Category: Escritura

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Ended up in the hospital (as a patient), Pt. 5

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of life1 Comment

It feels like I’ve just posted an entry of this series, but here comes the next one! The previous entry recounted how I had ended up in the ER with a diagnosis of hemiplegic migraine. As they performed tests on these poor eyes of mine, to discard possible damage, they did in fact find damage in my right eyeball: my vitreous gel had detached. The doctor wasn’t sure whether that had happened years, months, or weeks earlier. Anyway, she told me that I should be careful, because it could develop into retinal tears or retinal detachment.

Yesterday I started feeling that another migraine was coming. Given that I no longer experience regular migraines since I started taking beta-blockers for my poor heart, this was probably yet another episode of the dreaded hemiplegic migraine. I experienced a weird pressure behind my right eyeball as well as in that temple, and I felt some nausea. I also made bizarre errors at work that I can’t explain; in the worst case, I accidentally mixed the data of a user I was creating with my own data, which left me unable to access the intranet. I still don’t know how that happened, because as far as I know, it should have been impossible.

This morning, as I finished writing the latest entry of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked, a conspicious black filament suddenly appeared in my right eye’s vision. When I shifted my gaze, it moved like thin kelp in the sea. I’m familiar with floaters from my previous detached vitreous gel, but this was a new artifact in my deteriorating vision. And, as I came to learn, just the beginning. The vision of my right eye worsened: the couple of blurry dots turned into a myriad, the thin kelp-like fibers became a tangled mass right in the center of my vision. Soon enough, it felt like I was looking through the water of a fish tank that hasn’t been cleaned in a while. This wasn’t a migraine, but a physical defect in my eye, one that was worsening by the minute.

I hurried to the ER. A couple of tests later, they confirmed that I’ve developed a tear in my right retina, and it was necessary to patch it up with laser to block further deterioration. The doctor was young, in his early twenties. He didn’t explain basically anything about the procedure or what steps I should take to recover from it. He didn’t even give me a report, which I’m pretty sure they’re obligated to do. Anyway, he sat me in front of some contraption with a built-in laser, he numbed my right eyeball with some drops, and pressed some crystal thing to my cornea. Shortly after, I learned how it feels to have a laser stitch the inside of your eyeball. Every flash of red light was accompanied with a gnawing sensation in the middle of a very delicate organ. Manly tears of pain streamed down my face. If I had retained a sense of humor at that moment, I might have imagined myself receiving a demon eye from Kishirika Kishirisu. Alas, I wasn’t in the mood, because my body has been breaking down steadily, in strange ways, these last three or so years. I’m exhausted and pissed off.

Worse yet, although the laser, with its biting, burning ways, has likely prevented further deterioration, what I can see from my right eyeball at the moment (my pupil is still dilated, and I’m not wearing that contact lens) suggests that the floaters that had seeped in from my retina or whatever have found a permanent residence there, and the vision of that eyeball is permanently fucked.

After that young doctor finished messing with my eyeball, he left me seated at the waiting room, right after telling me that I should have no problem going to work (I’m working the afternoon shift). The guy disappeared. After I regained some sense of self, I looked for him again, but couldn’t find him. I wanted to know if I could put on the contact lens, and if I needed to do something specific to recover from the ordeal. A nurse informed me that my right eyeball should be able to tolerate a contact lens. She also pulled me aside and cleaned the residue from the sticky numbing drops, which apparently looked like white splotches. So on top of the humiliation that my right eyeball subjected me to, I must have looked as if someone came in my face. I’m living my best possible life.

Anyway, I’m at work right now. I have informed my boss that I’m not supposed to lift weights nor do any strange movements for about two weeks, which could be a problem; we are sometimes told to move computers and printers around, or at least crawl under tables to push the ends of cables into wall sockets. Now I can only anticipate in what bizarre way my health will deteriorate in the upcoming years, until get tired of this shitty life and jump off a bridge. By the way, my health issues, from my heart to my eyeballs to my other balls (found a lump in there), apart from a markedly subdued mood and occasional disorientation, started when I got pricked in the shoulder with an experimental treatment for some world-wide disaster that shan’t be named. My heart started acting up that same day. It’s a good thing I won’t have children, because I probably lack swimmers at this point.

Anyway, fuck off and all that jazz.

EDIT: I fed this post to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of your material, and they came up with a particularly compelling Deep Dive. Thanks for cheering me up, guys.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 127 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

After an hiatus of nine months, mostly so I could tell the story of a motocross legend, my ongoing story, as long as a trilogy of novels, has returned. I wouldn’t blame if you if you’ve forgotten all about it. You can read any of its chapters on here, or listen to the existing audiochapters on here. I won’t continue producing audiochapters, though, because I have my fingers in too many pies. Anyway, let’s get rolling.

