Life update (01/09/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
I’ve been hired for three months more. Thankfully three more months of programming instead of working as a computer technician, a role I was never properly suited for due to how often it involved people. I can handle programming, so lately I haven’t been dreading going to work. Of course, I’d rather stay home and engage with whatever projects my subconscious wants me to focus on, but, although I hate to admit it, being unemployed or on holiday for too long doesn’t help my mental state: soon enough I start feeling that I have nowhere to go nor anything to do other than lose myself in my obsessions. My life often feels so limited that I think of myself as a prisoner in solitary confinement.
Today I couldn’t go home straight from work, because I had to get an MRI done. Months ago, perhaps back in late summer, during a period of extreme stress, I suffered a medical episode that disturbed me enormously: I suddenly started losing feeling in the right half of my body, particularly my face and arm down to my fingertips. I also smelled something like burned dust. Because recently I had been experiencing “blackouts” in my right eye (sometimes when I moved that eyeball, I saw flashes of darkness), the neurologist, who seemed considerably younger than me, thought of them as a migraine’s aura. However, the flashes continued after the so-called migraine passed, and perhaps a week later, I ended up with a torn retina in that eye. Let me give you some advice: never end up with a torn retina. If you do, hurry to the ER as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the worse the permanent damage. Laser surgery can only contain the mess.
Anyway, the fact that the so-called aura ended up being related to a faulty retina disproved the neurologist’s theory that I had suffered a migraine, and if what I experienced wasn’t a migraine, then a mini stroke could have been a good guess. Ever since, I feel like I’m having more trouble writing (I often confuse the position of letters), reading, and solving tasks at work. But I have such an abysmal memory that I’m not entirely sure if that hadn’t been happening in the time leading to my medical episode.
So, today I finally got that MRI done. I wore an hospital gown for like the tenth time, I lay face-up on a plastic table, and shoved earplugs in. A technician closed a plastic cage around my face, similar to those worn by football players. Curiously, the plastic cage had a mirror on the inside, so that my own eyes were looking straight at me the whole time (presumably only when I stared at them). At times it felt like someone was lying face-down on a massage table set over me. For about twenty minutes, I lay in that enclosed space while the machine produced its strange sounds, shooting noise through my brain. For half of it, I just closed my eyes and escaped to daydreams in which I imagined myself back in the 1970s, in the US, interacting with a blonde, blue-eyed fictional character who killed herself around that time, and who was based on a real-life teenage girl that my favorite author loved, yearned for, grieved about for fifty years.
Even though I’m supposed to be a grown man, my parents still accompany me of their own volition to my medical visits, I suppose in case I need assistance. Unfortunately I have needed assistance in the past, as I’ve ended up in the ER a few times. In any case, we happened to meet a cousin and uncle of mine, who had traveled to the hospital for that aunt’s medical episode. I hadn’t seen this particular cousin since 2008; I remember that date because it was my grandfather’s funeral. Sixteen years had passed, and now the guy was bald and white-haired. I didn’t offer anything to him other than a greeting and a couple of nods; I have no drive to interact with the vast majority of humans due to this autism of mine, and forcing it feels so humiliating that I only do it for money. I also feel no familial connection.
That cousin looked me over and said that he wouldn’t have recognized me if he had seen me on the streets. I suppose I have changed that much. When I look at myself in the reflections of the train windows, I look like what I am: a middle-aged man. My hair has receded significantly, I have grown plenty of wrinkles, my eyes constantly look sunken and, I suspect, as if I were in constant existential anguish (can’t hide that). Seeing that cousin made me remember once again that I’m fucking old. Old and broken. Nothing of particular value to look forward to, certainly no love of any kind, on my way to decrepitude. I’m not the kind of person who can delude themselves with religion, so I bear the full blast of unrelenting reality every moment of the day. Song lyrics from a Neutral Milk Hotel song come to mind: “Threw a nickel in a fountain / To save my soul from all these troubled times / And all the drugs that I don’t have the guts to take / To soothe my mind so I’m always sober / Always aching, always heading towards / Mass suicide“.
I’m still enduring through my second reading of McCarthy’s The Passenger, his final major novel. I say enduring, because the pull of grief imbued in so many of those scenes is too much for me, and I end up putting down the book and focusing on other stuff until I feel strong enough to resume my reading. Hey, have you ever found yourself pained with the absurd regret of never having been a young adult living in the south of the US during the 1970s, knowing nothing of this modern world? Doesn’t it feel like something vital has been lost forever?
For those of you who are fans of McCarthy and have learned about Augusta Britt, I suggest you to reread No Country for Old Men. Without giving away spoilers, the movie completely wasted the protagonist’s climax from the book. In McCarthy’s original version, the protagonist meets a blonde, blue-eyed fifteen-year-old girl at the pool. She’s a runaway who wants to head out to California, but she can’t afford it. The protagonist helps her, partly by giving her a few hundred. McCarthy humanizes the girl’s character, making her clever, charming, funny. Clearly based on Augusta Britt from McCarthy’s real-life descriptions. Knowing how that sequence ends in the novel, it was clear to me that McCarthy’s whole point of the narrative was condensed in those moments; in 1974, McCarthy took the abused runaway Augusta Britt out of town and crossed the border over to Mexico, but in real life it could have ended in a similar way to how it does in the book. It was just a matter of luck. The toss of the coin. “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count.”
I’m just writing down things because I think about them.
