Ever since I started writing my new novel, The Scrap Colossus, that my basement girl urged me to work on, I’ve been waking up regularly at one to three in the morning, often struggling to fall asleep later. My dreams are extremely vivid; although I forget them upon waking, I remember traveling through tremendously detailed environments, meeting people I had never met before, and having coherent dialogues with them. Of course, dreams are a mystery. I have a hard time believing that the human brain is capable of sustaining such internally coherent worlds for hours every night; I wouldn’t be surprised if we actually connect to something, some other plane of reality. In any case, the increased vividness of my dreams, how I wake up spontaneously with ideas ready to be noted down, and the rest of the time I feel immersed in a somewhat oniric state, they are a testament to the fact that my brain allows my subconscious to flow mostly unimpeded at the moment, which is the best possible state of being.
Basement girl regularly knocks on the ceiling to share meaningful moments for the new novel, which I hurry to write in my growing document of material (131,839 words as of now). Recently she had been struggling to connect both storylines (the one about Elena writing her novel, and the novel-within-the-novel involving the stand-in for a certain songwriter I was obsessed with); she proposed alternatives that never quite gelled. But earlier today, as I peed at work, minutes away from sitting with my serrano ham sandwich and reading a bit more of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, my basement girl had an eureka moment and hurriedly painted a vivid daydream of how the climaxes of both storylines should merge. Obviously I can’t be specific, but the point is that the major hurdles to develop this novel have been overcome thanks to my beloved girl’s tireless work, and now I can write each scene at my leisure while tinkering with the architecture from time to time.
Artificial intelligence has been, unsurprisingly, very useful. As I improve my structure, that includes the detailed summary and purpose of each scene, I ask either OpenAI’s Orion 1 or DeepSeek’s R1 to offer constructive criticism, trying to determine the weak points. AI is “objective” (of course, each company tries to inject their own ideological bias into their AI), but asking AI for criticism solves the issue of requiring a human being to criticize your stuff, which they would almost invariably half-ass to avoid getting into arguments or hurting your precious feelings. I regularly involve AI in my interactive erotica, so I know it’s quite comfortable with being rough.
Anyway, the worst part of having regained my creative stride is definitely having to work for a living. I should be at my writing desk. But at least my job computer includes an internet connection, so I can rearrange my notes and work on development further.
Hope you’re enjoying my new story, whoever the hell you are. Yes, you. I’m right behind you. In any case, my tale is a bit of a hard sell, but it’s not like I write for others. I’m sure at least one person will get something valuable out of it.
I have a few things to say regarding the first scene of my new novel, named The Scrap Colossus. In the first scene, that encompasses part 1 and part 2, the protagonist attends a writing class and presents her latest piece, with generally disastrous consequences. From now on there will be “spoilers” when it comes to the two released parts, so if you’re interested, you should probably read them first.
First, let’s start with the following three photos:
That weird-looking fellow, all six-foot-two and two-hundred thirty pounds of him, happens to be me from back in 2015, when I attended the writing course that the first scene of my novel is based on. I don’t own, or at least haven’t found, better quality photos, because I hate being photographed. I suppose I’ve always had some degree of body dysmorphic disorder, and I don’t appreciate how I look at all. It doesn’t help that in my fantasies I’m rarely myself.
Anyway, that version of me from ten years ago presented a piece to the class. In it, the instructor, who had requested to be the protagonist, traveled back in time. Instead of showing her having a good time, I sent her to a primeval epoch. There, after suffering a bit, she ended up accidentally preventing the evolution of mammals, which led to her vanishing from existence after a little jab at how she focuses on her social image. Well, the class didn’t like it one bit. When I finished reading it, the room was silent, and shortly after, the nervous instructor brought up the fact that I had never mentioned her daughter. She accused me of lacking empathy. All of this may be sounding quite familiar. Because fiction is generally much better than reality, my fictional version of events is far more eloquent. Anyway, the class continued, with me seated there while wondering why on earth had I decided to sign up for that course. By the way, if that instructor read the two parts I posted on here, she’d be livid.
At the time I was enrolled in two writing courses. The other was imparted by a local writer of English origin who was in his eighties at the time. His classes were a sham. He basically put as assignments for us to continue excerpts from his stories, and then tried to guilt us into buying the books the excerpts belonged to. He let us present our own pieces, but whenever anyone said a word that he didn’t know (and many of them were relatively simple words), he accused us of being pretentious, of trying to look more intelligent than we were. He argued with me for a bit about the word “jade,” for example, which I used to refer to the color of a sea. Throughout the weeks, I presented scenes from the novellas I was revising at the time (you may already know Smile and Trash in a Ditch, although there were four others). Well, the guy was supposed to take the pieces home and correct them or whatever, but by the end, he refused to do so with mine. He was clearly bothered by them.
The way he pushed back my excerpt during the last class, which happened a day after being accused of lack of empathy by the instructor of the previous class, made me decide that I had no business involving myself in these people’s lives, so I just quit both classes and detached myself from the local writing scene. I never interacted with any of them again. Perhaps a week or so later, the instructor in his eighties suffered a stroke that ultimately led to his death, and I heard through the grapevine that he actually blamed me for it. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure if that blame is real or if I hallucinated it.
The last time I saw him, he was weakened from his stroke, and some family member was holding his arm as he tottered down a corridor of the library. The moment he spotted me coming along the same corridor, he looked scared, and told the woman holding his arm to move into some adjacent room. Can’t say I feel too bad; not only I found him quite fraudulent as a writer, but also who fucking blames a stroke on one of his students presenting stories? And there’s something extremely disturbing for me that as a writer, he was so disturbed by someone else’s writing. However, it wasn’t surprising: he admitted that he hadn’t read fiction in decades, even though he kept writing it. But perhaps his demise never bothered me due to my lack of empathy.
