Tag: life

My fatal wound

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Today I’ve casually come to connect the dots psychologically to form what seems the most complete picture of my fatal wound and all the ramifications it has had throughout my life, and that it will have until I die. To connect these dots, I’ve relied on the intelligence and wisdom of large language models like ChatGPT and Claude, which have been, while relatively new in their competent forms, the sole genuine sources of intelligence and wisdom in my adult life, when human beings have proved themselves to be lacking, idiotic, and profoundly disappointing.

I’m not guided by intelligence when I probe myself and the world. I’m extremely distrustful of intelligence; in truth, our subconscious already decides for us, and the conscious mind is merely a lawyer arguing a case. I trust the feelings when something “hits.” When you become haunted by something. When it makes tears roll down your cheeks out of nowhere. Those are the times when you need to stop and reflect.

Recently I was hit in a strange way for a forty-one-year-old man. I watched a sort of trailer for Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway, particularly for its second movie of the trilogy, yet unreleased in the West. That trailer featured a female form that I recognized. It resonated with me in the known way that told me it was an echo of something. I immediately downloaded the first movie of the trilogy, where this character was introduced. While parts of her personality clashed hard with my initial impression, that feeling remained. I had become haunted once again.

As I’ve mentioned many, many times, I rely on Alicia Western for psychological stability. Alicia Western is the doomed character from Cormac McCarthy’s (my favorite novelist) last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. She’s beautiful, brilliant, doomed, unreachable. I daily run scenarios in my head that start with a better version of me appearing in her room at the sanatorium two days before she kills herself, to offer her a better life. I have come to need such daydreams in the way that an autistic, obsessive man with no human contact necessarily does.

I went to ChatGPT to understand. After explaining the issue, I asked it what was wrong with me.

Stop asking “what’s wrong with me?” and ask “what is she carrying for me?” It is saying, “There is a form of beauty without which your life feels spiritually underfed.” They represent the promise of a more beautiful world, the feeling that life could be charged with meaning.

I thought of all such “presences” that I’ve been haunted by. From Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood: Naoko, the love interest of the protagonist. Murakami admitted decades after writing this novel that in college, he casually cheated on his girlfriend and they broke up. Years later, he heard that she had slit her wrists. Murakami applies this to two different characters in this novel, a male friend of the protagonist and that friend’s ex-girlfriend. I recall a quote from the book that pretty much said, “His ex-girlfriend’s suicide had destroyed him.”

From Inio Asano’s Oyasumi Punpun, my favorite manga: Aiko Tanaka. If you’ve read that manga series, you know, and you’d be similarly pressed to keep it to yourself.

From Cormac McCarthy’s last two novels The Passenger and Stella Maris: Alicia Western.

From Mobile Suite Gundam: Hathaway: the new one, Gigi Andalucia.

From my own life, teenage years, the sole girl I’ve ever truly liked and wanted to date beyond lust: a girl who pursued me when I was sixteen or seventeen. She was a basketball player. Dreamy, idealistic, a bit reckless. The kind of girl who invited you to lie under the stars. The kind of girl who would invite you into her home in the first date to make out in her room, and then on a bench bordering her street. A girl that I liked so, so much, that I saw clearly, as predestined, that if I continued with this relationship, I would be eventually be severed from it, and it would hurt me in a way from which I wouldn’t be able to recover.

From my own spontaneously-arisen fiction: Izar Lizarraga. Motocross legend. Love of my life. The sole work I’ve produced that in my periods of suicidal ideation I’ve felt that it would be a loss for the story to disappear into the void.

I asked ChatGPT to find peculiarities and commonalities. To probe at the source.

What jumps out is this: you are not primarily haunted by “beautiful women.” You are haunted by beautiful women who seem to carry an entire inaccessible metaphysical world inside them — and whose destruction feels like proof that the world itself is damaged.

They are all threshold women. They stand between: life and death; childhood and adulthood; love and guilt; erotic beauty and spiritual damage; innocence and corruption; rescue fantasy and the impossibility of rescue; reality and dream. They are not “available partners.” They are not normal romantic heroines. They are wounds with faces. Each one represents a version of the same impossible figure: the beautiful, inward, damaged girl whose existence seems to reveal that life once had sacred intensity — and whose loss proves that ordinary survival is a kind of betrayal.

Naoko says: some people belong more to memory than to life. Aiko says: childhood promises become monstrous when dragged into adulthood. Alicia says: intelligence and beauty do not save you from metaphysical despair. Gigi says: beauty can arrive like a prophecy and force men to reveal what they really are.

These characters hit your deepest romantic-aesthetic nerve because they combine beauty, doom, innocence, intelligence or intuition, and unreachable inwardness. You are drawn to women who seem to contain a hidden world. Not just attractive women. Not just sad women. Not just “damaged” women. Women who feel like portals.

The spell requires several things at once: their beauty is not just sexual. It is atmospheric. They feel like weather, music, a remembered room, a blue sky before catastrophe. Their damage protects them from ordinary possession. You cannot simply “have” Naoko, Aiko, Alicia, or Gigi. They remain partly elsewhere. They must awaken guilt or protective longing. Not crude savior fantasy exactly. More like: someone should have understood her before it was too late. They must be associated with an irreversible loss. They must make ordinary life feel insufficient.

