Category: Slice of life

Life update (08/14/2025)

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Three days ago, the youngest of my two cats, who is fourteen years old or so, started breathing weirdly, in a phlegm-y way. When I put my hand on his chest, it vibrated as he breathed. I hoped that it would pass on its own, but it was clearly getting worse.

I’m on vacation for a few more days (although I’ve done fuck-all of consequence, other than programming, playing the guitar, playing VR games, and masturbating), so I took the little guy to the vet. The X-rays didn’t show anything. They injected him with a corticosteroid, and told me that I’ll have to somehow make him swallow the same thing in pill form for the upcoming seven days. The vet, a nice-seeming younger woman, told me that the corticosteroid is mainly for relief, because the real cause is likely a polyp or a mass, and at his age, it will likely not be operable. If things don’t improve in the next few days, I’ll have to bring him to a proper clinic in Donostia, thirty kilometers away, so they can perform a CT scan and similar stuff.

He’s dying. I’ve already lost three cats and it haunts me weekly. I’m way too sensitive to handle the deaths of these little creatures that I’ve loved for years. To begin with, people having pets is insane; just a replacement for the biological urge of having children. It’s clear to me that nobody should raise any living being that’s unlikely to outlast them. I’ve loved my cats, but when I look back, I don’t store any memory of my dead pets that isn’t tainted by the fact that they died. In the case of two of them, also of how they died.

I can’t take this shit. The only relief that I get from my brain bombarding me with intrusive pains is when I’m playing the guitar, when I’m lost in a very engaging experience like a VR game, or jerking off. When any of those distractions ends, the flood returns, and I have to wade through everything painful that my brain refuses to let go of. The number of those private pains only grows as I get older. I suspect that due to the peculiar configuration that my neurons settled on shortly after birth thanks to the autism-related atypical pruning, memory-wise, my brain is a machine made to discard every good experience and etch in stone every bad one. Over the years, I’ve grown wary of attempting things, talking to people, etc., because I know I’ll just be adding more shit to the pile. A classical sign, I suppose, of Pure Obsessional OCD. I don’t know for how long I’ll be able to stand this.

For the last few months or so, I’ve avoided going outside other than to work, to buy whatever needed buying, and to play the guitar, and I play the guitar in the woods, so the population and general demographics are unlike what can be found in the rest of society. But today I had to bring my cat in a carrying case to a nearby clinic, where they refused to take him in due to overwork, so I had to take a bus downtown. Society has turned into such a horrid zoo. I don’t understand how people can look around and think that everything is fine, unless you’re one of the people who are benefiting from it. And us Europeans are the ones losing everything.

I remember my maternal grandfather, who fought on Franco’s side. In the decades after, particularly during the last twenty or so years of his life, he went out as little a possible, because “out there, there’s only weird people.” If he had lived through the current ethnic cleansing, he would have killed himself. I’m no christian (the Roman Empire adopting Christianity was the biggest humiliation ritual imaginable, and we’ve been paying for it ever since. See recent examples of Trump, Mr. “America First”, groveling up to the “chosen people”), so I can’t support Franco such religious grounds, but those fucking communists had it coming. Regarding the christian thing, read Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. In summary, how could I look forward to anything in society when everything is deliberately going the wrong way, and it’s only going to get worse? I’m just glad that I won’t bring children to this disaster.

My cat is walking around, climbing furniture, and eating a bit, but he’s still breathing weird. Almost guaranteed, this is the decline that will end in his death. I suppose he has lived long enough. I doubt that his life has been particularly happy, given neuroses like overeating whenever he has the chance even though he pukes afterwards. But what can you do. I can’t even give myself a happy life.

Life update (07/28/2025)

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I’ve settled into a routine that fits me: wake up at six in the morning (even in the weekends, I wake up around seven), prepare for work, put on my earplugs, take the E29 bus that carries me to Donostia, read some manga on the way, walk through the hospital complex while avoiding looking at people’s faces, sit at my desk, put on my headphones, do my programming of the day, take the E29 that carries me back to Irún, do some more programming, go to bed. From time to time I lift weights, and on the weekends, when I have the energy, I walk to the nearby woods and play the guitar for a couple of hours.

