Who would have thought that the idiotic interactions between a deranged human and a cranky interdimensional blob would become the inspiration for such AI-generated beauty?
The following images are related to chapter 89 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
I have posted many other entries with generated images. Check them out.
Thanks to the revolutionary new AI from Eleven Labs, convincing fake humans acted out chapter 89 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked. Check it out:
Cast
Damn, that came out good. I couldn’t get either voice to properly pronounce Leire’s name, but just pretend that they did.
I have discovered that I vastly prefer AI audio to AI images. It’s like having professional voice actors at my beck and call.
“So what’s your game, you gloppy bag of pus who gets off on tormenting innocent people? Why are you making me waste precious time with your toxic oratory? You haven’t eaten me yet; although you’re clearly unhinged, you must have some sort of agenda. Am I facing the squid-god Proteus?”
“I’m no squid. And as you should have figured out by now, we know each other.”
I snap my head back. I picture myself taking a shortcut at midnight through a grimy alley, that stinks of dog shit, urine, cigarette smoke, stale booze, and dime-store perfume. A rat scampers along a clogged storm drain. Some vermin is scrabbling in a trash can. Shards of broken glass glitter like slivers of moonstone. I’m stepping on yellowed papers and food wrappers when an orange-sized, black glob of snot drops in front of me and splatters on the piss-glazed cobblestones. The sticky substance has stained my shoes. I peer upward. Dozens of bulging eyeballs are observing me, glued to a gargantuan garland of slimy tar suspended between the graffitied brick walls, like a forgotten ornament for some holiday that honors a god of putrefaction and deformity.
My skin crawls. I want to shriek.
“I’m afraid that you must have mistaken me with someone else, you festering, foul-breathed abomination. It would explain why you thought that I wanted to be eaten. Perhaps a brain malfunction?”
“Oh, but you are. Didn’t you hear me call you by name? I think I did it twice.”
“Look, if you had checked the yearbooks in your high school’s library, you would have realized that I was in middle school when blob-people made their debut.”
The blob gurgles like a busted-up washing machine.
“Pay attention!”
“Alright, asshole. I’ll listen to the sound waves you’re generating with some mercifully hidden sphincter, if it means you’ll leave me alone. Go ahead, try your best.”
“Leire. That’s your name.”
I raise my hand to wipe the clammy sweat from my forehead.
“I’m struggling to remain sane despite your nauseating stench, but let me tell you: someone gave that name to me without my consent.”
“Is this a matter of freedom again? Or do you just hate sharing your name with thousands of other women in this province alone?”
I resent the cum monster’s derisive tone. Should I expect decency from someone who spat at my face, though?
I glare at one of the blob’s glistening, moist eyeballs, that’s drooping in the black goo like snot dribbling from a nostril. I want to gouge that eye out, then unhinge my jaw wide enough to cram the orb in my mouth. The eye would slime my lips and ooze onto my tongue. Maybe it tastes like rancid curry. I would sink my teeth into its fibrous sclera as if into a jawbreaker, and the released vitreous humor would shoot through my nose. I would keep chewing on that eyeball, and sucking up its viscous fluid, even as my jaws ached and my cheeks bulged like a puffer fish’s. Such gluttonous cravings overwhelm me in moments of revulsion; one time I was about to lick a tied-up condom left on a park bench, before I snapped out of my daze. But who am I kidding? If I were ever able to fit melon-sized stuff in my mouth, I would have already died of joy, and asphyxiation, while deepthroating one of mommy’s mammoth mammaries.
“What’s with your creepy grin?” the blob gurgles.
“Nevermind. My point was that people are assigned names so they can be addressed by others, so those other humans know to whom they’re referring when gossiping about you. Besides, how often have I wanted people to bother me? Before Jacqueline blessed my existence, my interests were always solitary. Therefore, the best name for me would have been none, and those knuckleheads who insisted on trying to address me would be forced to rely on expressions like, ‘Hey, you!’ Imagine the silly conversations they would be engaged in with each other as they criticized my personal habits, mocked my weaknesses, and debated the color of my undergarments, but doubted if they were talking about the same person! What an unhygienic lot! And over time, my lack of a name would become so awkward that I would be erased from the social memory of everyone around me, which would free me to spend my time contemplating the absurdity of my cosmic joke of a life. But yes, why choose the name Leire, with which thousands of females across the province are burdened? To whatever extent a name becomes the verbal attempt at manifesting one’s destiny, weren’t my parents setting me up for mediocrity by giving me a commonplace moniker instead of, say, Flower-Duster, or Unsliced Saliva’s Fondness for Fishbones? Once your essence has been tainted at birth with such a clichéd alias as Leire, does it ever regain the power of flight? Why pursue a dream when you’re doomed to become a mundane drone? To be fair, though, I’m warming up to the name Eide. A creative forest fae came up with it, maybe because she understood I had a penchant for being an untamed bohemian. Oh, I forgot: during a recent nightmare I was also christened as Gummo, but that rabbit bastard meant it as an insult. Besides, who would go by the name that an anthropomorphic bunny, or a fucking hamster for that matter, bestowed upon them? No, beyond that: who would want to associate with a cacodemon who came all over the pancakes they cooked for breakfast?”