In the tomblike blackness, as if I were descending into the bowels of the earth, I keep inhaling oxygen to sustain the biological machinery of my aging body, even though every breath fills my throat and lungs with the stench of ammonia and rotten meat, a stink so overwhelming that it could knock out a woolly mammoth.

A click of a switch, followed by a whirring and the faint whooshing of air. With a buzz, fluorescent bulbs flare to life, bathing the subterranean lair in a bright glow.

“Here’s why I’m constantly up to my neck in bills,” my boss says.

At the center of the square-shaped room sits a hulking mass of metal: a shiny aluminum cylinder. No, not a cylinder, because a person-wide opening curves into the device, a path blocked now by an orange gate barrier that may have been pilfered from the streets. From the top of the machine grows a cluster of industrial piping, electrical wiring, and conduits resembling the ruptured guts of a mechanical beast.

A vibration disturbs the air like a low-frequency hum. From the opening of the spiral, through the gate barrier, danger leaks as a tangible yet invisible force; I sense the glare of a cosmic intelligence beyond my understanding.

The sight of Ramsés’ face, this swine in the guise of a man, with his middle-aged features, unkempt mustache, receding hairline, and lack of resemblance to Jacqueline or anyone I’d like to stare at, would have made me want to push him down a flight of stairs. Now, though, I’m glad he was born: he has led me to the one thing I couldn’t be arsed to search for properly.

“Hell yeah,” I say, and rub my palms. “I hate to admit it, boss, but you’ve done a great service for the universe.”

I grasp at the slippery reins of my sanity like a drowning woman clawing at pieces of driftwood. Alright, how can I destroy this reality-shattering device? The engraving of a skull and crossbones flashes in my mind: my trusty revolver, now stored in my work desk. I feel a pang of longing for its wood and steel to remind me of the glory days when I was still the main character and not the slave of others’ whims. Hey, Spike, my deformed, castrated pal, apart from wanting your own head blown into inhuman sludge, is this why you brought your revolver along? But I lack enough bullets to blast this spirally cylinder into nothing. Besides, I can’t forget the feeling of my hand being torn off that one time I relied on gunfire to defeat my foes, back when Alberto oozed from the wall in all his blobby, seething depravity to ruin my evening with apocalyptic tidings.

The stench is burning holes into my sinuses, and the hostility emanating from the machine thrums through my bones, but I approach the silvery-white shell, which reflects my blurry likeness like a liquid mirror. After rubbing my chin, I kick the device to gauge its solidity. Clang.

I was thinking of asking my boss if he had a chainsaw at the ready, when his hand, thick and beefy, wraps around my biceps, gripping tightly. He pulls me backward. Once I wriggle free, I’m tempted to punch Ramsés’ jaw with the force of my pent-up frustration and despair, which would atomize his teeth and ignite the meat of his face and pop his eyes. However, the fiend’s scraggly face, a map of the terrain of the damned, has contorted into a scowl, like a gorilla’s after I punted one of his relatives.

“Leire, what the hell are you doing?! You see an object you don’t understand, and the first thought you have is to break it?! Are you a chimpanzee?!”

My hand clenches around the ballpoint pen as if it were a dagger. The notion of impaling one of Ramsés’ eyeballs seems like a beautiful dream.

“Nah, I wasn’t planning on wrecking your stupid pipe thing, I just wanted to, you know, tap on it? Maybe I detected a kink that would be fixed by a whack on the side. Now seriously: I’ve finally found the cause of my misfortunes, the culprit to this whole ‘shredding reality’ business, and it’s been in the basement of my workplace all along! I should have known, given how this place has sucked up my soul ever since I foolishly allowed myself to be employed here. Anyway, once I find a way to obliterate this heinous contraption, this spiraling gate into insanity, the universe will be safe. Well, relatively safe, until the next asshole erects their own death machine. So let’s figure out how to acquire nitroglycerine.”

“Fuck’s sake, Leire, what are you blathering about?”

I sigh.

“Listen, boss, I can tell you haven’t grown so weary of life that you’ve been fiddling with, perhaps even fondling, an interdimensional end-of-the-world machine fully aware of the lethal stakes. You simply haven’t been notified by otherworldly monstrosities that tolerating this thing’s existence would lead to the irreversible and terminal cancerization of our fucking shithole of a world. Still, I must lay some blame on you, sir, as an accessory to this shitfest, whether through incompetence, naivete, or willful ignorance, if not sheer fucking stupidity, as long as you feel the machine’s malevolent aura attempting to smother our minds with its diabolical power. I shan’t have my newfound family squashed by a collapsing space-time continuum, so I must prevent the end of the universe, the death of everything, the grand finale of reality!”

Ramsés’ brow furrows as his jaw clenches, and I expect a torrent of insults and threats to gush from his mouth. Instead, he strokes the edge of his graying moustache, that unsanitary ornament made out of curly, coarse fibers that I wish to rip off strand by strand. His nostrils flare as he sucks in a breath to speak.

