I have spent most of my weekend in the capital of the Basque Country, named Vitoria-Gasteiz. I traveled there by train because on Sunday I had to pass an exam that would determine how often they would keep calling me to work as an IT guy at the local public health care organization, for which I’ve worked on-and-off since 2018.

Half of the city was upended because it happened to be hosting the Ironman Triathlon at the same time, which filled most of the hotels. I ended up spending my Saturday night in a two-star hotel with rusted lamps, and that seemed to have been built in the late sixties or seventies. Check out the photos I took:

I didn’t appreciate the whole vibe of that area, so I didn’t dare leave my valuables inside the room. That night, a couple of dickheads spent about two hours having a shouting match in a nearby alley.

Big cities make my head pound due to the noise and to being surrounded by the dangerous, unpredictable beasts known as human beings. I don’t understand why anybody would willingly want to live in such a place. Dazed, wanting to spend that Saturday afternoon productively, I made the worst mistake of my life by visiting the local museum of modern art.

I was assaulted by the muddle of abstract words grasping at coherence that passed for the exhibition labels, by doodles that an eight-year-old would be embarrassed to show to his or her parents, by sculptures that resembled refuse, etc. Most of it done with a pompous sense of self-importance, a disdain for beauty, and a rejection of meaning itself. I came to the obvious conclusion that, in my daze, I had wandered into a den of marxism. A couple of exhibitions later I was standing in a large room, empty other than for the film that was being projected and that featured footage such as a sunny sky, waves coming on to shore, a hand peeling a fruit. When the credits rolled, I turned into this GIF of DiCaprio:

The mastermind behind the video, a Basque woman, proudly identified herself as belonging to the communist party, and added that when she traveled to California, she contacted a local communist organization in part to help her put together the film. How heart-warming. Fuck you communists and your CBDC.

On Sunday I visited a museum of natural sciences, where I stared at fossils, rocks, and taxidermied animals. They had an exhibition of drawings made by schoolchildren, featuring the animals and insects they liked the most, and they were lovely.

Anyway, I passed the exam, scoring 62. Perhaps I should be content; the shitheads in charge of putting together the exams for this organization never fail to screw up somehow or pick questions that are rarely related to our job as computer technicians; it has happened for the four exams of this type I’ve suffered through. In this case it was even worse: we were given a list of 266 questions featuring laws and normatives whose contents often seemed arbitrary, and I had gone out of my way to code in Python a system that would allow me to nail them, as they would make up about twenty-five percent of the exam. It worked so well that I was regularly passing those mock exams in Python with scores of 95-100%. But the imbeciles who decided the exam questions ended up mistakenly putting in laws and normatives from a different department (stuff related to contracts and wages). All those questions ended up being invalidated. I wasted days and days studying the obnoxious 266 questions that corresponded to our department. Regarding the remaining questions in the exam, they were more often than not only tangentially related to how we spend our time at the office, but that’s par for the course.

Twenty-seven people with a disability equal or higher than 33% signed up for this exam, including myself (thank you high-functioning autism, OCD, IBS, a pituitary gland tumor, and clinical depression), and I’m proud to say that my otherwise low score of 62 bested them all. King of the retards!

The train that would carry me back home came in late. I got off at Donostia, where I waited for another train that was coming late. When we reached the Renfe station at Irún, the employees in charge of letting us pass through the gates had clocked out, and two security guards ended up helping us through. I arrived home at half past nine. Thirty minutes later I went to bed so that the next day, at six in the morning, I could wake up reasonably refreshed. New week of work and all that.

I’m beat, back at the office and being forced to listen, except when I shove earplugs deep into my earholes, to the neuron-killing conversations of my coworkers. This afternoon I hope to finally start writing the next scene of my novel. Other than that, I’m eagerly waiting for Baldur’s Gate 3 (possibly the best RPG in twenty years) to come out on the 3rd of August, and Starfield (the first single-player Bethesda RPG since Fallout 4, and their most ambitious), that comes out in September.

It’s eight in the evening and I’m stuck at work, thankfully alone because during the last two hours of the afternoon, I’m the only technician on duty. I have spent most of my spare time studying for an upcoming test on the 16th, but I have managed to pull off two full paragraphs of the next scene of my ongoing novel, which is quite a lot considering how much returning to work has disturbed me.