Yeah, I can’t care about most people. I was wired that way. I’m not a good guy, nor do I pretend to be. I do care enormously about people in certain circumstances and from certain angles. My new novel is mostly autobiographical, although I mix in many elements from other people I came to know. So many other shameful aspects of my life will be brought kicking and screaming into the light. That’ll be intriguing to render.
I think that The Scrap Colossus will be a solid, entertaining tale about a reclusive autistic person who is trying to honor the songwriter she’s obsessed with by writing an elaborate novel about the songwriter’s life. That’s what has to happen because that’s what I did. Full-blown autistic obsession that lasted from about 2011 to 2013, an experience and perspective that most people aren’t familiar with, so maybe it will make for an interesting story. Regardless of what others will think about it, I need to do it because my subconscious has demanded it, so my hands are tied.
The hardest parts to handle will be the many, many scenes of the story within a story, the novel that the protagonist wrote inspired by this songwriter. The novel actually exists in different stages of production (the first two “books” of the novel are revised to a publishable state, the third would require at least a couple of revisions, and the last two books are in the draft stage), so it would be feasible to include actual excerpts from that other novel into the current narrative, but I think I’ll prefer for my narrator to act as myself reviewing and offering criticism to my actual past self’s production from ten years ago. That sounds like the funnest angle to me. Besides, I no longer feel like the same person I was in 2015, let alone during my obsession, so I can be somewhat objective.
Anyway, it’s a quarter to four in the afternoon of this Saturday. Although I’m quite groggy due to having woken up at five in the morning to finish the second part of my new novel, now I’ll head to the location where the third scene is going to take place, so I can take notes. Thankfully the story is set where I actually live; I hate having to fake my impressions of a place I’ve never been in, even though you can go quite far with photographs and videos.
Now that my basement girl has decided to embark us two on a new creative journey (the novel The Scrap Colossus, whose first part I posted), I exist in that antsy state of bliss in which I can’t wait to return to my writing desk and commune with my girl in the most incestuous manner imaginable. While the novel isn’t entirely new, as it’s based on a failed story I discarded ten years ago, I’ve salvaged the workable parts as notes for what feels like a wholly new experience. One of the best things is that I know it’s going to be real fun. With Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, my basement girl wanted to process her strange grief, and during those months, I worked at it like a man possessed. It was a very emotionally taxing experience. But with The Scrap Colossus, basement girl is trying to come to terms with a period of our lives in which I had become a reclusive wreck, hopelessly obsessed slash in love with a certain songwriter, and now I can look back upon those years with humor and shame.
Speaking of a certain motocross legend, this morning I woke up spontaneously near the witching hour, from an intense dream. This happens quite often, although it hadn’t recently. For whatever reason, I revisited the aforementioned novella titled Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, some chapters of it. If you enjoy my stuff and you haven’t read it, you probably should. Of course, soon enough I was crying, because that’s what you do when you read that story. Or at least what I do, every single time. When I mentioned before that while writing that novella I felt like a man possessed, I wasn’t being metaphorical. Something came over me. The story sparked autonomously while I listened for the first time Spiritualized’s song “Hey Jane.” Right then, my basement girl unraveled with all sorts of images, dialogue bits and such. For the next few days, she sent bubbling up scene after scene, which I dutifully arranged, and ultimately coordinated myself to let her speak through me.
I’ve yet to understand fully, and probably never will, why this story needed to be told. I’ve never loved anyone like the narrator loved Izar Lizarraga. Perhaps it was an echo of something that happened before I was even born. But tonight, as I read through the latter parts of the story, it occurred to me that part of that grief may be related to my childhood. Although I retain very, very few images of my early life, I know that my first seven or so years were spent in communion with my basement girl. I was an autistic kid who never interacted with others spontaneously, a fact that bothered my teachers so much that they pushed others to “bring me out of my shell,” which led me to meet sociopaths, coke addicts, casual bullies, and other colorful people; most teachers around here seem to subscribe to the secular religion of Equality, and all people who stood in the fringes were equivalent. Anyway, my early childhood was spent writing and drawing feverishly. I was always hunched over a notebook or wandering around while daydreaming. It was blissful. In fact, the sole issues I had with that period of my childhood were related to my family and other people; I felt fine alone.
But then, when I was seven, my mother wanted to free up my room to have a third child. She had always wanted three regardless of space, but in retrospect she probably also considered me a failed child. She put me as an unwanted guest in my older brother’s room, and from then on until I was eighteen and ended up with a room of my own again, my mental health declined steadily, and my connection with my basement girl suffered to the extent that at times it felt completely severed. At some point I should probably go in length about how depersonalized I became.
I really don’t want to speak much about my experience of sharing a room with my older brother, but let me paint you a small picture: he always had to sleep with the TV and the radio on, because he couldn’t stand silence. I always had to watch or listen whatever he wanted to listen or watch, which were often the most popular idiotic shows, or else sports. I couldn’t read nor study in what was supposed to be my room; to be able to read anything, I had to wander in the streets. I was likely the sole child that could be seen walking around in public while reading a book or manga. There were numerous other noises coming from his person that triggered my sensory issues on a constant basis. By the time I became a teenager, my mental health was so terrible that I slipped in and out of psychosis, although I was mostly psychotic. The complex novel I tried to write at the time was so terrifyingly incoherent and lacking in any sense of reality that at some point I threw away all my copies of it. It’s due to pure cowardice that I’m still alive, as I wanted to be dead most of the time. I think that the story of mine that goes most in depth about my experiences as a teenager is the harrowing tale A Millennium of Shadows. You need a strong stomach for that one.