“I should have known you’re so demented that you wouldn’t think twice before assaulting delicate, irreplaceable hardware. Leire, I’m going to tell you a little story.”

“Oh my, is it story time? Can’t we skip it?”

“No, damn it. I need you to understand something about the machine.”

“Isn’t this chimpanzee too dumb to learn?”

My boss scrunches his greasy, perverted mug in annoyance. He pats his jacket, fishes out a cigarette, clamps it between his teeth, and lights it up. Then he takes a drag so deep that the tip glows red.

“Shut your trap and listen. This story starts back in the eighties or early nineties, when the internet was still a network of text terminals for academics. I was a kid then, if you can picture that. We used to visit relatives on my mother’s side, traveling out of province. In that family’s foyer hung a painting that terrified me even before I heard the adults talk about it. As soon as I stepped through the doorway, a malicious glare coming from the painting stabbed me through as if saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing in my house? Get out!’ I only dared to glance at the picture once, but in that brief look, I burned it into my memory.” My boss exhales smoke, then continues. “The painting depicted an elderly, bearded fisherman garbed in a canary-yellow raincoat. He faced the viewer, standing in a wooden dinghy surrounded by choppy seas and a stormy sky. The image seemed hyperrealistic, as if I could reach out and touch that rough water. The family that had chosen such an unsettling painting as the centerpiece of their foyer spoke of strange occurrences attached to it: a stench of rotten fish coming from the entrance, footsteps pacing up and down the hallway at night. I didn’t enjoy staying over. Anyway, one evening, as my brother and I were playing on the SNES in our cousins’ bedroom, the lights shut off. Far faster than it would have been possible, the stench of rotten fish swarmed the room. I heard the adults hurrying to the entrance, where they flipped the circuit breaker. I don’t recall how the rest of the evening transpired, but from that day on, I knew the painting was haunted.”

“Wow. This turned out to be an intriguing tale.”

“Sure. But as I grew older, I learned that the smell of rotten fish can be caused by circuit failure, as can a sudden power outage. Some heat-resistant chemical coatings release such stink before burning up. And strong electromagnetic fields mess with people’s brains, make them feel as if they’re being watched. You see what I’m getting at?”

“That you gaslit yourself into believing that you didn’t experience a paranormal event, just because you couldn’t handle the truth? Maybe the painting was haunted. Have you thought of that?”

Ramsés’ frown deepens.

“I told you I did.”

“It could have been both electricity and a ghost. Poltergeists love fucking with electrical systems. Anyway, I see far weirder stuff on the daily. Cultures across all ages have spoken of ghosts, and depicted them in similar ways. Doesn’t that count as evidence?”

“That may be the case, but it’s irrelevant to my point.”

“What did your tale have to do with this spiraling death machine, then?”

My boss throws his hands up.

“Oh, who knows!”

“Sure, we can waste time with anecdotes. After all, there’s no hurry to destroy that thing, not when the universe is about to be torn apart. Why don’t we find the painting, burn it with gasoline, then piss on its ashes? Not that we’d need to bother, because the world will be ending soon.”

Ramsés flicks his cigarette, sending a clump of ash to the floor.

“I suppose I must spell it out for you: the machine’s electromagnetic field messes with your already screwed-up head. You’re hypersensitive to it. Don’t bother me with this nonsense about the end of the world. Take a seat and calm down.”

Author’s note: today’s songs are “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails, and “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead. I keep a playlist with the myriad songs I’ve mentioned throughout this series. Check it out.

I’ve missed you, Leire, you fucking nutcase. I hope I can get back in the groove of this story soon.

By the way, Ramsés’ story is straight out of my childhood. The original experience is even wilder when it comes to what my relatives told about how the painting changed.

Speaking of spirals, the anime adaptation of Junji Ito’s masterpiece about obsession and spirals premieres tomorrow. Check out the clip below:

I’ve fed this chapter to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of any material. Check out the result:

Life update (09/24/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Today I’ve gotten yet another proof of the fact that I’m one of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet. Allow me to explain the situation so you can point at my retarded self and laugh.

I’ve been working IT at a hospital complex since 2018. I will never be on a permanent contract for this organization, because I can’t speak Basque. But I replace workers when they go on medical leaves, on vacation, or when the bosses call in reinforcements for some project or general disaster (my longest uninterrupted period of work in my life happened during the covid heights). I’ve never taken vacation days, in this job or any other. I was under the impression that I got paid for those days, because it said so on my paysheets. And I’m not one to go on trips like your average Instagram girl, or do anything in particular during the holidays. After all, my sole purpose with working is to earn as much money as possible, so I gladly sacrificed vacation days to add more money to my bank account. There’s also something in my personality that highly dislikes inconveniencing people and making things difficult for others, which would happen by throwing my vacation days into the mix. That, admittedly, is a bizarre thing for my brain to feel when I spend part of my weeks daydreaming about murdering people.

