you forever and ever, so we will give you a name: it's Sylvie."
"We'll also keep you away from ovens," I say, "just in case."
The girl tilts her head sideways.
"Now, how will I make you understand..." Jacqueline wonders. "Oh, I know." She perks up and points at herself. "Jacqueline." She points at me, which causes a burst of warmth to flow down to my groin. "Leire." She points at our adopted daughter. "Sylvie."
The girl furrows her brow and squints, then her mouth opens in disbelief. She utters a word soup full of vowel sounds and gurgling consonants, but the tone alone spells out her disapproval.
"She hates it," Jacqueline says, crestfallen.
I put a hand on her shoulder.
"The name is good."
Our child speaks in a loud, dollish voice.
"Nairu!"
Jacqueline and I exchange a look. When we stare back at the girl, she's smiling as if our confusion amused her.
She points at Jacqueline. "Akedin." She points at me. "Eide." She points at herself. "Nairu!"
Jacqueline has blushed, but I shake my head at our girl.
"What the hell, child of the woods? Back at the cursed patisserie, I taught you that whole thing of pointing at yourself to share your name, but the two words you uttered to call yourself didn't sound anything like 'Nairu'! And why do you keep calling me Eide although you can pronounce the R of the name you gave yourself?"
An impish grin widens across Nairu's face. She clutches the top of the diagonal orbitals, installed at both sides of her body, and she swings back and forth while giggling like a loon.
I sigh. Our adopted child was born during the Ice Age; for all we know, her birth was celebrated with a drumming ritual during which the proud parents slapped each other's faces with dead birds, then they danced and beat their backsides to an inhumane rhythm, thus bestowing upon the infant a life of madness, a love of the absurd, and a hatred toward civilization. So I guess 'Nairu' fits this girl just fine.
"She may be trying to pull a fast one on us, and that word means 'booger' in her ancient language. In that case she played herself, because we will honor her choice. Won't we, mommy?"
Jacqueline's shoulders droop. She shoots me an awkward smile.
"Well, there goes my research."
I walk up to the playground equipment, then I reach to wrap the tail of our daughter's scarf around her neck.
"Welcome to our deranged little family, Nairu."
Her face breaks into a joyous smile. She claps her hands and chortles.
The corners of my mouth are fighting against my self-control to curl into a smile. This child is the most endearing little creature that I've ever met. I want to slide through her pupils until I reach the back of her brain, where I'd dissolve and become an indistinguishable part of her soul.
How would it be to exist as someone who can hoot with laughter like that? How does it feel to live a life that lacks a looming black cloud hanging over it?
---
Author's note: the two songs for today are "I Found a Reason" by The Velvet Underground, and "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned so far throughout this novel: this is the link.
Although it may seem otherwise, this chapter still hasn't finished the current sequence. I clearly have no clue when it comes to figuring out how many words rendering a bunch of notes is going to take: I originally believed that this story, which is already about 180,000 words long, would be a novella. I'm likely the only person on earth that cares about this, though.
Perhaps three months ago I enjoyed a two weeks-long break from my office job. One of the (very few) special tasks I managed to complete was visiting the park depicted in the current sequence (as well as the previous patisserie). I walked around and took some photos until I had a good notion of how being present there felt like, something you can't properly garner through photos and videos, unfortunately.
Another thing that writing does, at least for people whose brains work as weirdly as mine, is create memories that feel stronger and more meaningful than those of stuff you've actually lived through. So now that park in the hills of Donostia will forever be for me the place where I had a good time as Leire, Jacqueline and their little nugget. I also retain many bittersweet memories of the events depicted in my previous novel. Does this phenomenon happen to people other than writers?
September 29, 2022
Life update (09/29/2022)
Link to this entry on my personal page, where it looks better
---
I'm working afternoons this week. I suppose that people who have a social life, nevermind a family, hate working afternoons, but I'd rather always work such shifts; they allow me to write for a couple of hours first thing in the morning. Once I've already put in enough work to calm down whatever otherworldly demon forces me to create stuff, I can waste the rest of my energies and the afternoon at the office (until ten at night) in a sort of generally unproductive daze.
Anyway, somehow the subject came up that these last couple of months I've arrived late a few times, and my coworker (a kind woman with children who lives in my city) didn't know why. I told her about the heart issues I developed (pretty sure I told her back in the day, but I guess she forgot) as well as my current knowledge about it after a visit to the cardiologist and a couple of blood tests: I was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, and my left ventricle is considerably larger than normal, although without signs of myocarditis or pericarditis. Even my cholesterol levels are healty; I had suspected otherwise due to the amount of pastries I had eaten recently "for research." The cardiologist believes that my enlarged ventricle is due to me lifting weights on-and-off since I was a teen. Who knows. I'm no athlete.
We talked for a bit about the enraging absurdity of medical professionals getting pissy about the link between these "booster vaccines", or the original vaccines for that matter, and heart issues. There are articles online from societies of cardiologists worldwide that suggest an about four percent risk of atrial fibrillation with these jabs (among other things). My cardiologist got pissy when I stated the fact that I never experienced heart issues of any kind until the very same day I received the second "booster vaccine": as I was building up a fever, I experienced palpitations, "heart hiccups," that have remained to this day. Some of these professionals claim that there's no data to support the link, then they don't write down in the episodes the mentioned "circumstantial evidence" of the problems arising immediately after the vaccination. Very sinister shit.
One day a few months ago, as I was going through another one of my depressions (I had wished to die in my sleep that previous night, in a fucked up ritual I've gotten used to since I was much, much younger), and as I was wasting my morning at work, my heart went haywire with an arrhythmia that ended up landing me in the ER. They gave me some flecainide, a drug with a "black box warning" that suggests you can suffer heart attacks if you decide to take it regularly (which they suggested I did if I went through other episodes of atrial fibrillation). Fortunately, the medicine, apart from making me break in cold sweat the moment I ceased to be in a horizontal position, stopped my arrhythmia; they would have had to defibrillate me otherwise, which didn't sound palatable.
That stuff may not sound like much to some people, but it was the worst health-related episode in my whole life so far (not counting self-destructive episodes). I've been paranoid about my heart failing ever since, because you are far more likely to suffer a stroke during an arrhythmia among other things, and I've changed how I approach stuff in my day to day: I no longer hurry to solve an issue at work, I'm far more careful when moving equipment, and I don't want to get involved with the kind of coworkers that feed off conflict (which has made me stop talking to one of those people entirely).
The point of this entry, though, is that I ended up admitting to my coworker that I'm autistic; I was diagnosed with it in my mid-twenties, after a few other diagnoses. I have the now defunct variant of Asperger's Syndrome (these days it's simply considered high-functioning autism). I can't think of any time that I haven't regretted in one way or another admitting this autism of mine to people (online doesn't matter, though, as for all I know, you people are imaginary); however, my life is a series of "it seemed like a good idea at the time."
My coworker reacted nonchalantly. I suspect she already knew. My brother happens to work in the same office, so maybe years ago he mentioned that his brother was autistic. I'm uncomfortable with the notion that people with whom I interact in person may treat me in strange ways because they know I'm autistic; my own parents, who are quite idiotic in general, ever since they found out that I was autistic, find it impossible to imagine that I would be able to figure out how to arrive at a destination by myself. Even after I send them a screenshot of the route and the image of the location from Google Maps, they still attempt to explain to me step by step how to get there. Again, idiots.
In any case, shortly after the chat with my coworker, a technician from a company that provides barcode scanners showed up, because some nurse had dropped the scanner to the floor of its operating room (happens relatively often), and something had ceased to work internally. I could open the machine and try to connect the cables properly (I did it once in the past), but these technicians get paid for it, so why would I bother?
Well, the reason why I would bother to deal with the barcode scanner's internal cables myself is because otherwise I have to talk to a complete stranger, which involves me playing a role, behaving like a person completely unlike myself. After the person leaves, my skin crawls, and I feel disgusted for the basic dishonesty and degradation of having to pretend to be a complete stranger just to talk to another human being in person.
And why wouldn't I act instinctually with humans? Because my natural reaction is to remain silent and stare blankly, and by that I mean literally uttering not a single word. I've had plenty of instances in the past in which someone caused trouble for me merely for the fact that I couldn't figure out what words to come up with, usually because I was exhausted or in a bad mood. In other cases I refused to acknowledge those people, and they looked at me as if I was a ghost or Death itself. I have to walk through my decaying city at half past six in the morning five days a week, so I've had a few people try to get my attention. I just walk faster. Some guy working for the town hall attempted to stop me for some sort of quiz (judging by his clipboard), but I walked past without even looking at him. Behind me, the guy went, "hey, hey! Hello? Hello?! Hello!" Random people aren't entitled to my attention.