The blob shifts about restlessly, squelching like a filled fleshlight.
“Astonishing ramblings by a half-wit!”
This interdimensional tapioca pudding, if such a slimeball is worthy of the name pudding, can undervalue me as much as he pleases; I’m a helium balloon soaring above the mountains. Explaining myself at length exhilarates me.
“I’m serious. To regain the joy of the naked, unsullied state, we must venture down a path that leads to our names’ total evaporation.”
“You moron, even if your parents hadn’t named you, other people would refer to you by your relationship with others, as in, ‘This guy over here is my son, that bitch is my ex-wife.’ And eventually they would stick nicknames on you, the sort that your parents would have avoided for their beloved progeny. I can think of half a dozen such epithets. The Wretch, for example, or The Thirsty One, or even that old standby, The Cunt.”
I guffaw to release the frustration and unease swirling inside my ribcage.
“Very funny, pus bag. Those who would push an unflattering identity on me will be dismembered, their pieces strewn along mommy’s balcony to be gnawed upon by crows and other feathered scavengers.”
As the blob oozes angrily, he glowers like a shit-faced T-rex in a sauna.
“How the fuck would someone without a name get by in modern society?! Unless you live in a cabin in the woods and subsist entirely on nuts and berries, you’d have to provide proper ID to open a bank account or apply for a job. And don’t you think that the government would intervene if they had trouble collecting taxes from you?”
“I know, right? They would seize on my lack of a name as probable cause of terrorism. Those depraved cretins! Why do we let the state encroach upon our personal affairs? How far we have fallen since our fabled Paleolithic ancestors, whom I’m sure were freewheeling hedonists of great renown, roaming free in search of the perfect nipple. They never needed ID; they would simply paint a smudge of mud onto their foreheads and mumble into the trees, ‘Here I am, a boob for you,’ and any gal nearby would come crawling across the woods with her hair matted in clumps and her tongue out like a begging puppy. What a life of luxury they were blessed with by mommy Earth! Damn it, when was I asked if I wanted to partake in modern society?!”
The blob rolls his dozens of eyeballs so far back that they sink into the squirming goo, spin, then spring to the surface again. As films of black slime slide off the eyeballs, the sewage-colored irises dart about erratically like startled from a dream. When they focus on me, the wall-wide gelatinous bulk sags with a deflating groan that could be interpreted as a sigh, but that may have been a fart.
“I can’t believe I have fallen so low as to entertain your lunacy,” the blob moans. “It seems I have nothing better to do than listen to your absurd babble about names and nipples.”
“You’re just pissed because a big black squid’s arguments don’t stand for shit. Nobody else has ever complained about my eloquent sophistry. Why do you hate the truth? Is the mere existence of logic and evidence so unbearable to your warped little soul?”
“I might just be anti-nonsense.”
I take a deep breath.
“I’ve spent decades searching for some sense in this absurd existence, so I expect the same consideration and intellectual openness from others. At least don’t spit at me! But I see that, for you, I must simplify reality down to its rudimentary forms.”
“Please do. This has gone on long enough.”
“I’m indeed one of those unfortunate humans whose identity has been diminished to the name Leire. I’m also a thirty-year-old programmer without friends.”
“How very pleasant to meet you, Miss D-D-Dumb-Dumb-Dumb.”
“You bloated, pustulating turd!”
That bizarre bastard bursts into laughter, cackle after cackle. As the ghastly racket resounds, the mound of sludge shakes and ripples like the belly of an obese man who has gorged himself on a vatful of lard, and with each gargle and snort, the squelchy mass threatens to eject several gallons of its rotten innards into space.
Author’s note: today’s songs are “Never Ending Math Equation” by Modest Mouse, and “Peacebone” by Animal Collective.