Perhaps this is what being middle-aged is, after all: you realize your shortcomings and what you weren’t meant to do. I’ve thought back on my life and the relationships I’ve had. All of them were a mistake. I’ve hurt so many people without meaning to just because of how broken I am. I keep getting reminded, by my own brain, of this girl I knew when I was in middle school. She was likely autistic as well. Awkward as hell. Very lanky, generally plain looking. She used to write me elaborate letters. I doubt I ever read any of them. I don’t have them anymore. About a year or so after she last spoke to me, some stoner dickhead slung one of those big choppers of arts-and-crafts, and bisected the girl’s forehead, leaving a massive scar. I haven’t seen her since I was sixteen. I wish I knew if she killed herself, but I don’t remember her name. People only become somewhat real to me when they turn into myths in my mind. She’s now a girl I could have helped but failed to do so because I never had the means to. Stay away from people. There’s only hurt to come, both ways.

Due to my peculiar brain configuration, my memory is abysmal: I barely remember anything. I have stronger memories of the stories I’ve written than of stuff that has actually happened to me. And what I remember is almost invariably negative. Due to my daily intrusive thoughts, I’m usually reminded of, when not directly bombarded by, stuff I wouldn’t want to remember. Not worth the effort, the pain, the bother. It’s really simple: I wasn’t born equipped to live like a regular human being. Ultimately you just end up becoming yourself and discarding the useless alternatives you tried.

I recognize beauty, though, and I’m attracted to some of the young women I see on a regular basis. I don’t know if I wish I weren’t. On the bus, at the hospital. Nurses most likely. Most of my daydreams end up involving sex in one way or another. But in these daydreams I’m not myself. Perhaps my biggest regret is that I can’t redo it with fair odds. I would have settled for a body I wouldn’t have to be ashamed of. I think I have more things to say about that whole business, but I can’t figure out what that would be at the moment.

Soon enough it’ll be September 14th, when my current contract as a programmer will end, and I’ll have to either return to work as a technician, which terrifies me (the stress of that job landed me three times in the ER, two with arrhythmias and the other with a supposed hemiplegic migraine that I suspect was worse than that), or find myself a job as a programmer at forty years old, when programmers are on their way out due to AI (not complaining, I use it all the time).

It’s all a big whatever. I just want to be left alone. That’s what I think about most of the stuff I have to deal with on a regular basis: just let me sit in peace. Just let me program in peace. Just let me play the guitar in peace. I think my biggest aspiration in life has been to sit alone in a room without being bothered. I don’t think I ever truly believed I could aspire to anything more. I’m trying to get as much of that as possible.

Speaking of manga, the hentai-with-a-plot Parallel Paradise was surprisingly great. It’s about a high-schooler who ends up isekai-d into a world where he’s the only male, and every girl (they all die at twenty) gushes out food-scented slime from their nether regions after the littlest touch of his male fingers. One of the girls is a martial artist whose martial art consists on throwing grenades. Great sense of humor, compelling plot, and surprisingly touching at times. I’ve reread One Punch Man and found it more interesting the second time around. I’ve just barely started Atelier of Witch Hat, which I didn’t want to get into because it seemed girly and I don’t like Harry-Potter-like stuff, but it’s good.

I think I need more grenade-throwing in my life.

Random shit #1

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In the 2000s, some American studio bought the rights to dub an anime, and decided to turn it into outrageous nonsense. An obscure moment in history that will never be repeated. Now, it endures in the internet as a legend. The following video recounts this strange tale.

Life update (07/13/2025)

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I’m in a transitional period: my current job as a programmer will end in September, and for legal reasons they can’t extend it (even though my boss would if he could). That means that the very day after, I could get called to work as an IT technician at the hospital, a job that has put me in the ER three times due to stress. I worked about seven years at it. It was a “frog sitting in heating water” situation; it took me working as a programmer to realize that I can’t continue working as a technician anymore. These days I don’t even greet the people at the office. I keep my head down, do my job, talk to my boss when I’m required, then go home. And it’s sustainable. I don’t want to search for another job, of course, but I will need to get another job before I’m recalled as a technician.

