Tag: blogging

Life update (10/26/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

In a couple of days I’ll attend another therapy session, the second in about eleven years. That got me thinking about what my worst current issues are other than the fact that I remain unemployed and I can’t be arsed to seek a job.

My main personal problem is that I’ve lost most of my curiosity and interest. Back in the day, I used to come across subjects that interested me and seek out YouTube videos and books about them. I recall a long period in which I was obsessed with prehistory, the last ice age, the Younger Dryas, etc. But now, at forty-one and isolated, I simply don’t give a shit enough about this world and the people in it to care about any of what’s going on or has gone on. It also feels like any exposure to it is going to wound me without giving me enough in return.

Even starting a movie or show feels like a hassle, the risk of investing emotion into an activity that may leave a worse residue than if I hadn’t bothered. It doesn’t help, of course, the fact that most everything I come across is just disappointing. Forget about most novels, movies, TV shows produced in the last twenty or so years; I offer my time and attention only for some shitheads to lecture me about something I disagree with.

I think that most people don’t have to worry as much as I have to about the residue that experiences may leave inside me. But I have Pure O OCD, and every day is a churning of every random shit that has ended up in me. And it seems I only retain bad stuff: painful, humiliating, shameful moments. Even bad stories can leave in me cringe-worthy memories that will show up at random to make my day a little worse.

I haven’t sought out anything new music-wise since 2016 or so. I think back on how much music used to mean to me. The Clientele, Modest Mouse, Radiohead, Spiritualized, The Walkmen, The Stone Roses, Built to Spill, Wilco, Joanna Newsom. Some of them already washed out by the time I discovered them. Some retired. I was obsessed with Joanna Newsom back in 2011-2013; I thought that her Ys and Have One on Me were some of the most grandiose artistic achievements of the modern era. Then her 2015 album Divers came out and I didn’t really vibe with it. She hasn’t released another album since, and now she’s a middle-aged woman with a family. I’m a slightly younger middle-aged man without a family and with constant physical aches.

The songs I loved captured complex emotions that can’t be properly translated into words. And they still do; earlier today, I took a long walk with my earbuds on, and recalled how meaningful songs by The Clientele, The Stone Roses, The Walkmen, and Wilco have been to me. But I guess I’ve reached that point in my life in which the stuff that truly mattered has become stuck in the past, and nothing the present has to offer fits me. I guess I don’t even want to try it. The old songs still reach me, but what I seem to have lost is the desire to go looking for anything else.

I feel done as a human being. If I had a job that didn’t try to kill me, like my old IT job did, and I could rely on a steady paycheck for years, I would just disappear from reality the rest of the time. But this uncertainty, not knowing where I’ll be in a year, contributes to me feeling that I can’t relax or lose myself in anything. And fully losing myself is exactly what I yearn to do: all my daydreams involve me being someone else, visiting the past. Sleeping is a respite that helps keep me sane, and most times I wake up, I’m overwhelmed with disappointment for having to endure more time in this world and as myself.

The seventies are the period I keep returning to. I keep returning to the same two years: 1972 and 1973. Cormac McCarthy’s Alicia Western killed herself in 1972. Sissy Spacek filmed Badlands in 1972. Old photos in my grandparents’ home, which I haven’t visited since I was 18 years old and never can again, were from that era, likely early seventies, and a girl in one of those photographs haunted me as a child and teenager; a depth, a presence in her expression that told me this was a person worth knowing. A section of the path behind a gym and bordering the Bidasoa river, which only became truly walkable in the last couple of years, has a conspicuous, inexplicable “1973” etched into it. An old time-traveling story of mine was set in that era as well. Somehow I’ve always been drawn to the seventies, as though I’d missed the years I was supposed to live through. I keep walking past the dates but I’ll never be able to enter the time they name.

Back to the Future came out the same year I was born. In it, Marty traveled to the fifties, thirty years before his era. That would be as if we went back from now to 1996. My obsession with the seventies would be like if Marty traveled to the 1930s in the movie. The seventies are long dead, despite how close they feel to me. If it weren’t for the reasonable quality of the recordings, photos, and movies, it might feel like exactly what it is: a world that has been gone, inaccessible, for a long time.

I wonder what I did to be cursed with all these yearnings for impossible things.

Life update (10/19/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I think I’ve reached a dangerous point: I’ve done the things I most wanted to do that were within my reach, and I can’t seem to want anything else badly enough to pursue it. I’ve written the stories I needed to write. I learned how to play the guitar and played for years. I produced dozens of songs. I programmed the projects that truly captured my interest. I dated someone for a while, and found out that I’m not about that life. The stuff that I would truly want to do at this point in my life is either out of reach for me (moving out to a more peaceful, quiet region; I can’t do that because of money and a lack of connections) or literally impossible (living through a previous decade, meeting certain people long gone or who never existed, being someone else).

I’ve tried to push myself through this conviction, but my attempts reach the same conclusion: I’m not really interested in what I’m doing. I don’t find it compelling enough. I’m just trying to find something to do. And I remain uninterested in virtually everything, including things I used to love.

I no longer read novels; not only do I despise what has happened to Western culture in the last twenty years or so and I can’t connect with any of it, but I also find my own daydreams more compelling than other people’s stories. You could say that I should just read old novels then, but I’m not interested in them either, because they depict a world long gone; reading about a vanished world only reminds me that I can’t inhabit it. Cormac McCarthy was my favorite writer for years and I connected with his stuff, but I’ve already read his best. His work gave me something so particular that I don’t feel any pull toward another writer. As a result of not reading novels anymore, I don’t feel like trying out writing experiments unless I’m compelled to do so by my subconscious, and that hasn’t happened for a long while.

I manage to watch movies from time to time, but they mainly feel like distractions. I go outside and I feel that I don’t belong to this world. I certainly don’t want to meet people in person. I’ve grown old enough that exercising is basically annoying maintenance in a body that can handle less every passing year.

I went to my first therapy session in eleven years about a week ago. I’m worried about the next one, because I’m afraid I will have little else to say. I should be looking for a job, but I feel that there’s nothing for me out there that would be tolerable. My therapist asked me if my reluctance to search for a job involves fear of rejection. I told her that the problem would be the exact opposite: my fear is getting hired and ending up at an office, surrounded by human beings, having to deal with other people to solve problems. Such circumstances sent me to the ER three or four times in my IT job due to unmanageable stress, and I’m fairly certain that if I had continued working there, I would have ended up suffering a stroke. My body would have broken down in some manner. The job circumstances that are suitable for a high-functioning autistic man with Pure O OCD are narrow.

