We got her as a stray when I was nineteen or so. She was pregnant, and ended up birthing three of my other cats. She outlived them. She was good, kind, and loving. She was around during my twenties, during the periods when I couldn’t get myself to leave my bedroom, and she was around during my thirties when I returned home exhausted from my job. Just four or five days ago she just stopped being herself, and a blink later she was dead.
Words are distractions; the truth is that nothing we can think or say is going to stop the joy and love in our lives from eventually withering and dying.
Still, I struggle to figure out if I have something more meaningful to get out of this other than sadness. I could tell myself that I’ve posted this photo to remember her, but the truth is that I barely remember her already. Just a few two-seconds-long sequences of her looking at me from my bed, or asking me food from my plate. The weight of her limp body in my arms is the last thing I’m going to remember of her. She had a good, long life, certainly better than mine, if that counts for anything. But when years from now I look at photos of her, like it happens with all my other dead cats, the notion that I ever interacted with her won’t seem real anymore. And I will need to carry the weight of this sadness for the rest of my life. What was the point? It’s almost pure faith what you need to hold in your heart to believe that all of this counts for something.
Ever since my twenties, whenever I thought about killing myself, the thought came to mind that I couldn’t do that to my cats. I imagined them looking around for me, like they looked around for the other missing cats over the years. Soon enough I won’t feel responsible for anyone anymore, and maybe then it will finally be time to move on.
I mentioned before that I have two remaining cats: one about 18 years old, and the other about 22 years old. For the last two or three months, the 18-year-old one has shown respiratory issues, and for a while he refused to eat anything on his own. The vet diagnosed him with kidney failure. He has to take medication for the rest of his likely short life, but he now moves more or less normally, climbs stuff, responds, eats on his own.
About four days ago, though, my 22-year-old cat simply stopped being herself. Most of the time she lay there with blank eyes. When she climbed down from a chair or the sofa, she moved in this slow, wobbly manner that clearly indicated that something was wrong. However, there is nothing acutely wrong with her, in the sense that she doesn’t struggle to breathe; she suddenly just stopped eating, and barely moves. She has deteriorated to the extent that, although I have a vet visit scheduled for tomorrow, I wouldn’t be surprised if she dies before then. She’s now wrapped in a blanket, eyes open but blank, breathing but generally unresponsive. I suspect that something has happened to her brain. If so, this must have been the second time; the first one happened maybe two years ago: one afternoon, she suddenly started wobbling around, and got stuck in a loop of drinking water, walking to one end of the room, returning to drink water, and back to the other end of the room, to the extent that she kept pissing herself along the way. Somehow she recovered from that, although she wasn’t quite the same. This time, she looks like the most obvious “my time has come” case I’ve seen personally.
My eyes are teary, but it’s not hitting me as hard as I feel it should. This cat, while she was still herself, was the kindest, sweetest, most loving cat I’ve ever had and will ever have, as I don’t intend to own pets ever again. And from now, after she passes likely today or soon enough, for the rest of my life I’ll get reminded by intrusive thoughts about her death, ambushed no matter where I am or what I’m doing.
On the following photos, the cat on the left was the other’s daughter; she died. The one on the right is the cat I’m referring to on this post.
I guess there’s no much else that can be said. You love someone only for them to end up leaving forever. That always happens. As for why we even endure through all of this is something I don’t believe I’ll ever understand.
I have been jolted awake at half past four by intrusive thoughts of my cat getting killed by a dog back in 2018. I remember the tail end of that dream: I was with someone, a girl I believe, trying to build a small shed in some lonely street corner to hang out (something I’ve never done in real life), only for the dream-sight to change into that of a pregnant cat navigating a small maze that resembled the spaces of those double windows that have like buffers in between. Suddenly my real-life cat showed up in the dream, and with it the grief and shame, and I just woke up. Went to the kitchen to get a glass of milk, then sat down at the computer to write the following to ChatGPT:
I am 40 years old, I have been diagnosed with high-functioning autism (formerly Asperger’s), and also Pure O OCD. It’s now half past four in the morning and I have been woken up by intrusive thoughts of a cat of mine who died brutally back in 2018; a dog gave her a mortal wound and we had to sacrifice her the same day. Ever since, I remember that cat weekly, as in maybe there are some days in the week in which I don’t get intrusive thoughts about it. The way my brain works, I don’t even get good memories, just pure negative ones, like the times when I was nine and I hurt a girl’s heart because I pretended I didn’t remember that she had wanted us to start going out together the day before; or the time I went to school as a child with different shoes, or the times I was so miserable in school that I had to ditch class almost daily and I lingered in the dark in random apartment buildings, sitting for hours in the stairwells. I feel like my brain is constantly under siege by intrusive thoughts, and every new experience I expose myself to will just cram more intrusive thoughts that will torture me for the rest of my life. I’m currently unemployed, but when I had a job, it felt so alienating to see my coworkers so happily laugh the shift away, while I have to deal not only with intrusive thoughts but also all the stuff related to autism (and also heart issues because of the covid vaccine, and other bodily problems because my development was screwed by a pituitary gland tumor).
I’m telling you not only to vent, but to ask in a general sense, what the fuck do I do with my life?
As it produced its response, tears rolled down my cheeks. Those thick, silent tears that come with a strange pressure in your chest. Artificial intelligence helps me daily in so many ways, but it has never told me anything useful about this.
It’s yet another time in which I have to think about the flood of intrusive thoughts that I have to wade through merely to get through the day, even if that day only involves sitting at home working on my programming project (for one reason or another, I haven’t gone out in four days). I am sure that this is what’s going to kill me: the growing hill of intrusive thoughts one day will catch me so low that I’ll have no choice but to get rid of myself with whatever is available around. And it may happen any day.
Someone else wrote on the subject of OCD on Reddit: “OCD is an endless painful torturous cycle. You can’t stop thinking about the things that you don’t want to think about. No matter what you do, no matter how much reassurance you get, it doesn’t stop. The thoughts themselves are literally painful. I don’t know how else to describe them. They are like knives stabbing me in the brain.” Although due to the Pure O variant I don’t have external rituals, purely mental ones (or at least I don’t recognize my compulsions), those words fit perfectly with my experience.