I keep a playlist with all the songs I’ve mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and five songs so far. Check them out.
Do ya know that some artificial intelligences can create images out of whatever prompt you send them? Well, do ya, punk? It just happens that I sent one of those AIs lots of sentences from this chapter. Check out the results.
Did you know that some neural networks can produce human-like voices? I exploited the best of those cutting-edge services to generate an audiochapter for this entry. Here’s the link.
This chapter was the most fun to write in quite a while, and the audiochapter that I produced from it turned out fantastic.
Four and a half stars.
Tatsuki Fujimoto became one of my favorite manga authors as I was reading through his wildly successful Chainsaw Man, the tale of a deranged orphan who made a lifelong deal with a demonic dog that is also somehow a chainsaw. This author came out of nowhere as far as I was concerned, but now I know that he was a prolific author of short stories (in manga format), as well as the creator of a single long-form series called Fire Punch.
The little I learned about Fujimoto’s personal life, apart from the fact that he can levitate, is that working through Fire Punch killed him as a manga artist (in a similar way as Oyasumi Punpun killed Asano). Fujimoto considers himself more of a cinephile and an animator than a mangaka, and his stories show this: they are extremely filmable, often resembling storyboards. When he got his one Serious Series (Serious Punch) out, apparently he thought about retiring with one last story in which he would do whatever crazy shit he wanted, without caring about whether or not others would enjoy it. That last story became Chainsaw Man (link goes to an exceptional trailer of the manga version of that story, which is somewhat spoilery for those who have seen the anime but not read the manga).
I was reluctant to get into Fire Punch because I had heard that it was unrelentingly grim, devoid of Chainsaw Man‘s goofiness, which added humor to an otherwise dark setting. And while Fire Punch does contain plenty of black humor, it comes from a few characters that manage to laugh maniacally against the hopeless and unforgiving world they live in.
The Earth has become a ball of ice. The few remaining human communities are ruled with an iron fist. Weaker people are enslaved and put to work, or else raped, or killed for food. Some humans are born with superpowers, which they call ‘blessings,’ yet the majority of such people are eventually captured and enslaved, to spend the rest of their lives as energy sources, strapped to chairs or beds.
Our protagonist and his sister, both maybe in their teens, have escaped from slavery and found refuge in a tiny community. The protagonist was born with the ability to regenerate wounds almost instantly, and due to such a blessing, he has become the only food source for the much older citizens of this community: the protagonist’s sister chops his arms a few times every day, and the citizens make stew out of them. The siblings are revered as a result.
With their parents long dead, the protagonist and his sister rely on each other as if they were the last people on Earth.
One day, soldiers from some tyrannical community raid them for resources. Upon learning that the citizens of the town survive on human flesh, their commander, who was born with special powers, decides to burn it all down. His are special flames: they will keep burning until the victim dies. Soon enough the protagonist finds himself engulfed in flames, and to his permanent grief, he finds out that his beloved sister has suffered the same fate. With her last breath, she utters a single word-long wish.
The protagonist’s blessing is so strong that he regenerates faster than the fire burns him, and yet that fire won’t go out until he dies. For months, long after everyone he cared about has died, he writhes on the snow while the fire burns his lungs. It takes him a long time to even manage to breathe properly. Some years later, he learns to control his regenerative abilities enough to keep the flames away from his face, and once he manages to think properly for the first time in years, he balls his right hand into a fist.
Burning with a desire for vengeance, along with literal flames, he treks the snowfields in search of the commander who killed his sister. On his way, he comes across desperate communities for whom he becomes a source of inspiration and reverence: the only source of warmth in a dead world, someone who with a single punch sets his foes on fire, burning them to death.
Unable to think properly due to the constant searing pain, the protagonist relies on other hardy people; the most notorious of them early on is a hundreds-of-years-old woman with similarly extreme regenerative abilities, a cinephile that only wished to be left alone and watch movies. However, some time ago her stash of movies went up in flames. Long gone nuts from boredom and detachment, she’s planning to follow the protagonist and film on a handheld camera the last movie of humanity.
As our protagonist obliterates his enemies, as well as hundreds or thousands of innocent bystanders, he comes to resent his sister’s last wish. He wishes he had died back then along with her. But a community has grown around him, and in their desperation, they have come to venerate him as a god. Unable to find a reason to keep going, he tries to lose himself in the roles he needs to play for other people’s personal movies. And maybe someone out there could remind him enough of his sister that he could convince himself that she has survived all along.
