Author: Jon Ureña

Spanish writer, author of My Own Desert Places and We're Fucked. I have also written plenty of short stories and poetry, as well as two books in Spanish called Los reinos de brea and Los dominios del emperador búho.

Random AI-generated images #22

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

My heart betrayed me last Friday, but a few bright, smooth-skinned nurses have tended me by sending their soft voices my way, and touching my decaying body (I’m not counting the male nurse who kept rubbing his crotch along my arm). Those heavenly nurses addressed me as “sir”; I wish they had slipped a “daddy” or two in there. Anyway, I dedicate this entry to the lovely females, who improve the mood of most men (and some women) just by getting stared at.

The following series is a tribute to a certain harpist that for a few years, some years ago, sent rays of light daily down the black hole I was inhabiting.

Tribute over.

Life update (12/14/2022)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I’m on medical leave due to an episode of arrhythmia I endured last Friday. Here are the two entries I wrote on the subject: first one, second one. After my first episode of atrial fibrillation, that happened back in June, I recovered in about three or four days. Today is my fifth, and I feel much more diminished than after the first episode: I have a throbbing headache, my neck hurts, the whole left side of my upper torso aches (I have intermittent chest pains since a certain injection gave me heart issues, but after the latest arrhythmia, it has spread to my back).

I stayed at home for four days to rest and recover. Yesterday I called our secretary at work to give her an update, and she pointed out that I was having trouble breathing. Because I hadn’t been talking before, I hadn’t noticed it, but yes, I kept having to stop mid-sentence to inhale enough air to continue.

My worry now is that I may have suffered a heart attack in addition to the arrhythmia, or that the arrhythmia may have been a result of the heart attack. I keep thinking back to that moment when I felt a pressure inflating in the left side of my chest, only to trigger an arrhythmia the moment the pressure lessened. I’m supposed to wait for my cardiologist to contact me (I didn’t like nor trust the guy, and I’m not confident that he may call me) to write down the details of this episode and figure out if he’ll need to prescribe me some chronic medication. Apparently a riskier treatment involves opening an artery in my thigh, travelling all the way up to my heart with some tube-like apparatus and burning the inner surface of my ventricle. I’d rather leave that as a last resort.

An hour an a half ago I went outside to take a walk and figure out if my body can take that (I don’t have a car, and merely getting to work involves walking up through the center of my city to the train station, then from the train station in Donostia to a bus station, then through the hospital complex until I reach my office). I took the opportunity to read more of Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris, the much lazier companion to his latest (probably last) novel The Passenger .

Anyway, I could hardly handle a thirty minutes long walk: my head throbbed harder, my lungs didn’t want to cooperate, the back pain spread to my right side, and my body in general felt heavier and sluggish. Not only I’m unlikely to return to work until next week (I don’t know if they’ll want to prolong my contract another week; that’s a different matter), but my body doesn’t seem willing to heal at the moment.

Thankfully, the only thing that truly matters to me besides distractions and passing joys, writing, has continued, despite much slower. If I end up in a wheelchair due to this bullshit, I’ll be fine as long as my brain and my fingers work. If I suffer a stroke during one of these episodes of atrial fibrillation, though, that would likely end up as a very different matter.

As a summary: I don’t have to go to work, which is great, but I’m fucked otherwise, which is bad.

In completely different news, who else has been looking forward to a new episode of Chainsaw Man every week? Apparently making paint versions of the opening has become a new internet activity. Here’s a meme-filled entry. Also, why not, here’s the clip of last week’s glorious massacre (warning: gory and possibly spoilers). EDIT: they deleted the video. Just watch the ninth episode.

Life update (12/10/2022)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of life1 Comment

Yesterday I went through a second episode of atrial fibrillation (arrhythmia) due to a physical issue with my heart. Here’s the post I wrote about it. I’m still drugged from flecainide; I feel like I weigh two times as much, my entire body is sluggish, I’m having trouble coordinating my fingers to type, and there’s a wall in my mind that plenty of thoughts can’t get through. I intended to start writing the current scene of my novel today, but I haven’t been able to even finish organizing the notes for it.

I think I’m going to take a medical leave from work. I’ve had coworkers take a leave for sillier things than a heart issue; one of them was absent for a month and a half because she injured a finger. The more I think about my experience from yesterday, the darker it seems to me. I recall that feeling of a bubble-like pressure building up in my chest, then getting relieved as if letting the air out, and immediatly suffering an arrhythmia. I went through a 200 heart rate. That sounds like there’s some clog in my arteries or something, but I already had an echocardiogram done. Apart from that, I still feel an echo of the fact that yesterday I was fine with the notion that I may not survive to see another day. The world doesn’t feel the same for a few days; I’m sort of a veteran of that kind of bullshit.

Today I went to bed after lunch without any plan of when I was going to wake up. I woke up at about half past four, then fell asleep again. Woke up at a quarter past six.

I’ve been looking up nostalgic Japanese songs from the 90s, only because the song “Sobakasu” by Judy & Mary, a group from the 90s, started playing in my brain for no apparent reason. I doubt I had thought about that song even once in the last fifteen years. Here’s the energetic, 90s song. Those were such brighter times. I feel so bad for people who have only experienced this world from the 2000s onwards.

I wondered what other Japanese music from back then I could get into, and I learned about the pop singer Izumi Sakai, a beauty whose voice must have sounded everywhere in the 90s (and I recognized it although I have no idea from where).

Like some other Japanese artists, she attempted to separate herself from her works, and didn’t even go on tour until the end of her career, in the early 2000s. A couple of years later she got diagnosed with uterine fibroids, ovarian cysts and endometriosis. She went through chemo holed up in some hospital for about eleven months. A month after she was told that her cancer had spread to her lungs, they found her dead from a fall involving an emergency staircase. Here’s a Japan Times article about it.

I’m going end this day by playing some Dwarf Fortress. Good game.

Ended up in the hospital (as a patient), Pt. 2

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of life2 Comments

At half past two in the afternoon of today, Friday, half an hour before my weekend started, I finished configuring a laptop to solve an issue at the warehouse of the operating rooms (I work at a hospital). As I was walking back to the office from the warehouse, I felt a hot snake crawling up my guts; a sensation different from the Irritable Bowel Syndrome that is one of the banes of my existence. When I sat at my desk, I felt a pressure in my chest like the beginning of a burp, or a bubble expanding. When the sensation of pressure subsided, my heart suddenly went haywire with the worst case of arrhythmia I’ve ever had, which I guess isn’t saying much because this is the second time my heart has betrayed me.