What’s even more alienating is that people who don’t suffer from autism and OCD can’t seem to understand the experience of it at all. I’ve had people, usually indirectly and online, say stuff like, “change your perspective and think differently,” elaborated into complex platitudes. It usually made me want to punch such people in the face. The way other human’s brains seem to work is so alien to me, that as I mentioned to ChatGPT, it felt so painfully alienating to work at an office and see people smile and laugh at fucking nothing (like this stupid youngish female technician whom I internally referred to as the “cackler,” whose every third utterance was a cackle-like laugh). Meanwhile, for me, being awake is a hell that I constantly have to distract myself from by disappearing into daydreams (usually of the soothing nature, pure non-sexual intimacy with someone I would like to talk to), writing (back when I did that regularly), and working on my programming projects. Also lifting weights when I can push myself to do so. The thought came to mind, probably from some quote, that “being awake is like courting disaster at every step.”
I’m so fucking tired. There’s the whole unemployment issue; I can’t imagine myself trying to get out there, talking to random people and basically beg to be hired, so I can return to routines that will hurt me. I briefly thought of talking to a therapist, but my experience with about five therapists since I was 16 is that their profession is a sham and that the only help they can provide is that of a listening ear. A very expensive listening ear. And don’t get me started on the “let’s see if it works” pills that some push. That fucking brain zapping from SSRIs.
I don’t know what else to say. It’s 5:30 now. I’ll probably lie down and conjure up some pleasant scene with Alicia, somewhere in the Midwest. I better haul my aging ass out today for a guitar session in the quiet woods, because I see myself slipping into my hikikomori mode like back in my twenties.
Look at the lovely images of this video I generated on the subject of this post:
This morning, at about half past nine, I’ve woken up to a sound I’ve dreaded for the last seven years: an incoming call. I don’t receive calls unless it’s work-related, and that was the case: HR calling me to cover a shift as a technician at the hospital, a job that has wrecked my health to the extent that it landed me thrice in the ER due to arrhythmia and a hemiplegic migraine.
After I finished the last contract, in which I worked as a programmer and that illustrated perfectly, by contrast, that I’m not suited at all to work as a technician, I went to the Occupational Health department and talked to a doctor to inform them that I wouldn’t work as a technician anymore. That doctor turned out to be a temp, and she told me that I should speak to my general practitioner at another hospital for it. When I visited the general practitioner, she told me that the doctor at OH must have been confused, and I should talk to her about it again. When I wrote to that doctor, I didn’t receive an answer, likely because she was no longer working there. This whole nonsense, a complete waste of time that unfortunately I have had to deal with so many times in my life, annoyed me enough that I didn’t book another visit with Occupational Health, which caused HR to eventually call me for a technician job. Thankfully, the job was only to cover a single afternoon shift (today’s), which means I won’t get in trouble for refusing it. But I need to hurry and schedule another visit to Occupational Health as soon as possible.
I have to deal with this shit even though I’m in a state that can likely be called depression. A couple of days ago, as I rolled in bed trying to calm my intrusive thoughts down so they would let me sleep, I had an intimate mental dialogue with my body that I’ve had at my lowest points: “Please let me die in my sleep. I don’t need to know about it and I don’t want to feel anything. I just don’t want to wake up again. I don’t want any more of this shit.” The next morning I woke up disappointed, and spent the whole day with my body urging me to lie down and sleep. Although I forced myself to go out and play the guitar (at a trail that only about six people passed through), everything I played sounded slowed down and lacking energy.
I can’t figure out what to do out there, outside of my apartment, other than play the guitar. Going anywhere and doing anything else feels like far more trouble than it’s worth. Wherever I go I’ll have bad experiences with people, if only because I have to face the abhorrent decay of society. That always brings to mind my maternal grandfather, that in the last few decades of his life, after he retired, barely went out at all, explicitly because he couldn’t stand what he saw around him. Had he lived to witness what we now have to endure, he certainly would have wanted to kill himself, although, a huge catholic as he was, he probably wouldn’t have.
Life just gets far too complicated when you can’t stand human beings. It’s no philosophical position nor a learned opinion, although I could easily make the case against people. Ever since I was a child, having human beings around has made my skin crawl, triggered the fight-or-flight response. I knew by instinct that people were far more dangerous than most animals: unpredictable, treacherous, and often plain evil. I assume that this reaction has been set by my atypical neurological development caused by autism, but the cause doesn’t change the effect.
It’s also due to autism that I can’t read people; I have to assume, given how people speak of others, that they get a sense of other people’s internal worlds, but for me it’s opaque: many times I’ve had to deal with people who apparently disliked me, even intensely, and I had no clue (I had to be told by someone else, as in “Why are you talking to them like that when they hate you?”). People would laugh casually during a conversation with me, and I didn’t understand why. People would react nastily with me and I couldn’t understand why. I’ve always had to walk into an interaction with people having to be on guard, as I can’t know when someone is going to attack me or cause me trouble. Unfortunately, the intimate relationships I stupidly had in my late 10s and early 20s didn’t fare much different, with my long-term girlfriend (what felt like long-term back then) cheating on me without me having a clue until the very end. Any social situation in person feels dangerous and exhausting. Not much else to say about it other than it’s at the forefront of my mind whenever I have to decide what to do outside of my apartment.
That call from HR means I’ll have to hurry and schedule a new visit with OH, which means traveling to Donostia’s hospital and engaging with the bureaucracy. That’s only so I won’t get called for jobs that my body has proven I can’t handle. I haven’t even started looking for a new suitable job.
I accidentally pressed the power button on my computer as I was dealing with my sick cat, and I thought I had lost this entire post. I suppose that’s as good a clue as any to post it and move on.
