Jon Ureña's Blog, page 42
August 11, 2022
We're Fucked, Pt. 67 (Fiction)
Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better
---
Jacqueline has hugged the child tighter and is rocking her back and forth. The raven-black, glistening cascade of hair conceals the girl's face, but tears are sliding down Jacqueline's cheeks and lingering on her chin. Although she keeps sniffling, snot has bedewed her upper lip.
I hurry to grab a couple of tissues from their box, placed on one of the shelves between the balcony doors. When I return to my beloved, I kneel next to her and squeeze the mucus out of her nose into a tissue. I trail the tip of my tongue along her cheek, swiping a hot, salty tear. Jacqueline gazes at me with her striking cobalt-blues and rewards me with a smile of gratitude, but remains silent.
I pat the back of the child's leather tunic. It feels rough against my hand. From up close she smells of wet boar, woodland moss and apples.
"I'll state the obvious: this is my fault," I say soberly. "Whoever opened that invisible doorway to the Ice Age intended to target me."
"Don't blame yourself, baby," Jacqueline murmurs as she strokes the child's scalp. "We're in this mess together."
"This poor savage probably believes that the Megatherium, or whatever that monster was called, devoured her, that she has ended up in hell, or whatever underworld people believed in before Christianity hijacked our civilization. The Megatherium is probably responsible for a lot of disappearances, including that of my parents."
Jacqueline arches an eyebrow.
"That's what you call our idyllic nest? Hell?"
"Jacqueline, I stood in that boreal forest, apparently at the latest twelve thousand years ago. I took deep, panicked breaths of that cold, crisp air saturated with oxygen. The breeze whispered with the voices of extinct species. I was immersed in an ancient icebox of nature, alone except for the intrusion of that monster as well as of this girl that I ended up kidnapping, who until that point had lived in freedom."
"I hadn't been curious about prehistory, but those people needed to hunt to survive, didn't they? Maybe they couldn't farm reliably due to the cold weather. And what about disease?"
I sigh.
"You are right, but still: I snatched this child from a sort of paradise and sent her to hell."
When I lower my head, Jacqueline frees her right hand to stroke my neck and knead the muscles that are taut beneath my skin.
"Would you like to take walks in the woods, honey?" she coos. "Did you know I have a secluded park with lots of trees right in my backyard?"
I look over my shoulder at the balcony; because I'm sitting on the carpet, the parapet blocks the view. Someone, I assume a previous owner of the apartment, arranged fernlike plants with rounded stones in a way that halves the available floor of that part of the balcony. Two spiky plants that have grown in cube pots resemble still shots of a nail bomb explosion. Above the parapet, the night is onyx-black except for the faint outlines of oil-colored clouds. A single star glows in the dark.
It must be about five in the morning. It feels like the sun will never come up again, but soon enough the old fiery pervert will peek over the horizon to bathe us all in its whitish-yellow deluge of photons.
"I'm guessing you paid premium for this balcony," I say wearily. "However, the apartment didn't come with a garden."
Jacqueline chuckles.
"I meant nearby. That park is a couple of streets away. A hidden gem, peaceful and quiet. I'd love to take you there on a lovely day when the sky is clear. At night you can gaze at the stars, and no one will disturb you."
I take a deep breath and rub my eyes. I'm an idiot that needs to think to connect dots that for the rest of people come joined by thick lines.
"That does sound pleasant," I mumble.
I drag myself to my feet, then as I shuffle up to the balcony door, the glass reflects my face: I resemble a wan and emaciated gargoyle, all bone and shadows, with haunted eyes and a sour expression. I rest my greasy forehead on the cold glass pane.
In the distance, the palatial building that crowns the Mount Igueldo amusement park gleams white. Along the spine of the mountain glow pale cerulean lights, maybe cell towers. Some windows are lighted on the mountainside; the rich people that live in those houses may have woken up to go to work, or are wandering around in a daze with a hangover after a night of cocaine-fueled orgies.
"Sorry, I'm falling apart," I say weakly. "And somehow I will have to tolerate the long workday ahead of me, even though I never returned to bed after that bunnyman-induced nightmare."
I'm about to continue when a realization bursts in my brain. I gasp, then turn around. The wild child has snuggled closer to Jacqueline, wrapping her arms around the silky back of my girlfriend's robe. The girl has closed her eyes, and her placid expression suggests that now she doesn't give a shit about anything but the warmth that emanates from the pair of breasts squeezed against her ribcage.
"W-wait, we'll be away for work at the same time," I say, lowering my voice to avoid unsettling the child. "What the fuck do we do? Is there a company at our business park that lets workers abandon their kids there until five in the afternoon?"
"You know, there may be, but this isn't the kind of child you can drop off at a daycare center and forget about, is she? Besides, we can't even prove she's ours."
"Right, because she isn't."
Jacqueline cups the child's head, then plants a lingering kiss on its top. The girl narrows her shoulders, dimples her cheeks, and lets out a soft noise of contentment.
"Any nosy do-gooder out there may want to snatch her away from us," Jacqueline says with an edge to her tone. "And look at this precious baby, she's like a stray dog who has never been stroked. So I'm staying home today, maybe for a few days. You should too, Leire. It will be fun, just you and me and our little doll."
My mouth hangs open.
"You know I can't miss work! I can't imagine how stressed I would be knowing the amount of overtime I'll have to do when I return to the office. How would I rest if I knew I'm neglecting the growing pile of tasks and contracts to fulfill, and that the unmentionable pig will be fuming and cursing me under his breath as he digs into a bag of Doritos?"
The child's misty-eyed gaze drifts over to me as if wondering why I'm raising such a ruckus.
"Sorry for disturbing you, daughter of the Ice Age," I say. "I envy you: I wish Jacqueline would cradle me and run her fingers through my hair until I fell asleep in her arms, but instead I have to venture through the nightmarish modernity that awaits out there, because we need to earn our right to keep existing in a world that wants us gone and forgotten."
The wild child tilts her head in puzzlement, but a wicked smirk spills across Jacqueline's lips.
"I will take care of you soon enough, sweetie. If you feel more comfortable going to work, that's fine. But I will message you often."
"A-alright. What about our boss, though? Should I tell him that you've come down with diarrhea?"
"I'll figure something out. That guy won't be thrilled, but he wouldn't dare to fire me. Anyway, I don't want to think about work now. I'm going to cuddle this sweet morsel of happiness."
A yawn overpowers me, so I nod as a response. I'm dizzy and exhausted. When I stretch my back, my vertebrae crackle like a bonfire. Every cell in my body wants to slink back to the warmth of Jacqueline's bed.
So now what, I'll prepare myself another coffee, take a shower, then look up on Google Maps what bus lines will carry me from the hills of Donostia to the business park where we work? I almost got mauled to death in the Ice Age. I've learned that we are surrounded by an invisible realm; although I would prefer to ignore it, its inhabitants will keep harassing me. That realm is separated from ours by a thin layer of glass that if it were to shatter, let's say by a horse headbutting it, I would get sucked into the void between worlds.
Now we need to give this wild child the love she desperately needs. We'll bathe her in a tub full of bubbles; feed her with pastries and ice cream; dress her in a pink tutu and a pair of slippers; tell her that everything she does is perfect, and that we admire her even when she breaks things in a fit of rage. Later on, when this cute kitten grows into a lovely young woman, she'll stay at home forever, becoming our personal servant as we progress toward old age and decrepitude. That's right: I want to grow old with Jacqueline, and this wild child will wipe my ass for me. The rest, like our world that has made us its slaves, or the creeping sickness that invades our brains, or the fact that I'm half-woman half-goat, I will gladly forsake.
How often do plans work out the way they should have, though? I never planned for such a life, one where a child born during the Ice Age has become our daughter. This child may become a powerful wizard one day, and leave us to fend for ourselves. Or she might get frozen to death at twenty-six while trying to save a baby penguin from drowning. But maybe it doesn't matter whether this girl grows into a beautiful princess or the spawn of a fucking vampire, or whether we live in the Ice Age or in the cesspool of a modern city where strangers dump their loads on our heads. Maybe we can live for those little moments when we forget about our pain.
I'm likely going through a shock and trauma that no psychiatrist is trained to treat, not that I would rely on psychiatrists, because that industry is a scam. Apart from my usual despair at the knowledge that human beings other than Jacqueline exist and that I may be forced to deal with them, now I risk walking into invisible traps. My otherworldly stalkers sent me to a boreal forest with my tits and buttocks exposed; what if the next time they open the other end of that doorway above the throat of an active volcano? Or what if the bunnyman interrupts me as I'm taking a shit, then he clobbers me in the face with his dick? I can't defend myself against anyone stronger than a child. Maybe I should start carrying around a flamethrower or a chainsaw.
I take a deep breath and try to keep the lump of dread from swelling inside my stomach. When I hold Jacqueline's gaze, something in my eyes must have unsettled her, because she straightens her neck and furrows her brow.
"Jacqueline, where have you hidden Spike's revolver?" I ask calmly.
My queen gasps. She attempts to rise to her feet, but the child is clinging to her.
I consider prying our adopted daughter away from Jacqueline. However, I suspect that the girl would bite me, as it befits a cannibal.
"From now on I intend to keep the revolver on my person at all times, even during sex," I say. "I should order some sophisticated holster online, maybe one that also works as a strap-on dildo."
Jacqueline's expression has grown grim.
"Leire! Don't you think you are exaggerating a bit?"
"Nope," I reply with the assurance of one who knows that only bad news await us. "I usually defer to your wisdom, my beloved queen, but you haven't looked up at the furry face of that extinct abomination as it was gearing itself up to swallow me whole. Pushing a bullet-shaped load of metal through the monster's skull at supersonic speed would have surely saved me. Well, who knows if revolvers shoot at supersonic speeds, maybe just sniper rifles do. Am I being irrational? I don't need rationality, I'm not running a bank. Perhaps the most logical approach would be to wipe the face of every otherworldly kidnapper with a thick coating of toothpaste, but I'm afraid that they might retaliate by drowning me in a bathtub full of semen. So I'm going to carry Spike's revolver everywhere. If the police stops me, though, I'll be fucked; the authorities want us defenseless so we'll be easier to control."
Jacqueline's cheeks are flaming red. As her eyes lose their focus, she nuzzles the child's disheveled hair.
My guts feel like a dead man's hand is gripping them. I blink away a sudden rush of tears.