But apart from random people and potential muggers, I recall an instance during the last time I considered that attending a writing course was a good idea: a refined-seeming woman in her early thirties, who was seated in front of me, turned around and asked me something. I don't remember what. I merely stared at her blankly, and as my brain was working to string together a few words, the woman looked disturbed and said, "Sorry for bothering you, I didn't mean anything by it." Bitch, I'm retarded. Give me a fucking break. Anyway, she avoided me for the rest of the course, not that I wanted to interact with her or the other attendees anyway.
What l learned from writing courses is that most aspiring writers want to be Authors and Famous. They seek the status. They want the glitz of being present in writing-themed events. Or at least they want to meet new people. Most of them hadn't even finished a short story in years. Many wanted to be convinced to write.
In the end I was even accused, or so I heard through the grapevine, of causing the stroke of an elderly "writing instructor" with plenty of books published. His course was fraudulent: every class was a guilt trip to get us to buy his books, and he admitted that he hadn't read fiction in decades. To fill time, he told us to bring our own texts. It seems that my stuff disturbed him tremendously; for the last class of his I attended, he even refused to let me present more material. The texts I used to write back then were far milder than my current nonsense. Anyway, after that class, I simply quit, not only that course but the couple of others I was attending. I don't think I'll ever get together with writers again. They can keep sucking and licking each others' dicks and vaginas.
Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, the notion of starting an interaction with another human being just doesn't cross my mind. I'm receptive to others contacting me if they are interesting, but I simply lack the instinct for including people in my routines. I was the kind of child that walked around like a monk while holding a notebook, scribbling stuff, sometimes muttering to himself (I act out the scenes I write, at the very least with my facial expressions, and I rarely notice myself doing it, so I can't write in public).
I never, ever went out of my way to make friends. Because teachers seem to be do-gooders with very little common sense, particularly those that tend to children, a few of them pushed me towards other kids, and even convinced them to call me so I would hang out with them after school. My mother's whole intention was for me to "act normal and eventually it will become second nature" (fuck you, mom), so I was also pushed by them to hang out with randos.
That way I ended up meeting a malignant narcissist who attempted to ruin my life literally until he died in a car crash, a jock for whom bullying came naturally and innocently (he ended up becoming a soldier), coke addicts, a cat torturer, a run-of-the-mill sociopath, a pyromaniac who was also a compulsive thief (he wasn't that bad of a guy, he just couldn't help himself; he ended up OD-ing or killing himself), girls who wanted to feel like good people for helping a special needs kid but who were otherwise like "ew," etc. Probably plenty of other people that I have forgotten.
I never felt like I belonged in any of those groups, because I didn't. I was told a couple of times (in two different groups) that I was considered a sort of "corner plant." I was there but I wasn't. I spoke if others addressed me, but I didn't contribute much of anything. I doubt most of them wanted me there. I recall an instance in which they passed me the controller to play GTA (the third one), and the people around me were amazed that I was able to play it properly. Of course I tried to date, mostly because I wanted to have sex, and it was a disaster. I also nearly got raped by some guy when I was fourteen, because I couldn't tell that he only approached me for predatory purposes. Thankfully I knew the city, and he didn't (it happened during some local festivities).
My longest romantic relationship only happened because I pushed myself to want and be something I didn't and wasn't. I'm not built to be anyone's romantic partner. Paying attention to the other person felt like a chore. I recall that when we started dating, she was confused because I only wanted to meet like once a week, and it came as a shock to me that we were supposed not only to try to see each other almost every day, but keep texting each other or call each other throughout the day. Don't other people have hobbies, interests, or even their own internal dialogues to tend to?
Regarding sex these days, VR porn is fantastic.
At times I've thought that if people were interesting enough, I'd care, but virtually nobody I have ever met seems as interesting as the stuff I can play out in my mind. As that Modest Mouse song put it, "I eat my own blood and get filled up." It's unfair for me to seek human relationships, because I'd only end up hurting those people. Spreading misery has always been one of my talents. In my circumstances, I would only consider getting a romantic partner because there's no other reasonable way of having children, but I don't want children in the first place (sorry, Ice Age spawns). But what kind of person who suffers from depression and autism (and OCD, etc.) would want to produce a new human being who would likely also be exposed to such torture? To me that seems like extreme cruelty.
My brain must be a mess of recursive wiring, given the amount of random nonsense that pops in and the daydreams into which it traps me. Those two fuel my writing, so that's alright (although I shouldn't handle heavy machinery, nor drive, nor hold babies for that matter). What isn't fine is the daily bobbing in the maelström of thoughts and memories, usually the same ones, that force me to justify my existence, as well as face memories such as, "hey, remember that one time when you were eight years old and you wore mismatched sneakers, so other kids came to point at them and laugh?" (and that's by far one of the mildest ones), a process that I can't control in any way. Knowing that every new experience will end up processed into its more painful parts (usually getting rid of any good ones) with which my brain will bother me for the rest of my life has made me a let's say cautious person.
Anyway, it's half past seven in the afternoon and I feel as good as someone at work and who suffers from severe anxiety and a bad case of Irritable Bowel Syndrome can feel. The next chapter of my current novel is going just fine, my recent period of depression has ended, and my heart hasn't exploded yet. See ya, fuckers.
---
I'm working afternoons this week. I suppose that people who have a social life, nevermind a family, hate working afternoons, but I'd rather always work such shifts; they allow me to write for a couple of hours first thing in the morning. Once I've already put in enough work to calm down whatever otherworldly demon forces me to create stuff, I can waste the rest of my energies and the afternoon at the office (until ten at night) in a sort of generally unproductive daze.
Anyway, somehow the subject came up that these last couple of months I've arrived late a few times, and my coworker (a kind woman with children who lives in my city) didn't know why. I told her about the heart issues I developed (pretty sure I told her back in the day, but I guess she forgot) as well as my current knowledge about it after a visit to the cardiologist and a couple of blood tests: I was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, and my left ventricle is considerably larger than normal, although without signs of myocarditis or pericarditis. Even my cholesterol levels are healty; I had suspected otherwise due to the amount of pastries I had eaten recently "for research." The cardiologist believes that my enlarged ventricle is due to me lifting weights on-and-off since I was a teen. Who knows. I'm no athlete.
We talked for a bit about the enraging absurdity of medical professionals getting pissy about the link between these "booster vaccines", or the original vaccines for that matter, and heart issues. There are articles online from societies of cardiologists worldwide that suggest an about four percent risk of atrial fibrillation with these jabs (among other things). My cardiologist got pissy when I stated the fact that I never experienced heart issues of any kind until the very same day I received the second "booster vaccine": as I was building up a fever, I experienced palpitations, "heart hiccups," that have remained to this day. Some of these professionals claim that there's no data to support the link, then they don't write down in the episodes the mentioned "circumstantial evidence" of the problems arising immediately after the vaccination. Very sinister shit.
One day a few months ago, as I was going through another one of my depressions (I had wished to die in my sleep that previous night, in a fucked up ritual I've gotten used to since I was much, much younger), and as I was wasting my morning at work, my heart went haywire with an arrhythmia that ended up landing me in the ER. They gave me some flecainide, a drug with a "black box warning" that suggests you can suffer heart attacks if you decide to take it regularly (which they suggested I did if I went through other episodes of atrial fibrillation). Fortunately, the medicine, apart from making me break in cold sweat the moment I ceased to be in a horizontal position, stopped my arrhythmia; they would have had to defibrillate me otherwise, which didn't sound palatable.
That stuff may not sound like much to some people, but it was the worst health-related episode in my whole life so far (not counting self-destructive episodes). I've been paranoid about my heart failing ever since, because you are far more likely to suffer a stroke during an arrhythmia among other things, and I've changed how I approach stuff in my day to day: I no longer hurry to solve an issue at work, I'm far more careful when moving equipment, and I don't want to get involved with the kind of coworkers that feed off conflict (which has made me stop talking to one of those people entirely).
The point of this entry, though, is that I ended up admitting to my coworker that I'm autistic; I was diagnosed with it in my mid-twenties, after a few other diagnoses. I have the now defunct variant of Asperger's Syndrome (these days it's simply considered high-functioning autism). I can't think of any time that I haven't regretted in one way or another admitting this autism of mine to people (online doesn't matter, though, as for all I know, you people are imaginary); however, my life is a series of "it seemed like a good idea at the time."
My coworker reacted nonchalantly. I suspect she already knew. My brother happens to work in the same office, so maybe years ago he mentioned that his brother was autistic. I'm uncomfortable with the notion that people with whom I interact in person may treat me in strange ways because they know I'm autistic; my own parents, who are quite idiotic in general, ever since they found out that I was autistic, find it impossible to imagine that I would be able to figure out how to arrive at a destination by myself. Even after I send them a screenshot of the route and the image of the location from Google Maps, they still attempt to explain to me step by step how to get there. Again, idiots.
In any case, shortly after the chat with my coworker, a technician from a company that provides barcode scanners showed up, because some nurse had dropped the scanner to the floor of its operating room (happens relatively often), and something had ceased to work internally. I could open the machine and try to connect the cables properly (I did it once in the past), but these technicians get paid for it, so why would I bother?