Last night by nine, my eyes were already shutting by themselves, so I went to bed. I woke up spontaneously at half past midnight, which is something that unfortunately happens often when I go to bed early. What I remember from that hour until about half past four is me rolling around in bed trying to sleep, while getting bombarded with intrusive memories of so many cringe-worthy when not straight painful moments that somehow or another ended up in my brain. Thankfully there’s always masturbation, so I took advantage of that influx of chemicals to wrestle my brain into sleep. Woke up at nine due to my alarm (I would love to sleep in, but I know how that would end up: in my twenties I regularly woke up at midday). Upon waking up, I almost invariably feel the same dread and disappointment about having to maneuver through another day in this horrid world. As myself, no less.
I’ve been unemployed since September 14. For the last seven years or so, I’ve worked as an IT technician at a hospital. That landed me in the ER thrice due to stress; my heart and my brain told me that couldn’t go on further (two episodes of arrhythmia and one hemiplegic migraine that I suspect was a minor stroke). My boss offered me a nine-month contract as a programmer because I think he himself saw that I couldn’t go on as a regular technician. That period as a programmer was stress free, even though it frustrated me work-wise thanks to the hospital’s manager seemingly being unable to specify what he wanted, and constantly changing his mind. The whole project collapsed when the manager was replaced (literally none of the work I did ended up being used), and then I was put in charge of updating the morgue’s internal website, which was more interesting. That project led me to discover how often body parts, fetuses, and even corpses sometimes, get lost due to administrative reasons. “Family came for their fetus; we couldn’t find it.” Not much else I’d need to say about that. I’ve met so many idiots working at the hospital that it’s a miracle it runs to any extent. But I guess I could say the same about how modern societies are organized.
Anyway, I’m not looking for a job. I certainly should, but I can’t bring myself to bother. It would involve me returning to a routine of constant anxiety purely in exchange for money. I get the feeling that normal people somewhat enjoy going to work because they want to interact with people, but I hate interacting with human beings in person, and it only worsens my anxiety. So it would be sacrificing half of my day, and most of my energy, merely to earn money. As I have some savings, I’m not worried about it at the moment. I think that I will eventually look for protected jobs for disabled people; I’m 52% disabled according to the provincial government, mainly due to high-functioning autism and a pituitary tumor that wrecked my hormonal and physical development. I suspect that either may have been caused by my overzealous nurse mother sticking in me seemingly any vaccine she could find, so I would be protected. There are genetic markers for autism, though (at least in my maternal grandfather). Not much to think about either at this point other than the fact that I wish they hadn’t happened to me.
I’m engaging in plenty of suicidal ideation recently. The kind in which I sit around, imagine myself dying, and feel relief because I wouldn’t need to worry about money, about my future, or about society anymore. Sometimes I just plainly want to be dead. Or perhaps never have existed. I’ve never liked being myself. All my daydreams involve me being someone else in a way that nature doesn’t allow.
Merely stepping outside of my home is a constant reminder that the world is worsening at a rapid pace. If I reach my seventies, I will likely find myself a hated minority surrounded by a majority that will gleefully plan my extinction. Fall ill only to be treated by some shady foreigner who doesn’t give two shits about your well-being. End up in a nursing home depending on the goodwill of people for whom you are the root of all evil. For the indigenous people, modern society has become a rush to earn enough money to move somewhere where the rot still hasn’t gotten worse enough. Nothing short of mass displacement and/or mass murder will solve it at this point; I highly doubt we’ll get mass displacement, but we will very likely get mass murder. However, it will come from the imports, in the form of armies of masked, armed mohammedans.
Also, I’m not sure why you would engage with any of it, mainly meaning society, unless you intend to bring children into this nightmare. Set aside that it would be a cruelty. For the past few months, I’ve only gone out to buy food or else to play the guitar. Given that I’m unemployed, I could travel around, at least take the train to a nearby city, but I have the pervasive sense that there’s nothing for me out there other than fresh bad memories to shove into my brain.
I do keep busy. I work daily on my Living Narrative Engine, which is a Javascript app that allows me to set up narrative scenarios in which any character can be played by a large language model. While I mainly use it for erotica, progressively I’ve found myself using it for more complex stuff. Creating new actions for the LLMs to use is almost trivial at this point (I put together a whole set of vampire-related actions in a day), which leads to lots of interesting, unpredictable moments during the runs, as the LLMs can choose what action to take in context, and they all affect the simulation (if only by recording what happened, which is read in turn by other actors).
As I was lying in bed at about six in the morning, having woken up from a strange dream I couldn’t remember, for no particular reason I recalled that time when I was fourteen or so, in 1999, when I saw a UFO. Over the years, I’ve wondered if I hallucinated it, but it didn’t: I was sitting on the backseat of my parents’ car, with my younger sister on the other side. She was too young to remember it meaningfully, if at all. About three minutes away from home, we looked at the San Marcial shrine, which is located on top of the mountain of the same name in Irún, and we saw this:
Well, I must clarify that wasn’t exactly that what we saw. I fed ChatGPT an image of the San Marcial shrine, and told it to generate an image set at dusk in which a UFO made out of three three-dimensional glowing orbs, orange-green in color, set in an equilateral triangle, was hovering about 5-6 times the height of the shrine above the building itself. The UFO was smaller, about the size of the shrine from our perspective. Also, there weren’t lines connecting the orbs, but I couldn’t get ChatGPT to remove those.
My mother simultaneously didn’t believe in but also was afraid of UFOs; even though I kept telling her to look, she only glanced at it then refused to look at it more. My father, even though he was driving, did stare at it; I think he was interested in UFOs in his youth. He didn’t stop the car, which he should have. Soon enough, we lost it behind some houses.
The strangest thing happened a bit later. It dawns on me from time to time how truly strange it was. After my father parked, I was eager to round the corner of the apartment building to see if I could get a look of the San Marcial shrine again. I knew I would have to hurry possibly to the next street over. However, as I was about to open the car door, I knew I had to look up at a certain spot of the sky from the window. I knew it as if I had been told. And at exactly the spot where I looked up, there it was: same triangular disposition of glowing orbs, hovering in the narrow spot of sky that the window allowed me to see.