"I got snatched as I was walking into your bathroom to take a shower," I say in a low, hoarse voice. "Even as a child I dreaded to shower: I feared that a demon would jump out of the tiles and pee on my head. The feeling that some fiend was crouching behind the shower curtain was so strong that sometimes I washed myself in the sink instead. Every time I walked past the bathroom, certain smells could trigger my fear: my dad's aftershave, bleach, lemons... Even the scent of pizza became too much for me. In the end I only ate snacks that had been packed in plastic bags and stored for years. When I opened the bag, I often found them filled with sand instead of food. One time, I even ate the sand."
Hot tears run down my cheeks. I shouldn't be allowed to keep any pet more dangerous than a gerbil; I'm a pitiful, spineless wretch with no self-control and the brain capacity of a cockroach. I can't even masturbate properly: I need a certain level of stress to reach an orgasm. My own family walked on eggshells around me until they couldn't stand it anymore. Even an imaginary friend would run away from me screaming.
"When I was seven I wanted to be a ballet dancer and I begged my mom to take me to a ballet class," I continue in a ragged voice, "but she said she'd rather die than let me take dance lessons. And she did. She did. You know, I missed you so much when I was in the Ice Age, Jacqueline. I can hardly believe that I found my way back home. In a billion parallel universes out there, I told you to look out for horses in case they barged into the bathroom, then we never saw each other again."
---
Author's note: today's song is "Greens and Blues" by Pixies.
---
Jacqueline has hugged the child tighter and is rocking her back and forth. The raven-black, glistening cascade of hair conceals the girl's face, but tears are sliding down Jacqueline's cheeks and lingering on her chin. Although she keeps sniffling, snot has bedewed her upper lip.
I hurry to grab a couple of tissues from their box, placed on one of the shelves between the balcony doors. When I return to my beloved, I kneel next to her and squeeze the mucus out of her nose into a tissue. I trail the tip of my tongue along her cheek, swiping a hot, salty tear. Jacqueline gazes at me with her striking cobalt-blues and rewards me with a smile of gratitude, but remains silent.
I pat the back of the child's leather tunic. It feels rough against my hand. From up close she smells of wet boar, woodland moss and apples.
"I'll state the obvious: this is my fault," I say soberly. "Whoever opened that invisible doorway to the Ice Age intended to target me."
"Don't blame yourself, baby," Jacqueline murmurs as she strokes the child's scalp. "We're in this mess together."
"This poor savage probably believes that the Megatherium, or whatever that monster was called, devoured her, that she has ended up in hell, or whatever underworld people believed in before Christianity hijacked our civilization. The Megatherium is probably responsible for a lot of disappearances, including that of my parents."
Jacqueline arches an eyebrow.
"That's what you call our idyllic nest? Hell?"
"Jacqueline, I stood in that boreal forest, apparently at the latest twelve thousand years ago. I took deep, panicked breaths of that cold, crisp air saturated with oxygen. The breeze whispered with the voices of extinct species. I was immersed in an ancient icebox of nature, alone except for the intrusion of that monster as well as of this girl that I ended up kidnapping, who until that point had lived in freedom."
"I hadn't been curious about prehistory, but those people needed to hunt to survive, didn't they? Maybe they couldn't farm reliably due to the cold weather. And what about disease?"
I sigh.
"You are right, but still: I snatched this child from a sort of paradise and sent her to hell."
When I lower my head, Jacqueline frees her right hand to stroke my neck and knead the muscles that are taut beneath my skin.
"Would you like to take walks in the woods, honey?" she coos. "Did you know I have a secluded park with lots of trees right in my backyard?"
I look over my shoulder at the balcony; because I'm sitting on the carpet, the parapet blocks the view. Someone, I assume a previous owner of the apartment, arranged fernlike plants with rounded stones in a way that halves the available floor of that part of the balcony. Two spiky plants that have grown in cube pots resemble still shots of a nail bomb explosion. Above the parapet, the night is onyx-black except for the faint outlines of oil-colored clouds. A single star glows in the dark.
It must be about five in the morning. It feels like the sun will never come up again, but soon enough the old fiery pervert will peek over the horizon to bathe us all in its whitish-yellow deluge of photons.
"I'm guessing you paid premium for this balcony," I say wearily. "However, the apartment didn't come with a garden."
Jacqueline chuckles.
"I meant nearby. That park is a couple of streets away. A hidden gem, peaceful and quiet. I'd love to take you there on a lovely day when the sky is clear. At night you can gaze at the stars, and no one will disturb you."
I take a deep breath and rub my eyes. I'm an idiot that needs to think to connect dots that for the rest of people come joined by thick lines.
"That does sound pleasant," I mumble.
I drag myself to my feet, then as I shuffle up to the balcony door, the glass reflects my face: I resemble a wan and emaciated gargoyle, all bone and shadows, with haunted eyes and a sour expression. I rest my greasy forehead on the cold glass pane.
In the distance, the palatial building that crowns the Mount Igueldo amusement park gleams white. Along the spine of the mountain glow pale cerulean lights, maybe cell towers. Some windows are lighted on the mountainside; the rich people that live in those houses may have woken up to go to work, or are wandering around in a daze with a hangover after a night of cocaine-fueled orgies.
"Sorry, I'm falling apart," I say weakly. "And somehow I will have to tolerate the long workday ahead of me, even though I never returned to bed after that bunnyman-induced nightmare."
I'm about to continue when a realization bursts in my brain. I gasp, then turn around. The wild child has snuggled closer to Jacqueline, wrapping her arms around the silky back of my girlfriend's robe. The girl has closed her eyes, and her placid expression suggests that now she doesn't give a shit about anything but the warmth that emanates from the pair of breasts squeezed against her ribcage.
"W-wait, we'll be away for work at the same time," I say, lowering my voice to avoid unsettling the child. "What the fuck do we do? Is there a company at our business park that lets workers abandon their kids there until five in the afternoon?"
"You know, there may be, but this isn't the kind of child you can drop off at a daycare center and forget about, is she? Besides, we can't even prove she's ours."
"Right, because she isn't."
Jacqueline cups the child's head, then plants a lingering kiss on its top. The girl narrows her shoulders, dimples her cheeks, and lets out a soft noise of contentment.
"Any nosy do-gooder out there may want to snatch her away from us," Jacqueline says with an edge to her tone. "And look at this precious baby, she's like a stray dog who has never been stroked. So I'm staying home today, maybe for a few days. You should too, Leire. It will be fun, just you and me and our little doll."
My mouth hangs open.
"You know I can't miss work! I can't imagine how stressed I would be knowing the amount of overtime I'll have to do when I return to the office. How would I rest if I knew I'm neglecting the growing pile of tasks and contracts to fulfill, and that the unmentionable pig will be fuming and cursing me under his breath as he digs into a bag of Doritos?"
The child's misty-eyed gaze drifts over to me as if wondering why I'm raising such a ruckus.
"Sorry for disturbing you, daughter of the Ice Age," I say. "I envy you: I wish Jacqueline would cradle me and run her fingers through my hair until I fell asleep in her arms, but instead I have to venture through the nightmarish modernity that awaits out there, because we need to earn our right to keep existing in a world that wants us gone and forgotten."
The wild child tilts her head in puzzlement, but a wicked smirk spills across Jacqueline's lips.
"I will take care of you soon enough, sweetie. If you feel more comfortable going to work, that's fine. But I will message you often."
"A-alright. What about our boss, though? Should I tell him that you've come down with diarrhea?"
"I'll figure something out. That guy won't be thrilled, but he wouldn't dare to fire me. Anyway, I don't want to think about work now. I'm going to cuddle this sweet morsel of happiness."
A yawn overpowers me, so I nod as a response. I'm dizzy and exhausted. When I stretch my back, my vertebrae crackle like a bonfire. Every cell in my body wants to slink back to the warmth of Jacqueline's bed.
So now what, I'll prepare myself another coffee, take a shower, then look up on Google Maps what bus lines will carry me from the hills of Donostia to the business park where we work? I almost got mauled to death in the Ice Age. I've learned that we are surrounded by an invisible realm; although I would prefer to ignore it, its inhabitants will keep harassing me. That realm is separated from ours by a thin layer of glass that if it were to shatter, let's say by a horse headbutting it, I would get sucked into the void between worlds.
Now we need to give this wild child the love she desperately needs. We'll bathe her in a tub full of bubbles; feed her with pastries and ice cream; dress her in a pink tutu and a pair of slippers; tell her that everything she does is perfect, and that we admire her even when she breaks things in a fit of rage. Later on, when this cute kitten grows into a lovely young woman, she'll stay at home forever, becoming our personal servant as we progress toward old age and decrepitude. That's right: I want to grow old with Jacqueline, and this wild child will wipe my ass for me. The rest, like our world that has made us its slaves, or the creeping sickness that invades our brains, or the fact that I'm half-woman half-goat, I will gladly forsake.
How often do plans work out the way they should have, though? I never planned for such a life, one where a child born during the Ice Age has become our daughter. This child may become a powerful wizard one day, and leave us to fend for ourselves. Or she might get frozen to death at twenty-six while trying to save a baby penguin from drowning. But maybe it doesn't matter whether this girl grows into a beautiful princess or the spawn of a fucking vampire, or whether we live in the Ice Age or in the cesspool of a modern city where strangers dump their loads on our heads. Maybe we can live for those little moments when we forget about our pain.
I'm likely going through a shock and trauma that no psychiatrist is trained to treat, not that I would rely on psychiatrists, because that industry is a scam. Apart from my usual despair at the knowledge that human beings other than Jacqueline exist and that I may be forced to deal with them, now I risk walking into invisible traps. My otherworldly stalkers sent me to a boreal forest with my tits and buttocks exposed; what if the next time they open the other end of that doorway above the throat of an active volcano? Or what if the bunnyman interrupts me as I'm taking a shit, then he clobbers me in the face with his dick? I can't defend myself against anyone stronger than a child. Maybe I should start carrying around a flamethrower or a chainsaw.
I take a deep breath and try to keep the lump of dread from swelling inside my stomach. When I hold Jacqueline's gaze, something in my eyes must have unsettled her, because she straightens her neck and furrows her brow.
"Jacqueline, where have you hidden Spike's revolver?" I ask calmly.
My queen gasps. She attempts to rise to her feet, but the child is clinging to her.
I consider prying our adopted daughter away from Jacqueline. However, I suspect that the girl would bite me, as it befits a cannibal.
"From now on I intend to keep the revolver on my person at all times, even during sex," I say. "I should order some sophisticated holster online, maybe one that also works as a strap-on dildo."
Jacqueline's expression has grown grim.
"Leire! Don't you think you are exaggerating a bit?"
