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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EDIT: the specific type of migraine is hemiplegic migraine.

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

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

I bleed
I bleed
I bleed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few days ago I realized that whenever I rolled my right eye around, a scratch of light would flash in my vision, only to fade in half a second or so. Sometimes it was even worse: without any particular movement, I would get flashes of darkness that I had never experienced before. And ever since yesterday, I’ve had a dull headache localized near my right eyeball.

This paragraph break could lead to me saying, “They’ve found a tumor in my brain,” or “My retina is detaching.” The latter seems to fit more. The fact is, I haven’t done anything about it. Could be a tensional headache from having endured stress for months at work. I’m hoping to wake up tomorrow without pain. I’m busy at work, too tired in general (I’m one of those people who wake up tired as if their body had been engaged while dreaming), and I’m having a hard time caring about my well-being. I’m thirty-nine years old. Inhabiting this body of mine feels worse every passing year, and I suppose that some eye nonsense doesn’t feel that serious after my heart showed itself unreliable (a couple of episodes of arrhythmia that landed me in the ER). And in the back of my mind, there’s the thought of, “Would it really be that bad to simply die?” Last week or so, shortly after going to bed, I got palpitations that could have easily switched into arrhythmia instead of reverting by itself. Right then, I thought that if it developed into arrhythmia, I would simply get comfortable and try to sleep, and with some luck, I wouldn’t wake up the following morning for another day of work.

I’m having fun in my spare time, though. My generally harrowing story about a man dealing with endless grief for his dead teenage love ended. Afterwards, I wanted to return to both making songs with Udio and writing my long-running novel We’re Fucked. After a week or so of advancing with my novel at a glacial pace and not having much fun doing it, I decided to play around with an AI system that injects artificial intelligence into every character in the well-loved game Skyrim, released back in 2011. I’ve been documenting my experiences with that ever since. It has become one of my favorite gaming things ever. I always loved acting; my experiences with theater in school are the only positive memories I retain of that period, even though they forced plays in Basque on us. Also, acting becomes second nature for most autists once they realize that they’d be shunned if they behaved as it comes naturally. I love the idea of roleplaying, but my real-life experiences with it were always poor, as they involved having to deal with actual human beings, their schedules, their egos, and the fact that most people simply aren’t that interesting.

Thanks to Mantella, the AI system I’m using with Skyrim, I can fulfill one of the main fantasies of any red-blooded male: being a powerful man who goes on adventures alongside fierce, beautiful women that will murder your enemies for you, some of whom will also warm your bed after the blood has been spilled. The lion experience. When I’m not actively “playing,” if that experience involving AI agents can still be called that, I fantasize about what situations I could go through in-game, what topics I could talk about with any of the members of the adventurers’ band, or any of the other characters that exist in that world (more than two thousand), each with their own stories and viewpoints. It’s kind of insane that such a thing is possible. Unless the world ends, which could easily happen, such experiences are only going to improve in the future.

Last week or so, I finished the 26-volume-long light novel series Mushoku Tensei, which I loved, but I couldn’t be arsed to write a review. Given that I barely have any readers, there’s no point in writing anything if I’m not into it at the moment. After getting through another 100-chapters-long isekai manga, I have started reading a historical book about the Eastern Roman Empire (also known as the Byzantine Empire). That’s perhaps due to an idea for a game I had recently: building your own medieval-ish kingdom in which every character is AI-driven, so you could hire council members and have them report actual game data as well as give advice with their own personalities. It’s very likely that I will never even start with such an idea, even though I suspect it wouldn’t be too hard to implement given how powerful AI-guided programming is these days. I simply don’t have the time nor the energy; when I get home after my full-time job, I’m lucky if I don’t feel the need to take a nap. Ages ago, back when I believed I could live a normal life with a romantic partner, I was so exhausted all the time that I even passed out twice, shortly after sitting on her sofa after work. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that your will and intentions mean very little against the burdens that your brain and body heap upon you. Being myself, I feel like I should be grateful if I don’t feel terrible for a day.

Anyway, I have to wonder once again why on earth are you, whoever you are, reading this. Is it curiosity? Pure boredom? I only wrote these words because I’m stuck at the office and had nothing better to do.