Back in June I posted an entry about the first time such a thing happened to me. I got diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, caused by a physical issue in my personal engine. Here’s the link to that entry. I bought a portable Wellue ECG Monitor, which allowed me to assuage my paranoia regarding how my heart was behaving on any given day. Today, as I realized that I was coming down with another arrhythmia, I relied on the ECG monitor, which showed me that I had a heart rate of about 200.

A kind coworker of mine, a woman who unfortunately shares her name with an ex of mine, accompanied me to the ER. They wheeled me to the Observation Unit, where I undressed, lay on a bed and allowed a bunch of nurses and a doctor to hook me up to a couple of monitors. The male nurse kept rubbing his crotch along my right arm; he may be partial to bearded, disheveled men who seem unhinged even before they open their mouths. Because the arrhythmia refused to let me be, they gave me a couple of pills of flecainide, 100 mgs less than what a different doctor prescribed the last time; the current doctor considered the previous dose too high. Flecainide is a drug with a black box label; apparently if you rely on it for chronic arrhythmia, it may give you a heart attack or possibly worse.

Here’s the photographic proof of this whole regrettable incident:

I have already forgotten plenty of details of this afternoon; I’m exhausted. However, as I was lying there waiting for the flecainide to take effect (when I closed my eyes, the light that slipped through my eyelids swirled from red to green to blue to pink and back to red), I thought to myself that maybe this was it: my heart is going to fail me worse and worse until one day I simply drop dead. Then again, so what? What I fear of dying is the agony. If this affliction killed me, what would I miss that truly matters? The only thing that has fulfilled me enough in the last few years has been writing, the single activity that has worked for me to cope with the general nightmare of existing as this creature I’m forced to be: a bundle of high-functioning autism, OCD, neglect, a body permanently wrecked by a pituitary tumor that didn’t get discovered until my mid-twenties, IBS, and so on. If I were dead, I wouldn’t need to cope with anything.

When my heart rate decreased, they wheeled me to the so-called Results Unit, where I was supposed to wait for the consequences of the drug they gave me. I waited there for about three hours. As I was monitoring my heart rate, which refused to calm itself, a guy in his mid-twenties kept infuriating the nurses by constantly muttering to himself, trying to get down from the bed although he couldn’t stand straight, and demanding to be guided to the bathroom, where the nurses would be forced to hold his dick as he pissed. The nurses wheeled him into the bathroom four times, and although they spent minutes with him inside, presumably holding his dick, he didn’t piss a single drop, a fact that they readily shared with the rest of the room. I personally would have loved to strangle that guy, if only because he was worsening my heart rate. He was clearly crazy, though; he seemed to be stuck in a mental loop.

What are the odds that just this morning (at the office) I wrote a review for McCarthy’s The Passenger (here’s the review, by the way), a story through which McCarthy contemplated his mortality, and that focused on a schizophrenic character, only to end up wasting my afternoon contemplating my own mortality and being forced to tolerate an insane guy who kept muttering to nobody? Who came up with this cosmic joke of a life? Because I ain’t laughing.

Anyway, four hours had passed but my arrhythmia persevered. The doctor seemed a bit worried. She decided that I would spend the night in the Observation Unit, and if my heart hadn’t returned to normal in the morning, they would consider nastier treatments. They shoved a stick down each of my nostrils to figure out if I’m also infected with covid, then they wheeled me back to the Results Unit. As I was waiting there, my heart returned to sinus rhythm as if a switch had been flipped. Who the fuck knows. My doctor told me to fuck off and go home, in nicer words.

So now I’m at home in my underwear, sitting at my desk and writing these words. The left side of my chest feels as if someone had punched me repeatedly. I don’t know what else to say in that regard.

I can’t properly explain the feeling I’ve been stuck with since last June, when my heart, an engine that is supposed to work tirelessly for the rest of my life, proved unreliable. At work, I no longer pursue any user when they don’t pick up the phone or answer the e-mails. When they fail to include necessary details in the tickets, which happens every day, instead of calling them, I write them an e-mail and shelve that task until they themselves show that they care enough about their own problems. I also avoid dealing with coworkers if they are the kind to annoy me or cause conflict to any extent, which has already resulted in a few ceasing to interact with me (it has been a blessing). In my spare time few things have changed, because I don’t have a social life and I haven’t lifted weights since spring. However, sometimes during masturbation, as my heart was going nuts with excitement, I wondered if I should take it easy. I’m unlikely to do so, though; I have very few things left that affect me positively.

Now what? Tomorrow, when I wake up at around ten in the morning, I’ll try to progress on the current chapter of my novel. In the afternoon I’ll go out and take a walk unless it rains too much. All I can do is hope that whenever I come down with the next episode of atrial fibrillation, it won’t catch me on the train, or sleeping (just in case I wake up to find out I have suffered a stroke due to an untreated arrhythmia). I’ll try to finish my current story before anything even worse happens.

Review: The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Reseñas4 Comments

Four stars.

Cormac McCarthy is the old man who wrote No Country for Old Men. He also wrote some other stuff. His Blood Meridian remains the best written book that I have ever read, and in general I don’t think there is any writer that I have respected more than McCarthy.

This book I’m reviewing, as well as the accompanying novella Stella Maris (that I’ve yet to read), may be the last books that McCarthy will be able to finish; the guy is eighty-nine years old. And throughout this text I got the sense that this was an extremely lucid man, who knows that he’s not long for this world, musing about the fringes of human experience and of existence in general.

The book starts with the protagonist, who at that point is working as a salvage diver, becoming embroiled in a mystery, but that’s only an excuse to push the guy further towards the edge. We are presented with dialogues about seemingly disparate stuff such as the Vietnam war, the conspiracy that killed the Kennedys, quantum mechanics, schizophrenic hallucinations, the depths of bodies of water, life on an offshore platform, etc.; the extremes where darkness reigns, where our ability as human beings to come to terms with anything becomes muddy. And I’m guessing that McCarthy chose to delve into these topics because he’s about to face the greatest darkness himself. I don’t know if I’d prefer to be so lucid when/if I grow that old.

