In the most recent entry of this “diary,” I wrote that my eldest cat had gone senile suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped. For three days she did little else than wander around in a daze, get stuck in corners as if she were a robot with broken programming, pee herself, and fall face-first from chair or sofa-tall surfaces. Although something has broken permanently in her brain, because she has forgotten some basics about life such as not peeing herself, and likely no longer recognizes me nor her daughter (which may have been a blessing in disguise), she will get to live for a while longer.
Today I returned from work to find that cat’s daughter, sole surviving child, dead. She had been wasting away for weeks if not more. The vet couldn’t find anything wrong with her other than being super old. It seems that her heart stopped beating while she was sleeping.
I wonder for how long I will remember how it felt to hold her dead weight, or how devoid of light her eyes were. Goodbye, my little one.
This morning I woke up spontaneously at three in the morning because my balls hurt. At this point I’m quite sure I’ve got an inguinal hernia, and trying last night to push the protruding fold of intestine back into my body wasn’t that good of an idea. I’m supposed to visit my general practitioner about this on the 13th. I was already awake, so instead of going back to bed, I sat at my desk and worked on my novel until six in the morning.
After a tiresome day at work, I returned home to find out that my elderly cat, about seventeen years old, had jumped out of the balcony. Although she’s on her last leg and at times I’ve feared that a simple scare would end her, she managed to survive wandering around the neighborhood for hours. One neighbor recognized the cat, so I have her back. However, since a couple of days ago, it’s like a switch has flipped in this cat’s brain, and suddenly all she does, apart from sleep, is either roam around the place as if she’s looking for someone, or stare slowly at her immediately surroundings as if in a daze. When you put her down on a surface, she lies there in the same position, as awkward or uncomfortable as it may be. She doesn’t purr anymore either; I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t recognize me. Maybe she had a stroke or something. Three weeks ago she went through her first scary illness, some sort of pneumonia. She wheezed constantly for about five days, but she had seemed to recover fully from it. Her current behavior came out of nowhere.
My other cat, the previous cat’s only surviving daughter, has looked even worse for weeks. She started peeing out of her box, in other rooms, for no apparent reason. She also meows at me as if to point out the fact that she peed somewhere else. She has gotten thinner and thinner, practically skeletal, and her meows have become weak mewling. The vet didn’t seem to find anything wrong with her other than being old. She’s on special food, but she isn’t improving.
Years ago, my first cat was killed by a pitbull. I suffered the first breakdown of my adult life, after a total mental breakdown at about 18 when I realized that life wasn’t going to get any better. After that cat died, I cried and cried for what seemed to be hours, and ever since, I only need to remember her in order to get teary-eyed again. I don’t even remember good moments that aren’t tainted by the fact that she died. Although these surviving cats won’t die the same way, I anticipate that my brain will store their memories in a similar fashion: the associated pain will get added to the mound accumulated in these last thirty-eight years of living, and to keep sane, I’ll have to forget them as best as I can.
I’m not coming up with any original idea when I say the following: I’d rather have a loved one die suddenly that waste away to the point that death would be a mercy. I haven’t experienced anything worse than creatures I loved becoming so sick or broken that I couldn’t do anything but put them down or wait for them to die. I have decided that I won’t get any new pets after these ones; I have a very limited capacity to tolerate daily anguish without losing it, and I have always been on a tightrope in that regard.
My brain is likely broken when it comes to memory-making: I barely remember any good moments, as if genuinely I hadn’t had more than I can count with one hand, while the bad memories are like a hill I’m regularly forced to clamber up, thanks to intrusive thoughts and insomnia. I’m not sure if a lifetime of chronic depression is responsible for that. In any case, you become a cautious human being: why would you risk meeting new people or having fancy experiences, when in the end you’d only add to the growing pile of misery?
I’ll never be a father, but there’s that cliché of fathers refusing firmly to get a cat or dog for the kids. Soon after the pets appear, though, that father becomes enamoured with them. Of course you are going to love them. And when they die, it’s going to break your fucking heart.
Although I sound like I’m despairing, I’m either not, or I’ve adopted over the years a sort of automatic stoicism because the alternative is losing your mind and jumping off a cliff. I expect everything to get progressively worse, and as if to prove me right, it more often than not does.