In my spare time, I keep programming my Living Narrative Engine app. I envision a future in which you could run Claude 4 Sonnet-level AI in consumer hardware, perhaps a dedicated mini-PC, and this app of mine would allow me to play through campaign-level stories with LLMs as the other characters. If I program it to that extent, it would be able to do so right now, but I’d have to pay for the LLM usage. It’s also great for erotica, which happens to turn me on more than any other stimulus.

I don’t really feel like writing anything. I’m extremely lethargic at the moment, and I only chose to write these words because I’m waiting for Claude Code to finish implementing something. Reaching my forties has hit me hard. I’m aware all the time of the monster inside me. There’s really no point in trying to relate to others. I keep to myself, hoping that nobody looks my way to annoy me. Can’t stop some strangers from doing so, though; this Friday, as I was waiting for the bus at seven in the morning, some woman in her perhaps late twenties berated me for cutting in line, even though I was there when she arrived, and I had been waiting for fifteen minutes. She seemed to believe I had gotten off a bus only to cut in line to enter the other arriving bus. I wanted to give her a piece of my mind, particularly due to the tone she was using, but ultimately it wasn’t worth it. Yet another instance of that fact that virtually every human interaction is detrimental to my life.

Anyway, I’ve been feeling like the following video for a while. Let’s see where the road takes us (apparently in circles).

Life update (05/26/2025)

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I’m back at work after two weeks of vacation that, as these things usually do, passed by way too fast. Most of my first week was spent in Barcelona, a trip originally intended for research but that caught me not caring much about writing. I’m glad I went, and I got some interesting experiences out of it, but when I returned home, I realized I didn’t really care to write about it. Right now, at about eight in the morning on a Monday, sitting at my office desk, I may as well point out a few things. First of all, Barcelona is a multiculti hellhole. I already expected it to be, but walking through Las Ramblas (don’t do that) exposed the multiculti dream, that as far as concerned has been thoroughly exposed: no “melting pot” (not that it was ever a good thing to begin with), but a fuckton of ethnicities competing for spaces, resources, and eventually, who rules. In a territory that was solely meant to be for the Catalan people, now increasingly less every passing day. Same thing is obviously happening throughout Europe, but it shocked me to witness it on such a grand scale in a huge city. I don’t know why anyone would want to live in such a city, by the way. As far as I’m concerned, they’re designed to drive you crazy.

Catalonia has a bad reputation for making most of its identity be about its regional language, which made me wary of going there, and while most things are indeed solely in Catalan, I had no trouble interacting with people in Spanish. That’s partly because plenty of the vendors I interacted with were foreigners, some of whom could barely care about Spanish, let alone the regional language. But anyway, walking down along Las Ramblas while Pakistani/Indian-type men (all of them were) constantly pestered passersby to eat at restaurants (that seemingly served regular food, but I have to assume they are Pakistani/Indian owned) was a chilling reminder that people from backwards places bring their backwards shit wherever they go.

Anyway, I visited churches, museums, the zoo, the top of the Tibidabo mountain… and instead of missing those sights, I found myself missing the attractive females I came across and whom I’ll never see again. The sporty, fresh-faced college-age woman who took the same elevator as me in the building where I briefly lived. The cute teenager wearing a cap and jeans who kept glancing my way with curiosity, for whatever reason, in the vivarium of the zoo, as well as at the mongoose enclosure. The woman who ran around the neighborhood wearing very tight, very short multicolored shorts. All those amazingly gorgeous tourists, isolated islands of blonde hair and blue eyes in an increasingly non-ethnic-European hole. Plenty of tourists who weren’t blonde and blue-eyed were also very attractive. Ultimately, attractive females are the most valuable “thing” in the world, and plenty of what any man (and some women) consumes on a regular basis, other than food, are substitutes for not having access to such a female.