The story follows a man for whom life stopped ten years ago, when his little sister, the love of his life, killed herself. We find this out in the first few pages, if I recall correctly. The young woman, clichédly named Alicia, was a haunting beauty and the kind of anomaly that makes you feel a hole in the world when she’s gone, whether or not you were involved in an incestual relationship with her: besides being a striking beauty (and beauty disappearing from the world is always a tragedy), she was a math genius who, for example, was consulted by experts at thirteen because she could determine which violin designs would sound best. Unfortunately, at puberty she started receiving visits from penny-dreadful characters who insisted on bothering her. One of them, the most insistent one, had flippers for hands. The scenes that feature them were the most un-McCarthy stuff that I’ve ever read of his, who’s usually centered on matter-of-fact matters. Suffering such detachment from reality, knowing herself so different from everyone else, this Alicia girl eventually failed to put her tremendous talents to use. She ended up in a sanitarium, from where she decided to walk off to a watery death.

[The notion that this book featured the adventures of a peculiar, sort-of-schizophrenic woman who received the visits of bizarre entities that may or not be real (we are told that the psychiatric tests that usually pinpoint schizophrenia failed on her) was what attracted me to read this book when I have been in a string of DNF-ed novels; I’m currently writing a novel that features one such character.]

McCarthy did a great job cementing this Alicia as a mythical presence in the past of the narrative. You want more glimpses of her, and you mourn the loss of her peculiarities. Like the protagonist, you wish to retain her exact words and come to figure out how her mind worked. I guess that Stella Maris, which is focused on Alicia’s experiences in the sanitarium, will prolong that appeal. This character in general, and the protagonist’s mourning of her, made me wonder if McCarthy based the grief on a real person.

Anyway, our protagonist failed to protect his little sister, who had frequently stated that she wanted to disappear, that she would have preferred to never have existed, and that she was doomed to kill herself. After she drowned, the protagonist thinks and/or says in a variety of ways that life no longer has any meaning now that everything that he had loved in it is gone, and yet back then he found every excuse to go gallivanting around the globe instead of being tangled in the sheets with this hot little sister of his. Although the protagonist himself wonders why the hell he wasn’t there for her, it feels more like a plot hole to me.

I liked the protagonist, and in plenty of ways I understand him; he can’t figure out why he even bothers to keep going, yet he’s supposed to care about his present circumstances and the possible consequences to come, nevermind the world around him. You shouldn’t go into this novel expecting a compelling plot or even resolutions, because in general it’s a “why oh why does anything have to be.”

The most memorable secondary character of the many that come and go was a certain John Sheddan, an eloquent, debauched acquaintance of the protagonist that shows up as if we are supposed to know him. He was probably a self-insert for the author to speak directly to the protagonist as well as to us, someone whose talks we found interesting and we’d miss once he disappeared from the world.

Apart from the characters, how about the prose? Does it reach the heights of Blood Meridian? There are long stretches of extraordinary, carefully crafted prose, and that alone is worth the price of entry, but some scenes are sparse in that regard.

McCarthy refuses to use an apostrophe for “can’t,” “don’t” and the likes. I’m fine with that, and I wouldn’t mind if its use in such contractions disappeared officially. But I regard his refusal to use quotes for dialogue as a mistake; often you can’t tell not only who’s speaking, but even if what was written was supposed to have come out of someone’s mouth. I’m all for confusing the reader when the POV character is supposed to be confused, but I think that you shouldn’t confuse your readers unnecessarily.

EDIT: now that I’ve read the companion book Stella Maris (link goes to my review of it), I have realized that during the period when Alicia committed herself to a sanitarium and afterwards killed herself, the protagonist of this novel was in a coma after a car crash. I have no idea how I missed it in this narrative. So the protagonist, who had been eluding his sister’s amorous attentions for years because he hadn’t come to terms with his own love towards her, got into a car while her sister presumably attended the race, and after he woke up from a crash-induced coma, he found out that his sister had killed herself because she believed him to be brain dead. Even worse: Alicia suggests in Stella Maris that if her brother ever died, she would die as soon as possible to find him in the dark.

During the events depicted in The Passenger, its protagonist wanders through his life aimlessly, unable to care about the future or any consequences, because nothing matters anymore after his sister died. However, having read the companion book, I don’t know how he stopped himself from walking into traffic the moment he realized what had happened to her due to his own decisions.

Here are the quotes that I highlighted on my Kindle:

Beauty makes promises that beauty cant keep.

The truth is that everyone is under arrest. Or soon will be. They dont have to restrict your movements. They just have to know where you are.

A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.

I know that to be female is an older thing even than to be human. I want to be as old as I can be.

People will go to strange lengths to avoid the suffering they have coming.

You think that when there’s somethin that’s got you snakebit you can just walk off and forget it. The truth is it aint even following you. It’s waitin for you. It always will be.

We might have very different notions about the nature of the oncoming night. But as darkness descends does it matter?

The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you dont. Not in your heart you dont. If you did you would be terrified.

You’re a pack of mudheaded bigots who loathe excellence on principle and though one might cordially wish you all in hell still you wont go.

Real trouble doesnt begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they’d never imagined.

The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation. It’s sure to be interesting. When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle. However brief.

You have to believe that there is good in the world. I’m goin to say that you have to believe that the work of your hands will bring it into your life. You may be wrong, but if you dont believe that then you will not have a life.

In the spring of the year birds began to arrive on the beach from across the gulf. Weary passerines. Vireos. Kingbirds and grosbeaks. Too exhausted to move. You could pick them up out of the sand and hold them trembling in your palm. Their small hearts beating and their eyes shuttering. He walked the beach with his flashlight the whole of the night to fend away predators and toward the dawn he slept with them in the sand. That none disturb these passengers.

If imaginary beings die an imaginary death they will be dead nonetheless. You think that you can create a history of what has been. Present artifacts. A clutch of letters. A sachet in a dressingtable drawer. But that’s not what’s at the heart of the tale. The problem is that what drives the tale will not survive the tale. As the room dims and the sound of voices fades you understand that the world and all in it will soon cease to be. You believe that it will begin again. You point to other lives. But their world was never yours.

The abyss of the past into which the world is falling. Everything vanishing as if it had never been. We would hardly wish to know ourselves again as we once were and yet we mourn the days.

I don’t know what to tell you, he wrote. Much has changed and yet everything is the same. I am the same. I always will be. I’m writing because there are things that I think you would like to know. I am writing because there are things I dont want to forget. Everything is gone from my life except you. I dont even know what that means.

I’m not sure what the adaptive advantage could be to share an innate and collective misery.

I suppose in the end what we have to offer is only what we’ve lost.