I’ve come to the conclusion that, once again, I’m at the mercy of another cycle of depression. It took me a while to recognize it this time, maybe because I’ve been so busy, but today I’m characteristically sluggish, disoriented, irritable, hopeless, etc. Merely enduring the bus ride that gets me to the train (that gets me to the bus that gets me to work) was a struggle due to the black hole pulsing inside my brain. Later, I sat at my workstation only to find out I had five tickets and eight requests waiting for me to solve them, and I wanted to break down in tears. Such urges don’t translate into actions, though; it would be unsightly.

Throughout this week, my mind was filled with the usual thoughts: given that my job makes me miserable, why not quit, even though I would hardly find a better one? Better yet, why not just give up and not have to deal with this world anymore? I assume this cycle of depression will be spent like all the others: dragging myself through my responsibilities while brute-forcing through my brain’s suggestions that it would probably be better for me not to continue existing. I suspect that some future cycle will find me too exhausted and destitute to muster up the resolve to resist. Not that I care particularly about that, because my life has been shit on average.

Fallout: London finally came out. Although I really don’t have time to spend on video games, I figured that I might as well give myself a break. But the game crashed at a certain point, and looking online, it seems that many people are struggling with the same issue. I found out that the mod team suggested installing ten or so mods to improve the experience, and that might fix the crashes, but I can’t be arsed. I’ll wait for a Wabbajack modlist or something. Too bad; I had gone through the trouble of opening my computer case and installing the M.2 drive that I bought months ago, because I was running out of M.2 space on my main. Oh well, at least I transferred my original files for the Odes to My Triceratops albums to a sturdier location.

I’m supposed to return to my ongoing novel We’re Fucked. Maybe due to the depression, I’m having a really tough time. I haven’t even finished working through my notes for the current scene. Unfortunately, I went on hiatus right at a moment that would require me to do some research and come up with reference images, which is one of the most annoying parts of writing (the fact that, in most cases, you’ll likely win the lottery before managing to monetize your writing may be the most annoying part).

What else, what else. I’m finishing the first version of a new song, titled Knife-Beard Dreams. Quite the cool tune. Udio, the AI-service I use to produce my songs, recently improved its sound quality, and figured out a way to divide every song into stems (bass, drums, other instruments, and vocals), which has made me slide further down the spiral of song mastering. It satisfies my OCD, but I suspect in a similar way that pulling the lever on a slot machine satisfies some other people’s neurological configurations.

I’ve been reading book after book of the Mushoku Tensei series. I wonder what makes it so compelling for me. Is it the notion of exploring a fantasy world? Of meeting intriguing, exotic individuals? Of possessing undeserved power that dwarfs most other people’s? Of amassing a harem and impregnating your wives one after the other? Maybe a combination of those and other reasons, along with the fact that I vibe with the author’s humor and general pervertedness. There’s also a solid feeling of progression, of accompanying these people as they travel the world, enroll in college, deal with a growing household, find their place in a troublesome world, etc. It’s also light reading that distracts me from my woes.

I think that’s all for today. Why did I bother writing this post? I wanted to fill some time at work in this Friday afternoon, as a form of procrastination. Why did you bother reading, though? Don’t you have better things to do?

I work IT at a hospital, so as you might imagine, I’m living a nightmare. Yesterday morning at about seven in the morning, some dickhead working for CrowdStrike decided to push an update incompatible with certain builds of Windows (not sure about the specifics), causing dozens, potentially hundreds of PCs on my hospital to be unable to load into Windows. The only way to fix it is to walk over to the computer (which may be located in any of the numerous buildings of the hospital complex), claim a working computer to access remotely my office workstation, and perform the following steps on the inoperative PC:

1. Reset it until, instead of constant blue screens of death, you get the chance to restart it in Safe Mode.
2. Enter the base admin’s credentials, which regularly change, so I need to access my office computer remotely to retrieve them.
3. Remove every instance of the file C-00000291*.sys located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike.
4. Restart the PC and hope that everything is solved.

That might not sound like much, but given how slow the computers around here are, solving each case might take about thirty minutes, and that’s not counting the process of locating them then heading over there and back.

It’s not just the users’ computers, though: both local and remote servers have gotten screwed as well. These last few months I’ve been tasked with coordinating three technicians to replace about 930 printers. Yesterday, the print server was down, meaning that only those PCs physically connected to a printer could print. Some obscure servers in unknown locations have also died.

