My week-long vacation has ended, and I’m writing these pointless words from the office. Back to the grind of fixing issues with printers, giving access to folders, and connecting cables to sockets. I don’t like my job, but it pays, so that’s what I do.

I don’t feel like writing fiction at the moment. I’m always compelled to work on this or that project, but my subconscious is the one holding the reins, and I don’t have any say in it. Most of my brain’s operating time these days has been occupied with thoughts of how to improve my Python project neural-narrative, that allows the users (meaning me and the few people that have cloned the repository) to chat with characters controlled by large language models, and in general engage in roleplaying with a large language model acting as the Dungeon Master. It’s all very exciting. I have been thinking about implementing events, lore books, and plenty of other weird stuff. Shortly after I got to work, I started relaying Hermes 405B my doubts about how some sections of the javascript code underlying my pages worked. I’m a systems builder by personality, and this is one interesting system to build. It certainly helps that at this point of AI development, the characters you can engage with behave like actual human beings, which is a bizarre thing to have gotten accustomed to.

I haven’t done much of note during this vacation time otherwise. I visited Donostia’s aquarium, and got a dose of nostalgia and grief due to my memories of having visited it back in 2021, with my then girlfriend Alazne. It just happens that it never happened: that visit took place in the novel I was writing (My Own Desert Places), and the actual last time I had visited the aquarium happened back when I was a teen or a child (I didn’t even bother to visit the aquarium so I could write the scene; sorry, writing gods). The act of writing a story brands your brain with memories similar to, if not stronger than your actual experiences. I’m not sure what to think about that, but in someone as isolated and generally avoidant of new experiences as myself, it may be a good thing.

A few days ago I went out for an aimless walk. I took a wrong turn and found myself climbing up a steep path. I love checking out new places, but I don’t have a car and I get anxious around human beings, so I can’t stray too far. Anyway, at a solitary stretch of the road, I found an even more deserted place: the cemetery. I realized I had never visited it, so I walked in.

I like cemeteries. They are usually empty, silent, and calm. As I strolled around, I ventured down a staircase and found myself in an underground lair of funeral niches. I thought of checking out the whole place, but I started getting a weird, sinister vibe, the kind that makes you think that you’re going to spot stuff out of the corner of your eye. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with ghosts, so I walked back up.

I spent maybe an hour reading the inscriptions on tombstones and checking out the gift and notes that the deceased’s loved ones had left. I came across the memorial for a girl I used to know, who got murdered by a psych student when she was barely twenty years old, and found out that her father, whom I used to see around in the neighborhood, had died six years earlier, before his time. I found the burial site of a twenty-two year old kid I knew about in my teens; as he rode his bike with his girlfriend seated behind him, he lost control and fell under the wheels of a truck. His girlfriend was unharmed, if you can call “unharmed” to look down at the burst remains of your loved one’s head. The last time I knew of that girl, she was attending the most prominent local disco then (I must have been sixteen or seventeen). She was wearing a T-shirt with the photo of her deceased boyfriend. At some point of the evening, she burst into tears. I don’t know what you do with your life after such a thing happens.

As I read the inscriptions on the tombstones, my mind pictured those people’s lives before they died, mainly the lives of those who died way before their time. One tombstone had etched the death dates of three members of the same family back in the fifties, and two of them were kids aged five and six. A girl with the peculiar name of Ninfa de Amo Díez had died in her early twenties back in the fifties or sixties. When I returned home, I googled that name, but nothing came up; at this point of our civilization, she may as well have never existed. It got me thinking, as I sometimes do, about the point of it all: you live, you fuck around for a while, and then you die. Soon enough, nobody will remember you. I guess the whole point is in the “fuck around for a while” part.

At some point, I felt permeated with a deep sadness. I could barely keep myself from getting teary-eyed. I wasn’t in the mood to start crying in a public place, even though there was nobody around, so I left.

Now that I’ve returned to work and I’m forced to do things I don’t want, I’m getting reacquainted with the notion that my body and brain don’t work as they should. For example, I was supposed to patch a network connection, but I forgot to grab both the keys of the network rack as well as the device that allows you to follow the cables. It simply slipped my mind, as many things have over the last few years. As I was crouching around at the network rack, as soon as I stood up, a buzzing, a sort of sudden dizziness, coursed through my nerves, and it took me minutes to get back to normal. I feel in general like I’m degenerating faster than I should for my age. I have a visit to a neurologist scheduled for the sixth of next month, and I hope to get an MRI done.

I also got my right eye checked out by an ophthalmologist, a couple of weeks after I experienced a torn retina. She told me that the debris and other weird shit that has ended inside my right eye (like a tangle of fibers that keep swaying before my vision) are pretty much there until I die. Wonderful news. She suggested to wear sunglasses outside, because such shadows in my vision are more prominent under the glare of the sun. I’m otherwise recovered from the ordeal.

Anyway, I think that’s all I needed to say at the moment.