As you may see coming, my coworkers started mentioning to me recently that if I didn’t spend my vacation days, I wouldn’t get reimbursed for them. I don’t know why this year, after six years working here, is the first time I’m hearing about this. Before I started this whole months-long project of replacing nearly a thousand printers in the whole hospital complex, my boss mentioned that he wasn’t sure if I would get paid for the unspent vacation days, but that he would consult with HR. He never returned to me on that subject. And I suspect now that he was always aware that I couldn’t reimburse my vacation days, and the fact that I never take vacation days was part of the fact why he assigned the printer project to me, because the bulk of it would get done during the summer. I stupidly, stupidly didn’t insist on him telling me whether or not my vacation days would get reimbursed.

Today I visited the appropriate departments, and I got the appropriate bewildered looks that anyone would offer to someone who says that he hasn’t taken vacation days in six years even though he doesn’t know if he has gotten reimbursed for them. You see, I am a dumb motherfucker, after all. I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, given that I’m autistic and such dysfunction isn’t precisely uncommon, but every time something like this happens, it makes me wonder if I really should try to pretend that I can live like a normal person, at least when it comes to working.

Anyway, I learned that I have the right to take five days off for personal reasons, four days off because they didn’t count properly last year’s vacations, three days off because of the Saturdays I’ve worked this year, and 21 days of regular vacations. So I suppose that I will spend most of the two following months writing, programming, molesting myself, and possibly traveling a bit.

That’s all I wanted to say. Bye, bitches.

EDIT: I fed this post to the Google thing that generates AI podcasts, to see what the two entertaining hosts had to say about it. Thank you for finding my plight “pretty hilarious,” you guys. Additional “thank yous” for pretending that my blog receives comments.

AI podcast about Alma: a Successful Case Study

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial, ReseñasLeave a comment

Back in 2021 I wrote this short story about a therapist and his troubled patient named Alma. Man, 2021 was one prolific year. Anyway, I’ve presented this tale to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of your source material so the pair of hosts would do a review. Check it out.

You can read the entirety of this story on here:

Alma: a Successful Case Study, Pt. 1
Alma: a Successful Case Study, Pt. 2

Ongoing manga: Rebuild World, by Nahuse

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

Four-and-a-half stars.

For once, this isn’t an isekai: the story is set long in the future, after some apocalypse about which the survivors are still trying to figure out the specifics. Apparently their predecessors had become so advanced that they were mixing biological engineering with super-AI or some shit, until their industries went haywire and started mass-producing mutated monsters that overwhelmed the world. Those facilities seem to be still active somewhere, pumping out enhanced monstrosities. Seemingly the sole remains of humanity live in a megacity. More accurately, the wealthy live in the megacity. The rest of humanity (or just Japan?) endure in the surrounding slums. Among the unwashed masses, the local badasses are known as hunters, the only ones daring to venture into the wasteland to make their living. Killing monsters is profitable if they’re threatening the city or other hunters, but their main source of income are the relics of the old world: any random underground mall from the pre-apocalyptic world suddenly found attracts most hunters around, that won’t hesitate to murder each other for the loot if necessary.

Meet Akira. It’s a post-apocalyptic Japanese story set in the future, so someone named Akira had to be involved. We are introduced to him as a traumatized teenager who constantly gets robbed and generally bullied by local shitheads. During a monster attack, the guy has enough, and decides to defend himself with a gun against a group who are bound to kill him. Suddenly, a naked female spirit appears, and hovers casually toward him. Akira freaks out until she, who calls herself Alpha, explains that she’s an AI remnant of the pre-apocalypse, and that he’s the only one who can see her because his brain is attuned to the old-world networks still in place, so she can show herself to him as augmented reality. She’s not just a curiosity, though: she can offer Akira superhuman support, analyzing his environment, pointing out enemies, guiding his shots. After she manages to save him from explosions and monsters by telling him to stay put or move at times, he realizes that she’s trustworthy, and that this sexy ghost of the past is his ticket to a better life.

Alpha, as we piece together early on, isn’t that trustworthy. Apparently, for many cycles, she has been finding humans to support. All of those cycles have ended with the subject dying. In the latest one, the subject came close to succeeding in beating some final dungeon that Alpha wants her subjects to clear out, only for some information to have been revealed that made the subject turn against Alpha, who promptly took the subject out. What’s Alpha after, then? Is she on the side of the pre-apocalyptic humanity, who may only want to resurrect the old world no matter how many modern eggs need to be cracked? Is Alpha part of the same AI that mass-produces monstrosities? We still don’t know. Throughout the story, the friendship between Akira and Alpha is heartwarming, but as Akira becomes more and more dependent on her, in the back of your mind you know that she’s going to screw him over in the end. It remains to be seen, though, whether or not Akira would go along with whatever Alpha’s true objective is.