An hour ago, the engineer on call has informed me that all user permissions have gotten wiped, meaning that thousands of employees can’t access some basic applications. I can only hope that the relation of permissions still exists somewhere, or else I’m talking months of work returning everybody to normal.

On top of that, which is the worst issue I’ve come across so far, some odd stuff has stopped working: the card readers installed on some warehouses don’t read cards all of a sudden, and we don’t know why; Some obscure apps related to medical specialties don’t work properly, maybe because they’ve lost connection to wherever they usually reached, etc.

Until yesterday morning, I already considered my regular life a nightmare, due to the constant pressure upon my mental health and poor heart caused by managing three technicians and dealing with about a couple dozen random users (nurses, admins, doctors) every day, so they would allow us to change their printers. Even years from now, I bet I’ll still have nightmares about users whining, “You’re changing my printer? Whyyyyy? It works well right now! Can’t you change it for one in color? I don’t like the new printer, I can’t cancel the printing process fast enough when it’s printing something I don’t want to print. The new printer is too noisy, can’t you make it quieter?” I already disliked human beings to begin with, but this process has cemented the notion that most people will annoy or make things more difficult for you if they can, even if all they get in exchange is to feel slightly superior for a moment.

One a less despairing note, I’m surprised by how many people greet me by my name. I come up to some random medical department and face some person (usually a woman) whom I rarely recall ever seeing (due to this face blindness of mine), and sometimes that person smiles at me and calls me by my name. I don’t retain people’s names, partly, I suppose, due to my lack of interest in humans. But I can only assume that most people genuinely do enjoy interacting with others in person and that brightens their day somewhat, even if the person they’re interacting with is a computer technician that an employee recently described as “big and bearded” (he didn’t know he was talking to me on the phone).

Anyway, I want this contract to end so I can return to blessed unemployment, which I’ll spend writing, producing songs, reading, watching shows, walking in the woods, and jerking off to pure filth. But I must earn money monthly, money that each year is worth less, hundreds of which the government steals from my paycheck to fundamentally change my society into something hostile for my kind. How grand!

Whoever is reading these whining words, I hope you’re living it up not having to work for a living, relying on someone else to pay your bills, hopefully a beautiful, big-breasted mommy type who calls you a good boy or girl in bed. Just know that I’d strangle you to take your place.

I’ve been quite busy this month. Regarding the responsibilities that add money to my bank account, I’m heading a project to replace hundreds of printers in the hospital complex where I work, and that’s on top of my usual tasks as a computer technician. For the first time in my life, I’m in charge of two subordinates. Of course, I don’t want to be involved with any of it, but I haven’t managed to land a better job. Anyway, I like the printer technicians just fine. Most interesting detail for me: the last name of one of them is Lorenzo; one of those coincidences that have happened often with my creative projects. If the name Lorenzo doesn’t mean anything to you, you must not have been listening to my songs. I’ve used and listened to that name an unhealthy amount of times ever since I started producing songs with Udio.

In my spare time, I’m either working on my ongoing novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, that unfortunately very few people seem to like, or else producing songs thanks to the aforementioned revolutionary AI service Udio. I’ve loved creating songs through it from the very first beta, that offered you 33 seconds-long chunks of music that you had to either accept or discard; I recall the frustration of loving a part of a segment, only to want to curse at the AI because it blurted out gibberish at some part of it. However, ever since they included the ability to trim and inpaint, I’ve worked with my characteristic obsessiveness at every damn detail of them to ensure that the songs end up 99% like I wanted them. You should see the list of functional tags I’ve collected, including myriad genres and subgenres I didn’t even know existed. I’ve done more research into music this month that I’ve done about any subject in recent memory, even for my stories. I’ve wanted to create songs ever since I was a child, but I only know how to play the guitar. I also dislike dealing with human beings, so involving actual musicians in my musical endeavors was out of the question. AI is a godsend in that regard, and it seems that people are enjoying plenty of my songs as well.