Regarding this whole thing, I think about the following Jason Lytle song somewhat often:
Anyway, tomorrow Saturday I’ll wake up at about six or seven in the morning to finish editing the next chapter of my ongoing novel. It’s going to be a juicy one. After two years of living vicariously through that tale, I have no clue how I’m going to find myself once I can’t look at the world through that framework anymore.
Yesterday I left work early so I could travel to the hospital at my hometown for a stress test, related to my heart issues. After I waited for an hour, I was ordered by a bickering couple of doctor and nurse to get naked from my waist up, attach some complicated shit to my chest, including a mesh that compressed my torso, and walk on an incline treadmill until my lungs couldn’t take it anymore. By the end I must have been a minute away from getting woozy. As an on-and-off weightlifter who also moves computers and computer-related devices around for work, I’m not a stranger to exercise, but I don’t do cardio. I hate it quite a bit, in fact.
Anyway, my heart didn’t explode. The doctor said that my case of (jab-induced) arrhythmia isn’t particularly bad, but if my episodes don’t pass spontaneously after an hour without medicating myself, and after four hours if I take flecainide, I should go to the ER. They will probably stop me from suffering an aneurysm or a stroke.
That’s one of my health issues more or less handled, apart from the fact that I’m taking beta blockers in perpetuity for now, although I’m experiencing plenty of the side effects of long-term use (disorientation, short-term memory loss, dizziness, depression, etc.). Out of nowhere, a few days ago I experienced a different, more awkward health issue that I’ll proceed to describe in detail.
One of our network cabinets at the hospital complex where I work has switches mounted so high that you need a ladder to manipulate them. Unfortunately, no ladder would fit in the narrow space between the front of the cabinet and the wall, so we steal a walking aid from one of the departments, and haphazardly perch ourselves on it. I did that for about ten minutes as I followed some connections. A short while after I got down from there, as I was heading back to the office, my right testicle hurt bad, as in “I can barely take full steps” bad. I attempted to stop in every bathroom along the way, but they were occupied, as it usually happens in a hospital with plenty of traffic. Once I got to the bathroom, I didn’t notice anything in particular: my balls weren’t swelling nor going purple, and I wasn’t vomiting from the pain, so I likely hadn’t contracted a case of testicular torsion. I tolerated the rest of that shift while trying to get up from my chair as little as possible.
The following day, my balls no longer hurt, but to my dismay, I detected a lump inside my scrotum, seemingly attached to the inner wall, located between my right testicle and whatever that zone that connects to the abdomen is called. The presence of that solid mass, about half of the size of one of my testicles, could be a coincidence; although I fondle my genitals often, I rarely go out of my way to squeeze the space between my right testicle and the rest of my body. In any case, either this is some cyst-like growth, an inguinal hernia, or testicular cancer. I hope it isn’t cancer, but the others will likely also involve a surgery of some kind. Inguinal hernias can be caused by lifting weights and pushing too hard while shitting, both things that I do regularly (I also have irritable bowel syndrome). One time I pushed so hard that I ended up with petechiae all around my eyes (google it).
A song I’ve been listening to a lot this week, as I’m playing it to get in the mood during the freewrites of my current chapter, has the following lyric line: “Don’t you realize our bodies could fall apart any second?” And that’s how I’ve felt about my body for most of my life: my brain causes me all sorts of problems (due to autism, various mental conditions, migraines), my bodily functions went haywire due to my pituitary tumor (thankfully now treated), I feel bloated constantly and I’m about to shit myself several times myself a day thanks to IBS, my heart fails, a random growth appears inside my scrotum, etc. I only wished for peace and to be left alone, but I’m not even left in peace by my own body.
Whatever. Are you having fun? I’ve been having quite a bit of fun preparing my latest chapter that I’ll have ready in a day or two. I can always look forward to that kind of joy, at least.
The next chapter of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked will take place in a real location that hasn’t been featured in the story yet. In such cases, if I can be arsed, I visit the place, get a feel of the area, take some photos, and write down in a notebook any impression that seems meaningful. I admit that sometimes, usually when I feel too burdened by my job, I have cheated by relying solely on Google Maps and whatever pictures I could find of the location. That always makes me feel guilty, though, because I miss the more meaningful impressions I would have gotten if I had dragged my lazy ass where my characters are supposed to be hanging out.