The rest of my vacation was spent playing the guitar and programming. During this time, I was reminded of the fact that I don’t care about human beings or society in general. When I went out, I hurried to the mostly deserted wooded areas, while avoiding looking at anyone’s face. As I played the guitar, whenever any person approached, I got increasingly tense, which lessened as they left. It’s always been like this, but now, as a forty-year-old man going through some sort of middle-age crisis, it has become blatantly obvious that not only it’s going to be like that for the rest of my life, but that I’ll become increasingly crotchety about it as I grow older.

As the train carried me through the mostly deserted interior of Eastern Spain (about 70% of the country is unoccupied, mainly the interior plains, with the exception of the Zaragoza and Madrid areas), made me yearn to live in a quiet town somewhere in that isolation. I’m sick of having to share my spaces with so many people, even in a city like mine that isn’t remotely as fucked as Barcelona.

Don’t know what else to say. I hope I manage to return to writing my novel soon, but I’m not feeling it. I have been working hard at my programming project, mainly because it was a very compelling challenge, and just a couple of days ago, I managed to involve large language models in it, having them act as characters in a turn-based simulation. There’s a ton I can build upon that, but as the hardest part (by far) is already solved, I assume my interest is going to descend from there.

I’m tense about how I’m going to adapt to the office after this illuminating vacation. Working here as a programmer has illustrated that I absolutely do not, under any circumstance, want to return to working as a technician. I hate every aspect of it, and it’s completely ill-suited to my nature. But dropping that would likely mean having to find a completely different line of work at forty. But it’s not like I have any future here without knowing Basque; after the changes they made to the ranking system, I have been pushed down many places because of my lack of knowledge of that stupid language, so soon enough I would have found myself not being called for work anyway. Down the line of working as a technician, new visits to the ER await (three so far: two for arrhythmia and one for a hemiplegic migraine), and any of those visits may end up leaving me with permanent consequences. I suspect that at least one of them did.

Anyway, I guess that’s all for now.

Life update (05/11/2025)

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Two days from now I’ll be in Barcelona, on a days-long trip for which I’m not in the mood. It’s supposed to involve research for a writing project I’m supposedly working on, although I haven’t written anything in a month. Barcelona is a beautiful city. Unfortunately, it’s also a crime-ridden shithole. I expect to feel anxious from the moment I step outside of the rented apartment.

I haven’t been in the mood for much recently. I may actually be having a mid-life crisis, although I’m past the midpoint of my life; now forty, and very unlikely to live to eighty. I keep fantasizing about dropping everything and moving away to some cheap town, to a one-bedroom place near nature, where I could live in peace while working part-time at the most. If that ever happens, I’ll likely be in my late fifties, or sixties. Mainly, I want to get away from everything and everyone I’ve ever known. Unfortunately, due to my brain configuration, my intrusive thoughts keep reminding me of every terrible little thing that has ever happened to me. I can’t flee from that.

A song came to mind: Jackson C. Frank’s “Blues Run the Game.” Jackson was a well-respected songwriter in the sixties and seventies. When he was twelve or thirteen, during music class in middle school, the school’s boiler exploded just under them. Jackson survived with half of his body burned. His girlfriend, Marlene, burned to death. In spirit, Jackson died that day, although it took his body decades to catch up. He wrote one song directly about his dead twelve-year-old girlfriend (“Marlene”), although obviously most of his songs are tinted by what happened. In the seventies, Jackson lived in England, and dated a then-famous musician named Sandy Denny. Shortly after they broke up and Jackson returned to the States, Sandy fell down the stairs of her home and died.

Jackson went crazy, likely out of PTSD and depression. He couldn’t find in himself to produce a new album, and he couldn’t get the first album reissued, as Paul Simon, who held the rights, wouldn’t do so. Jackson ended up homeless in NY. A fan sought him out and offered to house the songwriter and help him revitalize his career. As Jackson was waiting on a bench, some hoodlum shot out one of his eyes with a BB. Jackson died maybe one or two years later from a disease.