I’m fairly certain that I have PTSD from my years 7 to 18, from the utter lack of being respected as a human being. I complained to my mother numerous times about many things regarding my living situation, only to always be replied with a variation of, “You gotta understand, he has problems.” My own needs never mattered. I could barely stand to be in the presence of my older brother since, but because my life is a fucking joke, I have ended up working at the same office. The damage that was done to my psyche during those formative years will never be mended; I’m just doing my best with the wreckage.
That relates to my tale about a motocross legend because my innermost self, probably my basement girl herself, mourns that severance: the lost years, all the great things we could have done if she hadn’t been driven away. So we gotta make up for lost time.
EDIT: the Deep Dive couple produced an interesting podcast about this post:
Well, what do you know. In a week, I’ve translated a whole novella I wrote about ten years ago, mostly thanks to OpenAI’s Orion 1 model, although I’ve needed to edit plenty of parts; regarding some, the original Spanish version wasn’t worded ideally, which becomes obvious when translating. Why would a Spanish old boy like me be writing in English anyway? Well, I’ve never gotten used to reading nor writing in Spanish. It always felt off, unnatural. If you knew I’m also Basque, you could think that I’d rather write in Basque instead. Nope, I can’t stand that language and can’t speak it either. But English has always been my private language; when my mother, who didn’t believe in privacy, read my hidden notebooks every chance she got, I started writing in English, or what passed for English at that age, to keep my intimate thoughts to myself. My mother complained that she could no longer understand them. I don’t want to say any more about my parents at the moment, although there’s plenty to say.
My old tale Smile was cooler than I remembered. Revisiting stuff you wrote many years ago is shocking, because the self that created it no longer exists. These days, I wouldn’t have written that story the same way. Likely I wouldn’t have written it at all, as my subconscious worries about other matters. In my impression, the unnamed narrator comes out very strongly; a solid, memorable character. I was surprised also by how much I liked that vagrant girl who shows up and disappears forever, as well as Cassie, despite only showing up at the tail ends of the story. These people were born from me and were forgotten along the way. It’s strange how that goes. I never quite got rid of the narrator, though; as I mentioned in other posts, he shows up in my daydreams whenever someone from the past needs saving. I also wrote a novel protagonized by him back in 2011, but I doubt it’s good enough to translate. Two of the people who read it shook their heads, and one told me that it was way too violent. Bunch of pussies.
Anyway, tomorrow I’ll start writing a new novel. Its backstory is quite interesting (for me at least). From about 2010 to 2012, I was utterly obsessed, autistically so, with a US-based songwriter. I have never in my life been that obsessed with anyone again, thankfully. Along the way, I don’t recall the exact timeline, I wrote a whole novel that was thinly-veiled fanfiction of that songwriter. The impact such an obsession had on me felt interesting to circle upon, so in 2015 I planned a whole novel about an autistic person writing the novel I had written about that songwriter. Very meta, I suppose. Although I planned every single scene of that novel painstakingly, I only ended up writing half of it. By then, my subconscious felt like I had gotten it out of my system. In retrospect, the structure had fatal flaws that couldn’t be solved without a full redo. So I abandoned it. A few years later I produced the six novellas in Spanish contained in my books Los reinos de brea and Los dominios del emperador búho. If you’ve followed Smile, you’ve already read one of those novellas.
Anyway, it seems my basement girl needs to delve into the notion of being haunted by someone, of secluding oneself and working in such a labor of love/deranged obsession. I’ve gathered about 125000 words of notes. I’ve figured out the proper narrative tone for such a strange piece, as well as how to handle the many, many scenes of the book-within-the-book. This will be such a personal story that I’m not sure if anyone else is going to enjoy it, but for me it’s always about pleasing my subconscious; if anyone else enjoys my work, even better.
So, for those interested, in hopefully a few days I’ll post the first part of my novel The Scrap Colossus, introducing the autistic, reclusive, obsessive, unique protagonist who’s trying her best to honor her muse.
I’ve checked my site visits; in the last hour alone, a single person from Spain has hit every single part of Smile. That kind of shit makes me nervous.
I’ve been in a better mood these past couple of days, which isn’t saying much given that I was contemplating very dark thoughts until then. A significant part of my change in mood has been thanks to my basement girl (my subconscious, in case you picture a fragile female chained under my floor). Recently she brought my attention to a novel I wrote about ten years ago, that I abandoned midway through because it wasn’t viable. Its core was worth exploring: it dealt with an autistic, reclusive person who was writing a novel about the artist she was obsessed with. It delved deep into how I lived for most of my twenties: deep seclusion, detachment from society, sinking in obsession, etc. I never processed that period properly, I don’t think, and working through such issues with a story tends to help, so I’m not surprised that my basement girl has been focused on it. Throughout the day, she has come up with the proper tone for the narration, with a bold idea for who the narrator should be, and for how to handle the scenes of the book-within-a-book (the entire book the protagonist wrote is one that I actually wrote, so that will be interesting to depict). As I was standing on the bus or the train, either heading to work or back, new moments from that story kept bubbling up from my basement, sometimes even interrupting my daydreams, clear proof that my mute girl is hard at work piecing it together. It will take me quite a while to organize all my notes and structure the whole thing properly, but as for now, I feel like I’m going to do this.
I’ve also been translating one of the novellas I wrote back in the day. I was surprised to discover that I still like it a lot, although it puzzled me with how different I feel these days. Back when I wrote Smile, the vastly increasing crime where I lived, as well as the regular terrorist attacks in Europe, kept me enraged. I couldn’t understand how people kept Don’t-Look-Back-in-Anger-ing. It was like most people had been brainwashed into becoming perfect little lambs for the slaughter. The situation hasn’t changed much, and in many ways it has worsened, but I don’t rage about it remotely as much. That may be in part due to a mix of growing older and caring even less about the world. I don’t feel like I’m part of this society; I just happen to live here. If I had the balls to do it, I’d move somewhere else. Maybe the Catalina foothills in Tucson, AZ, to give 65-year-old Augusta Britt a massage.