"Nope," I reply with the assurance of one who knows that only bad news await us. "I usually defer to your wisdom, my beloved queen, but you haven't looked up at the furry face of that extinct abomination as it was gearing itself up to swallow me whole. Pushing a bullet-shaped load of metal through the monster's skull at supersonic speed would have surely saved me. Well, who knows if revolvers shoot at supersonic speeds, maybe just sniper rifles do. Am I being irrational? I don't need rationality, I'm not running a bank. Perhaps the most logical approach would be to wipe the face of every otherworldly kidnapper with a thick coating of toothpaste, but I'm afraid that they might retaliate by drowning me in a bathtub full of semen. So I'm going to carry Spike's revolver everywhere. If the police stops me, though, I'll be fucked; the authorities want us defenseless so we'll be easier to control."
Jacqueline's cheeks are flaming red. As her eyes lose their focus, she nuzzles the child's disheveled hair.
My guts feel like a dead man's hand is gripping them. I blink away a sudden rush of tears.
"I got snatched as I was walking into your bathroom to take a shower," I say in a low, hoarse voice. "Even as a child I dreaded to shower: I feared that a demon would jump out of the tiles and pee on my head. The feeling that some fiend was crouching behind the shower curtain was so strong that sometimes I washed myself in the sink instead. Every time I walked past the bathroom, certain smells could trigger my fear: my dad's aftershave, bleach, lemons... Even the scent of pizza became too much for me. In the end I only ate snacks that had been packed in plastic bags and stored for years. When I opened the bag, I often found them filled with sand instead of food. One time, I even ate the sand."
Hot tears run down my cheeks. I shouldn't be allowed to keep any pet more dangerous than a gerbil; I'm a pitiful, spineless wretch with no self-control and the brain capacity of a cockroach. I can't even masturbate properly: I need a certain level of stress to reach an orgasm. My own family walked on eggshells around me until they couldn't stand it anymore. Even an imaginary friend would run away from me screaming.
"When I was seven I wanted to be a ballet dancer and I begged my mom to take me to a ballet class," I continue in a ragged voice, "but she said she'd rather die than let me take dance lessons. And she did. She did. You know, I missed you so much when I was in the Ice Age, Jacqueline. I can hardly believe that I found my way back home. In a billion parallel universes out there, I told you to look out for horses in case they barged into the bathroom, then we never saw each other again."
---
Author's note: today's song is "Greens and Blues" by Pixies.
August 10, 2022
Random AI-generated images #4
Some more mesmerizing masterpieces from the da Vinci of neural networks.
[link to the entry on my personal page; it features many, many images]
[link to the entry on my personal page; it features many, many images]
August 9, 2022
Life update (08/09/2022)
This morning I posted the sixty-sixth chapter of the novel I’m working on. After I finish a chapter, for a few hours I feel fulfilled, as if I have earned the right to exist, so I decided to take a walk in the sun while reading a new book. I did very little reading (I’m very impatient with books these days), but I ended up walking to France (Jacqueline’s home country), which isn’t saying much because I live right in the border. It’s a picturesque town called Hendaye, de jure part of the ancient kingdom of Aquitaine. I’m thirty-seven years old now, but it was the first time in my life that I walked through Hendaye; as a child my father drove us through it plenty of times during the summer, because the local beach is great.
The town’s sidewalks are narrow and poorly maintained. Half of the stores have closed down, and of those that remain, plenty of the owners are old enough to retire. Even as a child I had a hard time believing that anyone lived in Hendaye throughout the year. Most of the people you come across are tourists and tend to hang out near the beach, and most of the buildings in that area look like vacation homes.
The more I walked around and checked out the sights, the more melancholic I felt. I also came across quite a few French beauties, which didn’t help my mood. I often daydream about being able to teleport; apart from emptying the treasuries of a few notorious gangs so I wouldn’t need to work, I’d spend my days teleporting from town to town. If any cop asked for my ID, I would teleport away. I’d absorb dozens of new sights every day. I’d write in deserted coffee shops and sleep in a new hotel every night.
I’ve mentioned before that whenever I do something more compelling than work at my office or sit at home, I feel like a prisoner on a furlough; I’ve had to endure health or health-adjacent issues from birth, from high-functioning autism to the intrusive troubles of OCD, hormonal issues thanks to a tumor, and an Irritable Bowel Syndrome that inflames my intestines if I don’t go to the bathroom every forty-five minutes or so. I also can’t drive around; I never got a driver’s license because I’m more likely to crash my car into a wall or a truck deliberately than arrive safely at my destination.
Anyway, at one point I came across a deserted graveyard. I took a stroll through it, checking out every tomb and reading to the best of my abilities the dedication plaques, which were obviously written in French. So many variations of, “to my beloved father”, “to my friend, who will never be forgotten” and such made me sad. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any ghost.
At that point I realized that I was carrying my tablet, so I figured that I may as well take some photos of my mundane journey.
[read the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains some images]
The town’s sidewalks are narrow and poorly maintained. Half of the stores have closed down, and of those that remain, plenty of the owners are old enough to retire. Even as a child I had a hard time believing that anyone lived in Hendaye throughout the year. Most of the people you come across are tourists and tend to hang out near the beach, and most of the buildings in that area look like vacation homes.
The more I walked around and checked out the sights, the more melancholic I felt. I also came across quite a few French beauties, which didn’t help my mood. I often daydream about being able to teleport; apart from emptying the treasuries of a few notorious gangs so I wouldn’t need to work, I’d spend my days teleporting from town to town. If any cop asked for my ID, I would teleport away. I’d absorb dozens of new sights every day. I’d write in deserted coffee shops and sleep in a new hotel every night.
I’ve mentioned before that whenever I do something more compelling than work at my office or sit at home, I feel like a prisoner on a furlough; I’ve had to endure health or health-adjacent issues from birth, from high-functioning autism to the intrusive troubles of OCD, hormonal issues thanks to a tumor, and an Irritable Bowel Syndrome that inflames my intestines if I don’t go to the bathroom every forty-five minutes or so. I also can’t drive around; I never got a driver’s license because I’m more likely to crash my car into a wall or a truck deliberately than arrive safely at my destination.
Anyway, at one point I came across a deserted graveyard. I took a stroll through it, checking out every tomb and reading to the best of my abilities the dedication plaques, which were obviously written in French. So many variations of, “to my beloved father”, “to my friend, who will never be forgotten” and such made me sad. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any ghost.
At that point I realized that I was carrying my tablet, so I figured that I may as well take some photos of my mundane journey.
[read the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains some images]
We're Fucked, Pt. 66 (Fiction)
Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better
---
Jacqueline has rested the laptop on her half-bare thighs, and as she slides her fingertip over the touch pad, the order travels through an HDMI cable from the laptop to her LCD television, where the cursor moves on a vertical plane over the rows and columns of illustrations. They depict beasts that may have come from fantasy, from prehistory, or from the instructions that some paleontologist was dictating to a painter while they both were tripping on peyote.
The wild child had grabbed one of the scarlet pillows and dropped it on the carpet, then she flopped down on the pillow and curled into a tight ball with her arms folded under her chin and her knees tucked into her chest. Now she's mesmerized by the parade of still beasts on the TV screen as Jacqueline scrolls up and down.
How would it feel to have been snatched from a boreal forest, where the comings and goings of ants may have seemed interesting, and dropped into this modern world of traffic jams and smartphones? A world that drowns us with so many choices that we prefer to slump down in a chair and let the hours pass. Meanwhile, we daydream about how nice it would be if the decay of our bodies accelerated exponentially, to free us from the responsibility of figuring out how to fill productively the time we have left until we are thrust violently into a pitch-black oblivion, where we'll forget that we were once human.
When I return my gaze to the screen, Jacqueline has clicked on a thumbnail to load the original image: an artist's rendition of a hulking beast with wood-brown, shaggy fur, who is standing on its hind legs, which are thick like tree trunks, to reach for a branch laden with verdant leaves. The beast's bone-white claws are curved and solid like a sabretooth's canine teeth. Those sunken, amber-colored eyes, that are surrounded by ovals of black fur in a swan-white face, stare at me with disdain. I escaped the monster's grasp through a doorway between worlds, but now that it has found me, it will burst out of the screen to reduce me, as well as Jacqueline and the child, to piles of bones stripped clean of flesh.
I gasp, then spring up from the sofa and jab my finger at the TV screen.
"Th-that's the monster that almost tore us to shreds!"
Jacqueline lets out a noise of confusion.
"It resembles a cross between a gigantic bear and a sloth. That tail looks far less impressive than what you suggested. Are you sure, Leire?"
I slide down from the sofa onto my knees and grab the child's shoulder. She looks at me over her shoulder, open-mouthed.
"You recognize it, right?" I ask as I point at the screen with a quivering hand. "That's the monster that wants to roast us into a meat pie!"
The child speaks nonsense in her high-pitched voice as she fiddles with one of her animal hair bracelets. I fear that she's not quite sane.
"At least nod or something, kid," I say, defeated.
Jacqueline clicks a link; it leads to the website that contains the original picture. The screen fills with a wall of text that imitates Wikipedia. My girlfriend narrows her eyes and pinches her lower lip.
"Megatherium? It's Latin for 'great beast'."
"How can they call something with such an ugly name?"
"So they are giant sloths, right? Funny, I didn't know they existed. Where do these animals live? Let's see... Like today's sloths, they were pure herbivores that ate leaves and grasses..."
I click my tongue.
"Anyone can write vile lies on Wikipedia. There are plenty of morons out there with nothing better to do than ruin everyone else's life. I'd also bet that the scientist who first described this species had a crack pipe in his hand. I'm telling you, the child and I stood in front of that monster. It was pining for our flesh. The claws alone could have severed us at the waist, and its body could have squashed us flat as a piece of paper. Let's name that beast... Hrafnagelr! It's a male with two penises that he uses to hunt his prey, and he makes sure to castrate them first. It's a shame we don't have a picture of his scrotum."
Jacqueline nods as she listens to my babbling.
"Once he's satiated," I continue, "he tosses his victim's guts out of his cave onto the shore, so the fish can feed on them. However, that's only the beginning of the monster's terrorizing: he rips out the tongues of those who annoy him, and even castrates himself to find out how much pain he can endure. Everyone in the world will eventually kill themselves so they can become a part of Hrafnagelr's fur."
Jacqueline, focused on the screen of her laptop, snaps her head back. As she reads on, her face pales. She straightens her spine and shifts her gaze to my eyes. Any trace of my girlfriend's self-assured self has been wiped from her expression; she looks as if someone pushed her off a platform and now her feet can't find a floor under them.
"Leire... these animals went extinct twelve thousand years ago," she says in a shaky voice.