Well, the reason why I would bother to deal with the barcode scanner's internal cables myself is because otherwise I have to talk to a complete stranger, which involves me playing a role, behaving like a person completely unlike myself. After the person leaves, my skin crawls, and I feel disgusted for the basic dishonesty and degradation of having to pretend to be a complete stranger just to talk to another human being in person.
And why wouldn't I act instinctually with humans? Because my natural reaction is to remain silent and stare blankly, and by that I mean literally uttering not a single word. I've had plenty of instances in the past in which someone caused trouble for me merely for the fact that I couldn't figure out what words to come up with, usually because I was exhausted or in a bad mood. In other cases I refused to acknowledge those people, and they looked at me as if I was a ghost or Death itself. I have to walk through my decaying city at half past six in the morning five days a week, so I've had a few people try to get my attention. I just walk faster. Some guy working for the town hall attempted to stop me for some sort of quiz (judging by his clipboard), but I walked past without even looking at him. Behind me, the guy went, "hey, hey! Hello? Hello?! Hello!" Random people aren't entitled to my attention.
But apart from random people and potential muggers, I recall an instance during the last time I considered that attending a writing course was a good idea: a refined-seeming woman in her early thirties, who was seated in front of me, turned around and asked me something. I don't remember what. I merely stared at her blankly, and as my brain was working to string together a few words, the woman looked disturbed and said, "Sorry for bothering you, I didn't mean anything by it." Bitch, I'm retarded. Give me a fucking break. Anyway, she avoided me for the rest of the course, not that I wanted to interact with her or the other attendees anyway.
What l learned from writing courses is that most aspiring writers want to be Authors and Famous. They seek the status. They want the glitz of being present in writing-themed events. Or at least they want to meet new people. Most of them hadn't even finished a short story in years. Many wanted to be convinced to write.
In the end I was even accused, or so I heard through the grapevine, of causing the stroke of an elderly "writing instructor" with plenty of books published. His course was fraudulent: every class was a guilt trip to get us to buy his books, and he admitted that he hadn't read fiction in decades. To fill time, he told us to bring our own texts. It seems that my stuff disturbed him tremendously; for the last class of his I attended, he even refused to let me present more material. The texts I used to write back then were far milder than my current nonsense. Anyway, after that class, I simply quit, not only that course but the couple of others I was attending. I don't think I'll ever get together with writers again. They can keep sucking and licking each others' dicks and vaginas.
Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, the notion of starting an interaction with another human being just doesn't cross my mind. I'm receptive to others contacting me if they are interesting, but I simply lack the instinct for including people in my routines. I was the kind of child that walked around like a monk while holding a notebook, scribbling stuff, sometimes muttering to himself (I act out the scenes I write, at the very least with my facial expressions, and I rarely notice myself doing it, so I can't write in public).
I never, ever went out of my way to make friends. Because teachers seem to be do-gooders with very little common sense, particularly those that tend to children, a few of them pushed me towards other kids, and even convinced them to call me so I would hang out with them after school. My mother's whole intention was for me to "act normal and eventually it will become second nature" (fuck you, mom), so I was also pushed by them to hang out with randos.
That way I ended up meeting a malignant narcissist who attempted to ruin my life literally until he died in a car crash, a jock for whom bullying came naturally and innocently (he ended up becoming a soldier), coke addicts, a cat torturer, a run-of-the-mill sociopath, a pyromaniac who was also a compulsive thief (he wasn't that bad of a guy, he just couldn't help himself; he ended up OD-ing or killing himself), girls who wanted to feel like good people for helping a special needs kid but who were otherwise like "ew," etc. Probably plenty of other people that I have forgotten.
I never felt like I belonged in any of those groups, because I didn't. I was told a couple of times (in two different groups) that I was considered a sort of "corner plant." I was there but I wasn't. I spoke if others addressed me, but I didn't contribute much of anything. I doubt most of them wanted me there. I recall an instance in which they passed me the controller to play GTA (the third one), and the people around me were amazed that I was able to play it properly. Of course I tried to date, mostly because I wanted to have sex, and it was a disaster. I also nearly got raped by some guy when I was fourteen, because I couldn't tell that he only approached me for predatory purposes. Thankfully I knew the city, and he didn't (it happened during some local festivities).
My longest romantic relationship only happened because I pushed myself to want and be something I didn't and wasn't. I'm not built to be anyone's romantic partner. Paying attention to the other person felt like a chore. I recall that when we started dating, she was confused because I only wanted to meet like once a week, and it came as a shock to me that we were supposed not only to try to see each other almost every day, but keep texting each other or call each other throughout the day. Don't other people have hobbies, interests, or even their own internal dialogues to tend to?
Regarding sex these days, VR porn is fantastic.
At times I've thought that if people were interesting enough, I'd care, but virtually nobody I have ever met seems as interesting as the stuff I can play out in my mind. As that Modest Mouse song put it, "I eat my own blood and get filled up." It's unfair for me to seek human relationships, because I'd only end up hurting those people. Spreading misery has always been one of my talents. In my circumstances, I would only consider getting a romantic partner because there's no other reasonable way of having children, but I don't want children in the first place (sorry, Ice Age spawns). But what kind of person who suffers from depression and autism (and OCD, etc.) would want to produce a new human being who would likely also be exposed to such torture? To me that seems like extreme cruelty.
My brain must be a mess of recursive wiring, given the amount of random nonsense that pops in and the daydreams into which it traps me. Those two fuel my writing, so that's alright (although I shouldn't handle heavy machinery, nor drive, nor hold babies for that matter). What isn't fine is the daily bobbing in the maelström of thoughts and memories, usually the same ones, that force me to justify my existence, as well as face memories such as, "hey, remember that one time when you were eight years old and you wore mismatched sneakers, so other kids came to point at them and laugh?" (and that's by far one of the mildest ones), a process that I can't control in any way. Knowing that every new experience will end up processed into its more painful parts (usually getting rid of any good ones) with which my brain will bother me for the rest of my life has made me a let's say cautious person.
Anyway, it's half past seven in the afternoon and I feel as good as someone at work and who suffers from severe anxiety and a bad case of Irritable Bowel Syndrome can feel. The next chapter of my current novel is going just fine, my recent period of depression has ended, and my heart hasn't exploded yet. See ya, fuckers.
September 27, 2022
Revised: Our Spot Behind the World
I wrote this short story back in July of last year, in a single day, if I remember correctly. Back then I took pride in starting a text and uploading it by the end of the day; nowadays, particularly when it involves writing my current novel, I revise the text until I can’t think of anything to change. I have become hardcore like that.
I remembered the aforementioned short story from last year fondly; I consider it one of the best I’ve written in the last couple of years. However, when I reread it a few days ago, I found it in an appalling state: the text was chock-full of redundancies, awkward writing and broken English. In general, an embarrassing mess. I apologize to everyone who read it back in the day.
I’m working afternoons this week. I have decided to spend a few hours revising the short story to a state that at least today feels good enough, and that doesn’t make me groan in despair. It managed to make me tear up a bit, so the emotional core remains there. However, if you find any mistake and you care enough about the matter, please tell me.
Whenever I thought about this story, The Clientele’s beautiful song “K” more often than not played in my mind. That’s the song I always associate, incidentally, to my favorite manga series ever, Inio Asano’s Oyasumi Punpun.
Bottom line: if you enjoyed this story back in the day, you should read it again through the link down below. If you have no clue what story I’m talking about, I’m presenting to you 4,667 words of a new self-contained story that doesn’t contain any of my usual silliness and nonsense. Just read it.
Link here: Our Spot Behind the World.
I remembered the aforementioned short story from last year fondly; I consider it one of the best I’ve written in the last couple of years. However, when I reread it a few days ago, I found it in an appalling state: the text was chock-full of redundancies, awkward writing and broken English. In general, an embarrassing mess. I apologize to everyone who read it back in the day.
I’m working afternoons this week. I have decided to spend a few hours revising the short story to a state that at least today feels good enough, and that doesn’t make me groan in despair. It managed to make me tear up a bit, so the emotional core remains there. However, if you find any mistake and you care enough about the matter, please tell me.
Whenever I thought about this story, The Clientele’s beautiful song “K” more often than not played in my mind. That’s the song I always associate, incidentally, to my favorite manga series ever, Inio Asano’s Oyasumi Punpun.
Bottom line: if you enjoyed this story back in the day, you should read it again through the link down below. If you have no clue what story I’m talking about, I’m presenting to you 4,667 words of a new self-contained story that doesn’t contain any of my usual silliness and nonsense. Just read it.
Link here: Our Spot Behind the World.
September 26, 2022
We’re Fucked, Pt. 74: AI-generated images
I spent a whole week working on chapter 74. This neural network spits out masterpieces in about thirty seconds. But our brains were cobbled together by evolution; nobody would design them the way they work. We should be grateful that we can walk and talk at the same time.