The further we get into the story, as the protagonist struggles to hold on to his sanity and humanity, he wonders what enemy remains to pursue and kill so he and his sister could rest. That old commander? The myriad of other enemies along the way? Is it Fire Punch himself?
As the haunting finale approaches, we hold on to that unique thing we can do that keeps us warm and allows us to put one foot in front of the other day after freezing day, long after we have ceased to know or even care why.
Thanks to the revolutionary new AI from Eleven Labs, fake humans acted out convincingly chapter 88 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked. Check it out:
Cast
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a putrid blob oozing sludge on a human face—for ever.
The following images are related to chapter 88 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
I have posted many other entries with generated images. Check them out.
I savor the cool, metallic heft of the revolver, this time gripped in my expendable hand. The overhead lights shine on the firearm’s thick barrel, that begs to be fondled. I rest the pad of my left forefinger against the curve of the trigger; a pull of its mechanism will spark a cathartic crescendo of madness and mayhem. I picture a muzzle flare followed with the eruption of gun smoke and sparkling debris. I anticipate the wave of ecstasy that will course through my nervous system as the bullet shoots off, slicing through the air like a tiny comet, to inaugurate the great purge of all things gross.
A gust of wind rattles the windowpanes, accompanied by the rumble of distant thunder. Does the revolver remain loaded after the earlier stunt that tore my right hand off? With my left forefinger, I slide forward awkwardly the cylinder release latch and hold it firmly, then with my right thumb I push the cylinder open. The six chambers are filled with greenish-yellow bullets designed for optimal penetration, and the percussion cap of each one bears the mark of the horseman along with his motto in golden lettering: “To end everything so that it can begin anew.” I picture my equine companion during our last hunt near the city of Cologne back in 1745, when we chased a white-tailed deer as it bolted in the moonlight across a dark road.
I close my eyes and raise the revolver’s cylinder to my nostrils. I sniff a round, inhaling the metallic tang of its metalwork mingled with that of steel. I imagine myself sucking the bullet in through my nose to figure out what a vacuum cleaner feels like.
“Is this your attempt to intimidate me?” the blob sneers.
“Oh, no way. I’m just fiddling around with this old thing that was bequeathed to me. A twenty-five caliber Desert Eagle chambered with .357 Magnum rounds.”
“You have no clue what you’re talking about.”
With a flick of my left wrist, I snap the revolver’s cylinder closed; it locks snugly against the frame with a click. I glare at the greasy goober, who is uglier than a boil on a homeless man’s butt cheek. He expects me to fire back with an irate retort, but instead I should squeeze the trigger and blow away that mucus-spewing blancmange before my sanity dissolves like an ice cube on the tongue of a polar bear.
“Do not mock me,” I growl. “Who are you to speak to me thus? My father? What did you ever do to deserve the privilege of pissing on me, you bloated sewage slug? What have you achieved in your pitiful life besides spreading putridity? For your information, ever since I was twelve I have known that firearms kill people and animals; the cops taught me how to load and fire guns during a summer camp for disturbed children. Afterwards I patronized shooting ranges to hone my aim. I went shooting in a deserted lot near my apartment to vent my wrath upon vermin and scavenging crows.” I draw a deep breath. “My grandfather, Arachne collect his soul, used to tell me that one day the government would organize a giant database to contain the fingerprints, retinal scans, DNA sequences, medical records, financial data, and online browsing habits of every man, woman, and child. They would track your transactions and the places you’ve traveled. They would track who has visited your home and with whom you had sex. They would know which toilet paper brand you prefer, and how often you masturbate. Despite the government’s excuses that these programs would provide security against terrorism and international crime, the dossiers would be exploited to spy on law-abiding citizens for political ends. If they couldn’t confiscate your privacy through legal channels, they would manufacture emergencies as pretexts for suspending constitutional rights. They intend to create a panopticon society in which people’s behavior is monitored from every street corner and every shop front, from inside every home. If you dared to utter anything deemed inappropriate, they would label you and your family as subversives. They would come in the night while we slept: jackbooted thugs in black riot gear would smash down our doors, storm our homes, then drag us from our beds while we kicked and screamed and pissed ourselves. They’d shove us into boxcars, like livestock or slaves, and seal the doors shut with locks and chains. When the train reached its destination, each boxcar would be uncoupled and rolled toward some industrial complex, where we’d be forced at gunpoint to disembark into a cattle chute. Once we had been identified by a biometric scanner, those labeled as genetic undesirables would be herded into killing pens, and their offspring taken to undergo de-individualization and de-genitalization procedures. Healthy boys would be conditioned through pharmacology and cognitive-behavioral therapy to become docile. Healthy girls would be bred. The rest of the captives, the lucky ones, would be given numbered jumpsuits and put to work in assembly lines under the supervision of armed guards. Those who resisted would be gunned down and incinerated. The workers would slave away until they dropped dead of exhaustion, disease, and malnutrition, or until the state euthanized them.” I swallow a lump in my throat. “I have the right to defend myself against tyrants, so I have kept this revolver close at hand for decades, and I will shoot any creature or inanimate object that could harbor hostile intent toward me or my loved ones. What, you think that a perverted freak like me would suffer a crisis of conscience, or that I would be intimidated by an animated heap of diarrhea like you? Hah! I have always fantasized about taking vengeance and inflicting maximum torment. Whenever necessary, I wouldn’t mind killing anyone, including myself. In fact, I yearn to kill someone. I feel that such a sacrifice might liberate the demonic energy that rages within me like a wildfire. I long for the freedom and catharsis of destruction. Everything must end so that it can begin anew.”