I’ve been hired for three months more. Thankfully three more months of programming instead of working as a computer technician, a role I was never properly suited for due to how often it involved people. I can handle programming, so lately I haven’t been dreading going to work. Of course, I’d rather stay home and engage with whatever projects my subconscious wants me to focus on, but, although I hate to admit it, being unemployed or on holiday for too long doesn’t help my mental state: soon enough I start feeling that I have nowhere to go nor anything to do other than lose myself in my obsessions. My life often feels so limited that I think of myself as a prisoner in solitary confinement.
Today I couldn’t go home straight from work, because I had to get an MRI done. Months ago, perhaps back in late summer, during a period of extreme stress, I suffered a medical episode that disturbed me enormously: I suddenly started losing feeling in the right half of my body, particularly my face and arm down to my fingertips. I also smelled something like burned dust. Because recently I had been experiencing “blackouts” in my right eye (sometimes when I moved that eyeball, I saw flashes of darkness), the neurologist, who seemed considerably younger than me, thought of them as a migraine’s aura. However, the flashes continued after the so-called migraine passed, and perhaps a week later, I ended up with a torn retina in that eye. Let me give you some advice: never end up with a torn retina. If you do, hurry to the ER as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the worse the permanent damage. Laser surgery can only contain the mess.
Anyway, the fact that the so-called aura ended up being related to a faulty retina disproved the neurologist’s theory that I had suffered a migraine, and if what I experienced wasn’t a migraine, then a mini stroke could have been a good guess. Ever since, I feel like I’m having more trouble writing (I often confuse the position of letters), reading, and solving tasks at work. But I have such an abysmal memory that I’m not entirely sure if that hadn’t been happening in the time leading to my medical episode.
So, today I finally got that MRI done. I wore an hospital gown for like the tenth time, I lay face-up on a plastic table, and shoved earplugs in. A technician closed a plastic cage around my face, similar to those worn by football players. Curiously, the plastic cage had a mirror on the inside, so that my own eyes were looking straight at me the whole time (presumably only when I stared at them). At times it felt like someone was lying face-down on a massage table set over me. For about twenty minutes, I lay in that enclosed space while the machine produced its strange sounds, shooting noise through my brain. For half of it, I just closed my eyes and escaped to daydreams in which I imagined myself back in the 1970s, in the US, interacting with a blonde, blue-eyed fictional character who killed herself around that time, and who was based on a real-life teenage girl that my favorite author loved, yearned for, grieved about for fifty years.
Even though I’m supposed to be a grown man, my parents still accompany me of their own volition to my medical visits, I suppose in case I need assistance. Unfortunately I have needed assistance in the past, as I’ve ended up in the ER a few times. In any case, we happened to meet a cousin and uncle of mine, who had traveled to the hospital for that aunt’s medical episode. I hadn’t seen this particular cousin since 2008; I remember that date because it was my grandfather’s funeral. Sixteen years had passed, and now the guy was bald and white-haired. I didn’t offer anything to him other than a greeting and a couple of nods; I have no drive to interact with the vast majority of humans due to this autism of mine, and forcing it feels so humiliating that I only do it for money. I also feel no familial connection.
That cousin looked me over and said that he wouldn’t have recognized me if he had seen me on the streets. I suppose I have changed that much. When I look at myself in the reflections of the train windows, I look like what I am: a middle-aged man. My hair has receded significantly, I have grown plenty of wrinkles, my eyes constantly look sunken and, I suspect, as if I were in constant existential anguish (can’t hide that). Seeing that cousin made me remember once again that I’m fucking old. Old and broken. Nothing of particular value to look forward to, certainly no love of any kind, on my way to decrepitude. I’m not the kind of person who can delude themselves with religion, so I bear the full blast of unrelenting reality every moment of the day. Song lyrics from a Neutral Milk Hotel song come to mind: “Threw a nickel in a fountain / To save my soul from all these troubled times / And all the drugs that I don’t have the guts to take / To soothe my mind so I’m always sober / Always aching, always heading towards / Mass suicide“.
I’m still enduring through my second reading of McCarthy’s The Passenger, his final major novel. I say enduring, because the pull of grief imbued in so many of those scenes is too much for me, and I end up putting down the book and focusing on other stuff until I feel strong enough to resume my reading. Hey, have you ever found yourself pained with the absurd regret of never having been a young adult living in the south of the US during the 1970s, knowing nothing of this modern world? Doesn’t it feel like something vital has been lost forever?
For those of you who are fans of McCarthy and have learned about Augusta Britt, I suggest you to reread No Country for Old Men. Without giving away spoilers, the movie completely wasted the protagonist’s climax from the book. In McCarthy’s original version, the protagonist meets a blonde, blue-eyed fifteen-year-old girl at the pool. She’s a runaway who wants to head out to California, but she can’t afford it. The protagonist helps her, partly by giving her a few hundred. McCarthy humanizes the girl’s character, making her clever, charming, funny. Clearly based on Augusta Britt from McCarthy’s real-life descriptions. Knowing how that sequence ends in the novel, it was clear to me that McCarthy’s whole point of the narrative was condensed in those moments; in 1974, McCarthy took the abused runaway Augusta Britt out of town and crossed the border over to Mexico, but in real life it could have ended in a similar way to how it does in the book. It was just a matter of luck. The toss of the coin. “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count.”
I’m just writing down things because I think about them.
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