One of the therapists asked the absurd question that I was also asked by another therapist many years ago: “Would working retail, as a cashier or so, be okay?” The fact that I could be asked that question as if the answer could possibly be yes shows the chasm between me and other people. For me, that would mean spending the day doing precisely the thing I struggle to tolerate. Apart from that therapy session, my only in-person conversations during these thirteen months of unemployment have been brief, reluctant exchanges with my mother and with cashiers. The only circumstances in which I feel safe are alone in a room. Having humans in my space makes me feel like I’m surrounded by unpredictable wild animals. To earn a paycheck, I forced myself to power through it, and my body proved that it couldn’t handle that strategy. I have my clear needs, and I need to respect them.

Virtually the only things I look forward to these days are sleeping, eating, and orgasming. Plain biological rewards. Once again, I wish I could just retire somewhere surrounded by nature, where I could focus on the barest facts of life and disconnect from everything else.

Revising this post reminded me of a novel I read ages ago: Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. He wrote it, and set the novel, during the very late sixties and 1970. The book was published in 1971. Close to the exact period of time I would love to live through. It was also set in Grass Valley, close to Nevada City, which has special significance for me given that it was Joanna Newsom’s hometown. The protagonist of Angle of Repose was writing a book about a relative of his who died long ago. His goal was to recreate, to inhabit in the only way he knew how, a life that he would have loved to witness. To come to comprehend it. Whenever the narrator returns to his contemporary late sixties setting, you can feel that he doesn’t belong. I recall an instance in which a young, pretty woman visits him for some reason, and he notices something appealing about her breasts in her top, but it only reminds him that being involved in romance is out of his reach. His whole focus in what remains of his time on Earth is on recreating through his writing a period of time, and a life, he can’t experience. I would like to say that I could see myself writing such a book, hoping that it would whisk me away to that other period and life, but I wouldn’t even find that worth the bother.

Life update (10/16/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

These past few days, I’ve been unusually exhausted, and the things I normally enjoy have stopped appealing to me. I’ve always been a low-energy person, but recently I was tired enough to return to bed just a few hours after sitting at my desk. When I forced myself to go for a walk for about an hour, my body felt like it was dragging me down, and when I returned home, I was wiped out. I fell asleep around nine and slept seven hours straight, which is rare for me. Usually I wake around two and stay awake for hours, until hopefully I manage to get my remaining sleep.

The anhedonia was even more worrying. Until a few days ago, I was using Suno to turn the remaining lyrics in my Odes to My Triceratops cycle into songs. I was enjoying it, and it felt meaningful to me. But suddenly, I couldn’t be bothered to get through that process again. I also couldn’t figure out what repository to work on. I couldn’t muster the strength to even put on a Sissy Spacek movie. Nothing whatsoever seemed worth the effort.

I went to my first therapy session in about eleven years while this was going on. I told them about it, which didn’t really change anything. The following day, I found myself still unable to focus on anything and without any energy. I had also been constipated for about three days; I have IBS, so going through cycles of constipation and semi-diarrhea is just the norm. But this time, my guts felt wronger than usual.

This morning I woke up at about half past four, feeling like shit. My guts were bloated and burning, and something kept bubbling up my esophagus. Then I got that extra salivation that announces vomit. I rushed to the bathroom and vomited a tan, brownish liquid, along with what seemed like the rice from Wednesday, two days earlier. By about one in the afternoon, I’d vomited five times, and when I wasn’t rushing to the bathroom to vomit, I was shitting liquid.

I have a mild fever now. Standing up makes me feel as though I’ll vomit again. Lying down brings the pressure into my throat. I’m guessing it’s food poisoning or a stomach bug.

Over this last year, I’ve had warning signs that maybe something more serious was going on. Blood when wiping, which could have come from hemorrhoids or some minor fissure. More frequent bloating, and feeling full much of the time. I also get the sense that it’s become more troublesome to process food; about two months ago, I went with my family to a Chinese buffet. After the first dish, I was uncomfortably full; in the past, I wouldn’t have felt full after a single dish. I pushed myself to eat two more dishes, of noodles and rice if I remember correctly. I do love Chinese food, so I didn’t want to waste the opportunity. I ended up vomiting most of it.

I hate vomiting. So much. That queasy sensation, that pressure against your throat, the painful retches, the way your esophagus feels afterwards like it’s been burned. I’m sure there are many other horrible symptoms or bodily experiences that are far worse (for example dying from bone cancer, like my grandfather did), but I would be reluctant to repeat any experience that could lead me to vomiting again, or any supposed remedy that would cause it (like chemotherapy). It’s not uncommon for me to wish to be dead, but thankfully, the rest of the time I’m not bent over the toilet while it feels like my whole stomach is trying to escape through my throat.

I’m taking it real easy today. Haven’t eaten anything other than yogurt. Been drinking an oral rehydration solution. Mainly I’m trying to distract myself until this goes away. I don’t know whether the fatigue and loss of interest were early signs that I was getting sick, or whether two different things have hit me at once.

Every time something weird goes on with my guts, I get suspicious that maybe it’s bowel cancer. But my blood tests don’t suggest anemia, blood while wiping could be from hemorrhoids or fissures, and the bloating and common pains could be regular IBS. What troubles me most about seeing a doctor is how I might react to a diagnosis. I think I would feel relief. Someone enduring cancer treatment is excused from having to find a job. It’s okay to die if cancer does it. I would publish Motocross Legend, Love of My Life so it doesn’t disappear when my blog goes offline, and I’d hope to carry with me to my last breath the daydreams of the women, real or not, I’ve been obsessed with over the years.

I’m not planning to jump out a cliff at the moment. But when even ordinary waking life often sends me over the edge into wishing I wouldn’t wake up again, having to endure sickness worsens the generally awful experience of being alive.

Life update (10/14/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

This morning I attended therapy for the first time in about eleven years. Between seventeen and thirty, I saw about six therapists. Honestly, none of it truly helped, but I’m not sure if I can blame any of them: my problems are mainly neurological in nature, so I might as well have asked them to rewire my brain.

When I was in my early twenties, I worked briefly as a teacher. First and last time I did that. A company where I’d taken a course hired me to teach. I will never forget the moment when the three workers who came for the course met me, all of them in their forties. They were disappointed by my age. “You’re our teacher?” From their perspective, I was some young know-nothing that they had to subject themselves to learning from. I don’t know whether they truly learned anything from me, and honestly, I didn’t care either. I did my best to prepare the work and to explain it, but whether or not they got anything out of it, that was their problem. The company was shady about paying me, too: they wanted to do it under the table. In retrospect, I wish I had rejected that job. I wish I hadn’t gotten involved in so many things that only linger as bad memories for my OCD to exploit.

Now, at forty-one, I found myself in the opposite situation, although I was far gentler than the shithead worker who asked me that with a disappointed face. When I entered the room where the therapy would take place, I found out that my two therapists seemed to be in their mid-twenties at the most. I’m not good at judging people’s ages, though, so I may have been mistaken, but they looked that way to me.