On the first day back, about twenty minutes from the end of the working day, I received a call. That late, we usually don’t pick up, and I seriously considered just pretending I had already left, but the call came from HQ. They told me that some technician from the electromedical service was in need of a computer technician because the monitors that handle the delivery rooms in the maternity ward weren’t “receiving data.” That’s too convoluted of an issue to start investigating so late in the evening. I considered just creating a ticket and leaving a note for my boss to decide next morning what to do; I certainly wasn’t going to interview the technician from the electromedical service so that he would rope me in past my schedule; they don’t pay me overtime. However, I ended up contacting the engineer on call.

I had tried to forget about that incident, but the following day, that engineer approached me and told me that she had been dealing with the issue from 22:00 to 1:30. Turns out that the monitors weren’t “receiving data” because none of them would turn on. It was an electrical issue. The technicians on duty from the electromedical service seemed to be newbies, and they insisted that we were responsible because a switch (related to the computer network) was nearby, but that apparently was also dead because it wasn’t receiving power. Basically, it was the same situation as complaining to your internet provider that you can’t browse the internet, even though your computer doesn’t even turn on. Eventually the engineer managed to convince an electrician to go and deal with the situation; it was their responsibility, after all.

The supervisor of the maternity ward was fuming for hours, fearing that any of the newborns may die, and had to call in additional nurses. If I hadn’t taken that goddamn call, nor called the engineer on duty, my ass may have been toast. On my first day back.

Have I stated enough times that I hate this job? I’m autistic, for fuck’s sake. What the hell am I doing dealing with constant chaos, an open plan office in which half of the people act like they’re in high school or middle school, and with such a lack of training and documentation that you must pursue other technicians around to figure out how to solve plenty of tasks? My only hope in this organization is that I may receive a call to work at a smaller hospital, and get stuck working there with an indefinite contract that would allow me to pay my bills reliably. I’m too old and generally uninterested to get back into programming, because I’d have to learn lots of shit I don’t care about (such as programming for mobile phones and websites).

This segues awkwardly into the following: a few days ago I had a conversation with an autistic gal from the US I’ve been talking to online for a while. Not sure how it came up, but I told her that when I was a kid I felt compelled to drown in cold water (not a particularly odd subject among the ones we bring up). She was stunned, because she felt the same way back then, specifically in cold water. She suggested that in a previous life we may have drowned in the Atlantic. I proposed that we may have been citizens of Atlantis. In any case, I have always felt like there was something waiting for me in the cold, black depths of bodies of water. Perhaps a kind of home.

In my beloved previous novel, My Own Desert Places, my protagonist, Irene, killed herself by jumping off a cliff, intending to crush her skull against the rocks below. Instead of that, she became crippled, and lay there until the tide drowned her. This isn’t much of a spoiler, because she starts that novel as a ghost. That was somewhat autobiographical. Back when I was twenty-one or twenty-two, I had such a harrowing experience at my first paid job, that one morning I couldn’t muster the strength to get on the bus and face my bastardly bosses and the tasks that I wasn’t trained properly to fulfill. I had survived until then by luck; middle school was bad, but I spent most of my high school years in a psychotic state. I skipped most classes to wander around town, sneaking into random apartment buildings and spending hours in the stark darkness between flights of stairs, listening to the echoes. A few of those times, I prayed for real (never again afterwards): I asked whatever omnipotent creature may exist in the vast darkness of the universe to come down and kill me. She never came. That indifferent bitch keeps herself busy somewhere out there, spinning her web.

That day, when I refused to take the bus to work, I had a realization: my life until then had sucked major ass. My longest relationship had ended with her gaslighting me about a guy who “was like a little brother” to her. She cheated with him and left. I remember vividly the humiliation I tolerated afterwards; I had no self-esteem left, so I took her calls. The whole thing was a terrible mistake; I shouldn’t have met her to begin with. I hadn’t healed from that pain, and my first job suggested that the rest of my adult life would be strewn with even worse nightmares.

I had enough. At that point I intended to head to some cliff and throw myself off. Plenty of such spaces around. In my mind, I signed off on everything. But because I’m a coward, instead of that I went to the library, and as a result I’m writing these words. I must say, though, that earlier this afternoon, as I was violently expelling diarrhea in the bathroom because my IBS wanted to ruin my day even more than usual, I lamented, as I have done often, that I didn’t kill myself any of the many, many times that I have wanted to. Hell, even as a kid I remember clearly walking alone in the rain, under an umbrella, and wondering why did I have to be born and tolerate this cold, this grating world, and the constant pain.