After a moment, we turn our heads in unison to appraise the child. That chestnut-brown, disheveled hair has only ever been combed with fingers. Her ash-colored leather tunic is worn and scratched as if by bending branches. Her necklace displays teeth pried out from downed beasts. The twisted animal hair that she uses as bracelets may have been found on the forest floor, or harvested from corpses. Jacqueline took off the child's crude boots, because they had been tracking mud over the hallway floor; the girl's bare feet are dirty, and their nails jagged.
Our guest's eyes dart like a wary beast's between the two strangers that are staring at her, trying to decipher the meaning in this tense atmosphere. Under our focused gaze, she narrows her shoulders, her pupils tremble, and she crosses her hands over her chest.
Jacqueline puts the laptop aside, then lowers herself to the carpet. She strokes the child's face.
"Somewhere out there," my queen starts in a thin, quavering voice, "somehow happening at the same time, this child's parents must have noticed her missing and they are searching for her, calling her name with desperation. But those thousands of years are already gone, aren't they? Her parents endured the rest of their lives wracked by guilt. They never saw their precious daughter again."
Jacqueline's eyes brim with tears. She scoots closer to the girl and hugs her, mashing the ten-year-old's face against that holy pair of breasts. The tit-meat bulges over the child's cheeks while her eyeballs roll around in their sockets.
Jacqueline sniffles.
"Sorry, doll, but I doubt you will ever return home. Still, you don't need to worry, because we will keep you safe."
Are we now responsible for this child's wellbeing? As the realization sinks in, a shudder shakes my bones. Until fifteen minutes ago this child had never seen a television, but forget about that tool of conformity; this girl would be unable to name a single board game. How would she ever navigate the modern world? Although she's still a child, I recall that the first four or five years are fundamental to build the neurological pillars upon which the rest of her future depends. Isn't she doomed to become a mental recluse forever isolated from the surrounding society, no matter how many sights and experiences we drag her to discover? And what about the damage that my manic paranoia will do to her fragile mind?
I swallow the knot in my throat.
"Are you sure about adopting this girl, Jacqueline...? Think hard, because this decision might haunt us for the rest of our days. She's obviously mentally damaged, and I bet her eyes glow in the dark. She probably hasn't heard of the Big Bang or the Industrial Revolution or the Spanish Inquisition. She may come from a prehistoric tribe of cannibals. And do you own any toys that she might enjoy, other than dildos?"
Jacqueline flings her head back and shoots me a teary-eyed look that shuts me up, but she must have recognized my concern. As she pulls away from the embrace, a trembling thread of saliva connects the meaty curve of her right breast to the child's wet lower lip. Our guest is focused on the mighty pair, maybe assessing them as weapons.
Jacqueline licks her thumb and washes the girl's eyebrows with that fingertip.
"She has lost everything," my girlfriend says with determination. "She needs us. It will take her years to understand the world we live in, and she'll always feel different. But anything is better than abandoning her."
I hug my knees to my chest and rest my chin on my wrist. My brain is buzzing, my temples are throbbing. My stomach churns like an unruly tide. I should have slept for a full night; I'm unequipped to consider the ramifications of taking care of a prehistoric person who will likely live for about five more decades. But if we surrender this child to the government, they'll confine her in some center for minors, where she'll be preyed upon by this country's uninvited guests, or she'll become some politician's plaything. Besides, the prehistoric tribes were likely as peaceful as they could, except for the occasional acts of cannibalism to replenish their stock of meat.
I lower my head in shame.
"F-fine, but make sure she keeps her hands off your tits. She's about ten, not five."
Jacqueline giggles like a drunk.
"Of course. My boobs are my insurance for survival."
Alright then, we have a pet, an exotic one. I would have preferred a cat, but you gotta work with what you're given, even if it's a strange forest girl from the Ice Age. She likely needs a mommy as much as I do; thankfully, Jacqueline can draw upon her boundless reserves of love to provide this child with enough affection that she won't kill us in our sleep. Along with fresh clothes, tasty food and a warm bed, the girl will forget her parents soon enough. For what remains of the night, maybe a good scrubbing in the bathtub will rid her of dirt and fleas, then we'll put her to sleep in the spare bedroom.
---
Author's note: listen to Neutral Milk Hotel's "King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1" and The Velvet Underground's "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'".
My latest contract with the hospital where I work ended last Saturday, and I'm very unlikely to be recalled until three weeks from now. That means that I have spent most of yesterday, as well as this entire morning, working on this chapter and the following one, of which I've finished the first draft. Apart from writing, I intend to exploit these three weeks to research certain locations that my characters will visit, take walks in the sun, read manga and a few books, masturbate to VR porn, and play through my ongoing campaigns of "Arkham Horror" and "Marvel Champions".
Minus points to Jacqueline for failing to notice immediately that the Megatherium was extinct. Leire likely knew that, but her mess of a brain failed to connect the dots and realize the ramifications regarding the child she kidnapped from the Ice Age.
---
Jacqueline has rested the laptop on her half-bare thighs, and as she slides her fingertip over the touch pad, the order travels through an HDMI cable from the laptop to her LCD television, where the cursor moves on a vertical plane over the rows and columns of illustrations. They depict beasts that may have come from fantasy, from prehistory, or from the instructions that some paleontologist was dictating to a painter while they both were tripping on peyote.
The wild child had grabbed one of the scarlet pillows and dropped it on the carpet, then she flopped down on the pillow and curled into a tight ball with her arms folded under her chin and her knees tucked into her chest. Now she's mesmerized by the parade of still beasts on the TV screen as Jacqueline scrolls up and down.
How would it feel to have been snatched from a boreal forest, where the comings and goings of ants may have seemed interesting, and dropped into this modern world of traffic jams and smartphones? A world that drowns us with so many choices that we prefer to slump down in a chair and let the hours pass. Meanwhile, we daydream about how nice it would be if the decay of our bodies accelerated exponentially, to free us from the responsibility of figuring out how to fill productively the time we have left until we are thrust violently into a pitch-black oblivion, where we'll forget that we were once human.
When I return my gaze to the screen, Jacqueline has clicked on a thumbnail to load the original image: an artist's rendition of a hulking beast with wood-brown, shaggy fur, who is standing on its hind legs, which are thick like tree trunks, to reach for a branch laden with verdant leaves. The beast's bone-white claws are curved and solid like a sabretooth's canine teeth. Those sunken, amber-colored eyes, that are surrounded by ovals of black fur in a swan-white face, stare at me with disdain. I escaped the monster's grasp through a doorway between worlds, but now that it has found me, it will burst out of the screen to reduce me, as well as Jacqueline and the child, to piles of bones stripped clean of flesh.
I gasp, then spring up from the sofa and jab my finger at the TV screen.
"Th-that's the monster that almost tore us to shreds!"
Jacqueline lets out a noise of confusion.
"It resembles a cross between a gigantic bear and a sloth. That tail looks far less impressive than what you suggested. Are you sure, Leire?"
I slide down from the sofa onto my knees and grab the child's shoulder. She looks at me over her shoulder, open-mouthed.
"You recognize it, right?" I ask as I point at the screen with a quivering hand. "That's the monster that wants to roast us into a meat pie!"
The child speaks nonsense in her high-pitched voice as she fiddles with one of her animal hair bracelets. I fear that she's not quite sane.
"At least nod or something, kid," I say, defeated.
Jacqueline clicks a link; it leads to the website that contains the original picture. The screen fills with a wall of text that imitates Wikipedia. My girlfriend narrows her eyes and pinches her lower lip.
"Megatherium? It's Latin for 'great beast'."
"How can they call something with such an ugly name?"
"So they are giant sloths, right? Funny, I didn't know they existed. Where do these animals live? Let's see... Like today's sloths, they were pure herbivores that ate leaves and grasses..."
I click my tongue.
"Anyone can write vile lies on Wikipedia. There are plenty of morons out there with nothing better to do than ruin everyone else's life. I'd also bet that the scientist who first described this species had a crack pipe in his hand. I'm telling you, the child and I stood in front of that monster. It was pining for our flesh. The claws alone could have severed us at the waist, and its body could have squashed us flat as a piece of paper. Let's name that beast... Hrafnagelr! It's a male with two penises that he uses to hunt his prey, and he makes sure to castrate them first. It's a shame we don't have a picture of his scrotum."
Jacqueline nods as she listens to my babbling.
"Once he's satiated," I continue, "he tosses his victim's guts out of his cave onto the shore, so the fish can feed on them. However, that's only the beginning of the monster's terrorizing: he rips out the tongues of those who annoy him, and even castrates himself to find out how much pain he can endure. Everyone in the world will eventually kill themselves so they can become a part of Hrafnagelr's fur."
Jacqueline, focused on the screen of her laptop, snaps her head back. As she reads on, her face pales. She straightens her spine and shifts her gaze to my eyes. Any trace of my girlfriend's self-assured self has been wiped from her expression; she looks as if someone pushed her off a platform and now her feet can't find a floor under them.
"Leire... these animals went extinct twelve thousand years ago," she says in a shaky voice.
After a moment, we turn our heads in unison to appraise the child. That chestnut-brown, disheveled hair has only ever been combed with fingers. Her ash-colored leather tunic is worn and scratched as if by bending branches. Her necklace displays teeth pried out from downed beasts. The twisted animal hair that she uses as bracelets may have been found on the forest floor, or harvested from corpses. Jacqueline took off the child's crude boots, because they had been tracking mud over the hallway floor; the girl's bare feet are dirty, and their nails jagged.
Our guest's eyes dart like a wary beast's between the two strangers that are staring at her, trying to decipher the meaning in this tense atmosphere. Under our focused gaze, she narrows her shoulders, her pupils tremble, and she crosses her hands over her chest.
Jacqueline puts the laptop aside, then lowers herself to the carpet. She strokes the child's face.
"Somewhere out there," my queen starts in a thin, quavering voice, "somehow happening at the same time, this child's parents must have noticed her missing and they are searching for her, calling her name with desperation. But those thousands of years are already gone, aren't they? Her parents endured the rest of their lives wracked by guilt. They never saw their precious daughter again."
Jacqueline's eyes brim with tears. She scoots closer to the girl and hugs her, mashing the ten-year-old's face against that holy pair of breasts. The tit-meat bulges over the child's cheeks while her eyeballs roll around in their sockets.
Jacqueline sniffles.
"Sorry, doll, but I doubt you will ever return home. Still, you don't need to worry, because we will keep you safe."
Are we now responsible for this child's wellbeing? As the realization sinks in, a shudder shakes my bones. Until fifteen minutes ago this child had never seen a television, but forget about that tool of conformity; this girl would be unable to name a single board game. How would she ever navigate the modern world? Although she's still a child, I recall that the first four or five years are fundamental to build the neurological pillars upon which the rest of her future depends. Isn't she doomed to become a mental recluse forever isolated from the surrounding society, no matter how many sights and experiences we drag her to discover? And what about the damage that my manic paranoia will do to her fragile mind?