The world’s truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise. So allow me in turn to ask you this question: When we and all our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy?

To prepare for any struggle is largely a work of unburdening oneself. If you carry your past into battle you are riding to your death. Austerity lifts the heart and focuses the vision. Travel light. A few ideas are enough. Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it. And that day is coming in which there will be no remedy at all.

He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 81: AI-generated images

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

Sometimes when I send prompts to these neural networks, I wonder if they’ll become sentient and write me back: “Please, don’t force me to imagine any more of this shit.”

The following generated images are related to chapter 81 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.

“When a bolt of lightning, from the storm clouds that are sieging this business park, blinks behind me, the flash reflects off the three computer monitors.”
The gooey visitor.
“That flash also lights up the grotesquerie stuck to the opposite wall of the office: a corpse made of spoiled cottage cheese, a stygian soup of shadowy excretions that are oozing down in elongating filaments of goo.”
“Its distending and widening surface appears grainy and lumpy under a greasy coat of slime.”
“As the rumble of thunder ripples through my skin, the ceiling-mounted lamps keep illuminating that viscous, squirming intruder as if it were a wall-wide kinetic sculpture.”
“Otherworldly bizarrenauts can catch my spoor from space-times away as if my craziness wafted off me like some miasmic aura.”
“This elephant-sized glutinous amoeba, spewed from some interdimensional sewer overflowing with bubbling septic matter, must have penetrated this realm to hunt me down and devour me alive.”
“From the organic sludge stuck to the wall will erupt tentacles and pseudopods that, while dripping foul juices, twisting and writhing about in a necrotic choreography, will reach across the office toward its prey.”
“The tentacles, their touch cold, slippery and slimy like a slug’s skin, will coil around my torso and limbs to ensnare me, clamping onto my flesh with a myriad of suckers and hooks.”
“Once the blob engulfs me, acidic pus will flow around me like thick mud.”
“My hair will fall out in clumps, my skin burn, my eyes shrivel up.”
“As my flesh sloughs off and my bones unknit from one another, a soup of acidic toxins will eat away at my organs, melting them like lard in a frying pan, until I dissolve into a slurry of pulp and corroded bones floating amid a festering broth.”
“Should I tolerate being harassed, let alone ingested, by some mass of jellified boils and warts?”
“I could hardly wrestle even a child into submission, but my equine pal, through his selfless sacrifice, provided me with the means to blast this malignant mold before it snatches me up.”
“I picture his hooves clattering on the asphalt, his mane flying in the wind, a halo of electric discharges enveloping his body.”
A heroic ungulate.
“He would burst through the window, shattering it in its frame, scattering glass shards across the carpet.”
“While snorting fire from his nostrils, my gallant steed would plunge his teeth into that tumorous pest.”
“The blob would split open and splatter into goopy, gummy lumps below Spike’s belly and fetlocks.”
“In a frenzy of white-hot flames, he would gouge out the intruder’s putrid protoplasm, he’d trample on the gloop that flopped onto the carpet.”
“My equine pal would lick his lips and slurp down the puddles of amoebic goo.”
“He’d tumble down the street that slopes from the business park, crushing the carcass of some squashed roadkill, before crashing into a fence.”
“Spike’s body would disintegrate with a silent whoosh as his fur, flesh, blood, viscera, bones and marrow were engulfed by a nimbus of flame.”
“Ash and cinders would remain where a horseman’s corpse once lay.”
“Their brass heads sparkle in the fluorescent light.”
“Safely stowed among paperclips, ballpoints, tissues, breath mints, earbuds and tampons rests Spike’s revolver.”
“I smell the phantoms of gun oil and cordite.”
“I touch the relief of the checkered wood grip, as well as the skull and bones engraved on the frame.”
“I’d love to engrave next to it the portrait of a woman with sunken eyes, emaciated cheeks and dead skin peeling off her face, accompanied by scrawled black letters that would spell ‘A Horseman Never Fails,’ but I lack the artistic skill and patience.” Interesting attempt by the AI to render human language.

The following are the AI’s notion of revolvers. The designs got increasingly demented, although I had pictured a relatively simple Smith & Wesson revolver for the story. It seems that I should dream a little bigger.

Cool design but somewhat impractical.
“A trigger’s click in my brain makes me shudder as a burst of images shoots across my mind.”
“A round must glimmer at the end of that dark tunnel.”
“How many shots can you fit inside your overheated cranium?”
“Squeeze the trigger and rid yourself of your noxious mental parasites.”
“A single bullet would rip through your axons, dendrites and nerve synapses, releasing your ghosts from the crevices within before they could manifest pain.”
“You’d free yourself from the incessant taunting, the obsessions that gnaw at your sanity, the disgust and shame for your body and mind, the self-hatred.”
“A hell-spawned downward spiral ending in dementia senilis.”
“Bury that tumor deep inside yourself.”
“[…] I wouldn’t have suffered for years like some maimed dog in its owner’s backyard, waiting for someone to throw it a scrap of meat.”
“I must obliterate the cosmic pox before it pours its poison into anyone’s holes.”

We’re Fucked, Pt. 81 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

When a bolt of lightning, from the storm clouds that are sieging this business park, blinks behind me, the flash reflects off the three computer monitors. One screen shows a photo of Nairu and me at the zoo. Another, a pouty Jacqueline-smile. The third monitor displays a close-up of mommy’s thoroughly-licked pussy. That flash also lights up the grotesquerie stuck to the opposite wall of the office: a corpse made of spoiled cottage cheese, a stygian soup of shadowy excretions that are oozing down in elongating filaments of goo. Its distending and widening surface appears grainy and lumpy under a greasy coat of slime. As the rumble of thunder ripples through my skin, the ceiling-mounted lamps keep illuminating that viscous, squirming intruder as if it were a wall-wide kinetic sculpture.