Leire and her deranged little family will take a leisure trip to the amusement park at Mount Igueldo, Donostia. I had already organized the notes, and I was supposed to start synthesizing them this morning, but I was fine with delaying them until Monday so I could visit the place. However, the weather forecasts for next week promise an unending deluge. I almost gave up on the trip. When this morning I spontaneously woke up at six, I made sure that it wasn’t going to rain, and left for Donostia.
La Concha Beach. An awkward name for Spanish speakers from Latin America.
That vaguely castle-like structure on top of a small mountain is my destination: the amusement park of Mount Igueldo.
That’s the famous isolated island that looks like a whale from certain angles. From the beach, it looks like a flattened tit.
I’m getting closer to my destination, in case you couldn’t tell by the sequence of images. That’s Ondarreta Beach; Leire and Jacqueline had a little moment there at the beginning of the sequence titled “Leire’s Got a Gun.”
At the beginning of the sequence titled “A Hail of Meteorites Upon Our Heads,” Jacqueline and Nairu waited for Leire at a bus stop located on the left of this picture.
Lots of tennis courts in this area. That ivory-colored structure on top of the mountain is the keep of the castle-like palace, or whatever it can be called. Those houses on the hill slope are only attainable for those who have “house-on-a-hill-slope” money.
Most of the sequence “Leire’s Got a Gun” takes place in this pub.
A five-euro breakfast. I should stop eating pastry, but I became hopelessly addicted to them during my research for the sequence “A Hail of Meteorites Upon Our Heads.”
That little pigeon took a couple of baths in the presumably cold water of that puddle. Afterwards, drenched and fluffy, it hung around begging for scraps. I didn’t understand its logic, but then again I’m not a pigeon.
If you were brave enough, I guess you could claw your way uphill to the amusement park, but Donostia provides its citizens with a cable car that brings you straight there, for a price.
After such sights, I must admit that although I love to bitch and complain, I’m lucky that I live close to such a gorgeous city.
The last time I visited this amusement park in spirit, I was a forty-year-old ghost named Irene who had possessed a man’s body.
I did want cotton candy, but I have to watch my weight.
Half a dozen of these guys were posted at corners, looking resigned to their fate.
I wished to steer one of those boats, but they were only selling tickets for couples.
This picture and the following capture the vistas from the top of the keep, likely the best views in the Basque Country. That’s the famous whale island, a proper shape given that ancient Basques were the most proficient slaughterers in the world of those noble beasts.
You can see Jacqueline’s home from here.
As I descended the stairs of the keep, I took photos of the heritage exhibit: artifacts and black-and-white pictures. Some of those photos made me teary-eyed, particularly the one of my hometown.
Afterwards I ambled through the local House of Horrors. It was deserted, and the attendant looked bored out of his mind. I had a great time standing in the dark and studying the carefully arranged exhibits, second-rate as they were.
This is just taxidermy, but I guess the ibex itself would have been horrified had it known.
A wall-wide mirror faced a bloody hotel door numbered 666.
The last attraction was a boat ride.
Today was a meaningful day. I should do this kind of shit more often: visit for leisure the kinds of places whose existence people usually forget unless they consider bringing their children there. I also wish I could play Planet Coaster in VR.
Anyway, I can finally start writing the next scene of my story without feeling like a fraud.
As of the eighth of this month, I’ve been writing my novel We’re Fucked for two years. Two goddamn years of near-daily, painstaking work that has filled plenty of my spare time, as well as whatever time I could steal from work. The novel is already 3.12 times longer than the average. A few humans out there in this wide world have followed Leire’s descent into interdimensional derangement from the beginning, and if you’re one of those people, I must question your motivation, your sanity, and maybe even your level of mental retardation; I can’t imagine anyone other than myself genuinely enjoying this story, that delves deep into my psychological issues. In any case, thank you for the blips of dopamine that I receive whenever someone presses like on my stuff, and I hope you’re getting something out of the narrative other than nightmares.
I’m a couple of days away from finishing the current chapter, which is the climax of its sequence, as well as the longest chapter in it. My current contract at work is supposed to end this Friday. If I’m lucky and they don’t extend it under some pretense, next week, happily unemployed, I’ll take a documenting trip to a certain beautiful spot in Donostia, Jacqueline’s city, because the following scene is supposed to take place there. The protagonists of my previous novel also visited the place, but I faked the whole thing up; I hadn’t been there since I was a kid. I’m a grown-up writer now, or at least a literal grown-up even if it happened against my will, so I figured that I could make the effort of traveling there like I’ve done for some other real-life spots. I suppose that I’ll upload some pictures taken with the shitty camera of my tablet.