I swallow the knot in my throat.
"Are you sure about adopting this girl, Jacqueline...? Think hard, because this decision might haunt us for the rest of our days. She's obviously mentally damaged, and I bet her eyes glow in the dark. She probably hasn't heard of the Big Bang or the Industrial Revolution or the Spanish Inquisition. She may come from a prehistoric tribe of cannibals. And do you own any toys that she might enjoy, other than dildos?"
Jacqueline flings her head back and shoots me a teary-eyed look that shuts me up, but she must have recognized my concern. As she pulls away from the embrace, a trembling thread of saliva connects the meaty curve of her right breast to the child's wet lower lip. Our guest is focused on the mighty pair, maybe assessing them as weapons.
Jacqueline licks her thumb and washes the girl's eyebrows with that fingertip.
"She has lost everything," my girlfriend says with determination. "She needs us. It will take her years to understand the world we live in, and she'll always feel different. But anything is better than abandoning her."
I hug my knees to my chest and rest my chin on my wrist. My brain is buzzing, my temples are throbbing. My stomach churns like an unruly tide. I should have slept for a full night; I'm unequipped to consider the ramifications of taking care of a prehistoric person who will likely live for about five more decades. But if we surrender this child to the government, they'll confine her in some center for minors, where she'll be preyed upon by this country's uninvited guests, or she'll become some politician's plaything. Besides, the prehistoric tribes were likely as peaceful as they could, except for the occasional acts of cannibalism to replenish their stock of meat.
I lower my head in shame.
"F-fine, but make sure she keeps her hands off your tits. She's about ten, not five."
Jacqueline giggles like a drunk.
"Of course. My boobs are my insurance for survival."
Alright then, we have a pet, an exotic one. I would have preferred a cat, but you gotta work with what you're given, even if it's a strange forest girl from the Ice Age. She likely needs a mommy as much as I do; thankfully, Jacqueline can draw upon her boundless reserves of love to provide this child with enough affection that she won't kill us in our sleep. Along with fresh clothes, tasty food and a warm bed, the girl will forget her parents soon enough. For what remains of the night, maybe a good scrubbing in the bathtub will rid her of dirt and fleas, then we'll put her to sleep in the spare bedroom.
---
Author's note: listen to Neutral Milk Hotel's "King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1" and The Velvet Underground's "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'".
My latest contract with the hospital where I work ended last Saturday, and I'm very unlikely to be recalled until three weeks from now. That means that I have spent most of yesterday, as well as this entire morning, working on this chapter and the following one, of which I've finished the first draft. Apart from writing, I intend to exploit these three weeks to research certain locations that my characters will visit, take walks in the sun, read manga and a few books, masturbate to VR porn, and play through my ongoing campaigns of "Arkham Horror" and "Marvel Champions".
Minus points to Jacqueline for failing to notice immediately that the Megatherium was extinct. Leire likely knew that, but her mess of a brain failed to connect the dots and realize the ramifications regarding the child she kidnapped from the Ice Age.
August 3, 2022
We’re Fucked, Pt. 65: AI-generated images
A neural network generated the following images as I was working on the sixty-fifth chapter of my ongoing novel. Originally I intended to use the service to render particular moments of the chapter, but feeding specific lines from it as prompts to the neural network also produced interesting results.
[link to this entry on my personal page; it contains plenty of images]
[link to this entry on my personal page; it contains plenty of images]
August 2, 2022
We're Fucked, Pt. 65 (Fiction)
Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better
---
Wrapped up in a blanket, I chafe my arms through the sleeves of my wool pyjamas. The child from the forest is seated at the edge of the velvet sofa, while Jacqueline, as she kneels on the carpet, cleans the dirt off the girl's face with a wet wipe. The belt of Jacqueline's lipstick-pink silk-blend robe has loosened and the fabric slipped over her meaty breasts, revealing the old rose areolas. A couple of times, the savage girl has snapped out of her puzzlement to glance down and admire my queen's bountiful mammaries; soon enough the child will salivate, then her sucking reflex will kick in.
My head is throbbing, my body feels bruised and battered, and my fingers and toes are tingling like pins and needles. Now that I'm coming down from the adrenaline buzz, I'm getting dragged down further by the exhaustion that has settled in after successive sessions of nightmares, and that's on top of how wrung out my job leaves me five days a week.
"My stalkers didn't come to visit me this time," I say in a tired voice. "They somehow brought me to another place."
Jacqueline sustains a smile to reassure our guest, but the worry is deepening her crow's feet.
"I was staring at you when you disappeared, Leire. You vanished as if you had walked through an invisible doorway."
I shudder with a chill, then pull the blanket tight around me.
"For you this must feel like dating someone whose exes keep trying to ruin her life, except that I would never allow those abominations to befoul me, regardless of the size of their genitals."
Jacqueline winces.
"Was it the bunnyman?" she asks with indignation. "What the hell did he want this time?"
"That filthy buffoon likely wants me to worship him like a god. He never showed up, though. Maybe he and Alberto were mocking me from some hiding place."
Jacqueline lets out a deep sigh.
"I'm so tired of those assholes."
"You're telling me. I should consider filing a restraining order against them."
As if Jacqueline were babysitting a stray kitten, she wipes dried mucus from the child's nostrils, who's staring at my queen with rapt attention.
"This kid looks Mongolian, wouldn't you say, Leire?"
I sniffle.
"Those eyes seem Asian, yes."
Jacqueline lifts the child's necklace off the mud-speckled leather tunic, then examines the strung sand-colored teeth.
"She also looks as if she came from a different era."
"Well, once I figure out from what corner of this planet I snatched her up, I'll put her on a plane headed there. Given how her parents clothed her, I doubt they use cell phones, but she may find her way back to her tribe somehow from the airport."
My own body interrupts me with a yawn. I'm getting cranky; I want to say fuck off to all my troubles then go beddy-bye, but it must be about five in the morning, and in two hours I'll have to prepare myself for work. Maybe next time I'll reach the shower.
I rub my eyelids with my knuckles.
"I'm almost delirious. I need to guzzle down some coffee, although it may worsen my jitters."
I shrug off the blanket and rise to my feet, then I shuffle out of the living room and into the kitchen. The candy-red coffee maker stands out on a corner of the cloud-grey countertop. I load a capsule into the machine, I place a mug under the spout, I push the start button. As the coffee machine hums, the noise of the fridge door closing startles me.
Jacqueline has taken out a burgundy apple, which is glimmering in the kitchen light. The child's eyes flare with sudden interest, her nostrils quiver like a rabbit's. Jacqueline gestures for the girl to sit down on the closest dining chair, and once she obeys, my girlfriend hands over the apple as a reward. Our guest munches on the fruit, then lets out a yip of delight.
The coffee machine's spout drips the last drops of coffee into my mug, then it lets out a mechanical sigh and its red light switches off. I warm my hands with the mug. My eyelids are heavy and my head woozy from exhaustion. Once some caffeine enters my bloodstream, I should feel my brain slowly unclench.
Jacqueline, while she strokes the girl's disheveled hair, is staring at me as if trying to figure out how to bring up a troublesome topic. When she breaks the silence, she speaks in an anxious voice.
"Leire, have you been... contacted by Ramsés?"
I was taking a sip of the bitter brew partly to feel a tiny heater inside me, but when my brain processes Jacqueline’s reference, I gag on the coffee. It now smells and tastes like a dirt-encrusted metal pipe used to transport waste, or as if my girlfriend ripped an atomic fart that will seep into these consecrated walls and stink up the place forevermore. I put down the mug with a thunk, and the dark liquid inside splashes the countertop.
"J-Jacqueline, such a blasphemous word shouldn't have been uttered in this sanctuary! Why would that pig factor in anything that we do during our blessed time away from his domain? And what kind of dealings do you believe I've had with that evil wannabe satyr? Are you implying that he's been sending me pictures of his erect cock and hairy balls, and my consequent urge to flee from this plane of existence is why I suddenly became capable of walking through an invisible portal into some boreal forest? Or do you believe that I would turn into a wanton harlot if I snagged a peek at his genitalia?"
The child's face is tight with tension as her eyes dart between Jacqueline and I, but she keeps chewing on the apple. My girlfriend's eyebrows are knitted together. She shakes her head, maybe to clear up her mind from an unsavory notion.
"Sorry, Leire, I'm... overwhelmed. Keep drinking in peace, please."
I turn away and clutch onto the edge of the counter. My mind attempts to picture some of Ramsés' demands, and I catch a glimpse of me wearing a dog collar and flogging myself while my boss jerks off in a nearby chair. Then I see myself with my nose stuffed into his sweaty armpit.
My mouth fills with the metallic flavor of lukewarm, poisonous puke.
"I loathe Ramsés with all my being. Why wouldn't I? He has the face of a gargoyle and a donkey dick. I shouldn't be associated with that rotten cocksman. He believes that all women should bow down to him and lick his filthy feet!"
I shut my eyes tight, then I breathe deep to calm down. My entire body feels hot and prickly with embarrassment and disgust. Why did I believe that I had the right to raise my voice at Jacqueline, who is my beloved, my savior, my queen, the only person that makes it worth it that I have spent most of my adult life slaving away so the government can steal my money? Has she not provided many tender caresses and loving licks? Hasn't her warm and honeyed saliva, as well as other juices, flowed down my throat? Doesn't she make me cum more powerfully than ever before, in more interesting ways, and with all my fantasies brought to life? But I still felt compelled to shout at her.
I sniffle, and my chest fills with an onrush of sorrow. I should grab a knife from a drawer, slice my gut open and offer my dripping viscera for Jacqueline to feast on.
I mop up the coffee spill with a paper towel, then I empty my mug in the sink.
"It's alright," I mumble weakly. "I suddenly hate coffee."
Jacqueline approaches me, pulls my head towards her and nuzzles my hair. Her hand slides under my pyjama top to roam my bare back, and as her warm breasts press against my side, I imagine them filled with milk for my baby needs to be fed.
"I know you are exhausted, sweetie," Jacqueline coos, "but now you are home, safe with me."
I inhale deeply. My shoulders slump in relief.
"Where on Earth do you think you ended up?" she asks.
I want to scrub that memory before it crawls into some crevice of my brain, but the child would remain as a puzzling memento of having crossed that invisible threshold between worlds.
"There were... pines and skinny trees with moss hanging from their branches. I glimpsed ice-capped peaks far off into the distance. The sky was blue with little puffy white clouds flying in formation like some mythical flock. And a hulking monster nearly mangled me."