Anyway, plenty of my stories have involved cold water. Diving into cold water and coming across a downed UFO. Being dragged into the cold depths by a sort of siren (in a novella I wrote in Spanish). Having to rescue your suicidal wife from the cold water because she doesn’t want to live in your manufactured paradise (in another novella I wrote in Spanish). Pretty sure there have been quite a few others. I also wish I could run some LiDAR on the continental shelves that went underwater at the end of the last ice age, when the sea level rose about 120 meters (400 feet). Atlantis went to shit when the North American tectonic plate got subducted and locked like a thousand meters underwater, submerging the Azores plateau, due to the catastrophic melting of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Or at least, that’s what I prefer to think.

Not sure why I felt like sharing these thoughts. Maybe because I wanted to give myself a break from studying, and I needed to get some stuff off my chest. Until next time, stranger who is reading this for reasons that would likely annoy me if I ever found out about them.

Today, at about one o’clock in the morning, I was thinking about food, but also daydreaming about winning the lottery so that I would never have to work for others again (I daydream about that often). Five minutes later I received a phone call. It’s usually either a family member or spam. Today, though, the phone number was a valid one, originating from my province. The fourth and fifth digits were zeroes, which meant that someone from a government-run organization was calling me. That likely meant one thing.

Oh no.

Someone at the office where I’ve worked on-and-off for a few years had taken a sick leave, and my services were required for this very day, on the afternoon shift, and until the guy returned. I’m familiar with the particular fucker, and he’s either gone for two weeks or an entire year. I was already fifteen minutes late from when I need to start preparing myself to leave the apartment, walk through the chaotic city center, get on a train to Donostia, then take a bus to the hospital complex where the office is located.

Back to the grind, back to either waking up at six in the morning or returning home at eleven at night. Back to wasting eight hours in an office, surrounded by about fifteen people even though I’m basically a hermit, having to avoid shitting myself due to my virulent IBS (as if the universe didn’t hate autistic people enough, IBS and other disorders such as OCD are more prevalent in folks like us), and having to meet strangers to solve their issues, issues that will come suddenly, and that I will be expected to know how to solve so that the tense users can return to doing whatever the fuck they were doing. On top of that, due to my vaccine-induced heart problems, I’ll likely end up in the ER again one of these days, because stress is a trigger.

Plenty of people out there struggle through far worse nightmares on a daily basis, but working for others has been my most dreaded one. My brain and body are unsuited for office work. Programming I can handle to a certain extent (I love programming, but doing so for others is a different matter). However, those jobs ended up letting me go, or not hiring me after an internship, due to some variation of “you can’t work well in a team.” Now I’m too old, unfamiliar with most modern technologies other than Rust and Python, and unwilling to get back in the game.

Hell, in my twenties, for long periods that I can’t remember properly, I likely classified as a hikikomori. I became that sort of beast that ceases to clean itself and stores its pee in water bottles, for no reason that I could discern. It’s been about 12-15 years since then, but I’m barely keeping it together as a human being, and that’s unlikely to improve.

So I’m writing this from one of the outrageously, maddeningly slow computers we are supposed to work with (they take about 5-7 minutes on a good day to reach the Windows desktop, and this is an upgraded line of computers from three years ago). I’m on phone duty, having forgotten most of what I learned during the few years I’ve dealt with this nonsense, and dreading the next moment when the work phone will cry out for me to solve some stranger’s problem, even though most of my problems, certainly the most pressing ones, have remained unsolved for my thirty-eight years of living (not for lack of trying, but psychotherapy didn’t work for me, and neither did pills).

Some people out there can write for a living. How lovely that must be. If you are one of those lucky ones, please jerk yourself off to oblivion. You probably deserve it. I can’t even masturbate in the bathroom down the hallway, because someone may call me in the meantime. Anyway, expect a new chapter of my novel, if you care about that shit, in like two weeks or so.

Are there any rich mommy types out there that may want to adopt and feed me? I only require a bed, a computer with WiFi, and a steady supply of milk.