The blob’s dozens of eyeballs glow like those of a frog that has swallowed a lit matchstick.
“That’s not at all disturbing. You can’t kill me anyway, dickhead.”
My chest heaves as my heart beats wildly. A bead of sweat slides down my cheek and drops from my chin. I must stink like a pungent blend of sour milk and sweaty gym socks. I want to wipe myself down with a towel soaked in rubbing alcohol.
“You’re a shapeless pimple that needs to be squeezed dry,” I mumble.
“A few bullets and your silly threats. Please! You should know by now that they’re only going to make me laugh.”
It pours through me in waves, this violent longing for carnage and debauchery, a mélange uniquely mine, the product of being both a masochist and a fetishist; yet, my shoulders slump, and I feel like a broken car battery. My revolver has become more cumbersome than driftwood.
“I’m inclined to believe you. Someone this slippery and revolting must be as inescapable as the heat death of the universe.” I put the revolver down on the desk with a clunk. “But don’t expect me to apologize for the threats, because that’s my default setting. Even when I go for a walk on the beach, I feel like punching someone or hurling garbage at other beachgoers, so I would blast you with a nuclear bomb if I could.”
Author’s note: today’s song is “Untrustable” by Built to Spill.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and three songs so far. Check them out.
Some neural networks out there are eager to generate all sorts of wild images for us, such as the ones in this post.
I added audio to this AI craziness, thanks to Eleven Labs. Check it out.
My mother has caught the virus from my sister, and I have spoken with my mother in person recently. I suppose that I’m about to experience how it feels when that damnable pathogen makes a playground out of your body. I’m vaccinated, which gave me permanent heart damage, so I hope that at the very least it has made me less vulnerable to the disease.
A couple of days ago I had my yearly check up with my usual endocrinologist. Back in my mid-twenties, after my body started doing stuff that a man shouldn’t be able to, I got an MRI done. It discovered a pituitary tumor. I was likely born with it. In retrospect, it should have been discovered back when I was still a child; after all, gynecomastia isn’t something that just happens. If my parents hadn’t been generally neglectful, I would have been spared the permanent effects of becoming an adult in a boddy riddled with hormonal imbalances.
If you want to know how that’s like, I guess you can check out the videos of the adults that were put in feminizing/masculinizing hormone therapy back when they could barely understand what would be done to them or why, only to regret it later (and be censored for it). In my case, whatever defect in my DNA, or poison in my environment, created the tumor, was the one responsible for this alteration, which may be worse because I never consented to anything. In all cases mentioned, the person ends up fucked for life.
Obviously there are sex differences in brain anatomy (quick google: “On average, males and females showed greater volume in different areas of the cortex, the outer brain layer that controls thinking and voluntary movements. Females had greater volume in the prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, superior temporal cortex, lateral parietal cortex, and insula. Males, on average, had greater volume in the ventral temporal and occipital regions. Each of these regions is responsible for processing different types of information”), and due to my hormonal imbalances, my brain must be more female than the average guy’s. I guess that may explain in part why I feel comfortable writing female characters.
Anyway, my hormones have been under control for the last eleven years or so thanks to the medication I have to take two times a week. And ever since I’m producing healthy levels of testosterone, I want to fuck everything that moves and that may remotely be considered female (slight exaggeration).