The following images are related to chapter 74 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
[link to this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
The following images are related to chapter 74 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
[link to this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
September 25, 2022
We're Fucked, Pt. 74 (Fiction)
Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better
---
When I step out of Jacqueline's Audi into the night and I exhale, a ghost escapes from my mouth in a cloud that glows citrine-yellow in the light of the streetlamps. On the other side of the street, beyond a boundary wall that the Ice Age civilization that built the pyramids would point at and mock, on the third and last floor of the apartment building, a parapet encloses the balcony that may have cost half of what my girlfriend paid for that apartment.
As I refresh my lungs with cold air and I stare up at that home, a lump of emotion grows in my throat. For years I have lifted my weary legs off the bed every morning, although I couldn't justify why I should bother. Half of the days that I got off at the Euskotren station in Irún after hours of overtime, I felt like turning around and waiting for a train to come in the opposite direction, so I could step in front of the death machine and let its wheels run over me like a hulking lawnmower; instead of that I rushed to my dreary apartment, where I threw off my clothes and ate chocolate while I masturbated furiously. My mind was too weak to dig me out of the ice-cold soil where it had buried us; it hunched between my legs, and whenever it got shamed or scorned, it forced me to bury my fingers into my evil cunt again and again and again.
But I endured these thirty years so at the end of the day I could return here, to this isolated apartment in the hills of Donostia, away from the stench of the car exhausts, away from the wastoids and their shrieks, away from the dog shit and the urine splashing down from their balconies, and high enough that when the sea levels rise again, our island of peace will protrude from the crimson tide of blood and corpses.
I yank my mind back to my wilting body and I order my legs to carry me across the cobbled road, but a dizzy spell bleaches my vision, making me stumble. My hands are trembling. A growing headache and my exhaustion have coalesced into a grimy mesh of spiderwebs inside my skull. How many pastries did I gorge myself on back at that cursed patisserie? My heart must be pumping liquid sugar.
A hand cups my elbow. Jacqueline has materialized in front of me, standing in the middle of the cobbled road. Clothed in a dark sienna peacoat and a black turtleneck sweater tucked into a plaid skirt, and with her legs hugged by cinder-colored tights, she looks as if she just walked out of a movie premiere. She has draped her other arm around our Paleolithic daughter's shoulders, squishing the back of her scarf. The child is staring up at me as if my sugar-induced infirmity was an exhibit at a zoo.
Jacqueline wastes her limited time on Earth working as a secretary for a pig; the money she earned through that degradation, apart from the porn videos she sells online, paid for our girl's sweater, yet its fabric has been ruined by five brown stains, each surrounded by tiny stains caused by splashed droplets, as if a villain had thrown coin-sized turds at the child's chest. Mommy always seems ready to turn towards an ambushing paparazzi and flash a radiant smile that would burn out the camera's electronic components, so how come she has cointaned herself from peeling off the sweater and tossing it into a dumpster?
"Are you okay, darling?" she asks me in her sweetest voice.
I squint, then rub my temple to emphasize my headache.
"D-don't you feel sick after the bombardment of sugar we've received? I have become permanently dumber, as if a goblin had been nibbling at my brain."
"I feel jittery. But do you know what would do us some good on this November evening?"
"Rush to your apartment and jump bare-assed under the covers of your bed?"
Jacqueline chuckles. A smile warps the skin beneath her eyes.
"Also take a nature stroll through the park I told you about this morning."
"What?! Now?!"
"After you woke up from a nightmare, you got teleported to a boreal forest from thousands of years ago. Let's end this momentous day by exploring willingly a closer sanctuary enclosed by trees, one that will welcome you from now on whenever the world gets overwhelming."
Jacqueline might as well have asked me to unload furniture from a truck after I've been awake for forty-eight hours straight. But as I stare at her face to formulate my defense, I'm silenced by those soft-angled, raven-black eyebrows; her gleaming, ivory-white skin; the cupid's bow of her upper lip and that thick lower one into which I'd love to sink my teeth; her features designed by a team devoted to rendering the loveliest mommy face; and her breeze-swept hair gathered in a braided ponytail. I want those half-lidded, cobalt-blue eyes to keep staring at me, at this loosely human-shaped bundle of flesh and bones varnished with vaginal secretions and covered in spiders, because the moment Jacqueline ceases to acknowledge my existence, I'll get vaporized like the breath that pours from between her lips, and I will vanish into the night as if I had never existed.
"Okay," I surrender. "But I may end up vomiting and passing out."
"In that case, I'll carry you in my arms back to my apartment, and I'll tuck you into bed."
"Now I want to risk it. Let's go."
Jacqueline steers me across the road, with the child in tow, toward a path that ascends between her apartment building and the closest one. We stroll along a four-meter-tall fieldstone wall, the kind that upmarket neighborhoods often choose instead of brick walls, because laying randomly-shaped stones must be more expensive and annoying.
To our left, a view opens of the rounded top of Mount Igueldo, a black mass darker than the night sky and that blocks the horizon. Isolated clusters of lit pixels reveal the presence of those who could afford to live on the slope of the mountain. And now I can retreat to a shelter located about seventy meters above sea level, which fulfills a need for security that must have been inscribed in the genes of humans from when we witnessed the sinking of our world beneath the rising tides. We'll also spot the invading hordes as they trudge uphill, which will give us time to roll down flaming tar barrels towards them, or at least push them back with head of our pikes.
Jacqueline stops next to an open gateway. Past the entrance, a flight of stairs leads to a darkened footpath where a tall person would stoop to pass under the low branches, most of them nude like skeletal fingers. I look up at the canopies of the trees closest to the fieldstone wall. They reach higher than the nearby apartment buildings, and have grown outwards as if trying to escape.
"This place looks like private property," I say.
Jacqueline smirks.
"I know, right?"
She shepherds our child into the park, and I follow them up the stairs. Further down the path, a row of streetlamps is casting circular pools of light on the asphalt, which is bordered on our left by clusters of thin trees like the European equivalent of bamboo, and on our right by an ascending, grassy slope littered with dried leaves. The arched canopy filters the moonlight.
As I walk, my shoes scuff the rough asphalt, that reminds me of a go-karts track. The streetlamps throw our shadows in front of us, and stretch them across the path. The surroundings smell of moist bark, soil, moldy leaves. This cool, dark wood may swallow up my uneasiness; I want to venture deeper towards its enticing scents.
I'm groggy from the fatigue. After I blink away tear-stickiness, I lift my gaze to our right, towards the crest of the hill. Its grass has concealed the path, but I spot the upper half of a white bench bathed in the light of a streetlamp. The hill is bare except for a few segregated trees that have shed their leaves. Three frail, leaning trees are strapped with rubber belts to nursery stakes driven into the ground.
Lamplight illuminates the contour of our child's silhouette; she has skipped ahead and is prancing about with a graceful gait while she talks to herself in her native tongue. A sudden breeze whips my cheeks and lashes, and makes dead leaves skitter along the asphalt. The chill dips into my bowels, but our girl is acclimated to boreal conditions. In comparison to her, Jacqueline and I are house cats who have pestered their owner to let them out in the snow, only for us to regret it and claw at the door to be allowed back into the coziness of a modern home. While the child's footsteps sound ahead of us, I feel blessed by her presence, as if a snow leopard had chosen us to be part of her family.
Does our new daughter consider her relocation to this world as a strange vacation? Does she wonder how she will explain to that father of hers the sights and tastes we've presented to her? I can't imagine how she'll react once she realizes that she's stuck in this present forever. She's more resilient than me: by this point I would have already run into traffic with my hands on my ears, attempting to outrun the pain, or maybe I'd have pulled a knife and cut my throat. However, Jacqueline and I should be pleasant and kind to her to diminish the trauma of her displacement in time.
The child flinches, startled by a person who's jogging down a bend in the path: a bearded guy who's wearing tracksuit bottoms, a hoodie and a beanie. At the other end of a leash attached to his belt, a black-and-white border collie is running alongside the man. The dog's tongue is lolling out, and its ears flapping about. The pair's vaporized breaths are trailing behind them. As the man passes by us, he nods to acknowledge our existence, or maybe to apologize for having bothered us.
Why the hell is this punk intruding in our private park? I sigh, then remind myself that random human beings are technically allowed to exist near me, as long as they pay for the privilege.
Our daughter is standing in the grass next to the path. She has craned her neck towards the pair that is about to disappear through the park's gateway. I hope that she's interested in the dog instead of in the guy's ass.
I walk up to her, then pat the crown of her head.
"C'mon. You'll get to see plenty of cool wolves throughout your lifetime, because we protect them from extinction."
The child tilts her face up to mine and shares a look of wonder: her eyebrows are raised and her mouth is broadened into a grin that shows her gums. She utters a few words in an enthusiastic voice, but they sound like gibberish.
"I'm sure you're right, Ice Age girl," I say.
I put an arm around her shoulders to guide her towards Jacqueline, who has tucked her hands into the pockets of her peacoat, and whose nostrils are exhaling wisps of vapour.