I felt like writing this post due to something I have done wrong today, that speaks volumes about my life and my general state of mind these past few days. The thirtieth of June is when my city celebrates that in the nineteenth century we frustrated an attempt by the Napoleonic army to invade us, or whatever. Can’t say I care much about the actual details. I don’t celebrate festivities in general, nor my own birthday, but I dread such days because I’m forced to keep the peace with my family by attending the reunions. This time I was tasked to do one single thing: grab a take-out order because my parents were busy. I was told when I was supposed to walk into that store and grab the order. I wrote it on Google Calendar. After a morning in which I barely managed to write anything, let alone study for my upcoming exam, I went out and appeared at the store, only to be told by the shopkeeper that the order was supposed to take an hour longer.

The guy started apologizing, suggesting that he probably heard the order wrong or got confused when writing down the time. I told him that it was my fault. In any case, he was kind enough to cook the order and have it ready fifty minutes ahead of time.

When I left that shop, I was feeling like shit. How can any thirty-eight-year-old guy be able to fuck up something as easy as getting to a place at the specific time told a few hours earlier, written even on his calendar? I’m not surprised, of course, because stuff like this has happened over and over throughout my life. It’s pure executive dysfunction, a common part of being autistic. Your brain drops part of sequential logic of organizing something, to the extent that you screw it up as if you were a child. To curb this natural tendency of my brain to sabotage my life, at work I constantly walk around with a notebook and a pen. I write every step of every task, and when I’m applying a solution, I triple-check the results. I still screw up from time to time. Maybe I should give myself a break; I’m 52% disabled according to the local government. Doesn’t change how I feel, though.

And this happened after a few days during which I’ve been in a “fuck everything” kind of mood. I can barely write. I haven’t studied for the exam that I must pass in sixteen days so that I keep getting called to work as an IT guy at public hospitals, a job I don’t want to do and that I can’t tolerate for long periods of time. At the family reunion, I have kept my head down, unwilling to make eye contact particularly with the couple of relatives of my brother’s wife, who brought over their screaming baby (not the kid’s fault, of course). Yet another psychological and sensorial assault I had to endure so that my family members don’t make my life less manageable than it already is.

Unfortunately, I’m up-to-date with the mortifying riots in France, that are happening next door and that have spread to Belgium because they share the same demographic problems. I expect us in Spain, as well as throughout Europe, to suffer similar riots in about ten years. The president of France, that weasely minion of the WEF, has blamed the riots on video games, and has pushed for more censorship of social media. For all we know, they wanted riots such as these to present themselves as saviors by proposing digital IDs, a central digital currency, a social score system, fifteen-minute cities, etc. They openly talk about wanting to get rid of most private cars; during the riots, the government suspended public transport. Good luck fleeing anywhere when these video game addicts, armed with AK-47s and screaming islamic battle cries, burn down the stores in your bulding block, if not set fire to your entire apartment building. Ask what happened to many Swedes who couldn’t move out of their conquered neighborhoods. George Orwell said that if you want a picture of the future, you should imagine a foot stamping on a human face, for ever. To picture it more easily, just watch the movie Children of Men.

I have been wanting to feel a bit better, partly to ease the guilt of knowing that I should be studying but I can’t be arsed to (it has always been extremely hard for me to focus on anything I don’t care about). I put on a couple of movies, but they didn’t hold my attention. Same with a twenty-five-minute-long anime episode. Played through the intro of Baldur’s Gate 3 yet again to check out recent updates, but knowing that the full game is coming out in August made progressing further quite pointless. In the end I relied on the tried and true: I put on my VR headset, loaded up some 3D porn and masturbated the pain away. These silly brains get tricked so easily that VR-induced orgasms feel better than the real thing as I remember it from my wilder youth. During my time off writing, I don’t know why I bother doing anything else than masturbating. People are unbearable, and the world is going to hell.

Congratulations on bothering to read this shit.

To me, the world feels like it’s becoming increasingly horrifying. The Russia-Ukraine war has gotten more unstable, the US government and its media are utterly corrupt (which matters a lot even for us in Europe, because whatever idelogical bullshit they come up with they end up spreading it), AI is getting nuts but the powers-that-be are focusing on trying to censor it to fit their ideology, insiders knew that the virus was a lab leak and yet they deceived us all, the WEF and the 2030 Agenda motherfuckers keep working every day to turn the entire world into a worse version of communist China, people are waking up regarding UFOs but whatever groups have the remains became a more entrenched power than that of public servants, etc. We’re living through the shoddiest dystopia imaginable.