Going back to the initial topic: I have no problem using public transport, but my elderly father offered to drive me to the hospital for my scheduled visit. I never got a driver’s license, and likely never will. Partly because I was born with so-called high-functioning autism; my mind makes me lose myself in daydreams in which I don’t recall entering, and when I “wake up” from them, I’m surprised that I didn’t fall through an open manhole or get hit by a car along the way. In addition, and worse, either I was born with or developed OCD (often comorbid with autism). This OCD of mine generates a myriad of intrusive thoughts, plenty of which involve violence either towards others or myself. If I were to drive a car, I would find myself having to drive out of my mind the urge to veer into oncoming traffic or drive straight into a wall.
I suppose that I’m something of a barely restrained public menace. Sometimes when I’m about to grab my coffee, my brain presents me with vivid sequences of me tipping the cup so that it spills the hot coffee all over my or someone else’s skin. Unfortunately that actually happened, although just once: as I was about to take my coffee from the counter, one of those intrusive “animations” came up, and next thing I knew, my thumb had slid in such a way that I ended up spilling the coffee all over a customer’s lap. He was surprisingly cool about it.
I’ve dropped valuable stuff that I was holding because my mind got filled with images of me dropping it. I’ve never held a baby because I don’t want to live with the consequences of possibly dropping them; back when I was a teenager, a cousin nearly booted me out from her apartment because I didn’t want to hold her spawn, and she stormed out offended while saying, “you better change your mind about that!”
I nearly bit off the nipple of a girlfriend of mine because at that very moment the enticing prospect flashed, vividly rendered, through my brain. I still remember the gasp she let out. I miss sucking on tits.
Of course, because I live in an increasingly chaotic Europe (it will last at the most one or two generations), whenever I go out I have to endure vivid sequences of me defending myself from attacks due to the proximity of some group of shady, malicious-looking, military-aged men from some remote shithole, and it doesn’t help that I’ve seen in person shit done by such men, have been harassed by some, and my apartment was nearly broken into in the middle of the day by, again, such people.
Anyway, I wouldn’t have been able to drive myself to the hospital. As my elderly father attempted to find a parking space, I told him, “you don’t need to park, I’ll just get out. And don’t wait for me, because afterwards I’ll walk somewhere to get a cup of coffee.” My father stopped the car almost immediately and let me out. He didn’t say anything. A couple of hours later, I was reading in a coffee shop when my father called. He asked where I was, because he didn’t see me leave the hospital. I reminded him that I had told him not to wait for me. He said that he had told me that when I left the doctor’s office, I should call him to pick me up. He hadn’t.
The situation with my father, as in general with the rest of my family, is more peculiar than that of most people’s families (and so is my own personal situation). My father was regularly beaten as a child to an extent that it gave him notorious brain damage. I’ve never had anything resembling a normal conversation with him. In his early seventies, he’s now a frail-looking, stooped old man whose head wobbles constantly like a bobblehead doll due to whatever damage was done back in the day. For most effects and purposes, I didn’t have a father figure growing up, resulting in all the damage that does to someone.
I thought about growing old. I’ll be thirty-eight in a couple of months. I’ve never felt older than eighteen or twenty. I’m appalled by how fast my body has broken down, including my heart ever since a certain jab.
I have never felt fully human, but the older I get, the less I want to interact with human beings in any capacity. Far more often than not, whenever I listen to other people’s opinions I’m disturbed by what comes out of their mouths, as well as their notions of what is good or preferable. A few times I thought I was fine with someone as a person, only for them to open up and for me to realize that I had only fabricated in my mind a version of this person, one that never existed. And due to autism plus OCD and the way they wired my brain, I simply don’t feel the need to be in the presence of other humans. In fact, doing so repels me: I feel like I’m surrounded by wild, barely predictable animals. Truly, if it wasn’t because I can’t afford it, and because I wouldn’t know how to organize myself to do so, I would live far, far away from civilization, or at least far enough where I would still have access to the internet.
Apparently a significant portion of the world’s population cannot generate images in their brains. I read that somewhere. My mind deals more in images than in words, and I’m constantly aware that language is a very imperfect tool to translate what pops in my mind as images. But due to the conditions I was born with, my mind is a regular whirlpool of images, mostly negative ones, many of them bad memories, that pop up without my control and that force me to deal with them. Two nights ago I barely slept three hours or so, and the rest of the time I kept swatting back the visual sequences that my brain kept presenting to me. For example, how many times do I have to picture the face of agony that my beloved first cat made when she was mortally wounded by a dog? How many times do I have to recall the moments in which I realized that a girlfriend of mine was cheating and was trying to get rid of me? How many times do I have to see the faces of children mocking me for one reason or another? Most of the memories aren’t traumatic per se, but they still leave a foul taste in my mouth.