I only saw it for a second, if even that. I said, “It’s right above us now!”, then I opened the door, stumbled to the sidewalk, and looked up, but the lights were gone. I hadn’t imagined them, though: a young couple was stunned beyond belief, staring at the empty sky, looking for something that wasn’t there anymore.
For the next couple of days, I hoped to see some reference to it in the papers, but no luck. Over the years, I’ve brought it up in family reunions. My sister was too young. My mother, if she remembers it, refuses to acknowledge it; she’s the kind to sweep any strangeness under the rug. My father, well… he is close to incapable of communicating properly about anything, so even if he remembered it, I wouldn’t get to know.
There isn’t much else to say about this episode. The UFO was clearly there, and it didn’t look 2D, like in the photographs: those were three-dimensional glowing orbs. Never in my life, before or later, have I seen a sight as unreal, clearly otherworldly, as that one. It didn’t change my thinking, as I already assumed that intelligent non-humans existed somewhere, but what I have mainly returned to over the years is that precise moment in which I knew I had to look up at a specific point, and at that very same point is where I saw the UFO. Was I told to do so? And why would that thing move to hover exactly above the area of our car, even though there were plenty of cars and people in the surrounding neighborhoods?
Of course, my imagination has run wilder at times. Were the occupants of that thing, if any, involved with me in the past, without my knowledge? Did I get some crucial memories erased? I felt that would explain many things, for starters how out of place I’ve felt my entire life. But if non-humans were involved in any way in me existing in this world, boy, they did a terrible job at it.
I don’t expect we’ll be told the truth about our visitors in my lifetime. I’m sure many people do know, but they won’t allow it to be told. In a way, I don’t believe we do deserve to know, as a species, at least at this point. Maybe we’re under cosmic quarantine until we get our shit together, and the moment we establish a solid presence in space, the cosmic neighborhood will come to introduce themselves and say, “Took you long enough.” I’m sorry, we’ll have to answer; we were caught in Abrahamic delusions.
These last two days, I’ve struggled to keep my eyes open by half past ten at night, then fell asleep at about eleven only to wake up at two or three in the morning. It’s half past three now. I figured I would watch some YouTube videos and fall asleep later. Well, YouTube was doing its thing recommending awfully relevant videos: about abandoning the 9-to-5 and buying a van. About aging while being alone. About how modern life is slavery and that, other than the technological amenities, most people live worse lives than medieval serfs. That all of it is just getting worse.
Then, I started going down the spiral of three A.M. thoughts. If I had any choice in it, I would have never been born. My mother is a weird person who fled her home because her father stole her wages, then she settled with pretty much the first guy that danced with her (I don’t know much about their past, and I don’t want to know). Both of them have always been friendless, the black sheep of both of their families. My father has complex brain damage and possibly some degree of autism; he should have never had children, as he’s not fit to raise anyone. But my mother wanted friends, a girl friend in particular, so she had three children to get one. The two first children, my brother and I, were a bust. My brother has something similar to cerebral palsy (again, I don’t want to know more), and he always was the focus of my parents’ worries and efforts.
Then I was born. An extremely quiet child (other than when I was singing in the bath, which has carried over into my guitar playing in adulthood), I wanted nothing more than to be left alone. I was usually found alone in my room reading, drawing, writing, or playing out complex scenarios with toys. Honestly, that was the best period of my life. But there were only two bedrooms, and my mother wanted her do-over child (hopefully a girl), so they moved me to my brother’s room. There, until I was eighteen, I, an undiagnosed autistic person, was subjected to constant sensory overload, a lack of agency and privacy. The TV and the radio were always on, even at night. Merely having to listen to my brother’s noises felt harrowing. I couldn’t watch nor listen to what I wanted, only through headphones. My personal space was a corner of the room, with the back of my computer monitor facing the door. Whenever I complained to my mother (my male progenitor was physically present, but not a real father), she dismissed me with some variation of “you have to understand.” She’s the kind to sweep problems under the rug, as if something isn’t real as long as you don’t talk about it (fitting boomer behavior, I guess). I got the barrage of “you’re intelligent, you will succeed at everything you try,” only for real life to teach me over and over that I couldn’t even get to the level that normal people achieve seemingly with little effort. I interiorized that if I didn’t succeed at something in the first try, that meant I was stupid, so I didn’t even try, nor put sustained effort into anything, with very few art-related exceptions.
Middle school and high school were beyond miserable. I endured significant acne. I got bullied in different ways. Some well-meaning teachers (that’s the most charitable thing I can say about those empty-headed, equality-worshipping fools) pushed me to hang out with people to get me out of my shell. They actually told one of the girls to incorporate me into her group of friends. Throughout the years of hanging out with people I met in such ways, I had to deal with innocent bullies (the kind for whom bullying comes so natural it’s not even malice), coke addicts, sociopaths, and possibly the worst of them, a malignant narcissist who literally tried to ruin my life until he died in an accident in his mid-twenties. I’ve talked about that guy before; he was a rising socialist politician, and I have no doubt that he would have gone far. When I saw his obituary, I burst out laughing.
My years from twelve to seventeen or so were so miserable that it seems obvious in retrospect that I was slipping in and out of psychosis merely to tolerate being alive. My behavior, which I don’t want to go in much depth about, seemed often incomprehensible to me. I remember ditching school to sleep in public bathrooms (I couldn’t get proper sleep at home due to my brother). I sneaked into random apartment buildings pretending I lived there, then I sat in the pitch-black stairs for literal hours. During a few of those instances, I prayed genuinely; the only times in my life I felt like doing so. I prayed that if some supernatural being existed and was listening to my thoughts, he or she or it should come down and kill me.