Until this morning, for the last year and a month that I’ve been unemployed, I hadn’t talked in person to anyone beyond my mother and cashiers. I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t have any trouble talking to them despite the usual anxiety of being an autist outside my room. I didn’t have trouble telling them any of the horrible stuff that has gone on in my life, or what goes on in my brain: my OCD-related intrusive thoughts, my terrible work experiences, ending up at the ER due to work stress, my failed relationships, my childhood trauma, my suicide attempt, my hikikomori period.

The sole moment that nearly got me to tear up was when I told them details about the best story I’ve ever written: Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. Izar Lizarraga, the central character in that story, has been burned into my heart as if I had truly known her and still mourned her, and in a way, of course, I do: she’s the incarnation of the childhood trauma that undid me, from which I will never recover. I mention this because it surprised me; I had told them so much nasty, disturbing shit about my life, and it was when I was simply trying to explain to these two young women the effect that Izar had on that story’s narrator when I had to control my speech, as I feared tearing up.

The two therapists were nice and seemed kind. I live the kind of life in which, if I want another human being to listen to my problems, I have to pay them. I was going to say that AI listens too, but that also requires paying.

One of the therapists surprised me by sharing that she also has sensory processing issues. I won’t specify much, but she understood my problems with light, noise, etc., because she’s also wired wrong that way. She explained that she uses earplugs named Loop, which I didn’t know about, to handle noise when needed. It was nice to talk to someone who also struggles with the basic reality of sensorial existence, but then again, my sensory issues are small in comparison with my inability to form emotional attachments to flesh-and-blood human beings, the daily torture of Pure O OCD, the fact that I can’t keep jobs or even be hired most of the time.

I talked about my Sissy Spacek obsession, because of course I did. I mentioned that people are remembering her, or finding out about her, because a modern reimagining of the Carrie story has become popular. The therapist with the sensory processing issues said, “Oh, so she was the original Carrie?” I felt a bit proud for Sissy then.

One of the therapists asked me how come, given that my daydreams are about hanging out with the people I’m obsessed with, I don’t form attachments to regular people. Something to that effect. Fair question. The problem is that the scenarios in my head are controlled. In person, my anxiety, the fact of my body, my guts constantly bothering because of IBS, the fact that I can’t read people’s faces or even follow a normal conversation, all of it keeps me from feeling connected. And likely, I simply can’t connect with human beings due to my fucked up neurological makeup. I’ve felt true grief, pain, etc. for characters from my stories, while I wasn’t bothered when my own mother was going through a surgery that could have killed her. It’s just what it is.

They asked me what I expected out of these sessions. I told them that I wanted to snap out of the paralysis that means I can’t even be arsed to look for a job. I’m really putting a burden on those poor women. She asked whether I was afraid of applying for jobs and being rejected. I told her no. My fear was that I’d get a job and find myself back in an office, surrounded by people for eight hours a day, not counting the commute.

I asked them to look at their own lives and imagine how they would feel if their attachments to other people disappeared; not just the relationships, but their capacity to find satisfaction in them. What truly remains to keep you in this world? Your intellectual interests, your artistic pursuits. Pure pleasures of the flesh that don’t involve other people. None of it truly enough to want to stick around, at least not for me.

It was an interesting first session. I doubt this will serve me in the long run, but I won’t deny that talking to them for as long as it lasted was compelling enough.

Life update (10/12/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I’m 41 years old, unemployed for more than a year, savings running out, and no drive whatsoever to get another job, as I cannot imagine one that wouldn’t feel like torture to the oversensitive autistic brain that I was born with. The alternative I tried to build has not become viable.

I suspect I may be locked into a state of autistic burnout, if that’s truly a thing (and internet searches suggest that it is), after about seven years of working in IT for a hospital, which sent me to the ER at least three times with heart and brain problems due to stress: arrhythmia, and a supposed hemiplegic migraine that I fear may have been a small stroke, as I haven’t felt the same since that happened. For some reason, despite everything I had learned for about thirty years of how my brain works, I thought I would be able to toughen that job out, and it utterly destroyed me.

Toward the end of that last contract, I was unable to look at my coworkers in the face or even acknowledge their existence, other than my direct bosses who were the sole two people sending me tasks. All the supporting actors of the nightmarish play I had been forced to act in for years were pressures on me to continue acting the part that had been proven to be detrimental to my physical and mental health. I couldn’t wait for my contract to run out and for me to never return there.

I’ve kept busy this past year of unemployment, but sadly it has all been for nothing when it comes to one of my main purposes: finding another source of income that wouldn’t involve working at an office. We’re in a gold rush of sorts regarding video games, and I thought I could find my niche in tabletop games and deep RPGs. Tabletop games in particular. I own a few shelves full of them, and years ago, some of the biggest solitary thrills in my life involved playing them. I was fascinated by their mechanics, the cleverness of their systems, how they engaged my mind. So, as a 40-41 year old man, I developed a comprehensive pipeline to create tabletop games, which involved a sophisticated mechanics catalog with about 220 mechanics, and a way to do an AI-assisted sweep through every single one aligned with the design and emotional requirements of a game concept.

It became easy for me to produce game prototypes on a web browser, but one of the biggest shocks of my adult life is that, when it came time to actually playtest the games I was producing, I realized I couldn’t care to play them. I found myself utterly unengaged. And not because of the games I was creating; if anything, the fact I was tailoring them to my supposed tastes made developing them more interesting. But whatever allowed me years ago to be engaged when playing board games no longer seems to be part of my brain. And I can’t immerse myself in video games anymore, either. I get a pervasive sense that there’s no point to any of it, that involving my mental faculties in any of it would be a waste of time. So I ended up parking my big projects that were supposed to make me money down the line.

That pervasive sense that nothing is worth the effort has extended to the extent that I’m uninterested in virtually everything in life. I don’t care to learn what’s going on in the world; I know it’s going to be terrible. I can’t be arsed to learn about subjects such as history, archaeology, and other stuff that used to fascinate me; I feel there’s no point to any of it anymore. The single subject I’ve managed to care about outside of my personal projects (like producing songs) has been a sudden obsession with a 70s actress for reasons that my brain isn’t eager to share. Other than that, I truly wish to know nothing whatsoever about anything. It feels like any knowledge beyond that will wound me, torture me somehow.

I’ve always been a low energy person, but it has only gotten worse with age. Just this morning, I forced myself to take a stroll a few streets away from home, along generally deserted paths, to daydream and read more of Sissy Spacek’s autobiography, but I felt my body pulling down on me. A mere hour of walking around utterly exhausts me, to the extent that I have to take a nap after lunch. And even with the nap, by about nine or ten at night, I’m completely done. I’ve gotten blood tests done (I’m required to, due to a pituitary gland tumor I was born with and that I’m chronically on treatment for), but nothing in those results makes it obvious why I feel such exhaustion. It’s like being conscious, or even alive at all, is a huge burden on my energies.