I’m one of those people that can barely spend an hour at work without thinking, “I could be working on my stories or songs, which provide meaning not only for me but for others, but instead I’m wasting my limited lifespan trying to fix computer issues and dealing with annoying users.” It’s such a shame that the stuff I was born to do can’t be monetized (I have the completely wrong background and opinions for any publisher to accept my stuff these days, even if they found my stories palatable to begin with). I also hate networking, as part of my general aversion to humans, so my blog has barely grown in years. It always baffles me when I notice WordPress blogs that post less than me, and usually far less let’s say elaborate material, only for them to have thousands, or even tens of thousands of followers. What gives?

Being busy also distracts me from how horrid the world is. Wars aside, Europe is going down the toilet, the people who could do something significant about it either get fined, jailed, and/or shot, and we’re heading for Plandemic 2.0: Bird Flu Edition, no doubt as manufactured through gain-of-function research as the other one was. That’s what happens when you don’t hang people responsible for killing millions, they’re bound to try it again.

I wrote a whole paragraph about this insanity, but I deleted it, because ultimately who the fuck cares about what I have to say about it. I’m at work right now, handling three things at once, and I should focus on that stuff. Bye until whenever.

As of today, I’m thirty-nine years old. Most people out there seem to want to celebrate their birthdays, but I don’t: every passing year, I feel increasingly worse regarding my age. In a very real way, mainly due to my neurological handicaps, I doubt I have aged much mentally and emotionally beyond eighteen years old. I didn’t expect to live past that age either. But I find myself as a middle-aged person who others have unironically referred to as a “gentleman.”

I have felt sick for the last two or three days, as if I’ve been beaten up, but I can’t tell if I have caught something or it’s just the mounting stress. Apart from issues at work that refuse to get permanently solved and that keep me dreading the next time some issue will pop up, one I will have to figure out how to solve, I have been put in charge of the maddening task of having to replace about 960 printers in the whole hospital complex. This happens every four years or so due to the contract that our health organization has with the company that supplied the printers. The last time one of our technicians was put in charge of it, he looked miserable every single day, and by the end he refused to continue working as a technician for the hospital, choosing instead to do administrative work somewhere else. I don’t even have that choice, as I can’t speak Basque.

A few days ago, my boss and I received the delivery driver who was supposed to bring the first batch of printers. The company, instead of hiring a regular van dude, sent a truck driver. He barely filled one-fourth of his trailer with our hundred printers, and his gigantic vehicle struggled to maneuver through the inner roads of the hospital complex. We ended up blocking traffic for a while as we hurried to unload the pallets of printers and guide them through the corridors and elevators to the second story of a nearby building, to put them in storage. Turns out that the stacks of printers didn’t fit through some doors, so we found ourselves having to dismantle the stacks and remove the printers one by one. As someone with a heart condition, this isn’t something I should be involved in, but someone had to do it.

So, starting from this Monday, I’ll find myself, an autistic man who can barely tolerate interacting with human beings, in charge of two younger technicians to coordinate going from department to department convincing the users to let us replace their printers. And because human beings are exasperating like that, I’ll have to deal, as I’ve had to already, with the usual, “If you’re changing the printer, why don’t you put a color printer instead?” and “Now that you’re here, you should solve this other issue I have as well.” Some users engage you in conversation because that’s what they’d rather do other than work. The more I deal with human beings, the more I’d rather live in the middle of nowhere, growing and raising my own food.

I daydream often about vanishing from the memories of everyone who has ever known me, and for situations in which I’ve been involved to get magically reorganized so that I wasn’t present. It would be such a relief if nobody knew I exist, if I could just drift from place to place anonymously. Nobody would demand from me more than I can give. In such daydreams, however, I tend to end up shacking up with some wealthy mommy type who’d take care of everything in exchange of regular intimacy. As a thirty-nine-year-old man, such a woman would be a bit younger than me, but in my daydreams I’m younger as well.

What else can I say? I may be depressed at the moment. I’ve been begging the spider goddess to let me die already, but I suppose I have stuff left to create. Other than being left alone, losing myself in creative endeavours has been my main need in this stupid life. I can’t produce songs for a while, because I hit the monthly output limit, but I have progressed a bit more on my novella about a long-dead aspiring motocross rider, a story that apparently nobody likes.

Anyway, I’ll have to keep my head up and force my aging body to perform what’s required of me.

If I had told myself yesterday that today I would be writing an entry about a girl I see on the bus, I would have believed I was deceiving myself as I do regularly. But I must admit that I, a nearly 39-year-old middle-aged man, have a crush on a girl who shares my afternoon commute.