Leaves crunch under our feet as we walk up the bend in the path. Although this park is enclosed by a wall of trees, the breeze is picking up and cutting through the leafless branches to chill my exposed skin. My body has realized that I will force it to trudge upwards, and now my head is throbbing.
I fix my gaze on the vision of that swaying white bench as I fill my lungs with cold air.
"L-let's rest a bit, Jacqueline. I haven't been young in a thousand years."
She steps closer to me and slips an arm around my waist as if she suspected that I would tumble face-first into the asphalt.
Once we reach the bench, I lean my ass against its side. I'm blowing a stream of vapour when the slats tremble through me as they complain with a wooden creak; our child must have jumped onto the bench. I cross my arms, which presses a solid frame against my ribs. Ah, I was carrying my revolver, wasn't I? I'm a huntress, the protector of a child who's lost in a world she can't understand, and who doesn't know what to expect from this life.
As the vapour dissolves, I notice that from behind the uneven palisade of trees, most of which are naked except for a few semi-deciduous ones that hang on to their leaves, stick out three belfries. They end in spires topped with crosses. The structures may belong to a monastery, or to an insane asylum.
I close my eyes and take deep breaths of the crisp air, that smells of damp earth and rotting leaves. It gives me goosebumps and makes my head feel lighter. My heartbeat is slowing down. I hear the distant echoes of a barking dog, as well as the background hum of traffic like a sonic blanket draped over the city. I hear the thump thump of the music that some dickhead is blasting out of his car speakers.
A rustling in the trees past the bend in the path makes me open my eyes. I glimpse a lumbering black mass stalking the tree line. I straighten my back and uncross my arms, but after I stare at the space between those two tree trunks, I only see a mesh of branches, which quiver as if they were the timid nipples of some as-yet-to-be-discovered mammal.
I cock my head towards Jacqueline; she must be standing in front of the bench.
"Your neighbors haven't spotted sasquatches marauding around, have they?"
She giggles, then puts a hand on my shoulder. My girlfriend must be unaware of the sasquatches' history of kidnappings, mind-wipes and probably molestation of humans throughout the ages.
"I don't interact with my neighbors remotely enough to bring up Bigfoot, honey. But I think that being surrounded by neighborhoods would dissuade any of those creatures from settling in this park, unless they spawn wherever a forest is present."
I shudder.
"They might. I wish I could ask our girl about them; the Ice Age must have been a giant sasquatch den, where monsters and humans coexisted for many millennia. The age of miracles."
Wait, why the hell would I be worried about sasquatches attacking us? I'm armed. I should be able to punch a few holes through the chest of a sasquatch before it manages to control my mind. That should be enough to topple over one of those eight-foot-tall interdimensional monsters. But if they were already trying to summon their goddess so she would twist her mad weavings over the world, then we'd be fucked, along with the rest of mankind.
My head is pounding; I feel like there's an angry, feral god locked inside my skull. I dread to glance at the tree line, in case the glowing yellow eyes of a sasquatch are peering from behind a bough. Perhaps the rank stench of their musk will hit us first.
I push myself off the bench.
"We shouldn't risk it. Let's get going. If at any point we find ourselves in a bubble of silence and we can't hear the breeze, I'll grab your hand tight. You grab our girl's. Then we'll sprint to the nearest exit."
"I'll have that in mind, darling," Jacqueline says in a serious voice.
She offers a hand to our child, who is balancing herself on the backrest of the bench, lit by the glow of the streetlamp. The girl gets the point; she jumps down to the asphalt with a soft thud. We continue strolling upwards towards the next bend in the path.
I rub my eyebrows to dispel the image of sasquatches that are hiding in the trees, behind bushes, beneath piles of leaves, waiting to pounce on us and tear us apart. A middle-aged woman's voice startles me.
"What a cute child! Is she yours?"
A random stranger has materialized in front of us. She has a bob haircut dyed blonde, as well as round spectacles. She's wearing an oyster-pink cardigan over a denim dress, and she's holding a few shopping bags, one in the crook of her elbow.
This bitch must know Jacqueline. I step aside to let them talk, but the woman's eyeballs roll to follow me. Why would this stranger care about whether the child is cute or ours? Maybe her fake smile disguises an enemy in our goal to keep the Ice Age orphan for ourselves. Maybe she endures a boring routine as a librarian or a researcher, and now she wants to feel virtuous by rescuing a child from the traffickers that have fed her tons of pastries. My fingers are itching to grip the revolver under my jacket.
When I look down at our girl, she was already staring up at me in confusion. Those monolid eyes belong to a doll. I envy that smooth peach-orange skin, and I want to squeeze her chubby cheeks while babbling nonsense. She makes an angel look like a succubus on crack.
I hold the nosy stranger's gaze. Is she a sasquatch in disguise?
"Our child is quite pretty if you are into mongoloids. Regarding your question, does it look like my girlfriend and I can procreate? We adopted this child from the Ice Age."
The woman grimaces, crinkling her nose, as if she reached to pet a dog only for the beast to snap its jaws at the tasty hand. She opens her mouth, then closes it.
"Excuse my utterances; I'm insane," I add.
The woman avoids my gaze. She lowers her head and hurries to walk around us, then past the bench.
I take a deep breath. This pointless interaction has gotten my heart racing again, although I had taken a break to attenuate my anxiety.
"Is this what happens when you have a child, random people come to steal her from you?"
Jacqueline caresses my neck with a thumb. The breeze is brushing a lock of raven-black hair against her face, and when our gazes meet, she flashes a smile like a white flame.
"I have always admired your talent to stupefy people into silence," she says huskily.
The grassy slope is already concealing the lower half of the stranger as she scurries down the path to escape us.
"I fucked up, didn't I? Was she one of your neighbors?"
Jacqueline shrugs.
"I've seen her a few times; she must live around here. But who cares."
My heart is still pumping like a piston. I shake my head.
"Why would any stranger dare to vocalize towards me? Can't they tell that I'm unhinged?"
Jacqueline chuckles. She steps closer, lifts my chin and gazes into my eyes. A streetlamp is backlighting her head, bringing out loose hairs, but her cobalt-blues are gleaming. She's eating me alive with her intense gaze, filling my veins with hormones, kindling something ferocious and primordial within my being.
"I love it when you lose control, baby," she utters in a predatory tone. "It makes me want to spread you on my bed with your ass raised in the air."
A hot jolt shoots through my body. The monster inside my brain stirs awake: the master of lust and vengeance, of addiction and despair. My blood is boiling at such a rapid pace that even our child, whose face is impressed on the fringes of my awareness, must smell it in my veins. The dark deity arrives to pulverize the mind and incite erotic insanity within me. In another life, I would have found a hideout in the park to masturbate, spreading my genital lips to spread the plague, and I wouldn't stop myself from molesting myself in the dirt, against a tree, in the water of a pond, wherever I could reach, until I rubbed myself to death.
The Paleolithic girl, who is standing next to us, has tilted her head as she observes our interaction with curiosity.
My desperate need for cunt distorts my awareness, and for a moment I'm frozen in place. Some programmed instinct attempts to shame me for exposing a child to perversion, then I recall that this girl hangs out with us without understanding a single word of our private conversations. Maybe everyone's children should be prohibited from learning the local language until they become adults, when they'll have any business figuring out what the fuck is going on in this world. But perhaps that'll be the custom when civilization degenerates to the stage where trees grow through cities, and the devolved ghouls freebase sugar sprinkled on piles of skulls.
---
Author's note: the four songs for today are "Communist Daughter" by Neutral Milk Hotel, "Red Moon" by The Walkmen, "Slow Show" by The National, and "Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset" by Modest Mouse.
I keep a playlist of all the songs I've mentioned throughout this novel: here's the link.
Holy crap, this was the most agonizing chapter to write in a long time. Took plenty of freewrites. I've been in an awful mood recently, which hasn't helped.
I figured that Leire would be instinctively aware of the sasquatches' goddess and her evil designs.
The next chapter should conclude the current sequence, and we'll be getting into third-act territory.
---
When I step out of Jacqueline's Audi into the night and I exhale, a ghost escapes from my mouth in a cloud that glows citrine-yellow in the light of the streetlamps. On the other side of the street, beyond a boundary wall that the Ice Age civilization that built the pyramids would point at and mock, on the third and last floor of the apartment building, a parapet encloses the balcony that may have cost half of what my girlfriend paid for that apartment.
As I refresh my lungs with cold air and I stare up at that home, a lump of emotion grows in my throat. For years I have lifted my weary legs off the bed every morning, although I couldn't justify why I should bother. Half of the days that I got off at the Euskotren station in Irún after hours of overtime, I felt like turning around and waiting for a train to come in the opposite direction, so I could step in front of the death machine and let its wheels run over me like a hulking lawnmower; instead of that I rushed to my dreary apartment, where I threw off my clothes and ate chocolate while I masturbated furiously. My mind was too weak to dig me out of the ice-cold soil where it had buried us; it hunched between my legs, and whenever it got shamed or scorned, it forced me to bury my fingers into my evil cunt again and again and again.
