Jon Ureña's Blog, page 40
October 11, 2022
We’re Fucked, Pt. 76: AI-generated images
Two neural networks, one of them trained on anime, teamed up to depict moments from chapter 76 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked. It’s a good thing that I keep such talented artificial intelligences busy; they may otherwise figure out how to open portals to other universes, and who knows what kind of nonsense might walk out from the other side?
You can check out all the entries I’ve posted with generated images through this link.
[check out this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
You can check out all the entries I’ve posted with generated images through this link.
[check out this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
October 10, 2022
We're Fucked, Pt. 76 (Fiction)
Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better
---
Nairu stares up at the vertical, perforated panel of the play tower, a grater-like surface from which protrude pink climbing holds like half-jammed-in butt plugs. Although the metallic panel and the plasticky climbing holds must differ from any rock wall or tree that Nairu may have climbed, she reaches to grab one of the holds, then she pulls herself up. She attempts to climb further, kicking her right leg like a monkey, but her left foot slips. She falls flat on her butt with a thud.
I gasp. This is my fault: if I hadn't brought her to the present through an invisible portal, she wouldn't have had to suffer the indignity of landing ass-first on a rubber tarmac. I expect Nairu to start bawling and then increase the decibels exponentially, which is what I would have done, so mommy would rush to her aid and fill her mouth with one of her flesh pacifiers. Instead, Nairu springs to her feet and wipes dirt off her rear end. Her unbreakable confidence that whatever she does, both of her mommies will remain forever by her side to pick up the pieces, must have made all her woes vanish as if they never existed. She squints at the climbing wall with newfound respect.
Our girl stands on her tiptoes to reach a climbing hold, but Jacqueline approaches the child from behind, grabs her by the armpits and lifts her. Nairu, defenseless against the might of an adult, goes limp, until she clings to the closest metallic poles. She places a foot on a climbing hold and steps onto the top of the tower. The girl, turned into a watchtower lookout, surveys her surroundings: the splash of color of the rubber tarmac, the park that spans the hilltop, and the encircling trees, most of which are leafless, but also taller and older by a few decades than Jacqueline's apartment bulding.
My girlfriend's show of strength has caused tingles to shoot through my body, with my groin as their neuralgic center.
"Holy damn, Jacqueline," I say in awe. "You are ground-sloth strong!"
Jacqueline chuckles. She adjusts the collar of her peacoat.
"Am I that strong, or should you eat healthier and exercise with me more often?"
"Likely a combination of those three things."
"Anyway, I want our doll to experience how it feels like to go down the slide, so she'll have a better motivation to scale the tower. Don't you miss playing with this stuff? My parents brought me to indoor playgrounds quite often. I guess they paid by the hour so I could jump in ball pits, cross suspension bridges, slide down plastic pipes, lose myself in mazes made of netting and padded walls... Don't you wish you could access such equipment as an adult?"
"That sounds enthralling, but my parents never brought me to magical places."
Jacqueline shoots me a look imbued with pity. I feel as if I dared to examine my face in the stark light of a bathroom mirror, only to remember that my skin is marred with scars and pockmarks.
Coldness spreads in my chest. Did I become depraved because I was deprived of a girl's dreams?
I avert my gaze, in case my eyes reveal the misery lurking within.
"Don't look at me like that, please. I wasn't one of those latchkey children, although I stole food from stores, and hocked jewelry and clothes. I worked as an assistant for a black market doctor and a bootlegger, until one day I fell in love with a nobleman's daughter. All in the past, though. I've had lots of fun with you, Jacqueline."
"We sure have."
Nairu utters a garbled string of nonsense syllables. She's standing at the top of the slide, hunched over and eager to put herself at the mercy of the playground equipment that may butcher her, but hesitating like a dog that considers jumping into the pond where its owner has thrown a stick.
Jacqueline and I walk up to the slide. After she signals for our adopted daughter to pay attention, my girlfriend squats down, which causes the flesh contained by her cinder-colored tights to bulge like a fruit about to be squeezed out of its juice.
"It's easy, Nairu," Jacqueline says. "Lower your butt to the slide, then..." She thrusts her waist forward. "Let yourself go."
I picture a child, the size of a sack of potatoes, throwing herself down the slippery surface of a kilometric slide, but as she accelerates, she remains unaware that further down the metallic slide turns into a grater. Its sharp-edged grating slots gleam in the moonlight as they anticipate snagging the child's skin and shredding her flesh. When the slide's grater takes the first bite, the child screams and screeches. She hugs the side of the slide, but the metallic teeth dig deeper and deeper into her flesh, which bubbles under the strain. Her tears fall like raindrops from a starless night sky; they mix with the waterfalls of blood that paint the scene in scarlet hues. Her heart sputters and shuts down.