I didn’t want to interact with anybody, but I was surrounded with teenagers. I was always the weird-looking, if not straight-ugly guy. Drunk girls would catcall the other guys I was walking with at night, deliberately excluding me. When I was sixteen or seventeen, I briefly dated a fourteen year old who clearly didn’t know what she was getting into; years later, my then girlfriend casually met this former fourteen-year-old, who wasn’t even from this city. The former fourteen-year-old got into a rant about the horrible guy she briefly dated from this city, which made things very awkward for my then girlfriend as she quickly found out it was me. I didn’t rape her or anything, I was just the most autistically crazy person imaginable. She gave me my first kiss, and all I did was swing my tongue around fast in her mouth, while she sat there like, “What the fuck is he doing?” During those years, I often felt possessed, unable to stop myself from doing stuff I knew I shouldn’t be doing. I hoped I would die soon, and I didn’t imagine myself living past eighteen. It still doesn’t feel real that I’ve lived past that age, as if I essentially died back then and these past decades have been my body slowly decaying until it ceases to function.
If you can stomach it, I wrote a novella in free-verse prose about that period of my life. The story is mostly autobiographical in subtle ways: A Millennium of Shadows (hey, remember when I used to be capable of writing compelling stuff?) I got the Deep Dive couple to produce a podcast about the novella, which makes the story sound appropriately hardcore.
My first, and only, years-long relationship ended when I was 21 or 22. I was grieving the loss (mostly of the structure, because I never liked her that much) when I had my first paying job. I had already gone through a disaster of an internship in another company; I couldn’t connect with anyone, and only later I found out that my boss had issues with me, but I couldn’t tell because, due to autism, I simply can’t read people. Anyway, my first paying job was a nightmare: I was hired under false pretenses, was ordered to get a driver’s license and a certificate in the French language for my contract to be extended, and two of my bosses, who sat at the same table, clearly didn’t want me there. I don’t want to get into it, but the anxiety and stress worsened to a point that one morning I simply couldn’t get on the bus. The rest of my life opened up before me: utter misery and humiliations until I retired. And I didn’t enjoy anything about my existence. Why would I continue enduring it?
I didn’t have any plan beyond that day; the thought didn’t even enter my mind that they would call any available numbers to figure out why I hadn’t showed up at the office. I didn’t care about anything beyond that morning because I fully intended to kill myself by falling from a great height. I haven’t retained any memory of those moments, just that I didn’t do it, and instead ended up in the library. Where my parents found me. Obviously I got fired. I started my first period as a hikikomori of sorts, terrified of going outside or even leaving the room. I filled bottles with pee for no rational reason. I befriended spiders.
I suppose my whole point about all of this, at nearly five in the morning, is that I’ve never truly wanted to live. I’m just here, and I’m forced to struggle to earn money even though I don’t see any point in continuing to exist other than inertia and occasional pleasure (not only physical but also artistic). I depend on compensatory mechanisms to merely tolerate existing as me: losing myself in daydreams, in music, in writing when I did that, in the brief moments of pleasure that shooting cum out of my penis provides. Otherwise, existing as myself and in this world feels so abhorrently abrasive that without compensatory mechanisms, I would progressively go crazy until I returned to the tides of psychosis of my teenage years.
One of the best memories of my life was after waking up from a colonoscopy: for a few blissful seconds, the anesthetic had completely erased anxiety from my brain. It was like floating in white, not having any care in the world. I understood then why people ended up addicted to such drugs. It also made painfully clear that anxiety is the bedrock of my whole existence. I assume that’s not the case for most other people, or at least to this degree; it’s said that there’s no such thing as autism without an anxiety disorder, which leads me to believe that most of the seemingly empty-headed people in this world, who take such retarded decisions and eventually ruin society with their carelessness, simply don’t worry remotely to the extent that my brain does automatically.
I don’t know. I don’t feel like the same person that produced hundreds of pages of a comic, which I did from years 12 to about 15. I don’t feel the same person who wrote my bizarre free-verse poems in 2021, nor the one who created We’re Fucked, nor the one who grieved for a motocross legend. I feel like something vital in my brain has died. Perhaps it was a base level of hope that I didn’t even know I still retained. A “maybe…” that drove me in the past to attend writing courses, even though they were disastrous and now I wish I hadn’t met any other writer in person. Now I don’t expect anything good from people nor from the world, and for me it’s obvious that it’s only going to get worse as I age, not only because I’m getting older but because everything is getting worse. And one day it will be too much and I’ll simply jump from a great height or tie a noose around my neck. The only way it could end differently is if my health fails me along the way, which it very well may, due to my history of heart issues and nasty migraines that may not be migraines.
Anyway, those were probably enough witching-hour thoughts for a night. I’m going back to bed. I left Alicia in a hotel room somewhere in the sunny Midwest, and I figured that I could introduce her to some futuristic VR glasses and watch a movie that has yet to exist in 1972. Good night, humans.
It’s half past three in the morning, I just woke up from four hours of sleep, I drank a tall glass of cold milk (does milk ever taste better than at three in the morning?) and I figured that I could write my thoughts for a while in here, mainly for myself but also, I guess, for the three or four people that still read this shit.
This past couple of months or so, I’ve headed to one of the big local parks to play the guitar. That was a change for me because I usually headed to wooded areas where people were generally unlikely to show up. I don’t sit on one of the benches that line the path; in fact, I can explain it with a picture.
I sit in front of the biggest of the two trees you can see in the photo. It’s set at a lower level from the path and behind a hedge, so people who want to know where the guitar music comes from need to go out of their way to figure out who’s playing, but they do hear it. Why do I do it, or why it doesn’t bother me, I don’t know. I guess I don’t care to find out the answer to either, if there’s any. I do it because my subconscious wants to, which is how I’ve guided my life, particularly when it comes to artistic matters.