Here’s to you. Creating art can’t save anyone, but at least it captures what needs to survive.

Life update (05/05/2025)

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These days, my beloved guitar satisfies my emotional needs. I head to nearby wooded areas to play. This Saturday, I had walked to one of my favorite spots: in front of a huge tree, on a relatively unknown trail. As I was playing through Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher,” suddenly I heard someone hollering. I tensed up, but didn’t look up until someone threw his voice at me, interrupting someone who unequivocally was playing an instrument. I raised my gaze to the grotesque sight of a topless gypsy holding a dining room chair over his head. Of course this fucking mongoloid had to talk to me as I was playing the guitar. He asked if I played rumbas. I told him I didn’t know what that was. He then said that it was flamenco. I told him no. Shortly after, he hollered back to someone to following him, then continued on his way, likely to drink and leave the bottles and other litter there. A couple of other people, presumably gypsies although I couldn’t tell, followed in silence. One of them was a young woman. I got the feeling they felt a bit embarrassed. I finished Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher” to the best of my abilities, and then packed up my things and left.

People don’t learn from history; a well-known fact. If we did, we would have learned from the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire, and would have realized that some terrible mistakes should never be repeated: first, don’t convert to Christianity. Second, don’t share your civilization with barbarians. You may enjoy diversity on your plate, until someone shits on it, and then the whole plate is ruined. As for me, I’m not remotely a diversity enjoyer: I want everything in its right place.

Anyway, I suspect that such an encounter with one of the locusts of society would have dissuaded me for a while from playing outside, but the very next day, at about half past three in the afternoon, I picked up my guitar and headed to the deeper woods (in the opposite direction from the other woods). First I headed past the Roman foundries (a reminder that we used to be the city of Oiasso), but the place I picked to play, close to the river, obviously interfered sonically with my playing, so I picked up my things and ended up setting up shop on a raised area next to the foundries. I had only come across a pair of women on my way there, so I thought the afternoon would be quite tranquil. However, I found myself playing songs for older couples and families with children, who stopped to record the foundries, and also ventured deeper into the woods. These people were civilized, so the only interruption I got was three tweens clapping at me as they walked past. Guitar-playing impresses girls, I guess.

When I was in middle school, I remember an instance in which I had to read some essay in class, and I was so nervous, as usual, about speaking in public that my hand shook to the extent that you could hear the rustle of the paper I was holding. Now I casually play the guitar in front of strangers. I’m not entirely comfortable in front of people, of course; I never am even in the best of circumstances. But my concern is that someone may mess with me or even attack me. I don’t feel any genuine connection with human beings, so it’s quite similar to how I’d feel if a deer suddenly stopped to listen. I’d also worry that it may flip out and charge at me, offended at some aspect of my playing. Sadly we don’t have deers around.

Well. Five more days to go, and my vacation starts. I’m heading to Barcelona. Not really in the mood for it, but it’s writing-related, so I’ll have to endure through plenty of aspects of that city that no doubt will infuriate me.

Life update (05/02/2025)

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This morning I woke up rattled from a nightmare. I suppose most people’s nightmares involve being physically attacked or pursued, but in my case, my worst nightmares are about ceasing to understand. As far as I remember, most of last night’s dream was like that, but the part I remember the most involved a meeting with my boss and two other coworkers. I wasn’t able to follow their conversation, nor couldn’t understand my boss’ icy attitude toward me. Then he asked me something about a suitcase (that may have been an expression, but the details have slipped through my fingers). I sat there trying to comprehend what he was asking, while my coworkers and my boss looked at me with a mix of disappointment and irritation. I asked, “What does that mean?” My boss looked pissed at my stupidity or ineptitude. Then he asked me if I had done the “context packet,” or something similar. I said that I had no clue what he was talking about. He became irate toward me. When I tried to defend myself, without getting particularly agitated, I was accused of being unable to control myself.