Regarding my personal life, I’ve been unemployed since January. I thought it would last a month at the most, but turns out that the rankings that determine if I get called to work as an IT technician for hospitals got updated due to some new laws, and because I can’t speak Basque, I got pushed down from first to eight or ninth. I have been glad that I can wake up at nine in the morning and write, and that the goverment is paying me unemployment benefits. However, this won’t last much longer: they updated the rankings, and a good bunch of people above me must have gotten hired, because now I’m second. I may get called next week to cover summer holidays.

Obviously I just work to earn money. I wish I could write for a living, but that will never happen. Working as an IT guy with my neurological issues means not only that my time and energies will be stolen, but also my mental health. On top of that, ever since one of the so-called boosters damaged the electrical lining or whatever of my heart, working at the hospital will likely also end up with me in the ER yet again due to atrial fibrillation. From those who were permanently screwed by the biological weapon or its derivatives, I’m among the lucky ones; the twenty-two years old or so brother of a co-worker of mine, who played for a football team, dropped dead in the shower from a sudden cardiac arrest with no priors. The football team was checking him up regularly as well. His corpse lay for a week under a hot shower; they had to rely on his dental records to identify him.

Anyway, I’m getting more anxious by the day, not only because I may have to return to work soon, but because in twenty-one days I’ll have to travel to Vitoria to pass a bullshit exam that will determine the next ranking for this public IT job stuff. I’m having a hard time retaining half of the material; it involves semi-arbitrary laws and normatives more or less related to the public health system. Obviously I don’t give a shit about any of it.

Ever since I became unemployed, I haven’t spoken in person with anyone other than my family members and service providers. As an autistic guy who deals with regular intrusive thoughts due to OCD (possibly also untreated PTSD), I need solitude and a solid routine to avoid falling apart. I write first thing in the morning, I study a bit later, and after lunch I walk to the wooded outskirts of town to read. When I return home, I either study some more or waste time on YouTube and Twitter. I used to play video games, but I have a serious case of FOMO (can’t get into CK3, Victoria 3, Dwarf Fortress and Cyberpunk 2077 for that reason).

Today, though, as I walked to my usual spot in the outskirts of town, I felt unable to deal with even the occasional dog walkers and old couples that pass through that area. I walked further into the forest, past the ancient Roman foundry (this used to be a Roman mining town). An isolated home stood next to the foundry, inhabited by an old couple. You could tell that that house would have been demolished long ago if the couple hadn’t refused to sell it. There used to be chickens walking around. Today I have found that home bricked up. A cement kennel was overgrown with weeds.

I walked up a path that I don’t remember ever having followed, but maybe my parents brought me here as a kid. I took some photos of that area with the shitty camera of my tablet.

I sat on that spot for about half an hour. I couldn’t hear anything but the river and the birds. I thought of how old I’ve become: thirty-eight years old, far longer than I was sure I would get to live. Inside I’m still a kid, or at the most about eighteen years old. I have no idea how I’m going to cope if my life gets significantly worse. I fantasize about moving out of the area and/or travel for long periods of time, once my parents die. But due to my issues with executive dysfunction, I have a hard time dealing with anything that breaks my routine. Obviously I’m alone (I can barely handle myself), so I won’t get any help in that regard.

As I started heading back, I felt the kind of nostalgia that I could swear is written in my genes: I belong here. Not among people, not among cement and glass and steel. I need the internet to get by, but other than that, I wish I could get some job that involved losing myself in the woods for hours at a time without coming across any human being. Given my luck, though, I’d end up eaten by a bear, or becoming a Missing 411 case.

Someone had set up a huge salt circle, possibly for an occult ritual.

On the way back, I noticed a group of people out of sight because they were speaking obnoxiously loud. Shortly after, I could hear the presence of more humans from a distance: another group was having a picnic and lounging near the river while blasting music from a speaker. I endure sensory issues; the worst ones are audio related (repeated sounds make me feel like I’m being poked by someone who wants to fuck with me, and loud sounds make me feel like I’ve just been slapped. People’s abuse of noise has contributed greatly to my disdain for humanity), although I also have issues with light (outside, often I’m forced to do Clint Eastwood impressions, even if the day is somewhat cloudy), and whenever someone touches me, I cringe and feel the need to squirm (which was great for my sex life when I bothered with intimate relationships).

Anyway, I’m back home, sitting at my desk in my underwear. I’m not sure why I felt the need to write this instead of studying or browsing YouTube idly.