Akira is emotionally stunted. He was orphaned so young that he has no memory of his parents, and all he has known of people growing up is the need to protect himself from sentient wild beasts. As the story advances, he meets people who like him, and would even want to tear his clothes apart and mount him, but the part of his brain that ought to connect to people doesn’t work to any significant extent. Plenty of other compentent hunters see him as an uncaring loner who, despite his competence, is someone to be wary of. The exceptions are a few women in his life to whom he proved himself, and who are eager to take him under their wing and show him their delectable parts to get a rise out of him.

The gals in this story are delicious. Props to the author and the visual artist. From the teenage gang leader Sheryl to the redheaded murderess whose name I don’t remember but who was a super cyborg or something, you want to stare in awe and horniness. Thank you Japan for being you.

This is yet another one of those Japanese stories in which you follow the lives of the characters as they change and grow. Although some personalities clash, they have reasons for doing so. Some chapters are just about having a good time and hanging out with interesting characters that get along, and that’s something I think has been lost in Western stories, that are full of forced conflict and people acting like bastards to each other. As far as I’m concerned, you can rely entirely on the tension born from the story world and concept, as well as from some characters that are genuine bastards, and just have the rest of the crew navigating that while relying on each other.

I’m loving this story. I wish I could keep experiencing it, but I’ve run out of chapters. If you’re into Japanese stories with great action, careful worldbuilding, human stakes, and total babes, this is one of the greats as far as I’m concerned.

Also, why not, here’s an AI-generated short podcast about this review:

AI podcast about Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 3

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial, MúsicaLeave a comment

This weird thing that Google has released automatically creates short podcasts based on any source of information you give it. I suppose it’s quite useful for serious purposes, but I’ve fed it all my posts about the AI-generated songs I made for the third volume of Odes to My Triceratops. Listening to these almost perfect AI voices talking realistically about my stuff is really eerie. They made a couple of mistakes assigning lyrics to their proper songs, though.

Anyway, I thought this was cool.

Life update (09/16/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Who’s back at work? I am! After five days of a blissful medical leave to recover from a hemiplegic migraine, I’m back at the environment that put me in the ER to begin with.

As part of the fact that I’m autistic, looking at people in the eyes and acting like a more-or-less normal human being is always a struggle, and something I have to do deliberately; turns out that people don’t take it well if you remain silent when they address you. Shortly after I entered the office, I sensed the glances of “as soon as he looks at me, I’ll ask about what happened to him.” I never engage those. And the social worker slash computer technician, whose political opinions she had expressed over the months with the certainty that everyone shares them, asked me, “You’re back, so you’re okay now, right?” I could barely be arsed to shrug in her direction. What do you care? And more importantly, why do I need to pretend that I want to talk to you, when I don’t even want you here? Does my paycheck cover that?

It’s hard to deal with anything in a job that clashes with my basic nature, and that risks causing me brain and heart damage due to the mounting stress that I’m unable to handle. Merely being outside of a room in which I’m the only person present causes me stress. The very presence of human beings, that feel like wild animals to me, causes me stress. Being in charge of coordinating the replacement of nearly a thousand printers, which has involved having to negotiate with supervisors and users that love to cause problems and complain if they have the opportunity, has chipped away at my sanity little by little, and I don’t have the tools to prevent that other than not working here. I’m basically a ticking bomb until the next time I end up in the ER, with a body that will grow increasingly unable to recover from the attacks of arrhythmia and migraines.

This medical leave has put a spotlight on the fact that the only reason I’m miserable most of the time is because of my job. Otherwise, I was in a good mood, programming away at my little project, reading manga and such. I even found myself laughing at times. But it’s not like I can quit; I’m a middle-aged man with no real alternative that would pay the same, and programming jobs are getting harder to land due to AI (not that I blame AI for it, as I use it extensively for programming myself). Hell, even before I started working as an IT guy at a hospital, I wasn’t getting hired because I was too old and my curriculum was too spotty; it’s not a good idea to put down on that document, “I lost my will to engage in society, and at times even to live, so I spent long stretches of time barely leaving my parents’ apartment once every couple of weeks. I also collected pee bottles.”

Even though I have to deal with background despair daily due to the state of the world and how it will progressively encroach into my life (my home was nearly broken into a few years ago or so by a couple of imported arabs, for one), when I’m alone in a room, left to my own devices, none of that matters anymore. For everything else, I have manga, my fantasies, and my right hand.

As Jack said at the end of Chinatown, “As little as possible.” I can’t stand the current world. I don’t care about people. I will do whatever benefits me, and as little as possible of anything else.

Ended up in the hospital (as a patient), Pt. 4

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of life2 Comments

Another entry of this thrilling series! As I mentioned in my latest life update, for the last five days or so, I had been enduring flashes of darkness in one eye: sometimes, when I looked around, I lost the vision in my right eye for less than a second, something that I had never experienced before. It looked like black lightning. Because I’ve been beyond busy, at the limit of my human capacity, for months, I didn’t bother going to the doctor. The day before I ended up in the ER, the muscles around my right eyeball started bothering me, and I felt a strange pressure behind them.