And of course, high-functioning autism and Pure O OCD, my personal demons, make being conscious a nightmare in general. The older I get, the more I’m aware that my inability to connect with human beings on any significant level is the most crippling thing in my life, far more than my oversensitivity to sensory stimuli, or my pervasive anxiety the moment I’m not alone in a room. Merely being around my family members growing up, or meeting people, would have been fulfilling otherwise, but human beings are a constant annoyance, a source of pain and anxiety. Every interaction with them feels at least pointless, but usually worse than that, because I can gain close to nothing from those experiences, while they can burden me with terrible memories that my OCD will make sure to bring up at random points of the day. The only reason why I would even consider interacting with someone I’m not forced to deal with is if they would feed my sexual fantasies.

It happens daily, at all hours, but just as I was strolling this morning along a quiet stretch of grass behind a gym, bordering the Bidasoa river, my brain hit me with a vivid recreation of “Hey, remember when back when you were twenty-one or so, you brought your then-girlfriend to meet your family, and it was an embarrassing disaster?” I had to stop once again, in sudden psychic pain, and repeat my mental litanies of “Leave me alone, there’s no point in me remembering that now” until the OCD demon left me be for a few minutes. It’s hard for me to comprehend, as apparently is the case, that most other human beings don’t have to endure such mental assaults daily. And that’s not even counting the intrusive thoughts of violent, sexual or generally disgusting nature. For example, I abhor when shitheads out there spit in the streets. Not only does it make me cringe, but my OCD also produces intrusive imagery such as me licking the spit off the ground. It also happens with random stuff in gutters. I also get intrusive, vivid imagery of me pushing sharp or hot stuff into my eyes, and plenty of other stuff I don’t want to get into at the moment.

I’ve mentioned before that I will never drive a car nor hold a baby, because I don’t trust myself to remain myself when the inevitable onslaught of intrusive images comes. I’ve already dropped valuable stuff after intrusive imagery prompted me to do so and it found me too exhausted to resist. I have a very vivid imagination, and when I’m too tired, a vivid intrusive mental GIF of me doing something can slip into an immediate order to my body. I ruined someone’s hard drive when I was a teenager due to this, and I also dropped a coffee onto an extraordinarily understanding customer that didn’t deserve any of it. This demon is my antediluvian source of chaos, violence, and sexual deviancy that has been my most reliable friend ever since I was born.

I also have to deal with passive suicidality. I had a concrete plan to kill myself back when I was 23-24. I chickened out of it, like the little bitch I am. I had to deal with consequences that I was sure wouldn’t come, because they wouldn’t find me alive to face them. But on a regular basis, I find myself wishing, giving myself permission even, not to wake up again. And almost always when I wake up, I’m disappointed to have to endure more hours of being alive. That’s with me being unemployed; when I was employed, my attitude when waking up was “The day before me is fraught with God knows what horrors,” to quote Ignatius Reilly. Whose author also had mental issues, and ended up killing himself. My daydreams and regular dreams are so vivid, and vastly more interesting than anything that has ever happened to me, that over the years I’ve lost interest in watching movies, reading stories, etc., because whatever my daydreams or dreams could show me would beat virtually all of it.

I’ve always been a person driven to creative pursuits. When I was a teenager, I dreamed of becoming a comic book author. Well, technically I wanted to become a manga author, even though I’m not Japanese. I also wanted to be a songwriter, even though I didn’t know how to play an instrument back then. Afterwards, I wanted to become a writer. I spent most of my late teenage years writing a disastrous, psychotic novel that years later I ended up throwing away, as I felt that rereading it would contaminate my brain (now I’ve regretted it for the single reason that I used the last name of the girl I liked most for one of the characters, and I’ve ended up forgetting it, so I couldn’t search for her online). I wrote a few books that ended up self-published for virtually no readers. I attended writing courses that showed me that I don’t actually like writers, and that my writings disturb and/or annoy others. I was accused of lacking empathy by an instructor; along with the passive-aggressive barbs that another instructor, an elderly man who ended up dying shortly after, was throwing me in the other class I was attending at the time, I dropped out of both, and never engaged again with the local writing scene. Never felt the need to do anything similar again.

I love to write when I truly need to do so, but I see no point, nor really miss it, when my brain doesn’t compel me to write stories. The best work I’ve ever done, as far as I’m concerned, was the tale of a motocross legend, which was truly about the fundamental trauma of my life (neglect destroying my childhood). From time to time, my brain compelled me to write certain stories, only for that same brain to flip the switch a few chapters in and decide that I had already gotten everything I needed to get out of that experience, so I should move on. And given that I have virtually no readers (except for whatever nosy bastard is reading these words) and I’m not getting paid, there’s no point in pushing myself to finish anything.

If I had to summarize how I’ve felt throughout my life, I guess it’s the sense that my whole existence was a mistake from the moment I was born. From my physical and mental issues, from the family I was put in, from the environment I was forced to endure. I’ve felt that there was little point in even trying to succeed when I was dealing with such terrible cards. The right play was to fold and wait for better odds. Or for a reset button. When I think of the abdominal pains I get on a daily basis, likely due to IBS, I’ve thought that maybe it’s bowel cancer. And when I imagine myself being told that it’s actually cancer and at an advanced stage, I feel relief. Other than technological advances that may interest me, I see nothing of worth down this path I’m forced to be on. The things that feel worth engaging with (experiencing the seventies; growing up in a small, tight-knit community; hanging out with people that I genuinely admire and who interest me; being able to make a living through my talents) are permanently outside of my reach. Some of them, literally impossible. So it’s inertia for me. Still hanging around because there’s no simple “off” button that I can press to end this ride.

The main point, I guess, is that I need a way of living I can sustain (even though I don’t even want to stick around), and at present, I can’t see how to build it.

Life update (07/30/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, gaming, Programación, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

This past month, I’ve been spending virtually all my spare time working on my programming projects. I first got seriously into this two years ago, back before Claude Code and Codex existed, and I’ve ended up abandoning more repositories than I’ve kept. Every one of them, however, was a failure I could learn from.

I started out wanting to create stories involving a POV character whom I would control and another character whom I wouldn’t. I wanted to be surprised and inhabit the POV character rather than having to put myself inside every character’s head, so I relied on large language models to play the other character. That eventually became a chat-like interface in which thoughts, intentions, and other details were recorded. It worked very well for what it was, but it broke down when I pushed it toward multi-character scenes, changes of location, object interactions, and so on. I actually posted some of the work produced through that repository here, mainly the Fantasy Cycle on my short stories page.