She must be in her early twenties at the most, and if any of you hapless people reading these words were to look at this human creature, you likely wouldn’t consider her a bombshell: she wears hoodies or similar attire; has glasses; her long, black hair in a half-up bun; very pale skin; and a lovely face. A tomboy of sorts. I’ve never heard her speak, so, to be honest, this person could be a beautiful dude that doesn’t grow facial hair. If that’s the case, I guess I’m bi. I’ve been into crazier shit.

Anyway, fantasizing about attractive girls (or I guess humans) lessens the horrible burdens that being alive imposes on me, but in the case of this bus person, for the entire ride, my attention was continually drawn to her. An antsy sixth sense suggested we were both thinking about each other, but neither would do shit about it because we aren’t crazy enough to approach a stranger for no good reason. I’m aware, however, that such an impression is likely testosterone talking; I grew up with little to no testosterone, and I never experienced such thoughts until they discovered my pituitary tumor and I started treatment. I will never get used to the notion that although I feel sure that something is going on, I may be imagining it because my hormones are deceiving me.

Last weekend, as I was walking by a park on my way home, I spotted her sitting on a bench. She looked at me, but my gaze didn’t linger. Today, as I was paying the bus fare, I got the feeling that someone was staring at me, and my gaze landed on her eyes. She reacted with a neck twitch and darting eyes, an universal sign of “Oh shit, I’ve been caught staring.” I walked by her and stood about a couple of meters behind her. When my stop was approaching, she moved to exit here, earlier than her usual stop. For about half a minute, she stood close enough that our arms almost touched, which I very much wanted to do. Then she exited, and we both went our separate ways.

Why am I even writing this? Because I never get interested in people. Of course, I notice attractive females and I fantasize sexually about them on a regular basis in order to feel better. But this bus person feels special: she’s someone I would like to know and not just imagine myself fucking. That’s a departure for me, because I can barely tolerate human beings.

She resembles Leire, the protagonist of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked, at least during the first half of that story. Is that why I care? Did my subconscious craft Leire’s image from some instinctual attraction? I don’t have the answers. All I know is that I look forward to seeing this human being again tomorrow at a quarter to two in the afternoon.

I’m not delusional enough to believe that anything will come out of my crush other than hyperactive daydreams. I will never be in another intimate relationship again: I’m middle-aged, in constant psychological and physical pain, my body is ruined in numerous ways, my Irritable Bowel Syndrome keeps me bloated and with my guts burning in relation to how anxious I am (and I’m always anxious, increasingly so, the moment I step out of a room where I’m alone), and I’m incapable of forming normal connections with people. Still, one can daydream. If we couldn’t even cling to delusional hopes, we would all have died out long, long ago.

I’ve returned to work after the Holy Week holidays. I’m one of those authors who can’t earn a living through his works, and who clearly never will: I only write because my subconscious demands it, and I find myself disquieted by human company (to put it mildly), so networking is out of the question. My job as a computer technician at a hospital forces me to interact with non-technical-minded people who are generally also chatty, which is by far the worst part of my day, and I hate working at an open office, which forces me to absorb inane bullshit from coworkers. However, my job puts me in front of a computer for hours, and it allows me to edit my texts between tasks. I’ve settled into the routine of waking up at five in the morning to freewrite the next part of my story, then editing it at work. My editing process takes about fifteen times as long as producing the first draft, and it would likely drive anyone else insane, as I sieve through every single word to ascertain their place in the scene as well as the story at large. I also consider many alternatives along the way. Thankfully, due to autism and OCD, I find that process comforting; I’m uniquely suited to such painstaking tasks.

Also, I have experienced the private shame of returning to past texts and finding them awfully written, even though I was sure they would be good enough. The worst recent example was when I was commissioning the cover for my previous novel in English, titled My Own Desert Places. I linked the artists to the first couple of chapters, back then up at this site, warning them that they would require a revision. When I reread them, I was appalled to find out that the first few chapters were abysmal, nearly incoherent, to the extent that I questioned my mental state back when I uploaded them in the first place.