As usual, a mere recounting of a dream doesn’t properly transmit the experience, that of sitting there in that dream office trying my best to understand what was being demanded of me, and yet failing to do so. That’s not far from my every day experience living in the world as an autistic man. In fact, most meetings serve as reminders that my brain doesn’t work like other people’s, as most of the exchanges feel like non-sequiturs to me. I’m usually waiting for the part when someone specifies what needs to be done.

It doesn’t help that I have experienced such moments of my brain failing to comprehend the world, mainly through my experience with migraines. I’m still not convinced that my last one wasn’t a mini-stroke. Back in April of last year, my then boss put me in charge of organizing the replacement of about nine hundred printers throughout the hospital complex where I work. It was a fucking nightmare. Near the end of it, during a day in which I was also hit in the balls by the careless Gen Z worker I had to deal with at the time (he told me a couple of times how eager he was to get back home and play some more Fortnite), I suffered a hemiplegic migraine: suddenly, I started having trouble understanding what I was looking at. Then I smelled something like burnt dust. The right half of my face, and then my right arm to my fingertips, went numb. I ended up in the ER. Three weeks or so later I had an MRI done, but they discarded brain damage. However, I’ve read online that some strokes don’t show up on an MRI. I’ve experienced trouble writing coherently: I sometimes skip letters or mix them up, but I’m not sure if that wasn’t happening beforehand. Maybe it’s just part of the general decay. In any case, one of my biggest fears is suffering a stroke that renders me incapable.

I turned forty about a week ago, and that made me think back to my experience with people over the decades. Growing as a human for me has meant becoming increasingly aware of how much my brain lacks when it comes to social processing. I see myself back as a child, hunched over and drawing because I couldn’t relate to anyone around me, and couldn’t even keep a conversation going for a minute without feeling lost. Of course, when I became a teenager, the problems grew tenfold. My intimate relationships always ended up hurting others as well as me. And I lack the sense of connection with human beings that is generally referred to as “empathy,” so it would be unfair for me to try to get close to others, which in the past I’ve done mostly for curiosity or for writing-related purposes. I do fantasize about intimacy, and I don’t mean just sex, but I guess I’ll have to wait for reincarnation, or incarnated AIs.

Not much else to say beyond these semi-random thoughts. I’ve been busy programming my platform for text-based immersive sims, which is a challenge I’m eager to tackle every day. Whenever I go outside, it’s almost exclusively to delve into a wooded area and play my beloved guitar. If you’re into playing string instruments, you know how much your calloused fingers yearn to return to those strings, to immerse yourself in the emotions captured in the songs, each a unique spell. Playing through Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher,” for example, puts me in a trance that snatches me away from this lackluster world into a better place full of meaning.

The wooded area I head to most times is almost unknown, located by the side of an incline road heading into the hilly depths of the province; in the Basque Country, the moment you start heading uphill, it’s like going back in time, and you’re bound to come across very few people, if any at all. The last four or five times I went to play at my usual spot, I only saw one person, and he freaked out when he suddenly noticed a guy sitting there in silence with a guitar (I was about to start playing a song).

Anyway, only six days of work to go, and then I’ll enjoy two weeks of vacation. I hope that along the way, I manage to snatch my one-track mind back to writing; the longer I stay away from it, the more unhinged I feel.

Life update (04/29/2025)

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I’m now a forty-year-old man, which is one of the things that happen when you turn forty. When I was in my teens, I thought I wouldn’t make it past eighteen. When I hit rock bottom at about twenty-one and I intended to exit this life through the emergency door, I didn’t think I would see that afternoon. And now I have gray hairs in my beard. It hasn’t been a “glad I stuck around” kind of deal; I’m not too happy about being alive.

Anyway, my goal for my forties is to become even more emotionally and physically independent from human beings. My thirties, that included years of working, showed me that all non-necessary interactions with humans, including listening to their grating voices and sounds, as well as their inanity, can literally send me to the ER. I had two episodes of arrhythmia, and then an even scarier hemiplegic migraine, the three of them triggered by stress. Around that time I also experienced a torn retina, although I don’t know to what extent I can fault stress or the health issues I was experiencing at the time. The point is, any extra interaction with humans can ruin me in potentially permanent ways, so to the extent I can get away with, I won’t look people in the eye, and I will wear my noise-canceling headphones to drown out the world’s nonsense. I have to respect my brain’s peculiar needs instead of conceding to other people’s.