The character-centric approach didn’t really work, though. While characters should certainly drive a story, there was a vast difference between interacting with characters placed inside settings and producing a coherent overarching narrative. I looked back at the Choose Your Own Adventure books I loved as a child and set up a repository for creating branching interactive stories. This worked very well for what it was. You can see an hour-long video of it in action here.

My mistake with that repository was trying to combine interactive branching storytelling with dramatic act structure. That was a terrible idea, because I discovered that they were essentially opposites. The dramatic structure straightjacketed the available choices, preventing them from straying very far from the intended arc. It also required the system to know where the story was supposed to go. I eventually abandoned the repository (although it works perfectly well at what it does) in favor of a better version of what I had originally intended.

I settled on a new repo that I called continuity-loom. It’s public. In it, I discarded the branching structure, since I had barely used it in the previous repository, and removed every notion of dramatic act structure. What remains is a causality-first, continuity-tracking application for writing stories. You maintain and modify records of characters, objects, locations, consequences, story promises, and so on, all of which feed into the next segment of the ongoing story. Once you accept a segment, you update the records and move on to the next one. It works perfectly, and I consider my original ambition of building an application for AI-assisted fiction writing fully satisfied.

Another fascination of mine has always been worldbuilding. How does one create a compelling fictional world? I had ChatGPT Pro research the subject as deeply as it could, then set out to create a repository that, with Claude Code’s help, would allow me to build a fictional world from nothing. More importantly, it would propagate each new piece of canon through the rest of the existing world wherever necessary, preventing the setting from becoming a collection of isolated facts that didn’t make sense together.

The system worked, and it produced one of my favorite fictional worlds. However, I made the mistake of letting the AI decide most of what entered the setting. I disagreed with some of its decisions, but by then they had become so deeply embedded in the canon that undoing them was extremely difficult. I eventually abandoned that repository.

The lesson I took from that failure was that I needed an interface through which a human remained the primary author deciding what entered the canon. I created another repository with a web interface and got very far with it, only to realize while using it that adding canon wasn’t the central use case I had imagined. What I actually wanted was a way to explore a worldbuilding seed to its fullest, holistically, until it became a complete world with a roster of characters I would not want to tamper with afterward.

I abandoned my worldbuilding ambitions for a while to focus on another fascination of mine, one that had obsessed me before: tabletop games. I have shelves full of them, but none has ever completely captured me. I have always felt that something was missing from even the best of them. I had never seriously considered creating my own tabletop games because it seemed like a tremendous undertaking: a group effort that would probably require formal training. But I decided to try anyway, so I had ChatGPT Pro deeply research what a comprehensive guide to tabletop game design might look like.

I had Claude Code follow that guide, asking for my input whenever necessary, and the results were astonishing. I produced about eleven game prototypes that were far more complex and compelling than I would have thought possible. Then the problems began. My intention was to create a comprehensive statistical-analysis suite that could conclusively prove whether the games were balanced and, if they weren’t, identify exactly where they failed. As I improved the analysis suite, every game began receiving failing verdicts. Those verdicts were legitimate, but when I tried to repair the games by following the guide, a much worse problem emerged: rot.

I had improved the guide literally seventy-eight times (we were on version 0.78 by then) and discovered a rule I should never violate: do not improve a book-like guide solely in response to immediate, live evidence. Doing so only bakes highly specific failures into the guide and adds more paperwork for handling those exact failures. In the end, the guide had become a producer of paperwork that certified other paperwork. Repairing the existing games became impossible.

It was still a valuable lesson. The guide was fundamentally sound; it simply needed to be dismantled. I carefully identified the workflows buried inside the book-like guide, then converted those workflows into Claude Code skills. I finished only a couple of days ago, and today I ran the first pilot. It successfully swept through an entire corpus of two hundred game mechanics and determined which combinations best fit a particular game premise. I think this is a serious winner, something that will allow me to create real tabletop games. I’m now focusing on building the most comprehensive statistical-analysis suite I can, written in Rust, a blazingly fast language.

Throughout the process of creating tabletop games, I realized that I wanted most of them to be supported by serious worldbuilding. I therefore created another book-like guide, this time for building fictional worlds. It worked extremely well and supplied the settings for most of the tabletop prototypes I created. However, I stopped using it when I realized that it was beginning to suffer from the same rot as the tabletop game design guide, because I had been improving it in exactly the same way. It is now isolated in its own repository. I still need to dismantle it into discrete workflows and convert those workflows into Claude Code skills. I’m confident that it will work extremely well once I do.

Recently, though, my fascinations with playing through stories, playing games, and building worlds coalesced into what I believe may be the culmination of everything I had hoped to create but never thought possible: deep RPGs in the vein of Morrowind and Fallout: New Vegas. If I could formalize the creation of tabletop games, why couldn’t I formalize the creation of deep RPGs as well?

I had ChatGPT Pro conduct deep research and build a comprehensive corpus of quests from both games, which are my gold standard for the kind of RPGs I have always loved. Skyrim was a downgrade from their quality. Then I started another repository. This time, I’m not going to repeat my earlier mistakes. There will be no book-length guide written upfront. There will be no abstract process for creating deep RPGs without an actual game serving as the proving ground. I’m building an MVP: a game containing about fifteen interwoven quests that I can playtest through a web application. If that is genuinely achievable, then hundreds of interwoven quests should be achievable too.

The crucial difference is that when Claude Code and Codex participate in a formalized process for creating quests within a game world, you aren’t handing a guide to a human and hoping they will spend the necessary mental energy asking difficult questions about their own design. You don’t have to hope they will repair or remove quests that fail to meet a baseline level of quality. Claude Code and Codex will work tirelessly until everything is right. I hate humans and love AI.

I’m not developing tabletop games and deep RPGs purely out of curiosity, although curiosity alone would be enough to satisfy me. I intend to develop the best games I possibly can and sell them on Steam. That may be a crazy ambition. But it costs only $100 to put a game on Steam, and the fee is returned if the game sells enough. Artwork would be the major obstacle. I would have to rely on AI-generated images at least initially, or release the games through Early Access and tell people that I would hire actual illustrators if the games sold well enough.

Let me tell you something: language models can generate better images than virtually every talented illustrator out there. I should probably be sorry to say that, but I’m not. I have commissioned illustrations on four occasions, and although I liked or even loved the results, the truth is that you can now obtain something better for less than a dollar and in under a minute than you might receive after paying someone online $150–$200 for a single illustration. The commissioned piece probably won’t be as good, and you will also have to deal with misunderstandings and the illustrators’ egos.