I’ll proceed to relate how the afternoon when I ended up in the ER went. The moment I sat down at my desk in the office, two coworkers approached me due to printer-related issues that had come up in the morning. Because I have been tasked with coordinating the replacement of 930 or so printers, apparently now I’m the go-to person for absolutely fucking everything having to do with those printers even if they were put in place months ago.

I don’t recall what one of the issues was, but in the other, some guy from another department, someone we don’t know in person, had gone to fix a problem with the printer, and for whatever reason he had changed its IP address to a new one that we have no clue where he got it from. While the new IP does work, it isn’t assigned to a network name, and the group policies only go by network names, so every other computer at that office could no longer use that printer. I told my coworker, who had that ticket, to demand explanations of whoever did it, so he could hopefully revert it. Earlier this morning, when I checked my office mail, I found out that my boss just assigned the ticket to me so I would fix the problem. I would love to say that now they can suck it, because I’ll be on a medical leave for a few days, but I’m sure that the issue will be waiting for me when I return to work.

Anyway, like every day for months, shortly after I come to work, I have to start dealing with printer technicians from another company, who are tasked with replacing and configuring the printers (the part that gets configured physically in the devices). I used to have to deal with two technicians, but now that we are finishing the work, I only deal with one. Let me tell you about the technician I’m dealing with now: this guy is the biggest incompetent I’ve ever had the misfortune of working with. Here’s a list of the issues I have regularly with him:

  1. He lies even about inconsequential stuff. I recall one time he tried to deny that he had gone out for a smoke, even though I walked by him as he was doing it. He also lies to cover his ass with his company, not caring whom he has to bury for it. The guy went on vacation three weeks ago. The last day, he told me he would only replace two printers then take the car to travel to Madrid. I don’t have any issue with these technicians leaving earlier (less work for me), so whatever. But the following week, I ended up being questioned by his boss about whether it was true that the day this technician had to leave earlier, it had been because I hadn’t allowed him to replace more printers, which is what he had claimed. That day, this motherfucker had had the gall to shake my hand and tell me that he felt sorry for the troubles that him going on vacation might cause for me. The technician remains unaware that I know this.
  2. He consistently fails to remember to take stickers to name the network printers, which causes a multitude of problems. Even if I physically bring him the fucking stickers, which he has available at his office, half of the time as he’s replacing the printers, he forgets to do it anyway.
  3. I have to follow him around as he replaces the printers, because half of those he sets up, he does them wrong (even though the methods for replacing the same models are identical). That means I have to get out of my way to ensure that they respond to pings the moment he’s done with them, instead of configuring them in a batch as I do with the other technician.
  4. Part of my job as a coordinator involves walking up to whatever departments and buildings the old printers are located, then negotiating with nurses, admins and supervisors when they’ll allow us to replace the printers. Some, we can do in five minutes, others require taking up the connected computer for up to thirty minutes. Never mind the fact that I’m autistic and this level of human interaction is above my pay grade, but most human beings are garbage: if they can complain about anything and cause you issues, they will. I can’t count how many times I’ve gone to a department to solve a ticket only to be bombarded with “now that you’re here…” A few days ago I went for a printer-related issue, only for a random nurse to try to get me to replace her computer for a faster one. They know they have to put up tickets formally for any real issue, but most of them don’t give a shit; they’d rather bitch and complain among each other than spend five minutes making a call to HQ so they can register a ticket and send it to whoever can solve it. Anyway, this whole thing was about the incompetent technician: plenty of times after I’ve determined what printers could be replaced that day, this technician brings up some excuse that forces me to redo the whole thing from zero in other parts of the hospital. This is often related to the technician wanting to do the easiest stuff that day, even though he would end up with entire weeks of the hardest stuff right at the end.
  5. He’s always on the phone. Plenty of times I’ve had to phone him for work-related stuff, only for him to be busy talking to his friends or his girlfriend. He has also delayed work, or had me waiting for fifteen minutes, because his girlfriend was going to bring him lunch (why guys like these have girlfriends is one of those mysteries of life).
  6. Every time I’m supervising this technician’s work, he complains about being tired, about how annoying it is, about how far the locations are, about his coworkers who aren’t present, about his bosses, etc.
  7. Some printers require the technicians to dress themselves in appropriate attire. This guy has always delayed these, or even straight up avoided doing them when I tasked him, to the extent of forcing me to unload those locations to other technicians so they would get done. Mind you, I have to dress myself twice to enter these places: once to determine whether or not it can be done that day, and another to accompany the technicians, even if it boils down to pointing at the location of the printer.