I spend the rest of my spare time, when I’m not reading, taking a walk, or despairing for the future of Europe, playing video games. This week I’ve gotten into Crusader Kings 3 once again, using the Community Mods for Historicity compilation. Given that I don’t plan on burdening any innocent child with my genes, it always felt weird to play a game focused on creating an enduring dinasty, but then again in real life it’s rare to kill your neighbor, gift their land to your child, and get rewarded for it (unless you’re from the Middle East?).
Anyway, behold the king of the Kingdom of Navarre, my alter ego, forty-five years of age at that point:
Quite dapper, if I say so myself. I always pick the Kingdom of Navarre because some of my ancestors were from there. Although I wanted to play a Hellenist, I would have gotten dog-piled on by my Catholic and Muslim neighbors, so I picked some obscure Christian faith that inexplicably was focused on carnal desires and didn’t have a head of faith. As for my achievements so far, I stole Brittany from the Bretons (although I’m currently working towards hybridizing my culture with theirs), part of the duchy of Gascogne from the French (because a couple of counties were Basque; the French had split some years ago, which made it easier), a vertical strip of the east of Iberia, as well as part of Algeria (because some guy there asked me to oust his brother). Navarre has ended up as an unsightly vertical country that spans from Upper Brittany to slightly south of Tlemcen in North Africa. I try to avoid thinking about the shape of my domain. In general, most afternoons after work I look forward to spreading my medieval reign of depravity throughout southern Europe. My alter ego is already fifty years old, and my daughter slash heir is trying to murder me, so I’ll likely continue playing as that wretched mother of five soon. You must steal so much land from your neighbors so that four non-heirs don’t take most of your heir’s titles when you die.
That’s as much as I care to share about my life right now. Ta-ta, as one sexy demon says.
In the previous update about my stupid life, I shared that I had contacted the local union at the hospital where I work because I had been screwed out of a potentially years-long contract. I was informed definitively that due to the day the contract was registered (the 14th of August), I had no chance to contest the contract. You see, I officially worked until the 14th (included), but, because the motherfucker whose medical leave I was covering didn’t call in advance to inform that he would return to work, something that every other worker does as a basic human courtesy, I ended up showing up at work on the 16th (the 15th was a holiday) only to find out that I was out of a job. In such circumstances, nobody can give you a straight answer about whether or not you will get paid if you stick around for the day, so some just leave. I left in most previous occasions, but this time I stayed to finish some tasks that had kept me busy for the entire week, and because I get along with my boss. In the end I didn’t get paid, although I have contacted a couple of departments in an attempt to correct that issue.
Anyway, because our secretary wasn’t aware that the person whose leave I was covering would return, she arranged that potentially years-long contract on the 14th. She told me that if she had known that the guy would return, she would have waited a couple of days to formalize the contract (that started on the 18th), meaning that it would have gone to me. So the medical-leave guy has screwed me out of a better job in a different department. To say that I’m very angry at him is an euphemism. Some day I’ll end up paired with him to work the afternoon shift, and I’ll have to get it changed to mornings. This time he screwed me over was just the last one; I have covered his leaves about six times, and all of them ended with me entering the office to find the fucker nonchalantly sitting at his desk. It’s no use talking to him; he’s clearly screwed in the head.
I have spent this night entangled in an hours-long nightmare, and then I woke up with a headache. Shortly after my shift started at eight in the morning, the usual middle-aged coworkers who interact with each other as if they’re in a school playground forced me to shove earplugs in. Minutes later, as I was trying to focus on my tasks, the secretary approached the female technician who sits opposite me, and I started getting the feeling that they were talking about me. I usually ignore these kinds of paranoid thoughts; as a solitary autistic guy who was persecuted by nasty people in middle school and high school, and who can’t determine people’s intentions to begin with, I’m always on the defensive, never knowing from where the next attack is going to come. However, I’m also aware that such defensive mechanisms tend to create lots of false positives. But in this case, these two women started gesturing clearly toward me. Very annoyed, I pulled my earplugs off and asked them what was it that they wanted. The secretary asked me if I was alright. I considered explaining myself: I have a headache on top of a sensory processing disorder, and the fact that I’m wearing earplugs should have told them that they shouldn’t bother me unless necessary. I said, against my will, “I was just trying to…”, and my voice trailed off. However, they weren’t even listening; they were already chit-chatting with each other about the fact that they couldn’t wear earplugs themselves because shoving things into their holes is icky. Once again I was forced to face the fact that I deal five days a week with the kinds of human beings that would wake you up just to ask if you were sleeping. Also, fuck open-plan offices.