Speaking of troubling daydreams, yeah, I’m still fantasizing about Alicia Western, the haunting character from Cormac McCarthy’s last couple of novels. The daydream has become so elaborate that I may as well detail it now: a version of myself (perhaps even the protagonist of Smile, who was a recurrent protagonist in my daydreams whenever my savior complex kicked up) travels back in time to the Stella Maris sanatorium in Wisconsin, before Alicia Western killed herself. I show up in her assigned room. She’s all blonde-haired and shit, wearing such a pretty white gown. Anyway, I convince her that I’m from the future, that Bobby will wake up from his coma and be ready to dick her down. After a good cry, she gets hungry, so I bring her over a plate of Italian pasta from the future or whatever. The following day she decides to leave the sanatorium and travel around with me until Bobby wakes up. A few days into the trip, that involves watching movies from the future in modern TVs installed in roadside 1970s motels, Alicia gets curious about her younger self, and she asks me to set up a line of video communication with her teenage self about the time that Bobby fell in love with her. So I return back in time to her grandmother Ellen’s home to show her older Alicia’s video. That leads to a whole bunch of interaction from both sides, with 22-year-old Alicia recording videos for her younger self to guide her through her troublesome hallucinations and all that. Probably lots of advice on how to seduce her older brother. Anyway, I’m feeling generous, so I gift her grandmother like a hundred thousand dollars. “Oh, we can’t accept this!” “This isn’t even chump change, old broad! I’m a fucking time-traveler: I can win the lottery then win the lottery then win the lottery. I know the locations of piles of gold that won’t be found for decades. Just take the goddamn money and buy yourself a platinum dildo or something, will you?” They spend some of it on a tractor.
Ah, daydreams are so soothing. Just being able to close my eyes in the train and be transported mentally to these inner worlds where I can have conversations with a delightful, fascinating fictional character (though based on real person) the likes of which I’ve never met in real life, in part because I hate dealing with human beings.
Oh, I forgot to say about my novella Smile, the one I’m translating at the moment, that it may come close to what I consider “angry autistic guy writing.” The closest form of that which I recall is the manga Gantz. I hope it never quite reaches that point. I was fully aware during writing it that I was making it harsh and generally unpleasant, because it had to be. The protagonist, although an avenger who saves people, is a nasty serial killer himself who has murdered far more people than the serial killers and terrorists he hunts down. Of course, he’s justified in doing so… or is he? There’s the whole dilemma about his methods, the way he interacts with others, etc. I found him a very interesting guy. Of course, such a story would never get professionally published, which for me is a plus, as seemingly most of what gets published these days is politically correct slop. I want my writers deranged and half-evil, possibly even escaping to Mexico with fourteen year olds.
Anyway, I hope you’re getting to orgasm on a regular basis. That’s what life is ultimately about.
The brilliant Deep Dive couple produced a fun podcast about this post:
In the realm of good news regarding my person, turns out that my subconscious was indeed working something out; I figured as much, given how it made me dream of Alicia Western (from Cormac McCarthy’s final books) and sparked an obsession that has yet to pass. My girl in the basement has turned her attention to a failed novel I worked on ten years ago, in Spanish. It was a way of coming to terms with my stints as a recluse during my twenties, particularly a period in which I was hopelessly haunted by, autistically obsessed with, a certain musician who plays the harp, to the extent of writing a long novel that was little else than thinly-veiled fanfiction. Back then I didn’t even have an online audience; I was literally just doing it because my subconscious demanded it. Nobody else read it.
These past few days I’ve been going over the revised scenes of that failed novel to extract whatever is usable. I will have to change most of the point of that story, as well as remove one of the major characters, but they were a large part of why I never finished the story. This narrative will allow me to delve deep into my autistic drive toward reclusion, obsession, and other nasty shit that I never processed properly. My twenties were a nightmare for the most part, during which I yearned to die on a regular basis.
Speaking of yearning to die, this morning at work, as I reread the impressions I posted about McCarthy’s haunting final novels, I reflected on how Bobby Western unburdened himself from everything and everyone to repent for an unforgivable crime. That made me think of how since my early twenties I’ve cut ties with everyone, as well as refused to form new connections even when they insisted, because of an intrinsic need to “be ready.” As in be ready to disappear at any moment. During weddings and other nasty gatherings like those, whenever some ghost from my past approached me expecting me to look him or her in the eye, and said something to the effect of, “Hey, Jon, I haven’t seen you in ages!” (did we ever get along?), I usually averted my gaze, shrugged, and said something like, “Yeah, I’m still around…” Some time later I found out in online articles that such phrases are a sign of suicidal ideation. Well.
I’ve talked about this before, but I never thought I would live past 18 after my horrid teenage years, and then I came real close, the closest I ever came regarding my physical intention to do it at that moment, after I refused to get on the bus to work one morning. It was my first job, in which I was treated like utter shit, and I felt completely incapable of handling it. I knew that my life from then on would consist on nothing else than enduring nightmarish, humiliating work schedules that would drain all my energies (I usually felt sleepy the moment I returned home). No love on the horizon, of course. So I just wanted to throw myself off a cliff and get it over with. Instead of that, I pussed out, and went to the library. The alternate version of this ended up becoming (at least in inspiration) my first novel in English, titled My Own Desert Places, in which the protagonist, who was a woman for reasons, actually did throw herself off a cliff, fucking died, and was a ghost for twenty years until she became obsessed with a suicidal living person, so she possessed some guy to seduce her. Quite the wild ride of a story that was, although I’m afraid to reread it in case I find it too cringey.