Oh, I forgot: until yesterday and for three days, a single person from the US had racked up about sixty hits per day on pages of my site, from poetry to short stories and novels. Not sure what you were looking for, but thank you for the dopamine hits. Particularly noticeable given that I rarely get more than five or six hits a day.

I have barely written anything this week; my old pal darkness itself has paid me a visit. When I wake up I want to go back to sleep. After I drag myself out of bed, I lack the energy and mental focus to do anything but vegetate around. Although I force myself to go outside for a walk and to read in some coffee shop, every sensation feels grating. I try to avoid landing my gaze on any human being. Both the present and future seem hopeless. I think often of how lovely it would be if I hadn’t been born. So in general, the usual stuff that goes on when I end up depressed again. The only thing that has made me feel better is lying on a massage mat with my eyes closed while listening to ASMR through my noise-cancelling headphones.

I’m sure that the lack of a new chapter of my ongoing novel will be a tragedy for the five people or so that follow it, probably for sick reasons. I’m writing the stuff that I need to write; it just happens that I may be the only person who actually wants to read such a story.

I have been unemployed since January, and living on unemployment benefits that will last for eight more months. Honestly, I hope I don’t get a job until then. For the last few years I have been working as an IT guy at a hospital. I hated that job, but I thought I could tolerate it, until I developed heart problems that get triggered by the stress I endure at the job. I have gone through two episodes of serious arrhythmia so far, and both landed me in the ER. Going back to work, possibly to any job, will initiate a countdown until the next time that my heart fails me again. I only work to earn money, of course; if I could get away with it, I would write for a living. In addition, having a job from now on not only will steal my time, my energy and my mental health, but it could also cause a stroke, an aneurysm or who knows what other nasty shit due to my heart issues.

On top of that, I was working regularly in that health organization because I was ranked first in the list of people to call when regular workers get sick or go on holiday. However, some political bullshit has given further importance to being able to speak Basque, the regional language, to the extent that I’m now ranked the eight. If I don’t get called for the upcoming holidays in a couple of weeks, I’m unlikely to get any contract at all for the foreseeable future. Very few people who aren’t native speakers of that horrid language (that was cobbled together artificially in the seventies, because different regions of the Basque Country could barely understand each other) can get the certification, and their horror stories involve ceasing to read or watch any movie/show in their spare time except in Basque. The instructors that teach the language in publically funded courses seem to always be political activists for whom the language is inextricably linked to fighting for the independence of this region, as well as communism.

In my case, reading and writing the stuff that I need to read and write is the only thing that has kept me alive so far; I didn’t see myself living past eighteen years old, and I would have spared myself tons of horrors if I hadn’t. In addition, I loathe that fucking language, Basque; as if I didn’t find it ugly and useless to begin with, I have many bad memories of random adults related to the school reprimanding me for speaking in Spanish during recess, or even when I was walking around town in my free time. Joke’s on them, though: about half of the time you hear anyone speak on the streets these days, you hear neither Spanish nor Basque. Well, joke’s on all of us for that.

In summary, I may need to figure out what to do to earn money. I doubt I can go back to programming; I haven’t learned any programming of note in years, and I’m far too old already (I’ll turn thirty-eight in a couple of weeks) for an industry that recycles young programmers because they accept terrible wages.

Other than that, I’m loving the manga series Dungeon Meshi, about a group of D&D-like folks delving into a dungeon partly to eat every monster they come across. Well-realized and flawed characters, the way seemingly only the Japanese know how to do it anymore. Here’s a video review by someone who does good job extolling the virtues of that story.

Anyway, back to the winter prediction: it’s going to be cold, it’s going to be grey, and it’s going to last you for the rest of your life.

It’s a quarter to midnight over here and today I’ve gone through a surreal nightmare. Granted, most experiences feel like surreal nightmares when your neurological makeup is as screwed up as mine.

I woke up at seven to get on a taxi to get on a train straight to Vitoria-Gasteiz, the capital of Álava, a neighboring province, because I had to take a bullshit public exam that would determine if in three years or so, for a period of about eight months, they would keep calling me to work as an IT guy at some hospital (usually the main hospital at Donostia).

Whenever I travel somewhere new or that I don’t visit often, I love the sights on the way. There’s a curious mountain somewhere between my city and Vitoria-Gasteiz that looks like hundreds of meters of gray bones sticking out of the ground. The surroundings are flat, and the couple of neighboring towns look quiet and peaceful. I wonder how it would be like to live in such places.