Anyway, yesterday, I entered the office at one in the afternoon (doing a one to eight shift). For those shifts, I always send the technicians detailed instructions for what they should do for the few hours our shifts don’t match. Turned out that he had only replaced one printer, of the model I told him to replace that day. He told me that he would start preparing new ones afterwards (although he should have already done so in the morning). Later, he called me and told me that he had “accidentally” prepared a different model of printer, so those were the ones we could do that day. That forced me to reorganize the whole day of work, visiting and calling other departments to ensure they would allow me to replace their printers. This technicians knows perfectly well what he forces me to do whenever he screws me up like that, but obviously he doesn’t give a shit.

Some time later, he told me that he had finished preparing, and he was heading to our meeting point. After I waited about seven minutes at the meeting point, I called him to figure out what was going on. He told me that he was preparing some stuff, and that he would come in ten minutes. I’ve had so many of these that I bring with me my tablet to read some manga in the meantime. After he showed up, I was standing near his printer-filled cart, ready to ensure that the printers didn’t fall once he started moving it, when the guy messed with the elastic cord that secured the printers in place. Deliberately or not, he detached the elastic cord, that proceeded to whip around and lash me straight in the balls. As I stood straight, lips pursed, while pain coursed through my genitals, I thought, “Yes, this is my life. This is the kind of shit that keeps happening to me.”

Twenty or so minutes later, as I was configuring printers in a spare computer of some high-tech building, while the technician configured them physically in other floors, the nausea and dizziness that had started intensifying the previous day mounted up to worrying levels, and more troubling, an uncomfortable feeling radiated from my right eyeball to cover that half of my face, from the hairline to under my cheek. I don’t recall ever feeling it before. That part of my face had lost sensitivity. My right hand, holding my pen, felt clumsy, and I started feeling white noise coursing down that arm. After I stood up, I realized that the nausea had intensified, and I broke out in cold sweat. As I navigated my way to rejoin the printer technician, I felt like I was about to bump into people. I wondered if I was having a stroke. I usually avoid dealing with people even to my own detriment in the case of medical emergencies, but I didn’t want to end up crippled by a stroke and regret the rest of my life that I didn’t go to the ER soon enough, so that’s what I did.

Once again, I ended up in a hospital bed, hooked up to an electrocardiograph, tended by nurses whom I probably know from having solved computer issues in their department (although I couldn’t tell if that was the case, because I have some degree of prosopagnosia). They sent me to a very kind and patient ophthalmologist who subjected me to plenty of tests. She discovered that I have posterior vitreous detachment in my right eye, which apparently had nothing to do with my flashes of black lightning; the detachment may have happened at any time in my life. Apparently it is rare in people under forty, but happens to many old people. Just my luck. She told me that such a condition can worsen into retinal detachment if you lift too much weight, or shit too hard. There goes my weightlifting career (a joke, although I did plenty of weightlifting in my youth).

I ended up at the neurologist. He told me that what I was experiencing was a severe migraine, a different kind to those I had experienced since I was a teenager. Until I started taking beta-blockers for my heart condition, I used to have migraines every few months. They always started with dizziness and a very notorious white, squiggly line in my vision, that if not treated at that point with a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug, it would develop into a massive headache. But that happened in a matter of two or three hours. This experience of a five days-long migraine with flashes of black lightning, and still lingering insensibility in my face and right arm, is completely new. If they hadn’t also done an MRI as part of the batch of tests and discarded bleeding in my brain or any brain abnormality, I would have suspected that they had mistaken my symptoms, but I suppose they’re right, and what I have experienced is a massive migraine triggered by the intolerable stress I have been under for months.

I see and deal with nurses and interns, plenty of them gorgeous, on a regular basis. They are usually hypersociable; when they have nothing to do, they tend to gather at the break rooms to chat. Their altruism, sometimes pathological, is wonderful when it comes to caring for children and sick people, but apocalyptic when applied to the whole of society. In any case, dating one of these nurses must be a nightmare; every time I’ve ended up in the ER, I’ve had at least one nurse or intern pressing their lower abdomen if not their crotch against me. Even a male nurse did this. This time was no different: while a pretty, bespectacled intern, or whatever the hell she was, gave me the summary of my issues and the treatments to follow, she kept herself pressed against my elbow to the extent that I felt the warmth and curve of her mons pubis against my bare skin. I was looking at her, squinting against the bright lights, as in, “Are we going to address this, or is it the kind of thing you gals do?” Mind you, I’m not complaining; I’m chronically untouched, so press your mons pubis against me all you want. It’s just fucking weird.

Anyway, the neurologist told me to go on a medical leave for a few days, so that’s what I’ll do. Because I’m dutiful like that, I’ve sent the incompetent technician detailed instructions for what printers to replace in my absence. Although I’ve told him in no uncertain terms that I’ll go radio silent for my medical leave, I’m sure he’ll end up calling me anyway.

I intend to spend my sick leave programming, reading manga, and masturbating. Fuck my job, fuck this world, and fuck every single one of you.