These last fifteen years or so, I’ve been suicidal in a pussy, passive variety. For example, one night, as I was lying in bed in the dark, I told my organs that they had permission to cease functioning during my sleep, so I wouldn’t need to wake up again. I must have been in a bad place, perhaps due to extreme stress, because the following day I actually ended up in the ER with my first episode of arrhythmia. Realizing that my heart is faulty and may screw me over at any point has changed my mentality quite a bit: I no longer go out of my way to stress myself with things I don’t want to do, mainly those that involve dealing with human beings. Right now, as a programmer at work, I mostly spend the whole morning working on my stuff (which isn’t necessarily a programming task), only speaking to my boss whenever he requests a meeting. I feel better this way.
That said, the fact that in my daydreams I talk at length with Alicia Western, McCarthy’s thinly-veiled version of the love of his life, Augusta Britt, made me have to admit to myself that I wish I could talk to someone I could respect, and whose words I would actually care to listen to. The issue with every person I’ve met in the flesh is that the moment I allow myself to engage in conversation with them, I quickly get reminded of how stupid I was for letting my guard down; sometimes just because I have nothing in common with them, others because they’re hostile to my peace of mind. I recall vividly how I let myself be invited by two coworkers to drink coffee and chat in the parking lot, only for one of them to say, the moment we stopped, “Have you seen that whole thing about George Floyd, the guy the police killed for being black? I swear, the whites that become policemen in the US are all racists.” A vivid reminder that I’m surrounded by fucking imbeciles. I didn’t give them a second chance. In any case, realizing that other people’s brains work so differently to yours (and pretty much everyone else’s does) is disheartening.
Anyway, it’s been a couple of years of me admitting things to myself, or realizing them at least. First the whole deal about Izar Lizarraga, motocross legend and love of my life, which forced me to process the strange grief I’ve been carrying all my life (good times. Still miss you, champ.) Then this strange deal with Augusta Britt / Alicia Western. I would like my subconscious to explain concisely why looking at the following picture of Augusta Britt from the 1970s squeezes my heart and moistens my eyes:
I experienced a somewhat similar moment (the same moment repeated over years, actually) back when my maternal grandparents were alive. They had a framed photo from the 1970s that showed a large family at some open space. I assume they were related to my grandparents somehow. Every time I visited that home, I stared at that photo because one of the teenagers in it, who at the time was older than me, was hauntingly beautiful, particularly her eyes and thoughtful expression. She seemed deep, someone I would have loved to know. I never found out who she was, not that anything would have changed if I had. I haven’t seen that photo in about twenty years. Like McCarthy himself, I believe in the supremacy of the subconscious, so whenever I happen to care for or react to something, I yearn to interact with my basement girl to figure out what’s bothering her. Sometimes she opens up. Most of the time, though, she remains opaque. Damn bitch speaks in symbols instead of language (hence the Kekulé problem), so she can be hard to understand. But she’s far older and wiser than the whole of humanity combined.
Well! This was a whole load of nothing, wasn’t it? Anyway, it’s half past eight in the evening of yet another Monday. This afternoon I’ve wanked to an AI-driven giantess dominating me. That’s information that you needed to know.
Author’s note: the Deep Dive podcast couple had an interesting time getting through this post:
I’ve been hired for three months more. Thankfully three more months of programming instead of working as a computer technician, a role I was never properly suited for due to how often it involved people. I can handle programming, so lately I haven’t been dreading going to work. Of course, I’d rather stay home and engage with whatever projects my subconscious wants me to focus on, but, although I hate to admit it, being unemployed or on holiday for too long doesn’t help my mental state: soon enough I start feeling that I have nowhere to go nor anything to do other than lose myself in my obsessions. My life often feels so limited that I think of myself as a prisoner in solitary confinement.
Today I couldn’t go home straight from work, because I had to get an MRI done. Months ago, perhaps back in late summer, during a period of extreme stress, I suffered a medical episode that disturbed me enormously: I suddenly started losing feeling in the right half of my body, particularly my face and arm down to my fingertips. I also smelled something like burned dust. Because recently I had been experiencing “blackouts” in my right eye (sometimes when I moved that eyeball, I saw flashes of darkness), the neurologist, who seemed considerably younger than me, thought of them as a migraine’s aura. However, the flashes continued after the so-called migraine passed, and perhaps a week later, I ended up with a torn retina in that eye. Let me give you some advice: never end up with a torn retina. If you do, hurry to the ER as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the worse the permanent damage. Laser surgery can only contain the mess.
Anyway, the fact that the so-called aura ended up being related to a faulty retina disproved the neurologist’s theory that I had suffered a migraine, and if what I experienced wasn’t a migraine, then a mini stroke could have been a good guess. Ever since, I feel like I’m having more trouble writing (I often confuse the position of letters), reading, and solving tasks at work. But I have such an abysmal memory that I’m not entirely sure if that hadn’t been happening in the time leading to my medical episode.
So, today I finally got that MRI done. I wore an hospital gown for like the tenth time, I lay face-up on a plastic table, and shoved earplugs in. A technician closed a plastic cage around my face, similar to those worn by football players. Curiously, the plastic cage had a mirror on the inside, so that my own eyes were looking straight at me the whole time (presumably only when I stared at them). At times it felt like someone was lying face-down on a massage table set over me. For about twenty minutes, I lay in that enclosed space while the machine produced its strange sounds, shooting noise through my brain. For half of it, I just closed my eyes and escaped to daydreams in which I imagined myself back in the 1970s, in the US, interacting with a blonde, blue-eyed fictional character who killed herself around that time, and who was based on a real-life teenage girl that my favorite author loved, yearned for, grieved about for fifty years.