The chewed corpse lands on the rubber tarmac with a thump, like a sandwich dropping to the pick-up port of a vending machine. Her mother rushes over, only to discover that her child has become a flayed-pork carcass. The father rushes in too late: the dismemberment and devouring of his child's remains has begun.
A cold shiver runs down my spine. The flood of this vision has carved through the mountains of my brain like an Ice Age outburst of subglacial meltwater. I'm bracing myself for more devastation, for more blood-soaked trauma. My consciousness keeps cycling back into madness, and I'm having a harder and harder time clambering my way out of that spiral. Will one day my nerves burn so violently that I'll beg my girlfriend to push me off a cliff?
I unclench my teeth, then rub my eyes as my heart calms down. The slide squeaks; Nairu is sliding down the smooth metal at breakneck speed. She braces herself for landing, and at the end of the ride, she bounces on her feet and wiggles her arms in wild excitement. Our girl shrieks with laughter.
Jacqueline claps.
"Good job, darling!"
"She loved it," I say, relieved. "And kept her flesh intact."
Nairu bounds to the climbing wall. Once she faces it, she jumps and clutches a climbing hold that protrudes halfway up. She swings her legs and pulls herself up to reach the next hold, again and again until she summits the play tower.
Nairu straightens her back and shows off a triumphant smile. A giggle bursts from her lips along with puffs of white mist. She hurries to sit down on the flat part of the slide, and as she crows with delight, she launches herself into her descent, plunging feetfirst on her back like a luge track's racing bobsled.
---
Author's note: the two songs for today are "Don't Lie" by Vampire Weekend, and "Rambling Man" by Laura Marling.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Seventy-seven songs so far. Here's the link.
Leire's sickly daydream feels right now like the most harrowing in a while, perhaps because it involves a child. But hey, if I have to endure intrusive daydreams, so should you; it's not like anybody forces you to read this shit. Poor Nairu, though: of all the people that could have visited the Ice Age through an invisible portal, she had to end up with my protagonist.
The current sequence had already become the longest in the novel. Once I realized that Jacqueline, Leire and Nairu would spend at least four chapters in this park, it became clear that I could split the sequence into two. The previous sequence, titled "A Hail of Meteorites Upon Our Heads," ended back in chapter 73. The current sequence is titled "Who Stole the Stars?" You can check out all the chapters of this novel through this link.
---
Nairu stares up at the vertical, perforated panel of the play tower, a grater-like surface from which protrude pink climbing holds like half-jammed-in butt plugs. Although the metallic panel and the plasticky climbing holds must differ from any rock wall or tree that Nairu may have climbed, she reaches to grab one of the holds, then she pulls herself up. She attempts to climb further, kicking her right leg like a monkey, but her left foot slips. She falls flat on her butt with a thud.
I gasp. This is my fault: if I hadn't brought her to the present through an invisible portal, she wouldn't have had to suffer the indignity of landing ass-first on a rubber tarmac. I expect Nairu to start bawling and then increase the decibels exponentially, which is what I would have done, so mommy would rush to her aid and fill her mouth with one of her flesh pacifiers. Instead, Nairu springs to her feet and wipes dirt off her rear end. Her unbreakable confidence that whatever she does, both of her mommies will remain forever by her side to pick up the pieces, must have made all her woes vanish as if they never existed. She squints at the climbing wall with newfound respect.
Our girl stands on her tiptoes to reach a climbing hold, but Jacqueline approaches the child from behind, grabs her by the armpits and lifts her. Nairu, defenseless against the might of an adult, goes limp, until she clings to the closest metallic poles. She places a foot on a climbing hold and steps onto the top of the tower. The girl, turned into a watchtower lookout, surveys her surroundings: the splash of color of the rubber tarmac, the park that spans the hilltop, and the encircling trees, most of which are leafless, but also taller and older by a few decades than Jacqueline's apartment bulding.
My girlfriend's show of strength has caused tingles to shoot through my body, with my groin as their neuralgic center.
"Holy damn, Jacqueline," I say in awe. "You are ground-sloth strong!"
Jacqueline chuckles. She adjusts the collar of her peacoat.
"Am I that strong, or should you eat healthier and exercise with me more often?"
"Likely a combination of those three things."
"Anyway, I want our doll to experience how it feels like to go down the slide, so she'll have a better motivation to scale the tower. Don't you miss playing with this stuff? My parents brought me to indoor playgrounds quite often. I guess they paid by the hour so I could jump in ball pits, cross suspension bridges, slide down plastic pipes, lose myself in mazes made of netting and padded walls... Don't you wish you could access such equipment as an adult?"
"That sounds enthralling, but my parents never brought me to magical places."
Jacqueline shoots me a look imbued with pity. I feel as if I dared to examine my face in the stark light of a bathroom mirror, only to remember that my skin is marred with scars and pockmarks.