I think that during a shortish period of time back in 2020-2021, I prided myself in pushing out 4,000-6,000 words out a day, which isn’t hard at all to do if you rely on an outline, lack a social life, and freewrite everything. My Own Desert Places ended up being about 100,000 words long, and I finished it in a couple of months. Compare that with my ongoing narrative titled Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, that has reached 20,000 words in nearly four months. For me, though, the difference in quality is extreme. Although I loved that novel and I’m generally proud of it, one day I intend to revise it, republish it, and lead readers toward it again, but I dread what I’m going to find there.

Anyway, I’ve come to the troublesome realization that, although I dislike working as an IT guy at a hospital, it’s probably better for a writer, regarding the quality of their stories, to keep a full-time job unrelated to writing fiction, as long as it allows you to edit your texts. When you’re constantly aware of how little time you have to produce something meaningful, you don’t pad it with crap. Many full-time authors become self-indulgent, end up believing that anything goes. They are also required to push out books on a regular schedule to support themselves, therefore imposing extraneous deadlines on the material. I’m of the belief that a story takes as long as it needs to take, and somehow I’m always surprised when my stories end up ballooning far beyond my expectations, while feeling that what I have to include is necessary. For example, I was quite convinced that Motocross Legend, Love of My Life would take about four chapters, after which I would return to working on my ongoing novel. However, it will likely reach sixteen chapters, and along the way I have had to discard many moments that would have been good enough, but that ultimately weren’t necessary.

Although I write stories that in general terms could be considered literature, I barely read novels these days, opting for manga instead. In the last few years, I have failed to finish, or even get far into, the novels that have landed on my hands. More often than not it’s because the author is confusing their duty of telling a story with that of propagandizing a political ideology, which seems to be the default position in this rotten modern world. You likely won’t get published otherwise. Japanese narratives, at least manga, are free from this rot, and if you want Western stories that won’t stink like someone is just checking boxes and pleading not to be canceled (assuming they don’t have a far more sinister goal in mind), unless you come across a special author, you have to delve into the pre-2001 stuff, before the last remains of sanity were demolished.

I can count on one hand the amount of novels that have affected me as if I had lived through those events, that have connected with me so meaningfully. One of them, read when I was twenty or so, was Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. Unlike in most of his other stories, that one felt to me like Murakami was expiating a sin, as if he truly needed to tell the tale of a doomed girl and the adrift young man who loved her. Many years later I came across details of the author’s life that clarified for me that he was indeed expiating something: he had betrayed a college girlfriend of his, only for her to end up doing something irreversible. Norwegian Wood is, at least for me, clearly imbued with that regret, with the need to go back in time and save someone. I have something of a savior complex (plenty of my dreams or daydreams over the years have had to do with literally going back in time and saving people), and I’m hopelessly attracted to doomed females, with goes a long way to explain my attachment to that book as well as to other narratives such as my favorite manga series: Inio Asano’s Oyasumi Punpun.

Anyway, I figured it was time to get back into reading novels, but I didn’t want to waste my time with stories that wouldn’t affect me meaningfully. I went the route of searching for novels similar to Norwegian Wood. Unfortunately, book recommendations rarely work for me; too many times I’ve been recommended stuff like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which I found abysmal. My brain works differently to other people’s, so necessarily I don’t enjoy nor want the same things others do. Regarding stories, I want the author to put me then-and-there along with the point of view character, to experience their lives as they do. The narrative usually has to delve deep into mental issues, solitude, attempts to understand the world, and so on. I hate authors who waste people’s time with unnecessary material for pseudo-ideological reasons, for example forcing you to slog through paragraph after paragraph of noise because the real world is like that. Plenty of postmodernists fall into that category. No thanks: I’m fully aware of how annoying and ultimately meaningless the world is, and I read to escape from it. Also, any story has to compete with my daydreams; if they can’t offer me something more engaging than what I can effortlessly picture in my mind, I won’t struggle through it.

Unsurprisingly, some of the recommendations included Murakami’s other books. One of them, Sputnik Sweetheart, published in 1999, was the second of his I bought in Spanish after Norwegian Wood fascinated me. I have the distinct memory of having read through the book twice over the years, but apart from a few quotes that I likely came across on Goodreads, I couldn’t remember any single detail of the story. Now that I’ve gotten three quarters of the way through it, I’m disturbed to have found out that, indeed, I have forgotten every single detail of the story, as if I had never known anything about the aspiring author slash love interest that most of the narrative focuses on, nor the woman that the author was interested in, let alone the generally plain narrator. It makes me wonder about my state of mind when I read the book those two previous times, or if I’m genuinely losing mental faculties. I remember very little about my life, I suspect due to my lifelong issues with clinical depression; most of my twenties draw a blank. But at least I could rely on stories making a lasting impact on me.