EDIT: the specific type of migraine is hemiplegic migraine.

Also, today’s song is I Bleed by Pixies.

As loud as hell, a ringing bell
Behind my smile, it shakes my teeth
And all the while, as vampires feed

I bleed
I bleed
I bleed

Prithee, my dear, why are you here?
Nobody knows, we go to sleep
As breathing flows, my mind secedes

I bleed
I bleed
I bleed
I bleed
I bleed
I bleed

Oh, oh, oh, oh
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh

There’s a place in the buried west
In a cave with a house in it
In the clay, the holes of hands
You can place a hand in hand

I bleed (I bleed)
I bleed (I bleed)
I bleed (I bleed)

Life update (09/09/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of life1 Comment

A couple of days ago, I must have been having a really bad, anxiety-filled dream at about five in the morning, because I lunged forward only to find the wall in my way. I banged my head hard enough that I ended up with a bruise. That side of my head still feels weird.

I don’t know if that episode meant anything. Today I’ve gotten through an absolutely awful Monday for which I was already exhausted when it started. I’m close to finishing the replacement of about 940 printers in the hospital complex where I work, an operation that has made me consider going on a medical leave for depression a couple of times, not to mention fantasize about quitting or just never returning to this job. Last week, my boss told me that he wanted to put me in charge, along with another coworker, of replacing every single computer in the hospital complex. That’s about five times if not more the amount of printers. He had the gall to say that, after all, the whole deal of replacing the printers wasn’t that big of a task. Containing myself, I said, “No, it has been an utter nightmare.” Nothing will stop my boss from forcing me to replace all the computers unless I’m not employed there, so my fantasizing about not working as an IT guy at a hospital has multiplied.

It’s not just the act of replacing the printers: anything printer related gets sent my way. This last week we’ve had a pandemonium at the ER because the printers worked intermittently, and we discovered that something is wrong with the membership of some active directory groups, it seems just for a few groups of printers in the ER as far as we have detected. Well, I had the bigwigs at the ER berating me, suggesting that nothing of that kind happened before we changed the printers. The matter remains unresolved. There are lingering issues, not like that one, but that I dread listening about almost every day, because I have no idea how to solve them, and nobody can help. I want to quit and not work for a long, long while. Hopefully for the rest of my life, but obviously that isn’t feasible.

When my shift ends, I take a bus, then a train, then another bus home. Society has turned into a zoo, and it gets worse by the year. A few days ago I was thinking about the detachment I have felt for many years about the place I live in, and this world in general, and I’ve gotten to the conclusion that after you reached a point in which only your cowardice stopped you from dying, and afterwards you’ve yearned so many times to go to sleep and not wake up again, you exist in a different plane than the vast majority of human beings. I don’t understand how my coworkers relate to each other, or care about each others’ stuff, or organize plans and outings and such in their private lives. Most months I do the same stuff. When I go out, I usually walk to some solitary places in the woods nearby, because there’s nothing else for me out there. And what used to be a haven has also become tainted, but I don’t want to go into details. It just makes me angry.

I got my fantasies, of course. I survive thanks to daydreaming, some purely mind-based and some applied, plenty of them sexual. There’s also the works of art of other people, who are usually Japanese. Give me another derivative story about some isekai-d guy getting kicked out of a band of adventurers, and then delving into dungeons on his own to get stronger, and I’m as happy as I can be. Often I’ve been on the verge of losing my stop on the train because of how easily I disappear into such stories. I’ve honestly fantasized about getting hit by a truck, because at least that would be an ironic death for someone like me. I would die with a smile on my face, thinking of the zany adventures I’d have in another world.

Maybe I’m depressed again, who knows. I’m certainly disoriented, generally out of it, lethargic, on the verge of imploding at times. I feel like I’m operating on a regular basis at the edge of my capabilities as a human being for no real reward other than money, that every passing day is worth less. And I’ve started to worry about my the state of my brain, because I feel that it’s deteriorating. Something feels wrong. It doesn’t help that my eyes have been acting up for a while; sometimes when I whip my gaze around, I get flashes of darkness. I had a campimetry done a month or so ago, and the doctor told me that the results were odd. They put me up for another check-up in six months. The only thing related to my optic nerves that I know could be an issue is the pituitary tumor with which I was born or that I developed as a child; but I take chronic medication for it, without which the tumor may grow enough to press against the optic nerve. I don’t know much other than the fact that I don’t feel right. Most days, just walking around feels like a struggle in the sense that I’m so out of it that I may end up bumping into people without noticing, and it doesn’t seem like it’s getting better.

There’s a quote from Ham on Rye, Bukowski’s best book, that says “I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn’t let me.” That’s how I’ve felt most of my life, and I feel it very acutely these days. Anyway, I’m going to bed, to lose myself in dreams that despite being saturated in anxiety, are still better than my life.