These past couple of days, as I was strolling around mainly to move my legs, I thought of what I could write on here. The appalling, hopeless state of the world warranted writing about it, I thought, but ultimately I didn’t see the point. I would be either preaching to the choir or to people whom I don’t want reading these words. All I’ll say about it is that the only sane decision these days must be to move somewhere with the fewest number of people possible, become self-sufficient, stock up on weapons, fortify your territory, and be ready to kill in self-defense regardless of what the law may say. Wait it out under the very faint hope that people may have regained their sanity one or two decades from now. Which would be pointless anyway because the damage is already done and nobody has the balls to reverse it.

I visited the Fundación Adecco in Donostia, a center that supposedly helps disabled people get employment. The woman I spoke to seemed reasonable, which is rare. She told me that these days they have to fight with companies so that they publish the wages they intend to pay the employees, which supposedly they’re obligated by law to state. The companies seem to want to “talk it out” with the prospective employee, likely to pay them as little as possible.

In addition, I told her I’m not willing to work any job involving a split shift; the jobs I had that required it utterly destroyed me. Due to IBS, I need to be calm and alone after eating; anxiety ruins the digestion and I find myself heated, if not sweating, and with my guts in even more pain than usual during the second half of the shift, which rendered me almost incapable of focusing on anything, as well as in massive discomfort. In addition, you’re usually pressured to spend your breaks with your coworkers or even your bosses, which for me would be a worse curse than the work itself as I can barely tolerate the presence of human beings, let alone interacting with them.

In one of the software companies I worked for, they also pressured me to work extra hours after five or half past five, mainly because the sequence of departments that handed us the work had screwed up. My manager at the time told me that I wouldn’t have trouble with transport, because someone would drive me home. Apart from the fact that I had no certainty that they would pay my overtime (they were paying me minimum wage as a programmer), I also don’t want to spend my commute in a car with coworkers. I didn’t last much longer at that job.

My therapists, during my second session about a week ago, suggested I search for courses on subjects I may be interested in. I’m not really interested in anything, but they said that given that I’m always using AI, maybe having some certification on AI would help. That seemed reasonable enough, but I haven’t searched for anything yet. I’m demotivated again, not that I care about this matter to begin with. Right now, on a November Tuesday, I feel strange about the fact that I’ve been going out of my way to get help finding a job, or even going to therapy. I make these arrangements in one state of mind and have to face them in another. Right now I’m like a wall climber who finds himself on a ledge and has a panic attack, thinking, “What the hell am I doing here?”

I no longer feel much drive to do anything creative. I think the reason is that I’ve done what I was compelled to do, and I don’t have any human being whom I would want to experience any new work. I was always doing things for my subconscious anyway, but she seems satisfied enough with what I’ve produced, and she hasn’t been pushing me to do anything for a while. Over these past thirteen months of unemployment, I’ve tried to produce games, only to find myself not caring about playing them, and there would be no reason to push myself for others. Devise a complex plot for a story? Who would I be trying to impress? In general terms, it feels like this whole artistic drive is a symptom of the search for a mate to procreate with. You’re trying to create something impressive so an attractive-enough woman would go “Oh” and want to open her legs for you. That’s all it seems to be under the rationalizations. And as I fully intend to remain single for the rest of my life, which I highly doubt will reach my retirement age, there’s little point in me bothering.

Sexual fantasies do remain, though. There’s always that. But I’m never myself in my fantasies, and the kind of ladies I find attractive aren’t ones I could get, or even meet. Besides, my interest lasts as long as the horniness lasts.

I recall a moment I had with the therapists. I was trying to explain to them, as an analogy of sorts, how once you start traveling around, everything starts looking the same. One of them told me that when she traveled to South America and Asia, the people she met were very different, and that she got to learn very different perspectives about living. And I was surprised, because I hadn’t considered people at all. When I travel, which has always been a mixed bag, my main issue is people. Barcelona was attractive, but the throngs of people and the effects of so-called multiculturalism were horrifying. I enjoyed going to Zumaia and visiting the flysch, but had to deal with screaming tweens. Wherever I go, it’s always people who ruin everything.

One of the therapists suggested that my ability to relate to people and want to interact with them is blocked due to my childhood trauma. While I’m certain that there are blockages there related to childhood neglect, which will never clear out, the intrinsic process that led to an autistic brain simply hasn’t wired up those circuits properly. Anyone in my past who tried to engage in a relationship with me, even if it just resembled friendship, found out quick that there’s no progression with me. I may be interested in talking to you from a curiosity standpoint, particularly if you catch me during one of my writing spells, but otherwise, nothing is building up. And eventually, the annoyance of having to sustain that link outweighs whatever benefit I get from it.

I’ve been thinking of the cowardice that has determined my life in many ways. I think that it’s mainly tied to my fear of psychic pain brought by Pure O OCD. I’m extremely careful about new experiences, because they all leave wounds in my brain that OCD will bring up to ruin moments for the rest of my life. When I was seventeen, I met the girl I’ve liked most in my life, but I ghosted her after making out, because I could see the future: I was going to become obsessed with her, and the more time she spent with me the more she would realize she had made a huge mistake in getting involved with me, and when she eventually broke up, it would ruin me in a way I wouldn’t be able to recover from. So I preemptively ended things. I never talked to her again, and due to prosopagnosia, I’m not sure if I ever saw her again.

I was also sure at one point in my early twenties that it was my time to die, but due to cowardice, I continued living. It’s my fear of finding myself trapped in an office that has kept me from looking for a job this past year. When I brought up these matters, one of my therapists told me that risking being hurt in new experiences is part of life. Well, the equation is not mathing out for me: at the most, I get passing satisfaction from new experiences, but they only leave bad memories. Virtually nothing good registers in my brain as a memory.

I’ve loved my cats, for example, but when I think back on them, the absolutely overwhelming emotion and memories are those related to their deaths. My mother brought up, in the way this person has done in the past, whether I would ever want another cat, with her usual lack of understanding of my experience, and I had to put in no uncertain terms that I’ll never want to own a cat again. This woman is capable of showing up at my door with a cat and a big smile and then failing to comprehend why I’m angry at her.

Anyway, I’ve been working on a software implementation of the game Arkham Horror LCG. It’s the sole game I’ve genuinely felt like playing recently, but I don’t like the hassle of setting it up and processing the rules myself through Tabletop Simulator, so I figured that I could spend my Codex subscription on this. There’s an online Haskell implementation, but it doesn’t inspire me any confidence. Arkham Horror LCG is a very complex game rules-wise, particularly due to the timing windows and what the cards allow you to do, so I can see that a full implementation is likely out of the question. But so far, it’s keeping me occupied.