Today, at about one o’clock in the morning, I was thinking about food, but also daydreaming about winning the lottery so that I would never have to work for others again (I daydream about that often). Five minutes later I received a phone call. It’s usually either a family member or spam. Today, though, the phone number was a valid one, originating from my province. The fourth and fifth digits were zeroes, which meant that someone from a government-run organization was calling me. That likely meant one thing.

Oh no.

Someone at the office where I’ve worked on-and-off for a few years had taken a sick leave, and my services were required for this very day, on the afternoon shift, and until the guy returned. I’m familiar with the particular fucker, and he’s either gone for two weeks or an entire year. I was already fifteen minutes late from when I need to start preparing myself to leave the apartment, walk through the chaotic city center, get on a train to Donostia, then take a bus to the hospital complex where the office is located.

Back to the grind, back to either waking up at six in the morning or returning home at eleven at night. Back to wasting eight hours in an office, surrounded by about fifteen people even though I’m basically a hermit, having to avoid shitting myself due to my virulent IBS (as if the universe didn’t hate autistic people enough, IBS and other disorders such as OCD are more prevalent in folks like us), and having to meet strangers to solve their issues, issues that will come suddenly, and that I will be expected to know how to solve so that the tense users can return to doing whatever the fuck they were doing. On top of that, due to my vaccine-induced heart problems, I’ll likely end up in the ER again one of these days, because stress is a trigger.

Plenty of people out there struggle through far worse nightmares on a daily basis, but working for others has been my most dreaded one. My brain and body are unsuited for office work. Programming I can handle to a certain extent (I love programming, but doing so for others is a different matter). However, those jobs ended up letting me go, or not hiring me after an internship, due to some variation of “you can’t work well in a team.” Now I’m too old, unfamiliar with most modern technologies other than Rust and Python, and unwilling to get back in the game.

Hell, in my twenties, for long periods that I can’t remember properly, I likely classified as a hikikomori. I became that sort of beast that ceases to clean itself and stores its pee in water bottles, for no reason that I could discern. It’s been about 12-15 years since then, but I’m barely keeping it together as a human being, and that’s unlikely to improve.

So I’m writing this from one of the outrageously, maddeningly slow computers we are supposed to work with (they take about 5-7 minutes on a good day to reach the Windows desktop, and this is an upgraded line of computers from three years ago). I’m on phone duty, having forgotten most of what I learned during the few years I’ve dealt with this nonsense, and dreading the next moment when the work phone will cry out for me to solve some stranger’s problem, even though most of my problems, certainly the most pressing ones, have remained unsolved for my thirty-eight years of living (not for lack of trying, but psychotherapy didn’t work for me, and neither did pills).

Some people out there can write for a living. How lovely that must be. If you are one of those lucky ones, please jerk yourself off to oblivion. You probably deserve it. I can’t even masturbate in the bathroom down the hallway, because someone may call me in the meantime. Anyway, expect a new chapter of my novel, if you care about that shit, in like two weeks or so.

Are there any rich mommy types out there that may want to adopt and feed me? I only require a bed, a computer with WiFi, and a steady supply of milk.