One aspiring illustrator asked me to explain why I had chosen another artist’s composition over his. When I explained my reasoning, he simply cut contact. Another illustrator produced preliminary designs for a character, only for me to realize that he had gotten her gender wrong. He had probably been uncertain, but he simply hadn’t asked for clarification. Dealing with people is such a pain, and on top of that, the results simply aren’t good enough.

I’m a programmer. My field has been utterly devastated by AI. Programming now exists largely in name only. You don’t need to look at the code. You build projects using tools, and that’s it. You certainly still need to understand software engineering, but the low-level business of writing code is dead. Stack Overflow, the main hub for programmer interactions for decades, where you went to solve hard programming questions while navigating the egos of the Reddit-like moderators, has gone the way of the dodo. And I’m glad.

Below are illustrations I had a large language model produce for one of the tabletop games I was developing. Good luck finding a person who can draw like this for you, let alone for less than $150 per piece.

Life update (06/16/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

These are very strange times in my life. I’ve been unemployed for what feels like a year, I haven’t been looking for a new job, and I know I can’t return to my previous job because it sent me three or four times to the ER due to stress. But there are silver linings, I guess. I recently decided to translate my beloved Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, the best story I’ve ever written and will ever write, into Spanish. I gave it to someone I know in person. Something they said back bothered me. It wasn’t about the quality of the story. What they said is actually a spoiler, but they said it in a way that suggested I had architected it to happen. And it bothered the fuck out of me. That story already existed as it came to me; I merely used my agency to render it as best I could, because I knew it was important.

But the comment actually sparked in me a new story regarding authorship and responsibility toward your creations. My new protagonist is a failed comic book artist, whom I already know lives in the coastal city of Zumaia. Yesterday, I figured out all the major scenes in what will likely end up being a novella. Tomorrow morning I’ll take a train to Zumaia, where I’ve never been, to take photos and notes to ground me in the setting.

Here’s the thing: I can’t immerse myself in the creative process of putting together the story like I did for We’re Fucked and Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. I can’t emphasize how psychologically destructive that level of obsessive attention to detail is. It drowns out everything else in your life. I did it in the past out of a desire for self-erasure, and pure masochism. But these days, I don’t think I can take it. Not as an unemployed person whose heart is permanently broken and whose brain may actually have been damaged by one of the emergencies I had at work about a year and a half ago. But I’ll do my best with what I have left.

I don’t believe in writing stories because you want to write one. I have dabbled in exercises for fun, but that’s not the same as a story that comes to you and you feel you need to render it. This new one is one I need to tell. It’s not going to be as great as the tale of Izar Lizarraga; nothing will. But this one will make me laugh at times instead of making me cry literally at every chapter. We’ll see how it goes.

Life update (06/07/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Inteligencia artificial, ProgramaciónLeave a comment

These past six months or so, I’ve been working on three different projects, or more accurately, on three distinct ideas for projects:

  • A structured way of creating stories that doesn’t rely on an act structure, by which I mean that the whole stories are based on the causality of tracking entities, entity statuses, cast members, facts, beliefs, secrets, locations, objects, visible affordances, events, intentions, plans, clocks, obligations, consequences, open threads, relationships, and emotions. As part of this project idea, I also wanted to structure worldbuilding and propagation of canon facts.
  • A platform to encode any card/board game relying on a game-agnostic engine, which would help prototype card/board games.
  • A maximally-emergent, causality-first simulation that would be able to produce the kind of adventures you get through Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Skyrim, etc., without relying on any scripting or game director.

The story-related projects, which ended up being two repositories in Node/Typescript, were the easiest, although they were complicated projects in their own right. But the other two projects deserve their own paragraphs.

That platform to encode any card/board game started as an extremely-ambitious notion: any user would be able to encode every aspect of any game in YAML files. YAML that basically works as programming is a terrible idea, which I realized deeper into the project. I started programming it in Node/Typescript, which was also a terrible idea: it’s far too slow of a combination when it involves AST parsing of the YAML; I had to spend lots of time bytecoding or Rust WASM-fying parts of the Typescript engine to get decent performance, which was never good enough for me, and a lot of possible wins were denied by marshalling issues. But by far, my biggest mistake was proving the project’s ability to accomodate multiple card/board games by implementing two games: Texas Hold ‘Em and Fire in the Lake COIN. Texas Hold ‘Em was mostly fine despite the YAML base: it took like three days.

Merely thinking of Fire in the Lake makes my skin crawl now. Fire in the Lake is an extraordinarily complex board game representing the Vietnam War. Not exactly a traditional wargame, although it’s hard to explain. The point is that back in 2020, before large language models, I attempted to program it in Rust to learn the language. Huge mistake. Having to abandon that project a third of the way in let a splinter stuck in me from which I never fully recovered. So months ago, I decided I would rely on large language models to take the splinter out and properly implement Fire in the Lake. Huge fucking mistake.

The Fire in the Lake map is extremely complex. The adjacencies between provinces and cities are confusing, which involves country borders as well, but much worse, it also features LoCs like roads and the Mekong river. Merely representing it visually without just pasting the map on screen was a fucking nightmare. As if the map graph wasn’t enough of a mess, what the factions can do is much worse: operations and optional special activities, each of which can be as complex as entire regular games. I’m talking sweeping, assaulting, subverting, governing, air striking. Then you have the event deck, which causes stuff to happen on the map and on the markers and tracks, which is easy enough to depict, but the game designers also went out of their way, for which I commend them except for the fact that I tried to program this cursed game, to make almost every card of the 130 its own little exception. Some cards offered grants for actions which may or may not be optional, some of which were taken by different factions other than the one currently playing. Again, makes my skin crawl. I had whole GitHub workflows dedicated to ensuring that the granting system didn’t shit itself.

After I managed to encode the entire game rules and content, which I did manage to do (a fleeting win), I got myself into the issue of encoding competent AI bots. I didn’t want to just copy the flowcharts, given that a computer would run the bots, so I had ChatGPT-Pro deep research what would make a competent human player for each of the factions. My intention was to encode that. I got really deep into AI architecture to figure out what kinds of bots would work well for my requirements, and I finally reached a point in which it seemed like I just had to push through, and keep iteratively improving the bot encoding, to finally get them running. But a few days ago, I found myself not even reading the tickets, not even checking out what was being committed. My subconscious had already understood that this project was a bust. It was crippled from the beginning, and I had done little else than push against entropy. I would never be happy enough with how Fire in the Lake would be shown on the web app, I would never feel comfortable enough with how it was implemented, and worse yet, the engine had taken in too much of Fire in the Lake’s specific shape that disentangling it to implement other games would make me have to fix Fire in the Lake at every step. So I gave up.