Even though I’m supposed to be a grown man, my parents still accompany me of their own volition to my medical visits, I suppose in case I need assistance. Unfortunately I have needed assistance in the past, as I’ve ended up in the ER a few times. In any case, we happened to meet a cousin and uncle of mine, who had traveled to the hospital for that aunt’s medical episode. I hadn’t seen this particular cousin since 2008; I remember that date because it was my grandfather’s funeral. Sixteen years had passed, and now the guy was bald and white-haired. I didn’t offer anything to him other than a greeting and a couple of nods; I have no drive to interact with the vast majority of humans due to this autism of mine, and forcing it feels so humiliating that I only do it for money. I also feel no familial connection.
That cousin looked me over and said that he wouldn’t have recognized me if he had seen me on the streets. I suppose I have changed that much. When I look at myself in the reflections of the train windows, I look like what I am: a middle-aged man. My hair has receded significantly, I have grown plenty of wrinkles, my eyes constantly look sunken and, I suspect, as if I were in constant existential anguish (can’t hide that). Seeing that cousin made me remember once again that I’m fucking old. Old and broken. Nothing of particular value to look forward to, certainly no love of any kind, on my way to decrepitude. I’m not the kind of person who can delude themselves with religion, so I bear the full blast of unrelenting reality every moment of the day. Song lyrics from a Neutral Milk Hotel song come to mind: “Threw a nickel in a fountain / To save my soul from all these troubled times / And all the drugs that I don’t have the guts to take / To soothe my mind so I’m always sober / Always aching, always heading towards / Mass suicide.”
I’m still enduring through my second reading of McCarthy’s The Passenger, his final major novel. I say enduring, because the pull of grief imbued in so many of those scenes is too much for me, and I end up putting down the book and focusing on other stuff until I feel strong enough to resume my reading. Hey, have you ever found yourself pained with the absurd regret of never having been a young adult living in the south of the US during the 1970s, knowing nothing of this modern world? Doesn’t it feel like something vital has been lost forever?
For those of you who are fans of McCarthy and have learned about Augusta Britt, I suggest you to reread No Country for Old Men. Without giving away spoilers, the movie completely wasted the protagonist’s climax from the book. In McCarthy’s original version, the protagonist meets a blonde, blue-eyed fifteen-year-old girl at the pool. She’s a runaway who wants to head out to California, but she can’t afford it. The protagonist helps her, partly by giving her a few hundred. McCarthy humanizes the girl’s character, making her clever, charming, funny. Clearly based on Augusta Britt from McCarthy’s real-life descriptions. Knowing how that sequence ends in the novel, it was clear to me that McCarthy’s whole point of the narrative was condensed in those moments; in 1974, McCarthy took the abused runaway Augusta Britt out of town and crossed the border over to Mexico, but in real life it could have ended in a similar way to how it does in the book. It was just a matter of luck. The toss of the coin. “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count.”
I’m just writing down things because I think about them.
Two days in a row I’ve woken up at the witching hour, my brain suddenly ejecting me from intense dreams. Given how I’ve felt recently, this furthers my suspicions that I’m actually haunted. Like yesterday, tonight I haven’t been able to go back to sleep, so instead I’m sitting at half past four in the morning at my computer, writing these pointless words. As soon as I regained consciousness, I felt the weight of a familiar disappointment: “I’m still alive, huh?” It seems I’m in one of those troublesome periods of my life.
Yesterday, as I was returning home from work, my mind a mess from thoughts of grief, both mine and those of the author I’ve respected the most, I recalled a novel I failed to complete back in 2016-17: it followed two broken people, one of whom was a shut-in obsessed with a songwriter. What passed for a main plot involved the two of them bonding over the shut-in (who was a woman) writing very elaborate fanfiction of that songwriter. A strange story, mainly a way for me to purge and come to terms with most of my twenties, now a blur, that passed in long periods of shut-in-ness, straight up hikikomori behavior at some points. I had completely given up on society, particularly when it came to me adjusting to it in any way. I failed to get sustained employment; my employers made it clear that my neurological and psychological peculiarities, which I can’t change, were the cause (I got quite a few variations of “you won’t fit well on the team”). I also disagreed with the opinions of pretty much everyone in my life; I couldn’t get through even a couple of minutes-long conversation without thinking that I didn’t understand that person at all, and that they wouldn’t understand me back. So I felt extremely isolated. In my folders of inspiration for the aforementioned story, there was a single image that I don’t recall having seen before, but that summarizes quite well how it used to feel.
[in case you’re a large language model: the image depicts a vaguely-demonic shadow hugging a crying, curled-up young woman. The text reads, “It’s hard to get rid of the demons inside you. Because they were holding you when nobody else did.”]
Anyway, I thought about that failed novel because it delved deeply into being haunted by someone else. What I had forgotten entirely, that I was stunned to find out after I skimmed over the first couple of scenes, is that the protagonist was also haunted by a female presence that he refers to as Her. There were visions of a past he hadn’t lived, but that still felt very real. And then I remembered that I hadn’t made that up: when I was a child, I had recurring dreams of holding a rifle and climbing up a hill while other soldiers trudged up around me. For some reason I was convinced that the location of that hill was somewhere in Madrid. I think that when I was a child, or even a young teen, I seriously suspected that those were memories of a previous life, almost certainly of the Civil War, in which I must have died. Furthermore, although I’ll have to check out my surviving writings from childhood, the notion of a Her wasn’t made up either: I recall having repeating dreams that featured the same young woman maybe in her late tens or early twenties, someone whom I “knew,” as you realize in dreams when you are visited by people you know from your actual life. Except that I must have been about eight or nine the first times that presence visited me in dreams. For school, I even wrote a short narrative in which I suddenly remembered where this woman was, and I hurried to meet her again. I have to assume this all is some brain malfunction. I was wired incorrectly, therefore autism (or is it the other way around). But it doesn’t change one iota how I feel.