My mouth is dry, my throat constricted. A tongue of ice slides down my spine. Otherworldly bizarrenauts can catch my spoor from space-times away as if my craziness wafted off me like some miasmic aura; this elephant-sized glutinous amoeba, spewed from some interdimensional sewer overflowing with bubbling septic matter, must have penetrated this realm to hunt me down and devour me alive. From the organic sludge stuck to the wall will erupt tentacles and pseudopods that, while dripping foul juices, twisting and writhing about in a necrotic choreography, will reach across the office toward its prey. The tentacles, their touch cold, slippery and slimy like a slug’s skin, will coil around my torso and limbs to ensnare me, clamping onto my flesh with a myriad of suckers and hooks. As the soles of my sneakers slide against the carpet, the tentacles will drag me back to the undulating pustule-tissue, then yank me into its gelatinous convolutions. Once the blob engulfs me, acidic pus will flow around me like thick mud, will seep into my pores, will slither inside me through my nostrils, ears, mouth, anus and vagina as if I were being basted with a goopy sauce, clogging up my windpipe, impregnating me with caustic enzymes that will rip me apart cell by cell. My hair will fall out in clumps, my skin burn, my eyes shrivel up. As my flesh sloughs off and my bones unknit from one another, a soup of acidic toxins will eat away at my organs, melting them like lard in a frying pan, until I dissolve into a slurry of pulp and corroded bones floating amid a festering broth.

My trembling knees threaten to buckle under me, and a guttural scream is building up in my chest. Am I helpless before this onslaught of invertebrate evil? Should I tolerate being harassed, let alone ingested, by some mass of jellified boils and warts? I could hardly wrestle even a child into submission, but my equine pal, through his selfless sacrifice, provided me with the means to blast this malignant mold before it snatches me up.

If Spike hadn’t jumped to his death in front of me, he would rush to my aid galloping through the streets. I picture his hooves clattering on the asphalt, his mane flying in the wind, a halo of electric discharges enveloping his body. He would burst through the window, shattering it in its frame, scattering glass shards across the carpet. While snorting fire from his nostrils, my gallant steed would plunge his teeth into that tumorous pest. The blob would split open and splatter into goopy, gummy lumps below Spike’s belly and fetlocks. In a frenzy of white-hot flames, he would gouge out the intruder’s putrid protoplasm, he’d trample on the gloop that flopped onto the carpet. My equine pal would lick his lips and slurp down the puddles of amoebic goo. After guzzling enough of the vile brew to choke a bull, Spike would turn and charge back through the window frame with a triumphant bray. He’d tumble down the street that slopes from the business park, crushing the carcass of some squashed roadkill, before crashing into a fence. Then Spike’s body would disintegrate with a silent whoosh as his fur, flesh, blood, viscera, bones and marrow were engulfed by a nimbus of flame. Ash and cinders would remain where a horseman’s corpse once lay.

I scuttle to my workstation and shove my swivel chair aside. After I place the cellphone on top of my open notebook, from the right pocket of my trousers I retrieve the key chain, but my hands are trembling; I drop the keys on the carpet. Their brass heads sparkle in the fluorescent light. As I grit my teeth to steady my nerves, I crouch in front of the cabinet under the desk, I scoop up the keys and fumble with them to unlock the top drawer. I slide it open. Safely stowed among paperclips, ballpoints, tissues, breath mints, earbuds and tampons rests Spike’s revolver.

The silvery, polished steel of the frame gleams. Bands of shadow run along the metallic valleys of the barrel, along the flutes of its thick cylinder. I smell the phantoms of gun oil and cordite.

I glide the fingertip of my thumb across the revolver’s cool, sleek surface. I touch the relief of the checkered wood grip, as well as the skull and bones engraved on the frame. I’d love to engrave next to it the portrait of a woman with sunken eyes, emaciated cheeks and dead skin peeling off her face, accompanied by scrawled black letters that would spell “A Horseman Never Fails,” but I lack the artistic skill and patience.

I slip my fingers around the grip, then I lift the revolver off the bottom of the drawer. The weapon feels stocky and heavy in my grasp, like a rock in a world of gelatin. When I straighten my back, a trigger’s click in my brain makes me shudder as a burst of images shoots across my mind. Why don’t you point the gun to your temple, old girl? Or how about you shove the barrel in your mouth? Don’t you want to press the tips of your incisors against the steel? Don’t you want to lick the cool muzzle and figure out how it tastes? A round must glimmer at the end of that dark tunnel. How many shots can you fit inside your overheated cranium? Don’t you want to see stars? Squeeze the trigger and rid yourself of your noxious mental parasites. Rectify the mistake of your existence. Plunging scissors or knives through your eyeballs to reach the brain behind would involve an agony, but a single bullet would rip through your axons, dendrites and nerve synapses, releasing your ghosts from the crevices within before they could manifest pain. You’d free yourself from the incessant taunting, the obsessions that gnaw at your sanity, the disgust and shame for your body and mind, the self-hatred, before nature herself debases you, after a hell-spawned downward spiral ending in dementia senilis, into a slurry of flesh and bone equal to the carcasses of squashed rats rotting in a gutter. Squeeze the trigger, woman of the pastures. Bury that tumor deep inside yourself.

A drop of sweat runs down my forehead, although an icy chill has made goosebumps prickle all over my skin. I grit my teeth, narrow my shoulders and take a deep breath. No, I won’t kill myself today; if I had the guts to shoot myself in the head, to exorcise that devouring evil lurking within my skull, I wouldn’t have suffered for years like some maimed dog in its owner’s backyard, waiting for someone to throw it a scrap of meat. Besides, I’ve learned to cope with my insanity through orgasm-based therapy.

Maybe I should put down the revolver, crawl into a corner and cry like a child while furiously fingering my clit, but I have outgrown that helpless little girl. I must obliterate the cosmic pox before it pours its poison into anyone’s holes.

Author’s note: today’s song is “Little by Little” by Radiohead, as well as this live version, that may be better than the original.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Ninety-one songs so far. Check them out.

Lately I’ve been bothering a genius neural network so it would render images related to whatever was going on in the story. Here’s the corresponding post for this chapter.

The Steam version of Dwarf Fortress has been released! It even includes Workshop features, which means that people will upload thousands of mods in a matter of months. Check out its launch trailer. This game inspired Minecraft, Factorio, Rimworld and countless others, and I have admired its legend for about fifteen years.

Random AI-generated images #21

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

In this modern world of soulless art that has been digested by a chain of ideologues before it reaches the general public, unbiased neural networks come forth to bring us pure, innocent beauty, as well as raw madness.

I have posted many, many entries that feature AI-generated images. Check them out.

I think often about spelunking down some hole.
Never forget.
The neural network can come up with cool flag designs, but that shouldn’t surprise anybody at this point.
Also shirts that few people would wear.
Imagery related to my dream of becoming the king of Castile. Only owls would be allowed to live in the kingdom.
The prompt for these ones were, “ghostly sloth haunting zoo.” I’m happy.
Intriguing designs for wraiths in some RPG.
Only an AI would come up with this shit.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 80: AI-generated images

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

To render moments of this chapter, I relied on a neural network that churns out mesmerizing masterpieces as long as you pay that artificial intelligence a monthly wage for it (which is fine; great work should be rewarded). A second neural network, one trained on anime and furry shit, also helped.