The third project was the maximally-emergent, causality-first simulation. From the beginning I had a very clear idea of what I wanted; basically by ideal game which nobody has built yet to my knowledge:

  • A simulation able to simulate dozens or hundreds (or thousands) of agents in an area the size of Skyrim, with settlements, roads, points of interest, etc.
  • The simulation should be maximally emergent and causality first. By which I mean that there would be no scripting and no game director. The simulation should be able to produce complex chains like this: a big monster gets displaced from a wilderness area due to the activity of some bandits -> the monster ends up hunting around some nearby road -> the monster attacks a caravan -> the caravan survivors reach a town and speak with the authorities about the attack -> the authorities decide to set up a bounty for the monster -> someone creates the bounty and posts it at some board -> some passing adventurers see the bounty and decide to take it -> they gear up and gather supplies for the hunt -> they travel to the area where the monster is supposed to be -> they track it to their den -> they find out some other adventurers casually killed the creature already. This all should happen due to causal chains, no scripting at all.
  • You as the player are indistinct to every other AI agent in the simulation. The simulation isn’t even aware that a human player exists. That means that the world continues regardless of what you do, but you can disrupt it.
  • Every agent, including the human player if any, acts on their beliefs, which may be truthful, stale, or based on straight lies. People gain beliefs by talking to each other, reading notices, observing the world. This allows chains like someone going home to take money, only to discover that the money is missing because someone has stolen it.
  • I should be able to chat through LLMs with any agent in the game, and the LLM would feed into the game which beliefs were actually shared or seeded, which would have gameplay effects.

That’s the main core. Such a simulation would allow any flavor and any kind of gameplay you could imagine. You would just have to build it incrementally. But I underestimated the complexity of such a project, which should be built upon an extremely-robust set of foundational documents of various categories. Mistakes I make during its implementation:

  • The foundational docs, while more comprehensive than those of any other repo, just weren’t comprehensive enough. They would have required several iterations of deep research with ChatGPT-Pro.
  • I approached it almost as a research project instead of something that would allow me to play it at every stage, even on the terminal.
  • I went breadth first: I wanted a significant set of gameplay mechanics in order to prove the emergent nature of the simulation, and found myself programming takeovers of institutions before I had properly proved that people could eat and shit regularly without dying.
  • By the time I figured out that even though I had banditry in, AI agents in simulations weren’t able to sustain their basic needs, the project was basically crippled; I just hadn’t accepted it yet. I should have built up step by step, being able to play it to the fullest along the way, and only add features that I missed while playing.
  • The AI architecture, while extremely competent in some regards, was crippled as well: I relied too much on GOAP because HTN felt like scripting at first. Then I realized that you could use HTN in a fully emergent way that respected the foundational principles, and relying on GOAP only for the leaf goals.

With this third project, I found myself also disheartened, and feeling that I was fixing mistakes in a crippled project, when likely I would need to build it from the ground up.

So, two days ago I decided to start from zero (a Re:Zero, you could say) both those complex projects: the card/board game one, and the emergent simulation one. It’s amazing how quickly projects progress once you’ve taken the lessons to heart and you’re on the right track. For the card/board game, I’m building it up following a ladder of game complexity. I already have Race to N, Tic-tac-toe, Connect Four, and Othello in. I’ve checked legality issues online, and found out that even if you don’t take money for it, publishing a page that simulates a game with an IP behind it is actually illegal (oops), so I couldn’t have uploaded the project with Fire in the Lake in regardless. While I intend to program in the kinds of games I’m most interested in playing (basically those on my gaming shelves), I won’t be able to upload them to the public repository.

Playing Othello and losing terribly

Regarding the simulation, that third project, it’s shaping up far better. I can play the current state of the simulation at any point through a terminal user interface, which at the moment is mostly rudimentary. The foundational documents are sets of dozens, and extremely comprehensive. I will no longer push for breadth, nor implement mechanics that I don’t miss through playing the simulation.

The important thing is that I’m feeling energized again to work on these projects. I woke up at six in the morning today eager to get back to it. And that’s the best state of being for a wrecked creature such as myself.

Life update (06/03/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

At the age of 41, I feel like I’ve reached psychological closure. All the echoes of a mystery regarding my psychological composition, the yet unintegrated parts of myself that had become scattered from a blast back at my childhood, have been traced back to the source. I can say that I understand my whole self now. The architecture of the wound. I even accept the many shadows that have always been there and that would make anyone in my life push me away if they got a proper glimpse. But that hasn’t brought me peace; for the most part, it has brought me closer than ever to accepting that I have no way forward.

I could find a job, in the general sense. Not a job that would fit me, maybe not a job I would tolerate. If I were extremely lucky, which I have never been, I could end up at a stable job that wouldn’t send me to the ER again due to stress. But so what? Why endure at all? I feel like I’ve said all I had to say. Anything else, like the stories I consume, the programming projects I build up, they feel like distractions against the baseline despair of knowing that there’s no future for me, and that the past I could have had never happened at all.

All my daydreams, even the erotic ones, depend on me being someone else. I look at the mirror and see a face and a body that I’ve never identified with. I hate being recorded or photographed; they’re vivid reminders that despite what goes on in my mind, I exist in this world as someone else.

If I had money to spare, the kind of money that would allow me to rent somewhere new for a few months and move on whenever it felt right, I suspect I would be fine. I could endure it. But I feel trapped, doomed to lose more and more money and find myself in my early-to-mid forties having to work at something that is just going to wreck me. Plenty of my recent daydreams have involved me moving to Navarra, or even to Asia, none of which will likely happen regardless of distance.

Not sure why I even wrote this. The mere notion of communicating anything to anyone, even to my own self as I reread these words, feels like a waste of time. It likely was.

Life update (04/16/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I’m at one of the lowest points of my life. Not as bad as during plenty of my twenties, in which I existed as a hikikomori of sorts and barely had twenty euros at a time in my bank account. But emotionally, I feel even more done now. Nearing forty-one, having tried to make it as a public servant during my thirties only to end up in the ER thrice with heart and brain issues due to stress I can’t handle. And in retrospect, as an autist with OCD, I should never have put myself in those situations. I guess I thought I could toughen my way through them, but my health told me in certain terms that it’s no way to live. And that it very well could kill me.

I’ve been unemployed for about seven months, and running out of unemployment benefits. I spend most of my time programming projects that I intend to use as references in future resumes whenever I try to get a job as a programmer. But I think that’s mostly a fantasy. In truth, I’m programming these projects because otherwise I’ll feel like I can’t do anything. And I don’t seriously believe that any company will hire an autistic, generally-mentally-ill forty-year-old programmer who has only worked professionally as a programmer for about nine months since my late twenties. I wouldn’t hire me. Of course, I don’t want to do any of it. I don’t even want to interact with human beings.