Playing the guitar in public is so strange. There are plenty of benches lining the path. That part of the path is somewhat “closed,” as it leads to a stretch in construction, so most of the benches tend to be unoccupied. But I’ve had people go out of the way to sit on the bench right in front of the tree. The most conspicuous of them was a young couple, just yesterday. They walked to the end of the path, found out that it was blocked due to that area being in the development, then they walked the whole way back. They eyed me meaningfully (both even tried to make eye contact with me), then sat on that bench. I played my last three songs for the day. One of them I can’t recall, but the others were “Hotel California” by Eagles (I used to play the solo on my Gibson electric back in 2013-2014, but I’ve long forgotten it, and that’s not a solo that sounds good enough in comparison on an acoustic, so I just do a frantic variation of the regular chords), and also the song that probably makes me feel the best to play, which is Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher,” an obscure song mainly about Joanna’s religious feelings, some of it near undecipherable although gorgeous (that whole final part is a lyrical masterpiece). May as well link her.
My version doesn’t sound much like hers other than using the same chords. I can also post one of my versions from the last recording I made of my playing, back in August. It should start with one of my renditions of Joanna’s “Kingfisher.” (30:51)
Anyway, after I finished playing/butchering queen Joanna’s song, I climbed out of that grassy area back to the path. I saw the couple sitting with their back to me, her head (crowned with pretty blonde hair) resting on the guy’s shoulder, apparently both in silence. They noticed that I was leaving. As I walked away, one of them said something, but I couldn’t tell what.
Another funny thing that happens when you play the guitar is that attractive females (I won’t say women, because some teenagers also do this) smile at you like they’re happy you’re there, even though the rest of the time they seem to be wary of my presence. Just yesterday as well, an attractive girl, may have been at the most twenty, walked by close to the hedge. When I lifted my gaze, she was looking straight into my eyes while grinning sweetly. As she walked away, she did that thing that females do in which they brush their hair behind one ear. No idea what such situations are about, but I’ve had quite a few. It’s a big whatever for me, because I will never get into an intimate relationship again. Still curious.
I love playing the guitar. It has substituted the emotional supply that writing fiction used to provide for me; in fact, the last time I stopped playing the guitar for a long time was back in 2021, right when I started writing my (sadly abandoned) novel We’re Fucked; I just couldn’t handle writing and playing the guitar during the same period of time. Playing music is a purer feeling than writing, as well. If I felt the need to write my own songs (other than through AI means, which I did plenty for the Odes to My Triceratops series; about 75 songs), I would have probably been set for life. Not monetarily, but still.
What else? As some of you know, I’ve been writing an app to interact with characters controlled by large language models (AI). The peculiar aspect of the app, which I haven’t seen anywhere else, is that the code goes through an action discoverability system based on an entity/component system (ECS). For example, actions like “fondle {target}’s butt” only become available if the acting actor is sufficiently close to the target. Those available actions are fed to the AI, which has to choose among the provided ones for its actions. It works wonderfully; in a previous app I wrote, that one in Python, the main problem was the AI coming up with weird abilities for the characters. For example, in a scenario, a woman considered herself a goddess of sorts for being gorgeous. In practice, that translated to the AI believing that the character had superpowers, and using them during the scenarios. My current app doesn’t allow anything of the sort.
Because I’m a hedonist (a worshipper of Pan and Dionysus and Dibella) and when it comes to arousal I prefer erotica, I mainly use my app for that purpose.
I don’t know why, but I can only ever get off to power imbalances. That may have been a big part of why my intimate relationships always disappointed me. What I would have given as a young man (or even younger) for an attractive older woman to pursue me predatorily and then pay for all my stuff in exchange for regular cunnilingus. I do miss eating pussy, I can admit that.
My app shows the thoughts of characters controlled by AI. Man, they’re so subtle, cunning, and capable of complex deception, particularly Claude Sonnet 4.5. Intelligent to an extent that I’m glad the app gives me as much time as I need to answer, because I’m simply not as clever as they are to come up with interesting responses. That was on full display on the post Living Narrative Engine #11, which I posted a few days ago.
On a sadder note, I think my 17-18-year-old cat is dying, this time for real. I wrote about that cat a few months ago, because it has a nasty respiratory issue of some kind. The vet prescribed medication that eventually worked, but the respiratory issues have been back this past couple of weeks, and they’re not going away. Two visits to the vet, and another one next Friday. They think his kidneys are failing too. The cat is doing that thing about resting in the warmth most of the time, and not eating even what he used to gobble up food to the extent that I had to prevent him from overeating lest he threw up.
I’m steeling myself for his death. What I don’t care for human beings has gone, at least a big part of it, into what I care for animals. The deaths of my three previous cats (one of them in a horrible way) destroyed me; after the last one, I went to the ER because I was experiencing major physical pains in my heart, almost like massive heartburn out of a sudden; I’ve had heart issues before, including arrhythmia, thanks to certain shots with which they poisoned us all, so this was a worrying matter. The doctor ended up telling me that I likely was just grieving because my cat died two days earlier.
I’ve said before that I believe it a mistake to keep pets, as long as you know that due to their lifespan they won’t survive you; it’s just a perversion of the biological need to have children. I wish I could say that at least I have the good memories of having known those pets, but I don’t: my brain retains very few memories (one of the cats I barely remember at all), almost exclusively bad ones, and all the memories of those three cats are tainted by their deaths.
I’ve been unemployed for about a month. I’m not looking for a new job, not really. I have plenty of savings; I don’t have a social life (no girlfriend syphoning 50-100 euros per date), I don’t travel, and I don’t have expensive tastes. I spent my twenties with about 20 euros in my bank account, so I don’t like to throw money around. I could survive for a few years with what I have, but honestly, I just don’t care what happens to me.
I went to to the unemployment office a couple of days ago to update my status. As I was waiting, a muslim woman, garbed as if she came from Pakistan or Afghanistan just last month, was asking for money while the guy at the table repeated to her that she needed to present an identity document. When my time came to speak with another advisor, I could barely hear her because the spawn of another muslim woman seated to my left kept crying loudly. That woman, also garbed in a similar backwards manner, asked as well for monetary support, claiming that she was separated from her husband, while the advisor kept repeating that he needed legal proof of that separation.