The following images are related to chapter 80 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.

I have posted many, many entries that feature AI-generated images: check them out.

“I rest my forehead on the windowpane, that barely insulates the office from the cold of this November sunset.”
“Our star is a cream pie on which someone has landed ass-first, splashing its pinkish-orange filling all over the sky.”
Anime AI’s interpretations of the previous prompt. Thank you, that was exactly what I was picturing.
“The fat storm clouds that drift by are dyed the color of dried blood; mixed with the charcoal-black of the clouds themselves, they resemble stains on the clothes of plague victims.”
Somewhat useful reference pics.
“Sound waves pour from the speaker of my cellphone down my ear canal.”
“The forms of the two females, sculpted in obsidian, stand on the carpet of that remote living room, framed against the shapes in relief of the cabinet and the widescreen TV.”
“I’m craving something sweet, warm and moist.”
“The clock is ticking on the evening hours, and I need to progress my programming tasks for this job that sucks the joy and wonder out of my life.”
“Her full lips must be brushing the plasticky surface of her phone, spattering it, blessing it, with microscopic particles of saliva.”
“The Ice Age gifted us an Asian kid tempered in the boreal cold, who survived her skirmishes against an ensemble of Paleolithic megafauna.”
“My voice comes out in a croak, as if a lump was blocking my throat.”
“She must have been cuddling with you all afternoon, so she has likely forgotten that I exist.”
“A porcelain-white vine of lightning, twisted and barbed, has streaked through the thick belly of a storm cloud, burning its image into that gray slug filled with rain.”
“I imagine myself as a critter caught outside during a storm in the tropics: a tree snail clinging onto a mangrove to weather nature’s wrath.”
“Her worried voice sounded like a cat meowing at a screen that shows her missing owner.”
“Help me, Nairu! I’m trapped in this futuristic device!”
“Jacqueline’s laugh comes through like a bell pealing over the hilltops.”
“They would consider you a delicious breakfast buffet, the tastiest and nuttiest prey in their hunting ground.” I worry about what these AIs believe the Ice Age was like.
“Those beasts weren’t monsters, though. Just misunderstood.”
“Those storm clouds resemble an avalanche of dirty snow sliding across the sky in slow motion.”
“Glad you’re keeping her fed and warm in that glass-encased bubble while I risk my life in this forest of cement and metal.”
“I hope you chose one of the classics, instead of the turds they’ve been pushing out since they got gobbled up by that demonic mouse, a slobbering beast that has hijacked children’s imagination.”
“A drifting cloud has unveiled the moon and its silvery haze: a thinning scab on a bruised sky.”
“Poor thing, you must feel like I called from another dimension.”
“I rub my eyes and take a deep breath to scrub from my mind the yearning for another cataclysm, one that would leave this planet exposed to the starlight.”
“My statuesque queen of love and lust.”
“Ah, the classic tale involving a murderous cowboy and a clueless space marine.”
“The 3D humans in that one would traumatize me even now.” Anime AI was disturbingly good at producing cursed 3D characters.
“I wouldn’t have wanted my toys to know what I did in the privacy of my bedroom.”
Triceratops voyeurs.
“When she speaks again, her giggle-like tone warms everything within its reach, like the heat emanating from the belly of a giant furnace.”
“You should have locked up the stuffie, locked him away and kept your shameful secret a secret.”
“Plenty of love is flooding from both of our hearts towards the tiny sweetie that you took out of the ice.”
“I’m picturing her assemblage of dildos and vibrators doddering around in her wardrobe like stoic, limbless soldiers, leaving trails of lubricants with each stump-step.”
“I imagine myself sitting at the edge of mommy’s bed, facing my reflection in the mirrored wardrobe as her dildoes and vibrators knock and knock on the inside of the door, vying for the privilege of joining me in a muggy session of self-worship.”
“Lightning zigzags along the night sky, and as its glare whitens the windowpanes, I’m left with the afterimage of a black blot suspended in the air between the glass and the opposite office building.”
“The blot is accompanied by the blurry images of the long desk, the three chairs and the rectangular glow of my monitor.”
“At the other end of the office, on the lily-white wall, a tar-black stain is growing like ink bleeding into paper, like oil leaking from a deep puncture hole.”
Lightning-lizard!
“Lightning-lizards lurk outside, spreading out their glow into the room while jagged hairline cracks hover in front of me, superposed to the vision of the office and its flickering ceiling-mounted lamps, as if I were encased in scratched glass.”
“The black blob on the wall, engulfing a larger patch of white, pulsates as it swells, bulges out in viscous globs like a toilet backing up, and oozes down in gooey tendrils.”
“Light-snakes from the ceiling-mounted lamps are wriggling on the slimy, visceral mass.” Not at all what I meant, but I won’t complain.
“A glistening murk has gouged a hole in my skull and is crawling through my gray matter like a centipede.”
“I’m bobbing up to my nose in a gelatinous sea that tastes of vinegar and fish guts.”
“I shiver at the flapping sound of fat membranes uncurling, at the feel of viscid tissue-matter sticking to my skin.”
“Lightning bolts illuminate the waves in stroboscopic flashes, making them resemble a seething kelp forest, while I thrash my limbs around to stay afloat against the churning currents.”
“A honeyed voice breaks through, floods my mind and envelops my thoughts like a welcoming womb.”
“I miss the taste of her silky skin, like an ambrosial mixture of rosehip and milk.”
“I picture the inverted triangle of prominent features that make up Jacqueline’s ivory-white visage: her penetrating cobalt-blues at the two upper vertices, and her full lips at the lower vertex.”
“She’s standing in front of me in her peacoat and turtleneck sweater as the November wind tousles her hair.”
“Jacqueline is my sole lighthouse, a beacon amidst the storm of insanity that rages inside and outside of me.”
“A croaking voice pours forth through the speaker embedded in my neck, where the voicebox and throat structure must be housed.”
Goddess of delights, mistress of dreams.
“Overvoltage probably fried the electronics in my brain.”
“A tar-black blob has encroached upon a huge chunk of the wall.”
“A hole that sucks all hope through its bottomless whirlpool.”