Coldness spreads in my chest. Did I become depraved because I was deprived of a girl's dreams?
I avert my gaze, in case my eyes reveal the misery lurking within.
"Don't look at me like that, please. I wasn't one of those latchkey children, although I stole food from stores, and hocked jewelry and clothes. I worked as an assistant for a black market doctor and a bootlegger, until one day I fell in love with a nobleman's daughter. All in the past, though. I've had lots of fun with you, Jacqueline."
"We sure have."
Nairu utters a garbled string of nonsense syllables. She's standing at the top of the slide, hunched over and eager to put herself at the mercy of the playground equipment that may butcher her, but hesitating like a dog that considers jumping into the pond where its owner has thrown a stick.
Jacqueline and I walk up to the slide. After she signals for our adopted daughter to pay attention, my girlfriend squats down, which causes the flesh contained by her cinder-colored tights to bulge like a fruit about to be squeezed out of its juice.
"It's easy, Nairu," Jacqueline says. "Lower your butt to the slide, then..." She thrusts her waist forward. "Let yourself go."
I picture a child, the size of a sack of potatoes, throwing herself down the slippery surface of a kilometric slide, but as she accelerates, she remains unaware that further down the metallic slide turns into a grater. Its sharp-edged grating slots gleam in the moonlight as they anticipate snagging the child's skin and shredding her flesh. When the slide's grater takes the first bite, the child screams and screeches. She hugs the side of the slide, but the metallic teeth dig deeper and deeper into her flesh, which bubbles under the strain. Her tears fall like raindrops from a starless night sky; they mix with the waterfalls of blood that paint the scene in scarlet hues. Her heart sputters and shuts down.
The chewed corpse lands on the rubber tarmac with a thump, like a sandwich dropping to the pick-up port of a vending machine. Her mother rushes over, only to discover that her child has become a flayed-pork carcass. The father rushes in too late: the dismemberment and devouring of his child's remains has begun.
A cold shiver runs down my spine. The flood of this vision has carved through the mountains of my brain like an Ice Age outburst of subglacial meltwater. I'm bracing myself for more devastation, for more blood-soaked trauma. My consciousness keeps cycling back into madness, and I'm having a harder and harder time clambering my way out of that spiral. Will one day my nerves burn so violently that I'll beg my girlfriend to push me off a cliff?
I unclench my teeth, then rub my eyes as my heart calms down. The slide squeaks; Nairu is sliding down the smooth metal at breakneck speed. She braces herself for landing, and at the end of the ride, she bounces on her feet and wiggles her arms in wild excitement. Our girl shrieks with laughter.
Jacqueline claps.
"Good job, darling!"
"She loved it," I say, relieved. "And kept her flesh intact."
Nairu bounds to the climbing wall. Once she faces it, she jumps and clutches a climbing hold that protrudes halfway up. She swings her legs and pulls herself up to reach the next hold, again and again until she summits the play tower.
Nairu straightens her back and shows off a triumphant smile. A giggle bursts from her lips along with puffs of white mist. She hurries to sit down on the flat part of the slide, and as she crows with delight, she launches herself into her descent, plunging feetfirst on her back like a luge track's racing bobsled.
---
Author's note: the two songs for today are "Don't Lie" by Vampire Weekend, and "Rambling Man" by Laura Marling.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Seventy-seven songs so far. Here's the link.
Leire's sickly daydream feels right now like the most harrowing in a while, perhaps because it involves a child. But hey, if I have to endure intrusive daydreams, so should you; it's not like anybody forces you to read this shit. Poor Nairu, though: of all the people that could have visited the Ice Age through an invisible portal, she had to end up with my protagonist.
The current sequence had already become the longest in the novel. Once I realized that Jacqueline, Leire and Nairu would spend at least four chapters in this park, it became clear that I could split the sequence into two. The previous sequence, titled "A Hail of Meteorites Upon Our Heads," ended back in chapter 73. The current sequence is titled "Who Stole the Stars?" You can check out all the chapters of this novel through this link.
October 9, 2022
Life update (10/09/2022)
Link to this entry on my personal page, where it looks better
---
I had gotten into the groove of working throughout the week on a chapter and then posting it on the weekend, but that won't happen this time; I wasted three afternoons due to extreme exhaustion, and each of those days I lay in bed for a couple of hours while listening to ASMR or music and pretending to be far away from my worries and responsibilities. The next chapter of my novel requires at least two more days.
This past week I was on phone duty, and I'm also on phone duty throughout the next. Terrible stuff for an autistic guy who's as "introverted" as they come (I wish I could live alone in an island, but I need the internet and medicine. Also, I can't afford it). On top of that, the person in charge of assigning tickets made it so tomorrow I'll have to leave the office at about twelve in the morning and travel to another city, one I've never been in, to configure a fixed electrocardiograph machine so it connects to the WiFi. I'm not sure if I will be able to do it in one go.