There’s a sequence in my beloved previous novel, “My Own Desert Places”, when the main guy/girl and his/her love interest take a trip to Asturias. I wrote that sequence in a single Sunday (I have no clue how I managed to write so quickly back then; I wrote the novel in a couple of months). Along the way, the protagonist slowly loses her mind, with hilarious slash disturbing results. I felt pretty much the same on the way back home today, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, I reached Vitoria-Gasteiz, which is a pretty cool city. At least the architecture is intriguing, but my experience, as usual, went something like this: “What a nice and spacious avenue. But why is that retard blasting the morning news so loudly?” “What a picturesque little shop that sells antiques. Oh, that man just hacked up a phlegm and spat it onto the pavement.” “Look at that lovely, centuries-old plaza. But why do these people have to speak so loud?” In short, human beings are the worst part of every single fucking experience. Just imagine how lovely a sudden lack of human beings would be. Or at least if they had learned to keep quiet and reproduce responsibly along the way.

I ate a greasy combo plate at some restaurant that turned out to serve huge portions, but whose patrons were, expectedly, obnoxiously loud. I was seated next to a woman in maybe her mid to late thirties whose husband looked like he was in his late forties or early fifties. They had three young boys who wouldn’t stop annoying each other. The mother looked exasperated. At one point she leaned towards one of her boys and said something like, “do not snatch the toy out of my hand like that. Do you understand me? If you want it ask for it. Say, ‘can you please give me the toy?’ Do not forcefully grab it from my hand,” in a voice that sounded like she resented the kid. A bit later, the youngest of her crotch goblins started bawling. The mother went, “I wish I had come alone, that I had left you three at home so I could have a good time for a change,” or something to that effect. The husband wasn’t around to witness these interactions.

I will never become pregnant no matter what kind viscous experiment I may partake in, but if I were a woman, I think that one of my worst fears would be to have children only to years later resent having to spend my precious time dealing with them. I’ve been near a few women when they gave off that impression (another one I remember was a tired-looking woman in her thirties who was writing on a notebook at a coffee shop only for her son to topple her cup, then wander away non-chalantly as the mother was berating him. The woman then started crying softly), and it made me sad. I wanted to stand up and tell those women to shoot their kids in the face and then ride into the sunset with me. I would become their new son if they so pleased. I tend to fantasize about having sex with virtually every moderately attractive woman I come across.

I was dealing with acid reflux and lots of gas when five in the afternoon came around. I joined a few dozen people at some local college to subject myself to the harrowing experience of having to pass some bullshit exam. Turns out that whoever was in charge of choosing the questions for this exam was an idiot, incompetent, or both: about forty percent of the questions were only tangentially related to anything we do at work as IT guys for hospitals. For example, they asked shit like “what is the Spanish authority that provides guidelines to audit the security of information systems?” Bitch, we have nothing to do with network security nor audits. Those are engineers at a completely different job. I don’t recall even reading about most of that stuff in the books they told us to buy for this exam.

As if the infuriatingly ridiculous questions weren’t enough, the dickhead they put in charge of my classroom only informed us of the remaining time when there were only fifteen minutes left. I didn’t even have time to reread all the questions I had left unanswered. In all the other exams, the examiners started informing us of the remaining time with forty-five minutes left. This, along with the questions they chose for the exam, is the kind of shit that happens when both the jury and the examiners are chosen by lottery.

When I got out of that campus, it was dark outside. I was sure that I had flunked the exam. Seated at a coffee table in the mostly deserted train station, because I had to wait an hour until my train back home arrived, I felt utterly miserable. It’s not the kind of miserable that someone as broken as me felt back in the day; I’m fully aware that I’m not built for this world, that most of the sensory information it provides on a daily basis feels like nails on a chalkboard, and that I will never feel comfortable among human beings. I have long ceased to fight against any of that. I was just exhausted, defeated, and wanted to go home.

The ride was a blur of pitch-blackness outside, me wanting to have sex with the stylish fake blonde that was seated in front of me, and me wondering how such sexual encounter would work, given that I had spent the last hour and a half holding my farts.

When I got home at about eleven at night, I found out that I actually passed the exam. Barely. So instead of writing an utterly miserable entry, I’ve written this crap because I feel a bit better. Tomorrow I’ll go back to focusing on writing my novel, which is the only thing that truly matters in this world as far as I’m concerned, at least until I finish it and move on to the next thing.