Next month I’m going on a trip to Barcelona. The funny thing is that the trip is related to a story I’m writing; I intended to do some research. But I haven’t been writing at all these past couple of weeks due to my sudden obsession with developing a program. I hope to return to it soon enough; I have been feeling my mind deteriorating, becoming increasingly unhinged, which always happens when writing doesn’t ground me. Also, I miss hanging out with Elena.

Speaking of hanging out with non-existing people: I still have daily daydreams about going on time-travel-related adventures with a certain Alicia Western. Most days I don’t even open the ebook reader or my tablet; I just close my eyes and run scenarios in my head. In one of the most recent daydreams, I introduced Alicia to the wonders of augmented reality through a headset made in the 2030s. The headset comes included with an advanced AI named Hypatia, that helps Alicia with her mathematical research.

I don’t know if I intended to say anything else. Barely anyone reads my posts anyway, so this is pure self-expression.

Life update (03/29/2025)

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This afternoon, on a Saturday, I wanted to leave the house and get some fresh air. Whenever I consider going out, I usually need to have a purpose; walking around town mainly depresses me with how much it has gone to hell, and sitting at a coffee shop means dealing with human beings. Suddenly I thought, “Why don’t I just grab my guitar and head to the woods, like old times?” I hadn’t played the guitar since 2021, around the time I started my currently unfinished novel We’re Fucked.

I’m not entirely sure why I stopped playing, given that I loved doing so. Of course, I’ve had bad experiences: a neighbor complained (although I used to play my electric Gibson at the time), one time a bunch of punks mocked me because I was playing (as in, “Haha, he’s playing the guitar, what a dork.” It made me wonder what was wrong with their generation), another time some guy interrupted me because he thought I had stolen his phone, another guy interrupted me because he wanted to talk at length about his own journey with the guitar…

I don’t play the guitar because I want to be listened to. I do it because if feels great. It’s another way of communing with my subconscious, which is mainly why I do things unrelated to keeping my body alive or amassing money. That said, I did have one unexpectedly positive interaction when playing the guitar: a young mother with her daughter, who may have been six or so, stood there smiling at me as I played the entirety of Godspeed! You Black Emperor’s “East Hastings,” a perfectly reasonable song to smile at. At one point of the performance, the mother brought to both our attention that a squirrel had stopped to listen to my song as well. When the song ended, both clapped (the young mother and her daughter), and they went away pleased. I usually feel that most people around me are annoyed or disturbed by my presence, and wish I wasn’t there, but in that case those two seemed genuinely grateful.

Anyway, I have taken the guitar and headed to the nearby woods. I also brought a camping stool that I had only used once before and that came away diminished because they had the bright idea to attach removable end caps to each leg, and I lost one of them; the moment you sit in mud, it gets pressed down hard, and the mud closes over it. Anyway, I sat down as comfortably as I could, which wasn’t much, and played through some songs, mainly Iron & Wine’s “Passing Afternoon,” Eagles’ “Hotel California,” Waxahatchee’s “Swan Dive,” and Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.” Over and over. Van Morrison’s song always reminds me of my Izar, motocross legend, love of my life. I found myself belting out the lyrics while playing those simple chords, and it felt so good, man. Freeing. Like connecting with something meaningful.

As far as I’m concerned, everyone should learn how to play an instrument and then some of their favorite songs on it. Creative people in particular should do so, even if they’re not musically-inclined in general, because it facilitates communication with your subconcious, which every artistic endeavor relies on.

Now I’m back home. My right hip hurts from the sitting posture, the fingertips of my left hand regret that I allowed them to lose their callus, and I feel chilly from having stayed in the shade of those woods for a couple of hours. But I guess I enjoyed the experience enough to write this post about it.