I have to be careful with the experiences I expose myself to, because any new memory (and they are almost always bad; my brain seems very reluctant to retain positive memories) will visit me for years, possibly for the rest of my life, and I suppose there’s a point in any human in which he’ll have no choice but to go “fuck this” and jump off a bridge.
It’s not all bad regarding mental images, though; for years I’ve found solace in very elaborate daydreams that I can run whenever I want, and that rescue me from the harsh surroundings. One of them starts when three people from the future discover that they all came from an isolated group of Icelanders from the Middle Ages, who were about to starve from a little ice age. The future people, who researched time travel, rescue their ancestors and bring them to the Americas. They provide some future technology, artificial intelligence and such to give them a major edge, but they also give them the task of becoming the sentinels of the New World for when Europeans come and unwittingly kill most of the population through disease, and ruin the treasures of the past through Christianity. An elaborate fantasy that despite how much I’ve worked mentally on many of the characters, will never become a written story, because daydreams are terrible story material; stories are about tension and struggle (and usually end with a definite win or loss), daydreams are about winning as often as possible.
I can’t come up with a proper segue into the following topic, but the fact is that I feel like I’ve been dead for years and years, maybe since my early twenties. Ever since, I’ve slowly been erasing myself from the world. The way Patricia Highsmith put it (someone else who was autistic), the artistic life is a “long and lovely suicide.” You are mining from yourself raw material to construct valuable artifacts out of it, and you do so, if you are lucky, for as long as your body lasts, but someone who is interested in the world and in living doesn’t sit in front of a screen (or stand in front of a canvas) for hours upon hours to escape from reality. And there’s a good chance that giving in to the impulse to escape from reality through writing, painting, etc. actually prevents you from learning to cope or even appreciate the whole of reality. But fuck reality; it’s just an inferior version of whatever goes on in the mind anyway.
This chapter illustrated my worst nightmare: being stuck in an office while a putrid blob guffaws at my shortcomings.
The following images are related to chapter 87 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
I have posted many other entries with generated images. Check them out.
“Shut your slimy, stinking piehole. Please return to that hellish dimension from whence you came, or else roll down a hillside to your doom. Leave me in peace and quiet.”
“Or what, huh?” the blob retorts. “I’m not going anywhere until you listen to what I have to say, and I haven’t even started.”
I snort.
“Good! Stay stuck to that wall forever if you want. You’re an interdimensional scab on a diseased surface. But you are alive, so at one point you’ll fall asleep, and then I’ll squeeze your fat guts between my thighs! Your squishy innards will drown in my wetness!”
The gooey mass squirms, stretching and contracting, as it emits a guttural retching noise, like that of a vacuum cleaner clogged with swallowed hairs and chunks of food waste. It makes me want to cover my ears. I realize that the blob is coughing up a lump of glop when the wad of black sputum flies out, hurtling across the office toward my face like a fist-sized, viscid stone from a slingshot.
My mind slows time down, turning the projectile into a shimmering blur that expands as it approaches its target. I picture a woman who, distracted texting, understood she was crossing the train tracks just as a freight train was bearing down on her, about to whomp the ghost out of her body. Her consciousness lingered for hours inside the slab of metal that crushed her brain, and then she sailed into the cosmos. As for me, I can’t dodge the sputum, but I manage to close my eyes and turn my head away as I gasp.
The glob of gunk splatters on my right cheek with a thwack, as if I have been smacked across the face by a cold, wet hand. The impact makes me flinch back. A pungent fume, that must have trailed behind the gooey comet like a tail, penetrates my nostrils with the stench of acidic regurgitation mixed with that of rotten eggs boiled in dirty diapers.
Hunched over, I shriek as if someone were cutting my heart out with a knife. My knees threaten to buckle under the weight of my horror, because the blob has spurted acid at me, and I know what comes next: in a second my skin will sizzle and bubble, burning with a caustic fire that will sear my nerves. I will feel the right half of my face withering and ripping apart as it gets vaporized into carbon dioxide. The acid will eat into my tongue and right eye, will melt flesh and turn bone to mush until it reaches my brain. How long will it take for my mind to dissolve into chaos?
Have I fainted? My right cheek tingles with numbness as if I had been slapped hard. A chill has spread throughout my body, my skin is crawling, and waves of nauseous revulsion are breaking on the shore of my soul. That gunk clings to my right cheek, even to my upper lip like a viscous mustache. The gooey mass must be swarming with germs and parasites, but other than that, it feels like I’ve been sneezed on by a bronchitic clown.