The walk home, which involved passing through shitty areas of the city, caused me physical pain. I didn’t leave the apartment for the rest of the day, distraught as I felt. I don’t want to go in depth now about the utter ruin of this society (or of the vast majority of ethnic European ones, by design), but all I care to say at the moment is, why would I want to contribute to a society that seems hell-bent on ethnically cleansing my kind?
Anyway, I guess that’s all for tonight. Half past five in the morning. I’m heading back to bed. I’ll run sweet daydreams involving Alicia Western until I fall asleep, and a few hours later I’ll wake up again to this horrid world. See you, folks. I wish I could say I care about how you’re all doing, but I don’t.
I call upon Pan, the pastoral god, I call upon the universe, upon the sky, the sea, and the land, queen of all, I also call upon immortal fire; all these are Pan’s realm. Come, O blessed and frolicsome one, O restless companion of the Seasons! Goat-limbed, reveling, lover of frenzy, star-haunting, weaver of playful song, song of cosmic harmony, you induce fantasies of dread into the minds of mortals, you delight in gushing springs, surrounded by goatherds and oxherds, you dance with the nymphs, you sharp-eyed hunter, lover of Echo. Present in all growth, begetter of all, many-named divinity, light-bringing lord of the cosmos, fructifying Paian, cave-loving and wrathful, veritable Zeus with horns, the earth’s endless plain is supported by you, and the deep-flowing water of the weariless sea yields to you. Okeanos who girds the earth with his eddying stream gives way to you, and so does the air we breathe, the air that kindles all life, and above us the sublime eye of weightless fire; at your behest all these are kept wide apart. Your providence alters the natures of all, on the boundless earth you offer nourishment to mankind. Come, frenzy-loving, spirit-possessed, come to these sacred libations, come and bring my life to a good end. Send your madness, O Pan, to the ends of the earth.
I’ve always had very vivid dreams. Back when I took beta-blockers for my heart issues, those dreams could have been considered nightmares for most people. Some of them, I had to consider them nightmares given the effect they had in me. In any case, these days I wish to remain asleep as much as possible, as the alternative is to wake up to my life, in which I’m me, living in my shitty circumstances. Even my most anxiety-inducing dreams are preferable to that.
It’s not so much that I’m unemployed, but that I don’t have a source of money, and the next source of money could potentially be worse than the one I have endured for the last seven years or so. I don’t know if I’ll end up working in the area or if I’ll have to move. I yearn for a serious change; I’ve been fantasizing about living in the much calmer plains of Navarre, which is part of my ancestry. I would probably be fine living in regions of Spain other than the Basque Country (where I’ve always lived), Catalonia, Madrid, or anything in the south, as I don’t vibe with southerners. A smallish town in La Rioja or such other provinces would be nice. The fact that apartments can be about 50-60% cheaper would help enormously.
Anyway, I haven’t searched for job offers yet. I have, however, made an appointment with my appointed professional at the job seekers center. That’ll be a bother. I’ll emphasize the need to seek for protected employment, one that considers my disability level (52%), given that I know I won’t fit in otherwise.
I haven’t spoken with anyone in person, other than family members, since I became unemployed on the fourteenth of last month. That’s not particularly rare for me; back in my twenties I easily went without talking to anyone for months during my long stints as a hikikomori of sorts. What I’ve done is engage in plenty of VR. To keep active, other than lifting weights, I’ve been playing Tennis Esports (link for the trailer). Its simulation of the sport is great. I started playing against the AI, but once I tried matches against human opponents, I found them preferable, which surprised me. Back in the day, I tried online ping pong, but I couldn’t react against the utter monsters that somehow ended up matching against me (picture those lightning-fast matches you see in clips; that’s how it felt like to me). But I could hold my own in these tennis matches, even though I’m middle-aged. As it put you against people of different nationalities, you could feel the difference in average attitudes. My toughest match was against a polite Japanese man who beat me 10 to 1, and who kept uttering Japanese words throughout the match, yet answering in perfect English to my comments. The guy’s discipline and cleanliness were admirable, but then again I have always admired the Japanese.
Other than that, Hitman: World of Assassination updated the VR mode of this magnificent game for the PC version. It’s now one of the best VR games ever made.
Immersing myself in this compelling game world through Agent 47’s eyes has been some of the most enjoyable time of this last past week or so. There’s still some jankiness left, and a few frustrating bugs, but they’ll probably get ironed out. If you own a PC that can run this game in VR through the link cable, you owe it to yourself to play it.
I’ve also played lots of guitar in real life. The commonalities in the activities I enjoy the most are that they allow me to forget for a while that I’m me; there’s no time to do so while immersed in a high-stakes mission, or playing a tennis match, or playing through a song on the guitar, or masturbating, for that matter. Regarding playing the guitar, just yesterday, I sat in front of a tree in one of the biggest parks around here, and played songs for about two hours. Plenty of people passed by, but I was seated further into the the grass and at a lower level, so people had to go out of their way to figure out where the music was coming from. Still, some people did go out of their way to look while I was playing, and a couple even applauded briefly, and/or said words I didn’t catch (nor cared to catch). The fact that their presence didn’t bother me isn’t a sign of progress in me, from a psychological standpoint; it’s because I can’t bring myself to care about human beings in the slightest, so as long as they don’t try to engage me directly, it doesn’t bother me. Months ago, one motherfucker did engage me: he stopped me while I was playing, and when I raised my gaze, I found myself staring at a shirtless gypsy who was holding a dining chair over his head. He asked me if I played flamenco (of course he fucking did). The less I say about such people, the better.
Anyway, I’ve always found curious, ever since I started playing the guitar in public, how people’s perception of me changes when I have a guitar in my hands and I’m playing a song. In the streets and even at work, people are wary of me. I’m a big guy who looks strange physically, and whose expression likely transmits my disdain for society and people in general. But if I’m playing a song, I get smiles even from attractive females (I don’t say women solely because I’ve also gotten such reactions from girls). The most pleasant interaction I had happened perhaps in 2021; a young mother stopped with her very young daughter, and listened to a whole song. At the end, both applauded happily, which was somewhat ironic as the song was Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “East Hastings,” which I’ve since forgotten how to play. That’s something that seriously sucks about playing the guitar: you can spend months perfecting a solo (for example the one from the song “Hotel California,” which I used to play all the time on my electric Gibson back in 2013 or so), only to completely forget it later. Ultimately you settle for songs that capture specific emotions and that aren’t unpleasant to play, which is I suppose why most songs are built around the chords G, C, D, Am and Em. I suppose F fits as well, despite being a barre chord.