Jacqueline's hand travels down so her fingers can knead my ass. A shiver rolls over my skin. I hope she slips one digit into my asshole. When she thrusts it deeper, I always yelp like a puppy.
"Can you describe that animal?" she asks with a faint tremor in her voice. "They tend to live in specific areas of the world."
I briefly envision a reindeer with a human face. Then a woman who has a vagina for a face. Also a snake with human arms and breasts.
"Well, it was quite hairy, was covered in mud and drool, had teeth like daggers, and reeked of sex. Its claws could have torn my body into tiny pieces, and its tail could have wrapped itself around the planet a dozen times."
Jacqueline turns her gaze to a corner of the ceiling, then she arches an eyebrow.
"Lead the child into the living room while I go get..." After one look at our guest, Jacqueline strides up to her and snatches the ravaged apple from her hands. "You don't need to eat the core, baby girl. I'll get you something much tastier later." She tucks a stray lock of raven-black hair behind her ear, then she smiles at me. "I'll go grab the laptop."
My beloved leaves the kitchen with the apple in her grasp, and her hurried footsteps move towards the bedroom. The wild child's lips are smeared with juice. She's staring up at me inquisitively while the fingers of her right hand, which she has rested on the lap of her leather tunic, are curled around an invisible fruit.
My neck starts twitching. I swallow thickly. The gaze that is penetrating my pupils hasn't been corroded by schooling nor society, and sparkles with curiosity. This child is a creature examining another creature to figure out some truth for herself. It feels like she's pointing a flashlight directly at my heart, exposing its scarred tissue.
I fear that I'll burst into tears.
"I-I'm from France," I manage to stammer, and my voice cracks because I am a burden. "There, our children don't talk to strangers. There are piles of trash everywhere. Our rivers run with sewage and raw waste. W-we also don't eat apples whole."
The child gets down from the chair, reaches out and grabs my hand. Her grip is light but confident, her palm is moist, her fingers are tiny. She widens a smile that narrows her monolid eyes and dimples her cheeks. I would have expected her teeth to be rotten, but in the kitchen light they look quill-grey with some plaque buildup.
How has this girl survived in that forest from which I kidnapped her, and what part of me is her life raft in this ocean of madness?
"Can't you see that I'm a monster," I ask in a worn voice, "one far worse than any that walks on four legs?"
The girl tilts her head up. Her fingers tighten around my palm.
"You mean your face?" she asks in a gentle voice unbefitting of her ten years of living in that desolate land. "Or your soul?"
I'm the most miserable failure in history, the weakest person that ever lived. But right this second I'm a lonely human who needs this child to feel loved.
---
Author's note: today's three songs are Radiohead's 'No Surprises', Lucy Dacus' 'The Shell' and Bill Callahan's 'Too Many Birds'.
---
Wrapped up in a blanket, I chafe my arms through the sleeves of my wool pyjamas. The child from the forest is seated at the edge of the velvet sofa, while Jacqueline, as she kneels on the carpet, cleans the dirt off the girl's face with a wet wipe. The belt of Jacqueline's lipstick-pink silk-blend robe has loosened and the fabric slipped over her meaty breasts, revealing the old rose areolas. A couple of times, the savage girl has snapped out of her puzzlement to glance down and admire my queen's bountiful mammaries; soon enough the child will salivate, then her sucking reflex will kick in.
My head is throbbing, my body feels bruised and battered, and my fingers and toes are tingling like pins and needles. Now that I'm coming down from the adrenaline buzz, I'm getting dragged down further by the exhaustion that has settled in after successive sessions of nightmares, and that's on top of how wrung out my job leaves me five days a week.
"My stalkers didn't come to visit me this time," I say in a tired voice. "They somehow brought me to another place."
Jacqueline sustains a smile to reassure our guest, but the worry is deepening her crow's feet.
"I was staring at you when you disappeared, Leire. You vanished as if you had walked through an invisible doorway."
I shudder with a chill, then pull the blanket tight around me.
"For you this must feel like dating someone whose exes keep trying to ruin her life, except that I would never allow those abominations to befoul me, regardless of the size of their genitals."
Jacqueline winces.
"Was it the bunnyman?" she asks with indignation. "What the hell did he want this time?"
"That filthy buffoon likely wants me to worship him like a god. He never showed up, though. Maybe he and Alberto were mocking me from some hiding place."
Jacqueline lets out a deep sigh.
"I'm so tired of those assholes."
"You're telling me. I should consider filing a restraining order against them."
As if Jacqueline were babysitting a stray kitten, she wipes dried mucus from the child's nostrils, who's staring at my queen with rapt attention.
"This kid looks Mongolian, wouldn't you say, Leire?"
I sniffle.
"Those eyes seem Asian, yes."
Jacqueline lifts the child's necklace off the mud-speckled leather tunic, then examines the strung sand-colored teeth.
"She also looks as if she came from a different era."
"Well, once I figure out from what corner of this planet I snatched her up, I'll put her on a plane headed there. Given how her parents clothed her, I doubt they use cell phones, but she may find her way back to her tribe somehow from the airport."
My own body interrupts me with a yawn. I'm getting cranky; I want to say fuck off to all my troubles then go beddy-bye, but it must be about five in the morning, and in two hours I'll have to prepare myself for work. Maybe next time I'll reach the shower.
I rub my eyelids with my knuckles.
"I'm almost delirious. I need to guzzle down some coffee, although it may worsen my jitters."
I shrug off the blanket and rise to my feet, then I shuffle out of the living room and into the kitchen. The candy-red coffee maker stands out on a corner of the cloud-grey countertop. I load a capsule into the machine, I place a mug under the spout, I push the start button. As the coffee machine hums, the noise of the fridge door closing startles me.
Jacqueline has taken out a burgundy apple, which is glimmering in the kitchen light. The child's eyes flare with sudden interest, her nostrils quiver like a rabbit's. Jacqueline gestures for the girl to sit down on the closest dining chair, and once she obeys, my girlfriend hands over the apple as a reward. Our guest munches on the fruit, then lets out a yip of delight.
The coffee machine's spout drips the last drops of coffee into my mug, then it lets out a mechanical sigh and its red light switches off. I warm my hands with the mug. My eyelids are heavy and my head woozy from exhaustion. Once some caffeine enters my bloodstream, I should feel my brain slowly unclench.
Jacqueline, while she strokes the girl's disheveled hair, is staring at me as if trying to figure out how to bring up a troublesome topic. When she breaks the silence, she speaks in an anxious voice.
"Leire, have you been... contacted by Ramsés?"
I was taking a sip of the bitter brew partly to feel a tiny heater inside me, but when my brain processes Jacqueline’s reference, I gag on the coffee. It now smells and tastes like a dirt-encrusted metal pipe used to transport waste, or as if my girlfriend ripped an atomic fart that will seep into these consecrated walls and stink up the place forevermore. I put down the mug with a thunk, and the dark liquid inside splashes the countertop.
"J-Jacqueline, such a blasphemous word shouldn't have been uttered in this sanctuary! Why would that pig factor in anything that we do during our blessed time away from his domain? And what kind of dealings do you believe I've had with that evil wannabe satyr? Are you implying that he's been sending me pictures of his erect cock and hairy balls, and my consequent urge to flee from this plane of existence is why I suddenly became capable of walking through an invisible portal into some boreal forest? Or do you believe that I would turn into a wanton harlot if I snagged a peek at his genitalia?"
The child's face is tight with tension as her eyes dart between Jacqueline and I, but she keeps chewing on the apple. My girlfriend's eyebrows are knitted together. She shakes her head, maybe to clear up her mind from an unsavory notion.
"Sorry, Leire, I'm... overwhelmed. Keep drinking in peace, please."
I turn away and clutch onto the edge of the counter. My mind attempts to picture some of Ramsés' demands, and I catch a glimpse of me wearing a dog collar and flogging myself while my boss jerks off in a nearby chair. Then I see myself with my nose stuffed into his sweaty armpit.
My mouth fills with the metallic flavor of lukewarm, poisonous puke.
"I loathe Ramsés with all my being. Why wouldn't I? He has the face of a gargoyle and a donkey dick. I shouldn't be associated with that rotten cocksman. He believes that all women should bow down to him and lick his filthy feet!"
I shut my eyes tight, then I breathe deep to calm down. My entire body feels hot and prickly with embarrassment and disgust. Why did I believe that I had the right to raise my voice at Jacqueline, who is my beloved, my savior, my queen, the only person that makes it worth it that I have spent most of my adult life slaving away so the government can steal my money? Has she not provided many tender caresses and loving licks? Hasn't her warm and honeyed saliva, as well as other juices, flowed down my throat? Doesn't she make me cum more powerfully than ever before, in more interesting ways, and with all my fantasies brought to life? But I still felt compelled to shout at her.
I sniffle, and my chest fills with an onrush of sorrow. I should grab a knife from a drawer, slice my gut open and offer my dripping viscera for Jacqueline to feast on.
I mop up the coffee spill with a paper towel, then I empty my mug in the sink.
"It's alright," I mumble weakly. "I suddenly hate coffee."
Jacqueline approaches me, pulls my head towards her and nuzzles my hair. Her hand slides under my pyjama top to roam my bare back, and as her warm breasts press against my side, I imagine them filled with milk for my baby needs to be fed.
"I know you are exhausted, sweetie," Jacqueline coos, "but now you are home, safe with me."
I inhale deeply. My shoulders slump in relief.
"Where on Earth do you think you ended up?" she asks.
I want to scrub that memory before it crawls into some crevice of my brain, but the child would remain as a puzzling memento of having crossed that invisible threshold between worlds.
"There were... pines and skinny trees with moss hanging from their branches. I glimpsed ice-capped peaks far off into the distance. The sky was blue with little puffy white clouds flying in formation like some mythical flock. And a hulking monster nearly mangled me."
Jacqueline's hand travels down so her fingers can knead my ass. A shiver rolls over my skin. I hope she slips one digit into my asshole. When she thrusts it deeper, I always yelp like a puppy.
"Can you describe that animal?" she asks with a faint tremor in her voice. "They tend to live in specific areas of the world."
I briefly envision a reindeer with a human face. Then a woman who has a vagina for a face. Also a snake with human arms and breasts.
"Well, it was quite hairy, was covered in mud and drool, had teeth like daggers, and reeked of sex. Its claws could have torn my body into tiny pieces, and its tail could have wrapped itself around the planet a dozen times."
Jacqueline turns her gaze to a corner of the ceiling, then she arches an eyebrow.