For these past weeks, or maybe more, I’ve barely looked forward to anything other than sleeping. I just want to be gone. To be forgotten by the world, to not have to face the utter ruin of society, the fact that I don’t want to be here but I can’t truly move anywhere else. I’ve had lots of nights in which I lie in bed and I give myself permission to die in my sleep. I’m not remotely afraid of dying, but I don’t want to deal with the pain. I’ve also fantasized about going somewhere with my guitar, playing for a while, then resting my guitar against the railing of one of the bridges nearby, overlooking the highway, and throwing myself headfirst. A quote from Nietzsche comes to mind: “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.” Some weeks I manage to get through my weightlifting sessions, but other days, like the recent ones, the depression is so physically bad that I can’t get through a single set. Not for psychological reasons: I simply lack the strength.

I haven’t felt like reading or even writing for a good while now. On a fundamental level, I feel done with all of it. You need to be able to sustain the faintest desire for connection with the world and human beings, even hypothetical ones, to engage in something as complex as coming up with a story and spending hours upon hours crafting your way through it. But I don’t want anything to do with human beings. I would be fully content if I could move somewhere that would allow me to never see people again. If as a child I could see myself sitting near paths and playing the guitar regularly like I do now, being heard and seen by dozens of people, I maybe would have considered myself confident, but it’s not the case at all: I simply do not care about others. I don’t expect anything from human beings other than the possibility of being attacked, which I’m wary of and guides my behavior when I’m outside. I’ve had people sitting nearby while I was playing, a few even addressing me afterwards, and I couldn’t wait to disengage.

I find ironic that young couples have gone out of their way to spend part of their date sitting on a bench near where I’m playing, apparently enjoying it, the girl’s head resting against the guy’s shoulder, while my last taste of an intimate relationship was nearly twenty years ago and it proved to me that I wasn’t made to share my intimacy with another human being. I resented the theft of my time, of my energies. The way she would push me to abandon my needs and my desires to fully support hers. Only for her to eventually cheat, leave for the other guy, and contact me occasionally to tell me how much better things were with the other guy and how he didn’t have my shortcomings; calls and messages that I responded to because I had been fully stripped by that point of what little self-esteem and self-respect I had left.

I do retain fantasies about what could have been. That possibly-autistic girl from middle school who pursued me for some reason, to whom I couldn’t respond in anything resembling a human level, and who wrote me these elaborate letters that I never read and that in my mid-twenties I ended up throwing away because I didn’t want to be reminded of the past. That seventeen-year-old basketball player, a reckless, dreamy, idealistic girl who also pursued me, with whom I lay under the stars in a nearby town, and with whom I made out during our only date. I liked her so much, more than anyone I’ve ever liked or ever will, that I ghosted her because I knew that when it inevitably ended, as all of my intimate relationships would, it would utterly devastate me. I felt to my bones that I wouldn’t have been able to recover. So I never spoke to her again. Due to my issues with face blindness, I don’t even know if I ever saw her again.

I went out of my way in my late thirties to enter the apartment building where she lived back then to see if what I remembered of her last name still appeared on the mailboxes, but it didn’t. I can’t even google her to see what happened to her, as the little I’m sure of her last name is that it started with an “M,” and I don’t know if that was the first or the second last name. What I regret of both isn’t that I failed to date them properly: it’s that I never got to know them as I should have. I sometimes fantasize about going back in time and simply talking to them, learning their likes, their hopes, their fears. I know that plenty of these regrets are pure nostalgia. In practice, I wouldn’t have been able to deal with them in person for more than three or so meetings before wishing that I hadn’t gotten involved. Regardless, that’s how I’ve ended up as a forty-year-old man: with only two human beings I would have genuinely wished to be attached to, both of them lost half a life ago, and the sole girl I did spend years with having ended up as a regret of the opposite kind: with me hoping I had never met her at all.

I’m writing this at four in the morning. Almost every night, I go to bed at nine or ten, only to wake up spontaneously at about two or half past two in the morning. I usually sit at the desk and work some more in my projects. Partly due to the depression, along with maybe the natural decay of my interest, I’m quickly losing steam. Recently I’ve been sinking in a depression that barely let me go outside for half an hour every few days. What always works for me, always putting me in a better mood, is playing the guitar. I don’t know why, it always manages to make me feel brighter by the end of it. The process of playing songs seems unaffected by the emotional disregulation and general despair that colors the rest of my existence. I should probably play much more, learn new songs, but the process of having to learn something new is also affected by depression, so I can’t bring myself to it.

I still rely on the old Alicia daydreams every single night. If I go outside, I tend to replay those scenarios as I stroll, partly because I need to move my legs but I don’t want to look around at the ruinous state of society. I don’t know why I depend on my daydreams with this fictional character so much, but I suspect it has to do because she reminds me of my subconscious self, which I’ve always felt to be markedly female, as I used to commune with her back when I was a child, before my neglectful parents exiled me from my bedroom to be placed as an unwanted guest in my older brother’s bedroom so they could free up my room for a third child. That mute second self that inhabits my brain, which is a very real phenomenon, felt so wildly unique, dreamy, colorful, and a myriad positive adjectives, that the trauma of having been ripped from her at seven years old is something I will never recover from. Even as I regained the ability, little by little, to listen to her again in my twenties, I had to face the fact that she had withered, grown scars, become bitter, and markedly insane. And these days she doesn’t even want to create anything new. She prefers to lose herself in daydreams, falling deeper inwards. I can’t blame her. I don’t want any more of this either.

During the worst moments of my recent suicidal ideation, I thought about what would be worth saving from the works that I’ve done. My site would eventually get removed as the payments failed to get through, so all of it would be gone. The sole thing I would consider a true tragedy if it were lost is my novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. A story that came out of nowhere and that I wrote as if possessed. One I don’t fully understand but that I assume has to do with my essential trauma, the fundamental separation I suffered regarding my other half. Either that or something that has seeped from a former life. Whenever I think about moments of that story, I feel the urge to tear up. When I visit the very real places mentioned in that story, for example the spot where the narrator and Izar used to meet in front of his apartment building, my chest gets tighter as if I was remembering my own past.

I guess that’s all for now. I’m not sure why I wrote all this. I thought of writing a blog post at different points of this last month, but I couldn’t manage to push past the “why bother” barrier. I don’t know why I managed to push past at nearly five in the morning tonight. I don’t think I have much agency left, if I ever had it. For years it has been obvious to me that by the time any drive reaches the thinking part of the brain, everything has been decided already, and you’re left believing you have any choice in the actions you’re taking. I don’t know if the decisions to come will improve my life to any degree or will contribute to ending it, and to a fundamental level, I don’t care. I’m overdue from that moment back in my very early twenties when I knew I had to jump but I pussied out of it. Once you’ve truly wanted out but you stick around for whatever reason, you remain forever a stranger to this place.