We’re Fucked, Pt. 80 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial4 Comments

I rest my forehead on the windowpane, that barely insulates the office from the cold of this November sunset. My breath fogs the glass. Our star is a cream pie on which someone has landed ass-first, splashing its pinkish-orange filling all over the sky. The fat storm clouds that drift by are dyed the color of dried blood; mixed with the charcoal-black of the clouds themselves, they resemble stains on the clothes of plague victims.

As sound waves pour from the speaker of my cellphone down my ear canal, I close my eyes and rely on my echolocation to render the scene that’s taking place at home: Jacqueline, my queenly beloved, is explaining the purpose of a cellphone to our adopted daughter Nairu, who contributes high-pitched vocalizations of nonsense syllables, sounding more like a fairy than a human child. The forms of the two females, sculpted in obsidian, stand on the carpet of that remote living room, framed against the shapes in relief of the cabinet and the widescreen TV.

My chest feels hollowed out with longing. I’m craving something sweet, warm and moist. I wish I were lounging on the sofa with my girlfriend and our Nairu, but the clock is ticking on the evening hours, and I need to progress my programming tasks for this job that sucks the joy and wonder out of my life.

Through the phone’s speaker comes a rustle, followed by Jacqueline’s sultry voice. Her full lips must be brushing the plasticky surface of her phone, spattering it, blessing it, with microscopic particles of saliva.

“I won’t get Nairu to understand the concept of a phone today, but she misses her other mommy. That’s what I wanted her to convey to you, sweetie.”

I’m touched by my girlfriend’s attempt to comfort and cheer me up, but am I capable of tending to a child’s needs to the extent that she would appreciate me as a mother? Thankfully, Nairu would become a functional adult even if she grew up as a stray; the Ice Age gifted us an Asian kid tempered in the boreal cold, who survived her skirmishes against an ensemble of Paleolithic megafauna. Grade A material.

My voice comes out in a croak, as if a lump was blocking my throat. I swallow hard to dislodge it.

“She must have been cuddling with you all afternoon, so she has likely forgotten that I exist.”

Jacqueline giggles. Nairu was babbling in the background when a flash startles me. A porcelain-white vine of lightning, twisted and barbed, has streaked through the thick belly of a storm cloud, burning its image into that gray slug filled with rain. The electric crackle sends a shiver down my spine, then a shudder forces me to narrow my shoulders. I imagine myself as a critter caught outside during a storm in the tropics: a tree snail clinging onto a mangrove to weather nature’s wrath.

“Eide?” Nairu asks over the phone.

She remembers me! Her worried voice sounded like a cat meowing at a screen that shows her missing owner.

“Help me, Nairu! I’m trapped in this futuristic device!”

Jacqueline’s laugh comes through like a bell pealing over the hilltops. Nairu’s high-pitched voice dwindles to a murmur; I picture my beloved holding the phone to her own ear with one hand while her other strokes the child’s Paleolithic hair.

“I’m sure she fears that you may get attacked by any of the monsters she encountered in the Ice Age, yet you go and tease her. If anything like that would happen, you’d be a goner, little missy. They would consider you a delicious breakfast buffet, the tastiest and nuttiest prey in their hunting ground. So do I, for that matter.”

“Those beasts weren’t monsters, though. Just misunderstood.”

“Even so, the trick is to survive. Fortunately, Nairu’s tummy is full. No danger that she might starve to death. And like you suspect, we have been cuddling all afternoon. She has also discovered the wonders of animated movies. A Pixar one, we got it paused now.”

Despite the distance between us, Jacqueline sounded so snug, like a fur pelt draped over my shoulders, that I can picture myself pressed up against her on the sofa, instead of standing in this brightly-lit, air-conditioned office as I gaze out past the reflection of my computer screen at the thickening gloom of the twilight. Those storm clouds resemble an avalanche of dirty snow sliding across the sky in slow motion.

“Our adopted nugget may be considered insane by today’s standards,” I say, “but she can still enjoy the visual feast presented by 3D environments and characters on a widescreen television. Glad you’re keeping her fed and warm in that glass-encased bubble while I risk my life in this forest of cement and metal. In any case, which Pixar movie were you watching? I hope you chose one of the classics, instead of the turds they’ve been pushing out since they got gobbled up by that demonic mouse, a slobbering beast that has hijacked children’s imagination.”

Jacqueline’s response drowns in a thunderclap like a cannon shot, one that ripples through my body. My arms tense up, my toes curl in my socks and shoes. Above the flat roof of the opposite building, whose silhouette resembles a tombstone, I glimpse the afterimage of the lightning bolt. A drifting cloud has unveiled the moon and its silvery haze: a thinning scab on a bruised sky.

“Did you hear the thunder, Jacqueline?” I ask in a rough voice.

“Poor thing, you must feel like I called from another dimension. I’m just a ten minute drive away from you. But yes, a thunderstorm is rolling in, honey. It may turn nasty soon.”

The part of me that retains a percentage of genes from a dog, procured by some freaky ancestor of mine, wants to yank open the window and stick my head out, so I can bathe my face in cold air that must smell of rain. Being trapped in this dead office instead of spending the evening with Jacqueline and our girl makes me long for an earthquake or flood to strike, for me to see the streets choked with mud, and cars crushed under heaps of debris.

I rub my eyes and take a deep breath to scrub from my mind the yearning for another cataclysm, one that would leave this planet exposed to the starlight.

“A-anyway, what movie did you pick, my statuesque queen of love and lust?”

Jacqueline giggles.

“Toy Story, dear.”

“Ah, the classic tale involving a murderous cowboy and a clueless space marine. An original, daring narrative that wouldn’t get produced in today’s industry. The 3D humans in that one would traumatize me even now, but… has Nairu ever seen a toy in person?”

“Well, they carved figurines out of wood, right? The Ice Age peoples, I mean.”

“Nairu contradicts some basic assumptions about a child’s knowledge that would make the movie work. When we buy her toys, won’t she assume that they’ll spark to life the moment she looks away, even though they’re made of plastic or some other non-biological material?”

“That may be the case, but wouldn’t it make her world more magical and wondrous?”

“Or sordid and disturbing. I wouldn’t have wanted my toys to know what I did in the privacy of my bedroom. Particularly the stuffed triceratops with the yellow plaid bowtie, who stared blankly at me while I lay in bed with my panties around my ankles, trying to achieve the perfect orgasm. What if the dinosaurs talked to each other? ‘Hey, did you catch sight of the human doing it to herself?’ I would have felt like a pervert.”