"Lead the child into the living room while I go get..." After one look at our guest, Jacqueline strides up to her and snatches the ravaged apple from her hands. "You don't need to eat the core, baby girl. I'll get you something much tastier later." She tucks a stray lock of raven-black hair behind her ear, then she smiles at me. "I'll go grab the laptop."
My beloved leaves the kitchen with the apple in her grasp, and her hurried footsteps move towards the bedroom. The wild child's lips are smeared with juice. She's staring up at me inquisitively while the fingers of her right hand, which she has rested on the lap of her leather tunic, are curled around an invisible fruit.
My neck starts twitching. I swallow thickly. The gaze that is penetrating my pupils hasn't been corroded by schooling nor society, and sparkles with curiosity. This child is a creature examining another creature to figure out some truth for herself. It feels like she's pointing a flashlight directly at my heart, exposing its scarred tissue.
I fear that I'll burst into tears.
"I-I'm from France," I manage to stammer, and my voice cracks because I am a burden. "There, our children don't talk to strangers. There are piles of trash everywhere. Our rivers run with sewage and raw waste. W-we also don't eat apples whole."
The child gets down from the chair, reaches out and grabs my hand. Her grip is light but confident, her palm is moist, her fingers are tiny. She widens a smile that narrows her monolid eyes and dimples her cheeks. I would have expected her teeth to be rotten, but in the kitchen light they look quill-grey with some plaque buildup.
How has this girl survived in that forest from which I kidnapped her, and what part of me is her life raft in this ocean of madness?
"Can't you see that I'm a monster," I ask in a worn voice, "one far worse than any that walks on four legs?"
The girl tilts her head up. Her fingers tighten around my palm.
"You mean your face?" she asks in a gentle voice unbefitting of her ten years of living in that desolate land. "Or your soul?"
I'm the most miserable failure in history, the weakest person that ever lived. But right this second I'm a lonely human who needs this child to feel loved.
---
Author's note: today's three songs are Radiohead's 'No Surprises', Lucy Dacus' 'The Shell' and Bill Callahan's 'Too Many Birds'.
August 1, 2022
Random AI-generated images #3
Some neural networks have gotten so good that one of them, which runs on a supercomputer, creates masterpieces of visual art. I forced the poor AI to generate some of the stuff that came through my mind.
[link to this entry on my personal page; it contains lots of images]
[link to this entry on my personal page; it contains lots of images]
Life update (08/01/2022)
Link to this entry on my personal page, where it looks better
---
I’m not sure if anyone besides me cares about it, but I haven’t posted a chapter of my ongoing novel for two weeks. Although I’ve already forgotten the details of that first week, the week that just ended was hellish due to work: I spent the first half of every morning on phone duty (and by far, the worst part of my job as an IT guy at a big hospital complex is dealing with human beings), and the remaining half rushing to solve weird issues. Last Wednesday I got so stressed that if extreme anxiety was an immediate trigger for my heart issues (atrial fibrillation), by mid-morning I would have had to endure a new episode. It didn't happen, though, which saved me from another trip to the ER.
Three of those workdays, after I got home and ate, I was forced to take a nap so I wouldn’t waste the rest of the afternoon fighting sleepiness. It's a good thing that I lack a social life; back when I had to maintain a romantic relationship and a job at the same time, not only I passed out twice at my then girlfriend's place, but I also came to resent how exhausted her need to meet nearly every day made me. I can only consider this job tolerable because I leave the office at three in the afternoon (but I work some Saturdays, including this week), and because I'm not forced to interact with other human beings in my spare time.
Regarding my then girlfriend, the relationship was already doomed at that point. I think I only ever dated because I thought I was supposed to; I've never gotten enough out of intimate relationship as I assume normal people do, and sex didn't feel that great, maybe because I wasn't particularly attracted to the ones I could get. Thank the heavens for virtual reality and my right hand. I'm guessing most men are driven to pursue women because their balls are full. Once that's taken care of, I just want peace and quiet.
Anyway, even after I woke up from the naps last week, I barely managed to write a few sentences. I figured that once the weekend came I would be able to push out the current chapter, which at that point felt cursed. However, when I woke up at nine in the morning on this Saturday, I realized that I simply didn’t feel like writing. My subconscious hadn’t produced any new notes for a while, which means that the core of my being was currently disengaged from the material.
I have always had a terrible time trying to focus on anything I honestly couldn't care about; back in high school I did terribly not only because I was surrounded by savages, but because the material felt pointless to my goal of either programming or writing for a living. During my first few jobs, the tasks they assigned to me felt so boring and pointless that I knew I was wasting my life there. The whole time I was aching to sneak in as much writing time as I could to assuage my despair (which is in part how the whole deal of my current protagonist, Leire, came to be; I’m quite sure that there’s a Japanese verb that means both “to write” and “to jerk off”, which psychologically for me serves a similar purpose).
The way my brain works, I have to take advantage of what little free time I have to write as much as possible, because soon enough I’ll find myself in a blizzard in which I will feel unable to move or see anything beyond a few feet in front of me. During such periods I can do nothing but wait until the weather clears up. The circuits in my brain that produce meaning are faulty and unreliable, and of course this universe is meaningless beyond what the brains of living beings assign to certain stuff. During this last week and a half or so, it wasn’t only the act of writing that felt pointless; as I tried to fill my free time with board games, books, mangas or other interests that have satisfied me in the past, nothing felt worth the effort, so I spent most of last week at home in a catatonic state while my brain felt filled with lead. I still haven’t recovered fully; it’s taking me a lot to put my thoughts down, and I doubt I’m doing it coherently enough.
A bottomless hunger in me drives me to write every day, or else I’ll have to deal with a growing despair that may eventually kill me. This strange, somewhat demonic creative force gets bored or distracted from time to time, sometimes for a few days, weeks or even months, and abandons an obsession to sink its claws into something else. It did it again during these past two weeks: I suddenly felt an urge to get back into the COIN series of games, order the Tru’ng bot for the “Fire in the Lake” game and play it for four or five hours-long sessions on the Vassal engine.
I also got interested in Android Netrunner again, one of the most intriguing Living Card Games I have come across, but that I couldn’t play because it’s a player-versus-player game that uses hidden information and bluffing as some of its most notorious mechanics, so the game can’t be played solo. It had also been discontinued by its company despite having a loyal audience, but I was stunned to find out that a group of fans had rebranded the game, produced whole new series of cards and improved past ones while learning from the mistakes that the original company made. This rebranded version is called Nisei (this is its official page), it’s supported in the netrunnerdb page for reliable deckbuilding, and the cards can be printed for relatively cheap at a couple of partnered companies. More importantly, some hero has programmed a browser app that allows anyone to play the game against an AI opponent using the main sets of new cards: here’s the site.
I could feel my hunger wanting to sink its claws into this new subject to turn it into an obsession. How about I get back into programming and implement bots for one of my favorite games, maybe one of the COIN ones, which should be video games in the first place? Or surely I could design my own deckbuilding card game and implement it digitally. I wouldn't even need to commission the artwork now that I can exploit an AI to produce the images, and the license states that you are free to use the generated images for commercial purposes.
However, I stopped myself. I know what awaits me further down that path: programming has never fulfilled me enough, not remotely to the extent that writing does. I’d start a new programming project only to abandon it halfway through as if I had never bothered to start it. So instead I forced myself to focus on progressing through the draft of the current chapter. Thankfully, I finished it; the chapter is now at that state in which I would consider it good enough for publication, but as usual I’ll subject it to another creative pass line by line, which will take a couple of days. The events and interactions depicted in this chapter aren’t particularly hard to handle (nor that compelling, to be honest). I fear that my difficulties with it stem from the fact that I may be sliding down into another depression, even though the previous one ended three or so weeks ago.
Unexpectedly, last Thursday I received the best news in a good while. When they hired me for my current contract, I was told that it would last until October, and possibly until November if they could work something out. However, the big boss of my department called me in and told me that they had failed to mention that my current contract actually ends this Sunday (I work on Saturday), because they guy I’m covering for, who has been relieved of his tasks for an special project, has three weeks of holiday, so I can’t legally cover his schedule in the meantime. That means that I have three weeks of (unpaid) holiday as well.
That will be the first time in my adult life in which during a period of unemployment I won’t be either trying to get hired or waiting for my place of employment to call me and offer a new contract. However, I’m not guaranteed to be offered the next contract that will last until October or November; they will use the public rankings for that, which change from time to time. Some kid who just got his degree but knows how to speak Basque may rank higher than me; the regional government grants 18 points to people who can speak Basque, while I have only accrued about 3 points due to professional experience after the three or so years I’ve spent working here. We don’t even need to speak Basque at work, it’s a political matter.
The next day, my direct boss called me into his office. He told me that he wasn’t aware that I wouldn’t be working here for those three weeks in August, that he was counting on me, and asked for my permission to figure out how to secure a contract that would keep me here for those weeks. Fuck no. Emotional manipulation doesn’t work on me; these people don’t even know me, they have only interacted with the mask I’m forced to wear to survive in society. If they knew my true self, most of them would be horrified. It’s almost insulting to expect me to be grateful that I would have been “rescued” from three weeks of holiday because I would be paid in return, when my coworkers have spent the past two months counting the days until they could finally escape from this office.
I may take a trip somewhere for a few days. Apart from that, I intend to spend a whole day or two in Donostia (I live thirty kilometers away, and I also go there 5 to 6 days a week for work) to research specific locations where Leire and Jacqueline will hang out soon. Both of the novels that I have written in English (one ongoing) are set in cities or general areas that I’ve known personally; I think the farthest that my characters went was Asturias during a bittersweet sequence in my beloved previous novel (self-promotion!). Although I’ll have to study for an upcoming public examination during my holidays, I hope to cram as much writing time as possible. At this rate it will take me a whole year to write this cursed novel; I started it back in October of 2021.
Yesterday I got together with my family to celebrate my father’s birthday. He’s in his seventies. I wish I dared to avoid these reunions entirely, but I think some of my family members would go out of their way to annoy me even more in that case. I don’t have anything in common with my family beyond the genetic links. I barely got along with them before, but ever since my nephew was born five or six years ago, the experience has worsened. I can’t relate to that kid at all. I will never have children and I don’t want to deal with other people’s kids either. I can tell that the person I have to call my sister-in-law, with whom I’ve never talked more than a minute at time, resents that I refuse to accept the role of uncle. She’s also the passive-aggressive type; if I had ended up dating someone like her, let alone being married to one, I would have wanted to cut my balls off.
Anyway, we went to the Hondarribia marina for lunch (the restaurant visible to the right at this point of the linked video). Whenever I visit such places, I feel like a prisoner on a prison furlough (if that’s how they are called). The heated air of a sunny day, the smell of brine and sunscreen, the beautiful views that included attractive tourists in summer dresses… Such sensations nearly made me teary-eyed.