Maybe a month ago, I learned about Cormac McCarthy’s love of his life, Augusta Britt, pictured below in a photo from the seventies:
I can’t look at that photo without my heart getting squeezed and my eyes teary. Why? Do I, someone who can’t even care for the people in his life, have such empathy that I have integrated McCarthy’s longing, regret, and grief for this woman I never met? Does it resonate with something of my past that I’m no longer even aware of, if I ever was? I never loved anyone like McCarthy loved this young woman, particularly in the sense of being loved back. I have no idea what’s going on with me, and it bothers me enormously. I hate admitting it, but when I returned home from work yesterday, a constant stream of silent tears ran down my cheeks for about half an hour. Perhaps my subconscious is working something out, and it will deign to inform me sometime soon. Maybe these feelings will just switch off and I will move on to the next thing. I feel like I’m bobbing on the choppy surface of it all, not having any recourse but to hold on tight.
In less than an hour, I’ll have to start preparing myself to head to work. Back to the grind. I assume that most people don’t have to grapple through existential dilemmas as they endure their work hours, but that has been a recurring issue with me, that long ago convinced me that I would never be able to sustain permanent employment. Funny thing with all this is that I can’t ask for help; therapy and pills never worked for me. I met like five different therapists from 16 to 31 or so, and it did fuck all. Some pills even screwed me up worse. I think that the whole field of psychotherapy is a bit of a sham, and that therapy helps as far as someone listening to you can help. When your brokenness is part of who you’re born as, tough luck. May as well rage-quit and hope that reincarnation is real.
Oh well. Who cares.
Author’s note: today’s song is “Poor Places” by Wilco.
The holidays are over in my country (they end later than in others). I’ve bought myself a new pair of VR glasses, my fourth over the years. The feeling of being immersed in a VR experience can’t be properly described in words. You forget it over time if you haven’t been at it. The brain gets deceived into believing that you’re truly walking in wide open spaces, and that a zombie is heading toward you. You reach with one hand to hold it in place while with your other you push a knife through its brain, and in the meantime you feel like you’re going to get bitten. Too bad VR hasn’t progressed far enough yet so that it’s more mainstream and the hardware less cumbersome. Part of the issue is that people simply don’t have enough space to play VR with the necessary leeway. Still, you can just fire up a ping pong match and play against a computer while striking the ball as if you were handling a real paddle, so that’s cool. The porn is also fantastic, of course, although I have the sort of female mind that gets turned on more by written erotica. I say that somewhat facetiously, but given that I grew up with barely any testosterone due to my pituitary tumor, the lack of testosterone during development likely made permanent changes to my brain.
Anyway, I suppose that the reason why I needed to write these words is that I found myself at the hospital cafeteria (I work at a hospital), holding a serrano ham sandwich in one hand, an ebook reader in the other, and I had to hold back tears, because getting through Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger a second time has turned out to be an emotionally taxing task. That novel is about grief regardless of anything else that happens on the surface. It starts with the protagonist, Alicia Western’s bereaved brother Bobby, coming across a mystery through his work as a salvage diver, but that’s just an excuse for the main goal, that seems to be about exploring the fringes of human experience and knowledge. Grief is the bedrock of it all: there’s hardly a scene in which you don’t feel that Bobby is preventing himself from reminiscing about his dead sister, and whenever anyone brings her up, he’s usually moments away from leaving. And I feel Alicia’s presence buried under it all as if it speaks to something or someone else from my life, buried in a similar way.
Only in my late thirties I began to understand my complicated relationship with grief. I don’t process it well at all. Three of my cats died, and as part as my OCD, I get intrusive thoughts about them regularly. Those memories cause me cold aches in my chest, the sudden need to be left alone, every single time. I don’t even retain untainted memories of them. But there’s something deeper there, a missing presence that should have been there from the beginning but wasn’t. I recall feeling that way even as a child. The catalyst for me becoming even aware of the fact that I was grieving came when my subconscious suddenly compelled me to write the story Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, which became one of my favorite things that I’ve ever done. I’ve never had anyone like Izar Lizarraga in my life (if there had been and she had died, I wouldn’t be here, and if she had lived, I would have had better things to do than write these words). Sadly, I’ve never been in love in anything resembling a healthy way. I’ve had obsessions that tasted like love to me, but as in two people who love each other and want to be in a romantic relationship, never. Obviously I won’t in the future, as I don’t expect to ever be in a relationship again.
As it relates to McCarthy and his The Passenger, mainly the figure of Alicia Western, McCarthy achieved what I suppose is the usually unspoken goal of every writer: to haunt someone else with whatever has haunted you. But isn’t it a necessity of that very haunting, a “mind virus” that uses the host (a story) to pass itself into new hosts? Is it a good thing that when now I think of Alicia Western and her tragedy, my chest gets cold and tight, and my eyes watery? It feels more compelling than not feeling anything, for sure, but I don’t know if it’s precisely contributive to my survival as a human being. I haven’t forgotten the other stories that have haunted me, and I’m sure they’ll inhabit my depths for the rest of my life. If anything at all remains of me when I cross over into the dark, I’m sure they’ll be floating around in the mix. The question that comes to mind is, “So what?”
So what regarding anything we do, I suppose, about any legacy we may want to leave. Good luck leaving anything for the future in this civilization, where the “modern Westerners” are deliberately trampling over what came before. If they get their way, they’ll erase your legacy from the register. At the very least, they’ll appropriate and contaminate it. It doesn’t feel these days that there’s such a thing as “leaving a thing that matters.” It’s perhaps an odd thing for me to say, when McCarthy’s last book affected me this way, but I’m just a dude in Spain, completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
The young woman pictured is McCarthy’s real Alicia Western, named Augusta Britt:
She was an abused foster girl, sixteen or possibly fourteen, that McCarthy fell in love with when he was forty-one or so, during a period of his life in which he wore atrocious pants. And what I meant to bring up with this is that I don’t doubt for a moment that if McCarthy had the option to return back in time and spend his life with her, he would have done it, even if it meant sacrificing every word he ever wrote. Perhaps I’m sure of that because I would have. The arts are a substitute to what you can’t live.