Today I have travelled to the hills of Donostia for a cardiology appointment. I had sought a second opinion because the first doctor that treated me had performed an echocardiogram then failed to share the results (he was already ending the visit when I reminded him), had gotten annoyed at me when I told him the objective fact that I had never experienced heart issues until the very same day I received the latest “booster vaccine” (he told me, “[manufactured virus of unspecified origin] vaccines have nothing to do with heart issues, erase that from your mind”), and in general behaved like a prick.

This second doctor looked close to retirement, and was cold and abrasive. He simultaneously seemed to believe that patients shouldn’t research their symptoms on their own (“because Google mostly lies”) and that details about cardiological afflictions and their treatments should be common knowledge.

He told me that acid reflux likely triggered my latest episode of arrhythmia, that I possibly have some esophageal hernia too close to the left ventricle of my heart. It may be the reason why I felt like some pressure was coming up my esophagus, only to “inflate” in the general area of my heart, and then break out into an arrhythmia the moment the pressure deflated. However, he told me that I shouldn’t bother to get my esophagus looked at, because the treatment would be the same. Or some shit like that, I’m not sure on that point.

He clarified that I can lift weights, but not heavily (low weights, high repetitions), and that I should focus on cardio instead (I hate cardio). I also shouldn’t consume alcohol, caffeine, carbonated beverages or even too cold stuff (like ice cream) preferably ever again. I can’t think of anything that has kept me running as much as caffeine has for the last couple of decades, so I don’t know how I’ll handle that.

What infuriated me was the following (paraphrased) exchange:

Doctor: “When was the first time you experienced such issues with your heart?”
Jon: “Well, the last doctor who wanted an answer to that question got pissed at me when I told him, but here it goes: my heart was healthy until the day I received the latest “booster vaccine,” as I was burning up a fever, and I have experienced palpitations ever since.”
Doctor: “[Manufactured virus of unspecified origin] is known to damage the electrical functions of the heart, and therefore the vaccine does as well.”
Jon: “The other doctor told me that these vaccines are unrelated to heart issues.”
The doctor leaned forward.
Doctor: “That’s what they are saying because they don’t want to discourage people from getting it. But of course the vaccine can cause permanent heart damage, because the virus itself is known to attack such tissues. I have treated, for example, many young women that come from other doctors because they are experiencing what is called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS); other doctors have told them that it was anxiety related, but these women could tell that the only factor that changed in their lives was getting jabbed.”

I would like to put the following text in all caps, but it would look ugly as hell, so I’ll use italics instead:

Even though these vaccines don’t prevent contagion, don’t prevent transmission, don’t prevent mutation, that at the most (supposedly) they make the symptoms less severe, even groups that aren’t at risk (such as young people) have been mandated to receive them, despite the fact that a sizeable percentage of them will develop permanent health issues as a consequence, issues that could cause their deaths. In addition, some doctors, by lying about the dangers, are deliberately stealing their patients’ right to make an informed decision regarding whether or not they should get jabbed.

In case you didn’t know, Musk divulged emails from some big shot at Pfizer that used government channels to push for censorship of other doctors that stated that the index of mortality regarding this virus in young people was less than zero percent, and that therefore they shouldn’t get vaccinated. So many people’s heads should roll, but I’ll be extremely surprised if any of them end up defending themselves in a courtroom.

Anyway, my doctor emphasized that I should never get a [manufactured virus of unspecified origin] vaccine again. I suspect that the next time some people order us all into lockdown with whatever excuse, I’d need some signed exemption, or else I would likely lose my job.

This doctor prescribed me three different drugs: one to handle my acid reflux (that I should take every day before dinner), a beta blocker that is supposed to reduce blood pressure (and that could make me seriously dizzy on top of how out of it I generally am, partly thanks to the drug I take for my pituitary tumor), and flecainide in case I find myself out in the wild when the next arrhythmia hits. If my heart rhythm doesn’t revert in four hours after taking flecainide, I should visit the ER.

In the end, this new doctor was a bit of a prick, but an honest prick, and that’s the best kind. In addition, he didn’t fucking charge me for the visit.

I’m unemployed as of last Friday, and I have nothing going on until this Saturday, when I’ll have to travel to Vitoria-Gasteiz and pass some bullshit exam. Hopefully in the meantime I’ll manage to make enough progress with my novel.