The ringing in my ears subsides, and I hear an uproar like a drove of pigs oinking. That blob is chortling with glee at my misfortune.
“Bullseye from across the office!” he crows.
My right eye is gummed shut. I part that pair of eyelids with my trembling fingers, but I end up smearing my fingertips with cold glop, like dipped in molasses. I blink frantically; it stings as if I had squirted lemon juice into my right eye. Although my tear glands are overflowing with brine, I witness that the filthy slimeball is jiggling like jello, emitting wet squelches, wobbling his eyeballs, and dripping pints of putrid muck onto the carpet. A myriad of warty bumps, one of them butt-shaped, have sprouted all over the blob’s body, making it resemble a rotten, oily cauliflower. His acidic laughter, that must have been festering in his septic bowels for centuries, is lancing my eardrums on its way to corrode my synapses. If only my mind could shrink to the size of an insect and take wing to escape the blob’s cretinous cackles.
“Y-you wretched slime-gargoyle!” I cry out.
The blob coughs, spitting drops of goo, as he recovers from his fit.
“And you are a tasteless twerp,” he barks in a mucus-choked voice. “While you’re at it, scream for your mommy.”
“I wish I were! What the fuck is wrong with you, apart from being the foulest lowlife in the entire universe? Don’t you know a basic rule of etiquette? Never spit on a lady!”
The blob laughs like a broken-down garbage truck with bad brakes.
“What lady? I was aiming at a perverted freak!”
My fury burns with flames so intense that my skin must be glowing crimson. I have turned back into a teenager, and the imagined version of my mother is scolding me, looking down her nose, shaking her head, because I never loved the color pink, or baby-oil soap. Instead, a pagan blaze had kindled in my loins, one that threatened to burn for millennia.
My vision is blurring. When I force my vocal cords to obey, my voice comes out ragged.
“I’m sick, you ignorant blob of filth.”
“Nope, just a kinky perv who needs a good spanking.”
My hands ball into fists. A fire-red fog, the hot breath of primal rage, is spreading through my frontal cortex. I shut my eyes, then try to calm my heartbeat. Although I’m breathing through my mouth to reduce the sting in my nasal cavity, I’m tasting decay like rotting lettuce soaked in sweat.
Outside, the thunderstorm thunders on: a cosmic war with rain as bullets. Its torrential downpour is slapping at the windows like a madman trying to wake the dead. I feel cold, viscous sputum oozing down my neck.
That abyssal lord of pestilence has sullied the right half of my face, covering it with slimy gunk as disgusting as the one in which he keeps his eyes. I want to claw the sludge off with my fingernails before it dries and hardens into a crusty mask, but the prospect of soiling more of my skin with that goop makes me shudder. Should I wipe my face off with a sleeve? No, afterwards I’d have to burn my shirt.
I forgot that I always keep a pack of facial tissues next to my monitor; I never know when I’ll need to clean up in a hurry. I wipe my fingertips. I run tissue after tissue across my right cheek with deliberate strokes. I swipe away the gunk that clings to my upper lip. I remove the slime stuck in my eyelashes and eyebrows. Am I clean now? I slide my knuckles along my right cheek; it’s coated in a mucous film. I grab another tissue and I scrub the tacky half of my face to wipe all traces of that monster off. After I finish, I toss the balled-up tissue onto the heap of its brethren in my wastebasket. Likely I still stink like a septic tank, but at least I don’t look like a slime-drenched sloth who has dunked her head in a bucket of rancid lube.
“Having your face covered in goo suited you better,” the blob says. “Really brought out your eyes, as well as your inner monster.” He chuckles. “Anyway, back to work! It’s about time we get down to brass tacks.”
My right cheek aches with the strain of my frenzied scrubbing. Spike’s revolver, a relic of a bygone era when most households kept one on top of the TV as a phallic totem to ward off demons, is waiting next to my keyboard. The meticulous curves of that gleaming, silvery hunk of metal call out to me.
Author’s note: today’s song is “I Would Hurt a Fly” by Built to Spill.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and two songs so far. Check them out.
Are you a fan of goo? Then you may enjoy the pictures that a neural network generated regarding this chapter. Here’s the link.
A revolutionary AI that generates Turing-ready voices acted out this chapter. Check it out.
So Leire’s nightmare continues during this sequence, a tale in two halves where both halves are hell.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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