But I endured these thirty years so at the end of the day I could return here, to this isolated apartment in the hills of Donostia, away from the stench of the car exhausts, away from the wastoids and their shrieks, away from the dog shit and the urine splashing down from their balconies, and high enough that when the sea levels rise again, our island of peace will protrude from the crimson tide of blood and corpses.
I yank my mind back to my wilting body and I order my legs to carry me across the cobbled road, but a dizzy spell bleaches my vision, making me stumble. My hands are trembling. A growing headache and my exhaustion have coalesced into a grimy mesh of spiderwebs inside my skull. How many pastries did I gorge myself on back at that cursed patisserie? My heart must be pumping liquid sugar.
A hand cups my elbow. Jacqueline has materialized in front of me, standing in the middle of the cobbled road. Clothed in a dark sienna peacoat and a black turtleneck sweater tucked into a plaid skirt, and with her legs hugged by cinder-colored tights, she looks as if she just walked out of a movie premiere. She has draped her other arm around our Paleolithic daughter's shoulders, squishing the back of her scarf. The child is staring up at me as if my sugar-induced infirmity was an exhibit at a zoo.
Jacqueline wastes her limited time on Earth working as a secretary for a pig; the money she earned through that degradation, apart from the porn videos she sells online, paid for our girl's sweater, yet its fabric has been ruined by five brown stains, each surrounded by tiny stains caused by splashed droplets, as if a villain had thrown coin-sized turds at the child's chest. Mommy always seems ready to turn towards an ambushing paparazzi and flash a radiant smile that would burn out the camera's electronic components, so how come she has cointaned herself from peeling off the sweater and tossing it into a dumpster?
"Are you okay, darling?" she asks me in her sweetest voice.
I squint, then rub my temple to emphasize my headache.
"D-don't you feel sick after the bombardment of sugar we've received? I have become permanently dumber, as if a goblin had been nibbling at my brain."
"I feel jittery. But do you know what would do us some good on this November evening?"
"Rush to your apartment and jump bare-assed under the covers of your bed?"
Jacqueline chuckles. A smile warps the skin beneath her eyes.
"Also take a nature stroll through the park I told you about this morning."
"What?! Now?!"
"After you woke up from a nightmare, you got teleported to a boreal forest from thousands of years ago. Let's end this momentous day by exploring willingly a closer sanctuary enclosed by trees, one that will welcome you from now on whenever the world gets overwhelming."
Jacqueline might as well have asked me to unload furniture from a truck after I've been awake for forty-eight hours straight. But as I stare at her face to formulate my defense, I'm silenced by those soft-angled, raven-black eyebrows; her gleaming, ivory-white skin; the cupid's bow of her upper lip and that thick lower one into which I'd love to sink my teeth; her features designed by a team devoted to rendering the loveliest mommy face; and her breeze-swept hair gathered in a braided ponytail. I want those half-lidded, cobalt-blue eyes to keep staring at me, at this loosely human-shaped bundle of flesh and bones varnished with vaginal secretions and covered in spiders, because the moment Jacqueline ceases to acknowledge my existence, I'll get vaporized like the breath that pours from between her lips, and I will vanish into the night as if I had never existed.
"Okay," I surrender. "But I may end up vomiting and passing out."
"In that case, I'll carry you in my arms back to my apartment, and I'll tuck you into bed."
"Now I want to risk it. Let's go."
Jacqueline steers me across the road, with the child in tow, toward a path that ascends between her apartment building and the closest one. We stroll along a four-meter-tall fieldstone wall, the kind that upmarket neighborhoods often choose instead of brick walls, because laying randomly-shaped stones must be more expensive and annoying.
To our left, a view opens of the rounded top of Mount Igueldo, a black mass darker than the night sky and that blocks the horizon. Isolated clusters of lit pixels reveal the presence of those who could afford to live on the slope of the mountain. And now I can retreat to a shelter located about seventy meters above sea level, which fulfills a need for security that must have been inscribed in the genes of humans from when we witnessed the sinking of our world beneath the rising tides. We'll also spot the invading hordes as they trudge uphill, which will give us time to roll down flaming tar barrels towards them, or at least push them back with head of our pikes.
Jacqueline stops next to an open gateway. Past the entrance, a flight of stairs leads to a darkened footpath where a tall person would stoop to pass under the low branches, most of them nude like skeletal fingers. I look up at the canopies of the trees closest to the fieldstone wall. They reach higher than the nearby apartment buildings, and have grown outwards as if trying to escape.
"This place looks like private property," I say.
Jacqueline smirks.
"I know, right?"
She shepherds our child into the park, and I follow them up the stairs. Further down the path, a row of streetlamps is casting circular pools of light on the asphalt, which is bordered on our left by clusters of thin trees like the European equivalent of bamboo, and on our right by an ascending, grassy slope littered with dried leaves. The arched canopy filters the moonlight.
As I walk, my shoes scuff the rough asphalt, that reminds me of a go-karts track. The streetlamps throw our shadows in front of us, and stretch them across the path. The surroundings smell of moist bark, soil, moldy leaves. This cool, dark wood may swallow up my uneasiness; I want to venture deeper towards its enticing scents.
I'm groggy from the fatigue. After I blink away tear-stickiness, I lift my gaze to our right, towards the crest of the hill. Its grass has concealed the path, but I spot the upper half of a white bench bathed in the light of a streetlamp. The hill is bare except for a few segregated trees that have shed their leaves. Three frail, leaning trees are strapped with rubber belts to nursery stakes driven into the ground.
Lamplight illuminates the contour of our child's silhouette; she has skipped ahead and is prancing about with a graceful gait while she talks to herself in her native tongue. A sudden breeze whips my cheeks and lashes, and makes dead leaves skitter along the asphalt. The chill dips into my bowels, but our girl is acclimated to boreal conditions. In comparison to her, Jacqueline and I are house cats who have pestered their owner to let them out in the snow, only for us to regret it and claw at the door to be allowed back into the coziness of a modern home. While the child's footsteps sound ahead of us, I feel blessed by her presence, as if a snow leopard had chosen us to be part of her family.
Does our new daughter consider her relocation to this world as a strange vacation? Does she wonder how she will explain to that father of hers the sights and tastes we've presented to her? I can't imagine how she'll react once she realizes that she's stuck in this present forever. She's more resilient than me: by this point I would have already run into traffic with my hands on my ears, attempting to outrun the pain, or maybe I'd have pulled a knife and cut my throat. However, Jacqueline and I should be pleasant and kind to her to diminish the trauma of her displacement in time.
The child flinches, startled by a person who's jogging down a bend in the path: a bearded guy who's wearing tracksuit bottoms, a hoodie and a beanie. At the other end of a leash attached to his belt, a black-and-white border collie is running alongside the man. The dog's tongue is lolling out, and its ears flapping about. The pair's vaporized breaths are trailing behind them. As the man passes by us, he nods to acknowledge our existence, or maybe to apologize for having bothered us.
Why the hell is this punk intruding in our private park? I sigh, then remind myself that random human beings are technically allowed to exist near me, as long as they pay for the privilege.
Our daughter is standing in the grass next to the path. She has craned her neck towards the pair that is about to disappear through the park's gateway. I hope that she's interested in the dog instead of in the guy's ass.
I walk up to her, then pat the crown of her head.
"C'mon. You'll get to see plenty of cool wolves throughout your lifetime, because we protect them from extinction."
The child tilts her face up to mine and shares a look of wonder: her eyebrows are raised and her mouth is broadened into a grin that shows her gums. She utters a few words in an enthusiastic voice, but they sound like gibberish.
"I'm sure you're right, Ice Age girl," I say.
I put an arm around her shoulders to guide her towards Jacqueline, who has tucked her hands into the pockets of her peacoat, and whose nostrils are exhaling wisps of vapour.
Leaves crunch under our feet as we walk up the bend in the path. Although this park is enclosed by a wall of trees, the breeze is picking up and cutting through the leafless branches to chill my exposed skin. My body has realized that I will force it to trudge upwards, and now my head is throbbing.
I fix my gaze on the vision of that swaying white bench as I fill my lungs with cold air.
"L-let's rest a bit, Jacqueline. I haven't been young in a thousand years."
She steps closer to me and slips an arm around my waist as if she suspected that I would tumble face-first into the asphalt.
Once we reach the bench, I lean my ass against its side. I'm blowing a stream of vapour when the slats tremble through me as they complain with a wooden creak; our child must have jumped onto the bench. I cross my arms, which presses a solid frame against my ribs. Ah, I was carrying my revolver, wasn't I? I'm a huntress, the protector of a child who's lost in a world she can't understand, and who doesn't know what to expect from this life.
As the vapour dissolves, I notice that from behind the uneven palisade of trees, most of which are naked except for a few semi-deciduous ones that hang on to their leaves, stick out three belfries. They end in spires topped with crosses. The structures may belong to a monastery, or to an insane asylum.