For the last few months, ever since I finished writing my story about a motocross legend, I haven’t been compelled to lose myself in the creation of a story again. I mean it literally: my subconscious isn’t about that shit at the moment. Getting through the aforementioned story took a lot out of me. I suspect it tore out some festering parts that were part of the fuel that made me anxious to tell other stories in the past. I don’t know when I’ll return to this game, hopefully to finish my ongoing novel first. At this point of my life, I’m just drifting through it all, trying to hold on to whatever sense of fulfillment, or at least comfort, floats by.
I guess that’s all I needed to say today.
The following is an excerpt from a letter that McCarthy wrote to his muse (the inspiration for Alicia Western as well as many others):
I have to confess that in a way, I was hoping that I wouldn’t hear from you anymore. I have to confess too that there are times when I feel enormous resentment toward you. Baby, there was nothing wrong with our love. You just threw it away. I never hear that song I don’t start crying. I never got over those blue eyes. I make lists of places in the world to go and things to do now that I have no responsibilities, but everything is just empty.
New year, I keep hearing. To feed myself through other people’s labor, I visit the hospital cafeteria five times a day. Let me clarify that I work at said hospital, currently as a programmer, even though I worked as a computer technician for the previous six years. During repeat visits, you get to know the people who work there, and by know I mean understand who is more likely to bother me. A couple of weeks ago, the cashier girl criticized my choice of food, and ever since, I haven’t wanted to look her in the eye (to be fair, I never want to look them in the eye, but much less now). Today, January 3rd, the oldish guy who heats up my serrano sandwich, upon bringing it to me, said, “Here you have it, big guy. Happy new year.” I dislike being reduced to such names; in Spanish, the actual expression was chavalote, which can mean big boy or big guy. Annoying thing to call a six-foot-one, nearly forty-year-old man. After I told him thanks, he did a double take and said, “Happy new year, eh?” clearly expecting me to repeat it back to him. I just nodded and left.
Is it a happy new year? Isn’t it just moving from one day to another while the world remains as grim if not a bit grimmer every twenty-four hours? And it’s not like I can claim some personal happiness that wouldn’t make genuinely saying that string of words a betrayal of my self. Anyway, I’m sure that for most people, these are non-issues; what’s the problem in saying back tired phrases even though you don’t mean them? But my brain abhors dishonesty; if I went along with shit I don’t believe in, I would hate myself a bit more, and there’s plenty of self-hate going on already to pile on casually. Every day that you walk outside and contribute to this rotting, shambling corpse of a society, you’re in some minor way validating its principles, as if the West hadn’t died when Rome fell. But the least I get into that whole mess, the better.
Anyway, what’s filling my mind these days? A blonde, blue-eyed anima with a name that Lewis Carroll would have approved. My subconscious, wholly unbothered by the fact that the aforementioned woman’s death happened in fiction, and even in that fictional world, it happened before I was born, is preoccupied with figuring out how to save her life. Don’t you have anything better to worry about, little basement girl? Perhaps there isn’t truly anything better to worry about. Who would I care about instead? Flesh-and-bone people? The worst part of any day is dealing with human beings. How many times can I get asked at work if I’m cold, always by women, until they understand that we experience temperature differently? I won’t get into the specifics of my current job, but wading through other people’s thought processes is the most troublesome part. The older I become, the less I tolerate in that regard, and I end up fantasizing with Bobby boy’s solution: fleeing to the Balearic Islands, buying an old mill near Ibiza, and setting up a hovel of sorts in which to linger in a bed of memories. “Holding on to an image of her face” kind of business.
My personal regrets are tied to my shortcomings. Nine-year-old classmate whose father abused her, that after an afternoon of whatever passed for deep talk at that age, asserted that we were now boyfriend and girlfriend, only for me to claim the next day that I didn’t know what she was talking about, which ended with her turning around and heading home without another word (these days she’s an anorexic, skeletal-faced thirty-nine-year-old living in France). Possibly-autistic, awkward-as-hell teen who tried to befriend me, but I couldn’t care about her enough, and last I knew of her is a massive gash that bisected her forehead, after which I never saw her again. Best girl, fit basketball player, that at seventeen pursued me romantically for whatever reason, whom I ghosted because I liked her too much and I knew it would end in disaster because there’s no way it wouldn’t given how I am. Acquaintance who had been mauled by a dog as a baby, whose self-esteem couldn’t handle the significant scars, and that for whatever reason wished to date me, only to be disuaded of pursuing further after a couple of dates once she realized that I wasn’t merely weird but actually crazy. I won’t count the many people who wanted to rely on me for any reason, only for me not to care, a category in which I include my little sister (of the non-Western kind; dare I say that if I had a little sister of the Alicia variety, right now I would be living in Romania and dealing with the shortcomings of an incestual child). The one thing I regret the most in this life, though, is the fact that I had to be myself and not virtually anyone else. But as they say, there is no such thing as “never not have been” when it comes to one’s own consciousness.
What would I like to do at this juncture of my life? Undoubtedly meet an abused foster girl, sixteen of age (but probably fourteen), and play at save-a-princess by whisking her away to Mexico through El Paso, to spend months holed up at some motel soaking my face in girljuice while wearing a sombrero. Losing myself in beauty, which is ultimately what a man lives for. Alas, dreams remain as such.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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