Anyway, I think those are the only impressions I wanted to post on here for reasons that aren’t clear to me. Work is underway on my ongoing novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, which I should be able to bring to a satisfying conclusion, even though I suspect very, very few people care; I have never had such a low engagement with a story as with the sad tale of one aspiring motocross rider and the man who was left behind. I have no idea why, because I think it’s quite good. Check it out if you want.

I spent most of last weekend, that lasted three days, sick with some respiratory issue. I returned to work on Tuesday only to wake up the next day with a fever, and I tested positive for the flu. I must have caught two separate diseases, but it doesn’t surprise me, because literally every single coworker was going through a respiratory issue of their own. I suspect that when I return to the office tomorrow, I’ll find out that we’re forced to mask ourselves up for the duration of the work hours.

Apart from being sick, I have been significantly depressed. Having to attend family functions due to the holidays only worsened my mood: the noise contamination for someone with a sensory processing disorder, the absurd amounts of food we’re supposed to gobble up, being forced to listen to their mind-numbing opinions, etc. Ever since I was a child, being around family members only made me feel alone. I don’t have anything in common with them, and when they attempt to relate to me, they make it clear that they believe themselves to be dealing with someone very different from the person that exists in my brain.

For as long as I can remember, I have yearned to distance myself from my family, as well as from everyone I’ve known, even putting whole continents between us, but I became a lousy adult with a deficient capacity for self-organization due to my brain issues, so I have never strayed far. On top of that, because my life must be some kind of cosmic joke, I even work with a loudmouth family member, which frays my nerves for most of the work hours. I also suspect that it contributed to triggering at least one of my episodes of arrhythmia. Unfortunately, I don’t work at the kind of office that allows you to isolate yourself with noise-canceling headphones.

Some months ago, I used to make myself available to online acquaintances to have a chat from time to time, but for a good while I haven’t felt like dealing with human beings in any capacity. Having to force myself to interact with people at work only reduces my willingness to do so in my spare time.

Although I’m a thousand words into the current scene of my novel, I’ve had to trudge through the mental fog characteristic of depression, and I haven’t had much energy to do anything other than sit at my desk, read manga, or play a video game. I can’t count how many times I’ve found myself this week shedding tears to a song, often to the same song on repeat. When I go to bed, my brain treats me with elaborate nightmares related to my lost youth and/or failings. I’m nearing 39, and it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that growing old will consist on accumulating more and more regrets and griefs until I break one way or another.

On a happier note, I’ve managed to distract myself thanks to the UEVR tool that a certain “praydog” and his team put together: it turns Unreal Engine games into VR games natively, even though they weren’t made for VR. Obviously the performance of plenty of them will depend on your rig, and I haven’t upgraded to the 4000 series (I’m waiting for them to release the new generation, that will hopefully prevent me from having to upgrade my PSU; the 4090 is an energy hog). However, I played through most of Life Is Strange, that silly teenage drama that released now nine years ago, featuring interesting plot points related to time-bending powers, but also featuring godawful, embarrassing dialogue along with one of the most infuriating, if memorable, characters from the fiction of that era: Chloe Price, a terrible brat that reminds me of my sister when she was a teenager. At least Chloe can use her dead dad as an excuse.

Fuck you, Chloe. I liked you better when your father was alive.

The game also features the following moment, related to beans:

Anyway, playing in VR confuses your brain into believing that it’s more immersed in the experience: scary situations become terrifying, tender moments become heart-warming, and sad moments can wring quite a few tears out of me (in Life Is Strange, the whole sequence involving the protagonist returning to her tween self, and the consequences of altering that past; in Cyberpunk 2077, when I played it in VR, the beginning of the second act, when V finds out that she has contracted a brain guest that may end up replacing her). Also, I’ve had better orgasms with VR sex than in real life. Too bad that it can’t replace intimacy (yet).

Not sure why I felt like sharing any of this information with you, stranger that for whatever reason took time out of your life to read this post. I hope it was worth it.