However, the older I get the worse my sensory issues become (mine, autism-related, have to do with noises), and as usual, human beings were the worst part of that experience. As if I didn’t find the conversation of my family members intolerable enough, other people decided to bring their screaming babies to the restaurant. I suppose they are entitled to. By the time I got back home, I was drained, crabby and sad. Fortunately I managed to finish the first draft of my current chapter by nine; by ten I need to go to bed, or else I won’t get the potential eight hours of sleep that I desperately need to avoid feeling like a zombie on Mondays.
Anyway, this whole load of pointlessness ended up longer than the chapter I’ve yet to post. I suppose that I needed to get my thoughts in order. I don’t know why you (yes, the nosy stranger who’s reading this) went through the trouble of taking time out of your day to get through this text, but I hope I didn’t waste your time as much as I’ve wasted my own this past couple of weeks.
---
I’m not sure if anyone besides me cares about it, but I haven’t posted a chapter of my ongoing novel for two weeks. Although I’ve already forgotten the details of that first week, the week that just ended was hellish due to work: I spent the first half of every morning on phone duty (and by far, the worst part of my job as an IT guy at a big hospital complex is dealing with human beings), and the remaining half rushing to solve weird issues. Last Wednesday I got so stressed that if extreme anxiety was an immediate trigger for my heart issues (atrial fibrillation), by mid-morning I would have had to endure a new episode. It didn't happen, though, which saved me from another trip to the ER.
Three of those workdays, after I got home and ate, I was forced to take a nap so I wouldn’t waste the rest of the afternoon fighting sleepiness. It's a good thing that I lack a social life; back when I had to maintain a romantic relationship and a job at the same time, not only I passed out twice at my then girlfriend's place, but I also came to resent how exhausted her need to meet nearly every day made me. I can only consider this job tolerable because I leave the office at three in the afternoon (but I work some Saturdays, including this week), and because I'm not forced to interact with other human beings in my spare time.
Regarding my then girlfriend, the relationship was already doomed at that point. I think I only ever dated because I thought I was supposed to; I've never gotten enough out of intimate relationship as I assume normal people do, and sex didn't feel that great, maybe because I wasn't particularly attracted to the ones I could get. Thank the heavens for virtual reality and my right hand. I'm guessing most men are driven to pursue women because their balls are full. Once that's taken care of, I just want peace and quiet.
Anyway, even after I woke up from the naps last week, I barely managed to write a few sentences. I figured that once the weekend came I would be able to push out the current chapter, which at that point felt cursed. However, when I woke up at nine in the morning on this Saturday, I realized that I simply didn’t feel like writing. My subconscious hadn’t produced any new notes for a while, which means that the core of my being was currently disengaged from the material.
I have always had a terrible time trying to focus on anything I honestly couldn't care about; back in high school I did terribly not only because I was surrounded by savages, but because the material felt pointless to my goal of either programming or writing for a living. During my first few jobs, the tasks they assigned to me felt so boring and pointless that I knew I was wasting my life there. The whole time I was aching to sneak in as much writing time as I could to assuage my despair (which is in part how the whole deal of my current protagonist, Leire, came to be; I’m quite sure that there’s a Japanese verb that means both “to write” and “to jerk off”, which psychologically for me serves a similar purpose).
The way my brain works, I have to take advantage of what little free time I have to write as much as possible, because soon enough I’ll find myself in a blizzard in which I will feel unable to move or see anything beyond a few feet in front of me. During such periods I can do nothing but wait until the weather clears up. The circuits in my brain that produce meaning are faulty and unreliable, and of course this universe is meaningless beyond what the brains of living beings assign to certain stuff. During this last week and a half or so, it wasn’t only the act of writing that felt pointless; as I tried to fill my free time with board games, books, mangas or other interests that have satisfied me in the past, nothing felt worth the effort, so I spent most of last week at home in a catatonic state while my brain felt filled with lead. I still haven’t recovered fully; it’s taking me a lot to put my thoughts down, and I doubt I’m doing it coherently enough.
A bottomless hunger in me drives me to write every day, or else I’ll have to deal with a growing despair that may eventually kill me. This strange, somewhat demonic creative force gets bored or distracted from time to time, sometimes for a few days, weeks or even months, and abandons an obsession to sink its claws into something else. It did it again during these past two weeks: I suddenly felt an urge to get back into the COIN series of games, order the Tru’ng bot for the “Fire in the Lake” game and play it for four or five hours-long sessions on the Vassal engine.
I also got interested in Android Netrunner again, one of the most intriguing Living Card Games I have come across, but that I couldn’t play because it’s a player-versus-player game that uses hidden information and bluffing as some of its most notorious mechanics, so the game can’t be played solo. It had also been discontinued by its company despite having a loyal audience, but I was stunned to find out that a group of fans had rebranded the game, produced whole new series of cards and improved past ones while learning from the mistakes that the original company made. This rebranded version is called Nisei (this is its official page), it’s supported in the netrunnerdb page for reliable deckbuilding, and the cards can be printed for relatively cheap at a couple of partnered companies. More importantly, some hero has programmed a browser app that allows anyone to play the game against an AI opponent using the main sets of new cards: here’s the site.
I could feel my hunger wanting to sink its claws into this new subject to turn it into an obsession. How about I get back into programming and implement bots for one of my favorite games, maybe one of the COIN ones, which should be video games in the first place? Or surely I could design my own deckbuilding card game and implement it digitally. I wouldn't even need to commission the artwork now that I can exploit an AI to produce the images, and the license states that you are free to use the generated images for commercial purposes.
However, I stopped myself. I know what awaits me further down that path: programming has never fulfilled me enough, not remotely to the extent that writing does. I’d start a new programming project only to abandon it halfway through as if I had never bothered to start it. So instead I forced myself to focus on progressing through the draft of the current chapter. Thankfully, I finished it; the chapter is now at that state in which I would consider it good enough for publication, but as usual I’ll subject it to another creative pass line by line, which will take a couple of days. The events and interactions depicted in this chapter aren’t particularly hard to handle (nor that compelling, to be honest). I fear that my difficulties with it stem from the fact that I may be sliding down into another depression, even though the previous one ended three or so weeks ago.
Unexpectedly, last Thursday I received the best news in a good while. When they hired me for my current contract, I was told that it would last until October, and possibly until November if they could work something out. However, the big boss of my department called me in and told me that they had failed to mention that my current contract actually ends this Sunday (I work on Saturday), because they guy I’m covering for, who has been relieved of his tasks for an special project, has three weeks of holiday, so I can’t legally cover his schedule in the meantime. That means that I have three weeks of (unpaid) holiday as well.
That will be the first time in my adult life in which during a period of unemployment I won’t be either trying to get hired or waiting for my place of employment to call me and offer a new contract. However, I’m not guaranteed to be offered the next contract that will last until October or November; they will use the public rankings for that, which change from time to time. Some kid who just got his degree but knows how to speak Basque may rank higher than me; the regional government grants 18 points to people who can speak Basque, while I have only accrued about 3 points due to professional experience after the three or so years I’ve spent working here. We don’t even need to speak Basque at work, it’s a political matter.
The next day, my direct boss called me into his office. He told me that he wasn’t aware that I wouldn’t be working here for those three weeks in August, that he was counting on me, and asked for my permission to figure out how to secure a contract that would keep me here for those weeks. Fuck no. Emotional manipulation doesn’t work on me; these people don’t even know me, they have only interacted with the mask I’m forced to wear to survive in society. If they knew my true self, most of them would be horrified. It’s almost insulting to expect me to be grateful that I would have been “rescued” from three weeks of holiday because I would be paid in return, when my coworkers have spent the past two months counting the days until they could finally escape from this office.
I may take a trip somewhere for a few days. Apart from that, I intend to spend a whole day or two in Donostia (I live thirty kilometers away, and I also go there 5 to 6 days a week for work) to research specific locations where Leire and Jacqueline will hang out soon. Both of the novels that I have written in English (one ongoing) are set in cities or general areas that I’ve known personally; I think the farthest that my characters went was Asturias during a bittersweet sequence in my beloved previous novel (self-promotion!). Although I’ll have to study for an upcoming public examination during my holidays, I hope to cram as much writing time as possible. At this rate it will take me a whole year to write this cursed novel; I started it back in October of 2021.
Yesterday I got together with my family to celebrate my father’s birthday. He’s in his seventies. I wish I dared to avoid these reunions entirely, but I think some of my family members would go out of their way to annoy me even more in that case. I don’t have anything in common with my family beyond the genetic links. I barely got along with them before, but ever since my nephew was born five or six years ago, the experience has worsened. I can’t relate to that kid at all. I will never have children and I don’t want to deal with other people’s kids either. I can tell that the person I have to call my sister-in-law, with whom I’ve never talked more than a minute at time, resents that I refuse to accept the role of uncle. She’s also the passive-aggressive type; if I had ended up dating someone like her, let alone being married to one, I would have wanted to cut my balls off.
Anyway, we went to the Hondarribia marina for lunch (the restaurant visible to the right at this point of the linked video). Whenever I visit such places, I feel like a prisoner on a prison furlough (if that’s how they are called). The heated air of a sunny day, the smell of brine and sunscreen, the beautiful views that included attractive tourists in summer dresses… Such sensations nearly made me teary-eyed.
However, the older I get the worse my sensory issues become (mine, autism-related, have to do with noises), and as usual, human beings were the worst part of that experience. As if I didn’t find the conversation of my family members intolerable enough, other people decided to bring their screaming babies to the restaurant. I suppose they are entitled to. By the time I got back home, I was drained, crabby and sad. Fortunately I managed to finish the first draft of my current chapter by nine; by ten I need to go to bed, or else I won’t get the potential eight hours of sleep that I desperately need to avoid feeling like a zombie on Mondays.
Anyway, this whole load of pointlessness ended up longer than the chapter I’ve yet to post. I suppose that I needed to get my thoughts in order. I don’t know why you (yes, the nosy stranger who’s reading this) went through the trouble of taking time out of your day to get through this text, but I hope I didn’t waste your time as much as I’ve wasted my own this past couple of weeks.
July 23, 2022
Random AI-generated images #2
Once again I exploited a hapless neural network so it would render the nonsense that crosses my mind.
[Link to this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
[Link to this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
July 19, 2022
Random AI-generated images #1
I had some fun exploiting the current Da Vinci of neural networks, mostly to produce silly combinations of elements. Because that particular neural network is a damn genius, I ended up with some masterpieces.
[read the rest of this entry on my site; it contains many images]
[read the rest of this entry on my site; it contains many images]