I close my eyes and take deep breaths of the crisp air, that smells of damp earth and rotting leaves. It gives me goosebumps and makes my head feel lighter. My heartbeat is slowing down. I hear the distant echoes of a barking dog, as well as the background hum of traffic like a sonic blanket draped over the city. I hear the thump thump of the music that some dickhead is blasting out of his car speakers.
A rustling in the trees past the bend in the path makes me open my eyes. I glimpse a lumbering black mass stalking the tree line. I straighten my back and uncross my arms, but after I stare at the space between those two tree trunks, I only see a mesh of branches, which quiver as if they were the timid nipples of some as-yet-to-be-discovered mammal.
I cock my head towards Jacqueline; she must be standing in front of the bench.
"Your neighbors haven't spotted sasquatches marauding around, have they?"
She giggles, then puts a hand on my shoulder. My girlfriend must be unaware of the sasquatches' history of kidnappings, mind-wipes and probably molestation of humans throughout the ages.
"I don't interact with my neighbors remotely enough to bring up Bigfoot, honey. But I think that being surrounded by neighborhoods would dissuade any of those creatures from settling in this park, unless they spawn wherever a forest is present."
I shudder.
"They might. I wish I could ask our girl about them; the Ice Age must have been a giant sasquatch den, where monsters and humans coexisted for many millennia. The age of miracles."
Wait, why the hell would I be worried about sasquatches attacking us? I'm armed. I should be able to punch a few holes through the chest of a sasquatch before it manages to control my mind. That should be enough to topple over one of those eight-foot-tall interdimensional monsters. But if they were already trying to summon their goddess so she would twist her mad weavings over the world, then we'd be fucked, along with the rest of mankind.
My head is pounding; I feel like there's an angry, feral god locked inside my skull. I dread to glance at the tree line, in case the glowing yellow eyes of a sasquatch are peering from behind a bough. Perhaps the rank stench of their musk will hit us first.
I push myself off the bench.
"We shouldn't risk it. Let's get going. If at any point we find ourselves in a bubble of silence and we can't hear the breeze, I'll grab your hand tight. You grab our girl's. Then we'll sprint to the nearest exit."
"I'll have that in mind, darling," Jacqueline says in a serious voice.
She offers a hand to our child, who is balancing herself on the backrest of the bench, lit by the glow of the streetlamp. The girl gets the point; she jumps down to the asphalt with a soft thud. We continue strolling upwards towards the next bend in the path.
I rub my eyebrows to dispel the image of sasquatches that are hiding in the trees, behind bushes, beneath piles of leaves, waiting to pounce on us and tear us apart. A middle-aged woman's voice startles me.
"What a cute child! Is she yours?"
A random stranger has materialized in front of us. She has a bob haircut dyed blonde, as well as round spectacles. She's wearing an oyster-pink cardigan over a denim dress, and she's holding a few shopping bags, one in the crook of her elbow.
This bitch must know Jacqueline. I step aside to let them talk, but the woman's eyeballs roll to follow me. Why would this stranger care about whether the child is cute or ours? Maybe her fake smile disguises an enemy in our goal to keep the Ice Age orphan for ourselves. Maybe she endures a boring routine as a librarian or a researcher, and now she wants to feel virtuous by rescuing a child from the traffickers that have fed her tons of pastries. My fingers are itching to grip the revolver under my jacket.
When I look down at our girl, she was already staring up at me in confusion. Those monolid eyes belong to a doll. I envy that smooth peach-orange skin, and I want to squeeze her chubby cheeks while babbling nonsense. She makes an angel look like a succubus on crack.
I hold the nosy stranger's gaze. Is she a sasquatch in disguise?
"Our child is quite pretty if you are into mongoloids. Regarding your question, does it look like my girlfriend and I can procreate? We adopted this child from the Ice Age."
The woman grimaces, crinkling her nose, as if she reached to pet a dog only for the beast to snap its jaws at the tasty hand. She opens her mouth, then closes it.
"Excuse my utterances; I'm insane," I add.
The woman avoids my gaze. She lowers her head and hurries to walk around us, then past the bench.
I take a deep breath. This pointless interaction has gotten my heart racing again, although I had taken a break to attenuate my anxiety.
"Is this what happens when you have a child, random people come to steal her from you?"
Jacqueline caresses my neck with a thumb. The breeze is brushing a lock of raven-black hair against her face, and when our gazes meet, she flashes a smile like a white flame.
"I have always admired your talent to stupefy people into silence," she says huskily.
The grassy slope is already concealing the lower half of the stranger as she scurries down the path to escape us.
"I fucked up, didn't I? Was she one of your neighbors?"
Jacqueline shrugs.
"I've seen her a few times; she must live around here. But who cares."
My heart is still pumping like a piston. I shake my head.
"Why would any stranger dare to vocalize towards me? Can't they tell that I'm unhinged?"
Jacqueline chuckles. She steps closer, lifts my chin and gazes into my eyes. A streetlamp is backlighting her head, bringing out loose hairs, but her cobalt-blues are gleaming. She's eating me alive with her intense gaze, filling my veins with hormones, kindling something ferocious and primordial within my being.
"I love it when you lose control, baby," she utters in a predatory tone. "It makes me want to spread you on my bed with your ass raised in the air."
A hot jolt shoots through my body. The monster inside my brain stirs awake: the master of lust and vengeance, of addiction and despair. My blood is boiling at such a rapid pace that even our child, whose face is impressed on the fringes of my awareness, must smell it in my veins. The dark deity arrives to pulverize the mind and incite erotic insanity within me. In another life, I would have found a hideout in the park to masturbate, spreading my genital lips to spread the plague, and I wouldn't stop myself from molesting myself in the dirt, against a tree, in the water of a pond, wherever I could reach, until I rubbed myself to death.
The Paleolithic girl, who is standing next to us, has tilted her head as she observes our interaction with curiosity.
My desperate need for cunt distorts my awareness, and for a moment I'm frozen in place. Some programmed instinct attempts to shame me for exposing a child to perversion, then I recall that this girl hangs out with us without understanding a single word of our private conversations. Maybe everyone's children should be prohibited from learning the local language until they become adults, when they'll have any business figuring out what the fuck is going on in this world. But perhaps that'll be the custom when civilization degenerates to the stage where trees grow through cities, and the devolved ghouls freebase sugar sprinkled on piles of skulls.
---
Author's note: the four songs for today are "Communist Daughter" by Neutral Milk Hotel, "Red Moon" by The Walkmen, "Slow Show" by The National, and "Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset" by Modest Mouse.
I keep a playlist of all the songs I've mentioned throughout this novel: here's the link.
Holy crap, this was the most agonizing chapter to write in a long time. Took plenty of freewrites. I've been in an awful mood recently, which hasn't helped.
I figured that Leire would be instinctively aware of the sasquatches' goddess and her evil designs.
The next chapter should conclude the current sequence, and we'll be getting into third-act territory.
September 21, 2022
Random AI-generated images #8
Sometimes it takes a neural network to make this world compelling enough.
[Link to this entry on my personal page; it contains plenty of images]
[Link to this entry on my personal page; it contains plenty of images]
September 20, 2022
Life update (09/20/2022)
Link to this entry on my personal page, where it looks better
---
Yesterday I started a new work week, a Monday that I knew would involve preparing eight PCs and setting them up to fill a room for doctors and nurses. At a quarter past eight I left the office and walked to the bathroom to take my first shit of the morning (of about twelve on average; I have Irritable Bowel Syndrome), but as soon as I touched my belt, it came apart in my hands. Some metallic piece broke, and I couldn't fix the belt.
From that moment onwards and until I got back home, my day involved stopping every couple of minutes to pull my pants back up. Other days I would have sat at the office and connected remotely to the users' machines, but today I had to visit the local server room to physically load the eight PCs into one of those big shopping carts, then cart the PCs through the hospital complex to the workshop. Once I configured them so they would work properly at their new destination, I had to cart them to the fifth floor of a different building. Along the way I was forced to gesture for a couple of patients/visitors to get the fuck out of the way, because they were blocking some narrow path by standing there looking down at their phones. Also, for whatever reason three people considered that the unfriendly-looking big guy pushing a cart full of PCs was the person to stop for directions.
I didn't mind the peace and quiet I got at the workshop, working alone to configure the eight PCs. I took the opportunity to continue reading David Wong's/Jason Pargin's John Dies at the End, a story that I actually started reading in its web format back in 2001, because I frequented the guy's forums (Pointless Waste of Time back in the day). Entertaining book that has captured my attention, although I have some issues with it.
In any case, I carted the eight computers in groups of four. It turned out that no elevator goes to the fifth of that building for whatever reason (a fact I knew in advance but that I had forgotten). I had to unload each PC at the bottom landing of the fourth floor, then walk all the way to the fifth and to the room where I had to connect the PCs. At one point I ended up holding a PC in my left hand, a couple of keyboards, a mouse and an ethernet cable in my right, while my pants were bunched around my ankles. Thankfully there was no one around. I suspect that my other coworkers would have asked for help, but the presence of other human beings as I tried to get through yesterday's nightmare would have only damaged my mental health further.