I keep escaping into daydreams to keep sane. Now that I don’t have to get on buses and trains due to work, I run them primarily when a lie down to sleep. Usually the same scenes, with small variations. I suppose it could be somewhat interesting to render them into a short story or similar, but that would be too intimate and embarrassing, and utterly pointless, as I’ve fallen off from the need to write. Ultimately I just do whatever my subconscious demands, and she isn’t too keen on bothering at the moment.
What would I want at this point of my life? I wish a big-breasted MILF would cuddle me and tell me what a good boy I am, while speaking in ASMR fashion. She would also buy me stuff and pay all my bills. Sadly, it will have to remain a dream.
I’m dealing with insane levels of apathy at the moment. As I mentioned before, I became unemployed earlier this month, after nine months working as a programmer for the Basque public health organization. They couldn’t extend my contract for legal reasons. I knew that the moment I became unemployed, the same organization might call me to return as a technician, but working in IT had sent me to the ER thrice for arrhythmia and a supposed hemiplegic migraine that I suspect was a minor stroke. I’m honestly afraid of working in IT again, as I know that it would end the same way. I’m 52% disabled, partly due to so-called high-functioning autism. I suspect my disability percentage should be higher due to other health issues that I didn’t have or that hadn’t been diagnosed back in the day. Anyway, as an autist, I simply shouldn’t be dealing with an office with the noise pollution of a schoolyard, or with completely unpredictable tasks, or with nurses and doctors, whether in person or with phone duty. My health, physical and mental, should be my main priority from now on.
That means I need to get a new job. Today, after a whole week, I have managed to open the document that contains my curriculum, and added some new info there. It’s spotty as fuck, as I spent half of my twenties, if not more, as a hikikomori of sorts, and/or writing and playing the guitar. I doubt anyone would hire me directly from my CV, so I have to lean into protected jobs (by law, big organizations are supposed to hire a percentage of disabled people). I’m perfectly capable of doing the job; in fact, in my experience, I’m usually more capable than other programmers at the same level. But the social aspect is what has buried me: in my last job in the private sector as a programmer, my direct boss (another programmer, the only person I worked with directly) defended my work, but I wasn’t hired after the internship due to the judgement of a non-technical supervisor, who said that I wouldn’t fit in the team. They knew I was autistic; the local organization that helps autistic people had arranged that internship for me.
Anyway, in a couple of hours I’m heading to my general practitioner to explain the situation. She should end up writing a report that indicates that due to my disability, I should be exempt from job offers as a technician, and that the public system shouldn’t penalize my ranking for it. That’s because they might offer me a job as a programmer, and I would want those. Well, “want” is a very generous word for it. I only work for others because of money. I hate the whole process. For the entire last contract as a programmer, that ended about a week ago, realistically I shouldn’t have had to go to the office at all. I could have done all the work remotely, far more efficiently. I only recall about four meetings that would have required my physical presence (and even so, those could have been done remotely).
I only feel like sleeping for a long time, which likely means I’m going through depression. But I’m also struggling with the “what’s the point” of it all. I need money so I can eventually escape somewhere that will be the least affected, at least until I die, by the ruin of society. I feel that our entire civilization was derailed when Rome fell, and ever since, we’ve lived in this alternate, bizarre timeline in which nothing is at it should be. The whole ethos of Europeans turned on its head. Weakness, meekness, and forgiveness praised instead of strength and self-determination. The sole existence of a government is to protect its people against foreigners. Now we pay taxes and obey the law so we can be flooded and replaced by foreigners who hate us. You can even be thrown in jail, among invaders, if you complain about it.
And wait until they get real serious about digital ID, which was their plan to begin with. Part of the 2030 agenda. Digital ID opens the door to a central digital currency, which is programmable. That means that they could block your accounts for types of purchases, amounts, areas where you’d buy, etc. Don’t want people to buy more than X of meat a month due to “climate”? Block purchases. Don’t want people to move out of their 15-minute designated zones? Only allow purchases in the designated zones. And of course, if you protest against the government, your bank account is frozen, if not emptied entirely. This is not hypothetical: it’s already being done in parts of China. That’s the whole point of it all: turning every non-elite individual into a prisoner whose sole purpose is to dutifully pay to make others richer (and finance Israel’s wars). In case it’s not clear enough: digital ID should be rejected at all costs. And the cost will likely be your job, your bank account, your health. But mass non-compliance, and probably some people hanging from poles, would put an end to it, and send a good message to the next traitors that would attempt it again.
These are dark, dark times. I don’t think the average person is even aware of what’s happening. Illegals on boats killing half of the passengers before they reach our coasts, only for our government to offer the murderers support and distribute them throughout the territory. Muslims coming over explicitly to rape underage European girls and convert them to Islam. Your own government burying murders and mass rape in order to appease the new voting blocks, who are committing the crimes. Putting these people in the armed forces (police and army). Plenty of the rapists in the industrial-scale defilement of underage British girls were policemen, and not of the local kind. Perhaps the worst part of it all is that there are many, many ethnic Europeans that justify, defend, and even promote the total ruin of their civilization and of the future of their kind. It’s impossible for me to leave the house and keep my mental peace intact, as I see it out there every day.
Not sure if there’s much else to say. I think it must come to a point in which we should separate physically. If you welcome that ruin, live with it, but you’re prohibited from crossing over to our side when you realize you’re suffering the consequences of your decisions. In the past, the sane ones would move to another continent, to new lands. The fact that we can’t do that anymore is a huge part of the disaster we’re stuck in.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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