There's also the possibility that the person who assigned me the ticket mistook me for a coworker who has the same first and middle names. The person in charge of assigning the tickets might have sent me mistakenly to another city just because she couldn't be arsed to read the last name of the worker she picked to fulfill the task (although they are very, very well aware of the fact that there are two people with same first and middle names in the office, not that it stops them from calling out in our direction using only our name, which causes us to have to clarify almost every day who they want to reach), but confirming that act of carelessness would anger me so much that it would likely ruin my morning. Still, it would save me from the trip, so I'll have to ask.
Oh, how I hate my job. I can't drop it, though. No other job has paid me that much and that regularly, and I'm too old to reinvent myself in that regard. However, I'm going to end up with a full head of white hair, if I don't throw myself out of a window first.
As I was attempting to relax earlier, I came across another lovely video from a Westerner who spends his days walking around in Japan and recording it in 4K. I've watched his stuff for years. Videos such as this one (link), in which the guy strolls at night in a park/museum filled with changing lights, made me wish again that I could spend eternity as a ghost walking around in Japan. With my luck, though, ghosts likely don't exist, and even if they did, I'd find myself trapped in whatever dingy apartment in which I killed myself (by the way, I wrote a full novel about a bored ghost woman! It's pretty good, although it likely needs a revision).
Anyway, living in Japan must be pretty cool, at least for rich Japanese people. Check out more of the guy's videos (here's the link to his channel); an unsung hero, that one.
It's ten at night and I'm going to bed because I'll have to wake up at six in the morning. I'm like eighteen years old at the most in my mind, but my body only gets older. People have called me "sir" unironically for years. It's no wonder I keep daydreaming of wealthy mommies saving me from this mundane hell.
---
I had gotten into the groove of working throughout the week on a chapter and then posting it on the weekend, but that won't happen this time; I wasted three afternoons due to extreme exhaustion, and each of those days I lay in bed for a couple of hours while listening to ASMR or music and pretending to be far away from my worries and responsibilities. The next chapter of my novel requires at least two more days.
This past week I was on phone duty, and I'm also on phone duty throughout the next. Terrible stuff for an autistic guy who's as "introverted" as they come (I wish I could live alone in an island, but I need the internet and medicine. Also, I can't afford it). On top of that, the person in charge of assigning tickets made it so tomorrow I'll have to leave the office at about twelve in the morning and travel to another city, one I've never been in, to configure a fixed electrocardiograph machine so it connects to the WiFi. I'm not sure if I will be able to do it in one go.
There's also the possibility that the person who assigned me the ticket mistook me for a coworker who has the same first and middle names. The person in charge of assigning the tickets might have sent me mistakenly to another city just because she couldn't be arsed to read the last name of the worker she picked to fulfill the task (although they are very, very well aware of the fact that there are two people with same first and middle names in the office, not that it stops them from calling out in our direction using only our name, which causes us to have to clarify almost every day who they want to reach), but confirming that act of carelessness would anger me so much that it would likely ruin my morning. Still, it would save me from the trip, so I'll have to ask.
Oh, how I hate my job. I can't drop it, though. No other job has paid me that much and that regularly, and I'm too old to reinvent myself in that regard. However, I'm going to end up with a full head of white hair, if I don't throw myself out of a window first.
As I was attempting to relax earlier, I came across another lovely video from a Westerner who spends his days walking around in Japan and recording it in 4K. I've watched his stuff for years. Videos such as this one (link), in which the guy strolls at night in a park/museum filled with changing lights, made me wish again that I could spend eternity as a ghost walking around in Japan. With my luck, though, ghosts likely don't exist, and even if they did, I'd find myself trapped in whatever dingy apartment in which I killed myself (by the way, I wrote a full novel about a bored ghost woman! It's pretty good, although it likely needs a revision).
Anyway, living in Japan must be pretty cool, at least for rich Japanese people. Check out more of the guy's videos (here's the link to his channel); an unsung hero, that one.
It's ten at night and I'm going to bed because I'll have to wake up at six in the morning. I'm like eighteen years old at the most in my mind, but my body only gets older. People have called me "sir" unironically for years. It's no wonder I keep daydreaming of wealthy mommies saving me from this mundane hell.
October 8, 2022
Random AI-generated images #10
After an atrocious week at work, it’s such a relief to know that I can count on my creative neural network pals to bring some joy into my life. The anime-based AI in particular has become my best friend thanks to the stream of depravity that pours from its black mouth.
This entry will be shorter than usual, and increasingly more questionable. If you work at one of those offices where people suck (so most of them), you may want to close this tab.
[link to this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
This entry will be shorter than usual, and increasingly more questionable. If you work at one of those offices where people suck (so most of them), you may want to close this tab.
[link to this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
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.