This afternoon I’ll put together the audiochapter for the 114th part of my deranged, depraved novel, and during the rest of this morning I’ll arrange my 2200 words of notes for the following chapter into chronological chunks that will allow me to synthetize them through the usual sessions of freewriting (usually performed at five in the morning). Losing myself in writing is my most reliable way to remain sane; the older I get, the more unbearable I find human beings. Even dealing with them online has gotten annoying. Oh, and recently I’ve been playing Cyberpunk 2077. The 2.0 update finally made it good, so check it out if you’re into that kind of stuff. Bye bye.
Having to work is annoying enough, but in addition, it’s come to my attention that someone in my office has stolen a juicier contract from me even though I was ahead in the rankings. These last couple of months have gone as follows:
On the 16th of last month I came to the office only to realize that the bastard whose medical leave I was covering returned to work without calling in advance. Fifth time or so he has done this to me. Nobody is ever sure if the worker who was covering the leave will get paid if he or she stays for the day, so I usually just left, but I get along with my boss enough that I chose to stick around and finish the few tasks I had been dealing with all week, under the assurance that he would talk with the department of personnel so they’d end up paying me for those last couple of days (a holiday and the day when my coworker returned from his leave).
Days later, unemployed, I called to resume my unemployment benefits. They told me they couldn’t, because I still appear in their databases as employed. Excuse me? I don’t remember how (maybe I called the hospital where I work), that issue got solved, but when I checked until what day I had worked according to the internal system, it said that my last day was the 14th, meaning that they wouldn’t pay the two days they owed me (one a holiday, the other when the shithead on medical leave returned).
That month I got paid as if I had worked for its entirety, even though I became unemployed midway through. Second time that had happened to me. I knew that they would deduct the corresponding sum from the following contract, meaning that soon enough I would waste two more weeks of my life working for money that I already have.
One of my coworkers injured his back. A new medical leave. The current contract started on the 6th of this month. Three days later I got covid and spent a whole week at home. Yesterday, on the 25th, my current coworker on the afternoon shift initiated a conversation that sounded something like this:
“Are you aware that they have screwed you over?” “Don’t know what you’re talking about, bro.” “On the 18th of last month you weren’t working, and you’re the first in the ranking, but for a new contract they ended up hiring someone who’s way down on the list. Another one of our coworkers, higher than that guy, complained to the union and got rewarded with a three-months long contract that should have gone to you, because you’re higher than both on the ranking.” “You serious, mon?” “And she (the coworker who complained to the union and got a contract that didn’t correspond to her) ended up calling the union because I had to bump her off another contract that went to her, even though I was ahead of her in the rankings.” “Aw shit, son.” “They’re always plotting, this gal and our secretary. They keep saying that they want more girls to work here.” “That’s heavy, dude.” “Tomorrow morning, call the union and explain the situation. That original contract from the 18th has already been corrected. They only awarded it to that coworker because she was the one who complained. When they look you up in the ranking, they’ll realize you were ahead and they’ll have to either give you her contract or pay you for those three months of work that you will have missed out on.” “Dang, cuz.” “The secretary and this coworker know that they have screwed you over. They’ll do it again. You either correct this or the rankings won’t mean shit here. People like this will steal contracts if they can get away with it.”
So tomorrow morning I’ll have to call the union and explain the situation. When I get to work in the afternoon, I expect the secretary and this female coworker to glare at me as if they hadn’t been the ones who screwed me over in the first place. I’m the non-confrontational type, and due to my self-destructive urges I’d rather be unemployed, but my aggressive coworker is right: if you allow yourself to get stepped on, you will keep getting stepped on again and again. If I refuse to correct this situation, it will also set a precedent for the entire office. So after I involve the union, two of my coworkers will get permanently mad at me even though it’s their fault, and in exchange I’ll either have to work for a couple of months longer, or, in case they can’t legally transfer her contract to me, receive three months of wages for diddling my thumbs.
What a convoluted, boring mess that I wish didn’t involve me.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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