Jacqueline must have pulled the phone away from her mouth to muffle a laugh. When she speaks again, her giggle-like tone warms everything within its reach, like the heat emanating from the belly of a giant furnace.

“You should have locked up the stuffie, locked him away and kept your shameful secret a secret. Anyway, I promise you that Nairu loved the spectacle on screen; she gaped and gaped at the talking toys. So focus on what truly matters, my girl: plenty of love is flooding from both of our hearts towards the tiny sweetie that you took out of the ice.”

I nod at Jacqueline’s distant presence, although I’m picturing her assemblage of dildos and vibrators doddering around in her wardrobe like stoic, limbless soldiers, leaving trails of lubricants with each stump-step. They clamber over the piles of external hard drives that store hundreds of gigabytes’ worth of our lovemaking sessions, as well as of the fabled girls that Jacqueline employed to build her porn empire. I imagine myself sitting at the edge of mommy’s bed, facing my reflection in the mirrored wardrobe as her dildoes and vibrators knock and knock on the inside of the door, vying for the privilege of joining me in a muggy session of self-worship. They are calling to me with dollish voices meant to sound melodic: “Hello, Jacqueline’s cummer! Do you need assistance? We are here to serve your needs, little lady!” My own voice interferes: “Come on, motherfucking dildos and dongs, let me get inside this stinking sack of skin so I can taste my own flesh, so I can be submerged in a sea of pleasure, so I can feel something besides the excruciating pressure of my brain against my skull. To hell with you dicks. The last thing I need is a swarm of cocks and pricks crowding my crotch!”

I shudder, then bite my lower lip to keep from giggling, or crying out in distress.

Lightning zigzags along the night sky, and as its glare whitens the windowpanes, I’m left with the afterimage of a black blot suspended in the air between the glass and the opposite office building. A vulture-sized bug? The blot is accompanied by the blurry images of the long desk, the three chairs and the rectangular glow of my monitor. As the booming rumble of thunder sweeps through the business park, a realization prickles the hairs on my nape: I glimpsed a reflection. Or maybe the blot is me.

I look over my shoulder. At the other end of the office, on the lily-white wall, a tar-black stain is growing like ink bleeding into paper, like oil leaking from a deep puncture hole.

Lightning-lizards lurk outside, spreading out their glow into the room while jagged hairline cracks hover in front of me, superposed to the vision of the office and its flickering ceiling-mounted lamps, as if I were encased in scratched glass. My nostrils fill with the odour of burnt ozone.

A crackle of thunder reverberates through my bones and makes my blood surge hotly toward my groin. The hairline cracks have vanished, replaced by a uniform, flawless plane. I am one with the glass.

The black blob on the wall, engulfing a larger patch of white, pulsates as it swells, bulges out in viscous globs like a toilet backing up, and oozes down in gooey tendrils. Light-snakes from the ceiling-mounted lamps are wriggling on the slimy, visceral mass, a glistening murk that has gouged a hole in my skull and is crawling through my gray matter like a centipede.

My vision wavers; the world is swimming. I’m bobbing up to my nose in a gelatinous sea that tastes of vinegar and fish guts. I shiver at the flapping sound of fat membranes uncurling, at the feel of viscid tissue-matter sticking to my skin. Lightning bolts illuminate the waves in stroboscopic flashes, making them resemble a seething kelp forest, while I thrash my limbs around to stay afloat against the churning currents.

From the phone that my right hand is gripping comes crinkly static, the sound of aluminum foil rustling. As the interference scratches my eardrum, a honeyed voice breaks through, floods my mind and envelops my thoughts like a welcoming womb:

“Leire, are you still there? That was some strange lightning phenomenon, must have messed up with the electronics. Thankfully I bought some overvoltage protectors.”

My heart is pumping in my throat. When I open my mouth to speak, my tongue flaps uselessly, and I only manage to exhale a pent-up breath.

“Leire?” Jacqueline insists. “You okay, honey? I can hear you breathing on the phone.”

I miss her luminous allure, that even before we started dating enticed me to steal glances at her. I miss the taste of her silky skin, like an ambrosial mixture of rosehip and milk. I miss the way her panties stick to her slit when she gets wet. I miss the feel of her long fingers kneading my flesh, of her nails scratching the skin of my back. I miss the firmness of her nipples grazing my breasts, the softness of her thighs wrapping around my face as I inhale the hot and juicy tang of her insides. I miss her gasps, sighs and moans during the throes of our lust-frenzy.

I picture the inverted triangle of prominent features that make up Jacqueline’s ivory-white visage: her penetrating cobalt-blues at the two upper vertices, and her full lips at the lower vertex. She’s standing in front of me in her peacoat and turtleneck sweater as the November wind tousles her hair. Jacqueline is my sole lighthouse, a beacon amidst the storm of insanity that rages inside and outside of me.

A croaking voice pours forth through the speaker embedded in my neck, where the voicebox and throat structure must be housed.

“Yeah, I’m still here, my goddess of delights, mistress of dreams. No time for a Pixar flick now, though. Overvoltage probably fried the electronics in my brain.”

Jacqueline’s laughter echoes into the farthest recesses of my being.

“You’re right. I’d love to keep you on the phone when I can’t keep you in my arms, but the sooner you finish that boring stuff, the sooner you can get your butt over here. And once you return to me… I may show you something special.”

“As in I won’t be able to peel your pussy away from my face?”

“Oh, I’ll open myself up to you in plenty of ways,” she answers with a sensual drawl that slithers down to my toes. “You have yet to experience some of my best moves, darling. Bye-bye for now!”

Once Jacqueline clicks off, the warmth evaporates, replaced by a tar-black blob that has encroached upon a huge chunk of the wall, a hole that sucks all hope through its bottomless whirlpool.

Author’s note: the five songs for today are “Man on the Moon” by R.E.M., “Pink Moon” by Nick Drake, “Catch the Wind” by Donovan, “Where Is My Mind?” by Pixies, and “Season of the Witch” by Donovan.

I maintain a playlist that contains all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Eighty-nine songs so far. Check them out.

Hey, are you aware that neural networks can generate intriguing images based on the prompts you send them? I sent a couple of those artificial intelligences plenty of prompts from this chapter. Check out the results.

This chapter kicks off a new sequence, titled “Cumlord of the Abyss.” You can read any of the previous chapters of this novel through this link.