As I was on my knees to connect the power plug, as well as the corresponding RJ45 cable, of one of the computers, I started feeling a tingling sensation in my chest. These days I always fear that any exertion will trigger another episode of atrial fibrillation (a physical issue with my heart that the latest booster vaccine caused), but fortunately I survived the task without my heart betraying me.
I finished the task thirty minutes before I had to leave for the day. Although there was network flow in the switch after I plugged in a RJ45 for each computer, when I returned to the office I couldn't get the computers to ping back, so now I'm going to interrupt the act of writing this entry to walk to the fifth of that building and push an ipconfig /release on all eight PCs.
I just walked back from the other end of the hospital complex. They were using the room for a meeting, so except for exercise, I wasted the trip there. I'll try again in an hour. Anyway, when I got home yesterday I considered that I could have avoided the belt issue if I had cut a network cable and used it as a belt by tying it up in a knot. Stupid-looking, but it would have worked.
I haven't felt young in many years, and my body no longer tolerates physical exertion gracefully. Exhausted, I had to take a nap that ruined half of my afternoon, and afterwards I was only able to order my notes for the upcoming chapter 74 of my novel.
Currently I have all the symptoms of a major depression (feelings of sadness, tearfulness, emptiness or hopelessness; angry outbursts, irritability or frustration, even over small matters; loss of interest or pleasure in most or all normal activities, such as sex, hobbies or sports; sleep disturbances, including insomnia or sleeping too much; tiredness and lack of energy, so even small tasks take extra effort; reduced appetite and weight loss or increased cravings for food and weight gain; slowed thinking, speaking or body movements; feelings of worthlessness or guilt, fixating on past failures or self-blame; trouble thinking, concentrating, making decisions and remembering things; etc.). In addition, it seems that the current episode has grown into the psychotic variety of depression: whenever someone's conversation (mainly at the office) annoys me, I feel like they are doing it to fuck with me, and I regularly feel that others, even strangers, are glancing at me looking for an opening to bother me in ways that will waste my time and energies. Until this passes, I'll reduce my interactions with humans to the bare minimum.
Last night I went to bed at ten, but I woke up spontaneously at two in the morning. When I finally managed to fall asleep again, I had vivid dreams of the unpleasant variety. The first one was mostly weird: my dream self was watching a porn video in which eight or so people were about to have an orgy. Most of the video was setup to get to know the actors and actresses. I don't know why I would be watching such a video; my preferred pornos only involve two people. In any case, turns out that one of the actors in the video was my teenage self. I ended up sandwiched in uncomfortable ways.
Afterwards the video showed the involved actors and actresses walking around in the late evening, wearing autumn clothes. The dream switched to me hanging out with extended family members that I haven't seen since I was a teenager. We were walking around a strange city when a dread started building up in my stomach. We came across people who were hurling Molotov cocktails. As we were fleeing from the disturbances, I ended up getting involved, along with my parents, with the breakdown of modern society: the banks blocked transactions, the power companies shut off service to people's homes but not to business centers, and gangs immediately went out with guns to shoot each other and bystanders up. I remember flashes of my dream self running among screaming people.
My phone's alarm extracted me from the dream/nightmare at six in the morning, so I could prepare my physical body to endure a different, more mundane nightmare, one from which I still haven't woken up (don't ever work for a living, kids). I hope that when I return home this afternoon, I'll get to write at least four or five hundred words of my next chapter, which is the only reason I keep going these days.
Anyway, nice talking to you. Until next time.
---
Yesterday I started a new work week, a Monday that I knew would involve preparing eight PCs and setting them up to fill a room for doctors and nurses. At a quarter past eight I left the office and walked to the bathroom to take my first shit of the morning (of about twelve on average; I have Irritable Bowel Syndrome), but as soon as I touched my belt, it came apart in my hands. Some metallic piece broke, and I couldn't fix the belt.
From that moment onwards and until I got back home, my day involved stopping every couple of minutes to pull my pants back up. Other days I would have sat at the office and connected remotely to the users' machines, but today I had to visit the local server room to physically load the eight PCs into one of those big shopping carts, then cart the PCs through the hospital complex to the workshop. Once I configured them so they would work properly at their new destination, I had to cart them to the fifth floor of a different building. Along the way I was forced to gesture for a couple of patients/visitors to get the fuck out of the way, because they were blocking some narrow path by standing there looking down at their phones. Also, for whatever reason three people considered that the unfriendly-looking big guy pushing a cart full of PCs was the person to stop for directions.
I didn't mind the peace and quiet I got at the workshop, working alone to configure the eight PCs. I took the opportunity to continue reading David Wong's/Jason Pargin's John Dies at the End, a story that I actually started reading in its web format back in 2001, because I frequented the guy's forums (Pointless Waste of Time back in the day). Entertaining book that has captured my attention, although I have some issues with it.
In any case, I carted the eight computers in groups of four. It turned out that no elevator goes to the fifth of that building for whatever reason (a fact I knew in advance but that I had forgotten). I had to unload each PC at the bottom landing of the fourth floor, then walk all the way to the fifth and to the room where I had to connect the PCs. At one point I ended up holding a PC in my left hand, a couple of keyboards, a mouse and an ethernet cable in my right, while my pants were bunched around my ankles. Thankfully there was no one around. I suspect that my other coworkers would have asked for help, but the presence of other human beings as I tried to get through yesterday's nightmare would have only damaged my mental health further.
As I was on my knees to connect the power plug, as well as the corresponding RJ45 cable, of one of the computers, I started feeling a tingling sensation in my chest. These days I always fear that any exertion will trigger another episode of atrial fibrillation (a physical issue with my heart that the latest booster vaccine caused), but fortunately I survived the task without my heart betraying me.
I finished the task thirty minutes before I had to leave for the day. Although there was network flow in the switch after I plugged in a RJ45 for each computer, when I returned to the office I couldn't get the computers to ping back, so now I'm going to interrupt the act of writing this entry to walk to the fifth of that building and push an ipconfig /release on all eight PCs.
I just walked back from the other end of the hospital complex. They were using the room for a meeting, so except for exercise, I wasted the trip there. I'll try again in an hour. Anyway, when I got home yesterday I considered that I could have avoided the belt issue if I had cut a network cable and used it as a belt by tying it up in a knot. Stupid-looking, but it would have worked.
I haven't felt young in many years, and my body no longer tolerates physical exertion gracefully. Exhausted, I had to take a nap that ruined half of my afternoon, and afterwards I was only able to order my notes for the upcoming chapter 74 of my novel.
Currently I have all the symptoms of a major depression (feelings of sadness, tearfulness, emptiness or hopelessness; angry outbursts, irritability or frustration, even over small matters; loss of interest or pleasure in most or all normal activities, such as sex, hobbies or sports; sleep disturbances, including insomnia or sleeping too much; tiredness and lack of energy, so even small tasks take extra effort; reduced appetite and weight loss or increased cravings for food and weight gain; slowed thinking, speaking or body movements; feelings of worthlessness or guilt, fixating on past failures or self-blame; trouble thinking, concentrating, making decisions and remembering things; etc.). In addition, it seems that the current episode has grown into the psychotic variety of depression: whenever someone's conversation (mainly at the office) annoys me, I feel like they are doing it to fuck with me, and I regularly feel that others, even strangers, are glancing at me looking for an opening to bother me in ways that will waste my time and energies. Until this passes, I'll reduce my interactions with humans to the bare minimum.
Last night I went to bed at ten, but I woke up spontaneously at two in the morning. When I finally managed to fall asleep again, I had vivid dreams of the unpleasant variety. The first one was mostly weird: my dream self was watching a porn video in which eight or so people were about to have an orgy. Most of the video was setup to get to know the actors and actresses. I don't know why I would be watching such a video; my preferred pornos only involve two people. In any case, turns out that one of the actors in the video was my teenage self. I ended up sandwiched in uncomfortable ways.
Afterwards the video showed the involved actors and actresses walking around in the late evening, wearing autumn clothes. The dream switched to me hanging out with extended family members that I haven't seen since I was a teenager. We were walking around a strange city when a dread started building up in my stomach. We came across people who were hurling Molotov cocktails. As we were fleeing from the disturbances, I ended up getting involved, along with my parents, with the breakdown of modern society: the banks blocked transactions, the power companies shut off service to people's homes but not to business centers, and gangs immediately went out with guns to shoot each other and bystanders up. I remember flashes of my dream self running among screaming people.
My phone's alarm extracted me from the dream/nightmare at six in the morning, so I could prepare my physical body to endure a different, more mundane nightmare, one from which I still haven't woken up (don't ever work for a living, kids). I hope that when I return home this afternoon, I'll get to write at least four or five hundred words of my next chapter, which is the only reason I keep going these days.
Anyway, nice talking to you. Until next time.