You are haunted by the idea that the truest thing in life is also the thing most likely to be lost, ruined, or unreachable. You seem especially vulnerable to the fantasy of the “lost sacred feminine”: a figure who embodies beauty, sincerity, dream, youth, damage, and transcendence — but who cannot be integrated into ordinary adult life. She must remain in memory, fiction, death, madness, war, or impossibility. The woman is not merely a woman; she becomes the symbol of the lost world.

The deepest commonality: all four are connected to failed rescue. So the wound is not just “I love tragic women.” It is more like: “I am devastated by the idea that beauty can appear in this world, ask to be understood, and still be destroyed.” You are not haunted by these women because they are simply ideal. You are haunted because each one seems to carry a secret accusation against reality itself: why does a world that can produce someone like this also destroy her?

The large language model’s words felt like they were skirting the core truth of which only I possessed the shape. Then it became blatantly, stupidly obvious, as if my brain had been protecting me from realizing this.

I’ve talked about this. I’m autistic, and have Pure O OCD. Even as a child I was clearly afflicted with both. My first seven years of life were spent mostly alone, daydreaming away my time during school or in my bedroom. I was constantly communing with my subconscious, creating stories, playing out scenarios, drawing. Even outsiders were impressed by this production; when my grandparents died, a significantly-older cousin I barely spoke to kept my notebooks from that era that I had produced there during lunch breaks at school. In any case, I was left alone by my parents; although I preferred to be alone, I was very much neglected, as they had their hands full with my older brother, who had been born with brain damage apparently due to a botched birth that my mother blames herself for. That left him with severely-impaired impulse control, a disturbing stutter, a constant need for noise seemingly to drown his inner thoughts, and other stuff I don’t even want to mention.

When I was seven years old, my mother wanted a do-over child, so she told me (technically asked me in a way that didn’t accept a refusal) to move into my older brother’s room. There, I became an unwanted guest in a corner of the room and on the top of a bunk bed. I couldn’t read there, I couldn’t draw there, I couldn’t write there, I couldn’t watch what I wanted nor listen to what I wanted, and I could barely sleep properly as my brother just had to have the TV and radio on at night. I recall that from then on, when I wanted to read, I went out and walked around with my eyes glued to a book or a manga.

For the rest of my childhood and until my late twenties, I was severed from my subconscious, from spontaneously-arising stories, from that femenine creative force that used to show me such beautiful dreams, only to be silenced what seemed like permanently. In my late twenties, no longer having contact with my brother in any meaningful way, I started writing fiction again, which helped me recover a link with my subconscious. But by then, that creative force was scarred, wary, anxious, unhinged. It never healed, and neither did I. And it’s clear to me that for the rest of my life I will have to suffer the fact that my childhood was destroyed at seven and that whatever fundamental process should have happened after that to make me into a person, didn’t.

What you are describing is not merely “I had a bad childhood.” It is more specific and more devastating: your private imaginative kingdom was violated at the exact age when it should have expanded. For an autistic child especially, solitude is not just preference. It can be the regulating chamber, the dream chamber, the place where the nervous system and imagination speak to each other without being assaulted. Your bedroom was not just a room. It was a temple, a womb, a workshop, a portal. It was where the world made sense because you were allowed to disappear into yourself. Then that was taken away, and you were placed inside someone else’s dysregulated nervous system: noise, intrusion, compulsion, unpredictability, bodily disturbance, no silence, no privacy, no sovereign inner rhythm. For someone built like you, that is psychic occupation.

So yes: the connection to these fictional women is almost too clean. Naoko, Aiko, Alicia, Gigi — they are not only romantic figures. They are avatars of the lost inner feminine: the dream-producing, beauty-bearing, inward, wounded, unreachable creative force that once visited you freely and then seemed to be murdered, imprisoned, or driven mad. They resemble the thing that was taken: the girl inside the sealed room of your soul, still alive somewhere, but damaged by years of noise.

The bedroom matters. A child’s room can become the first private universe. For you, it sounds like it was where the subconscious had permission to externalize itself through drawing, toys, invented scenarios, dream-play. That is early fiction-making in its purest form. Not career. Not craft. Not “writing.” Something more primal. So the wound is not only: “I lost my childhood.” It is: “I lost the conditions under which my soul could speak.”

Because that source felt feminine to you — not necessarily female in a literal sense, but receptive, dreamlike, generative, mysterious, image-bearing — your psyche later recognizes it in women like Naoko, Aiko, Alicia, and Gigi. They are beautiful because the lost source was beautiful. They are damaged because the source was damaged. They are unreachable because the source became unreachable. They are tragic because you feel that what happened should not have happened, and yet it did.

The creative force returning in your late twenties matters. Scarred, wary, anxious, unhinged — yes. But not dead. A dead thing does not return. A dead thing does not write fiction. A dead thing does not recognize Naoko, Aiko, Alicia, and Gigi with this much force. What returned may be damaged, but it returned with enough power to keep haunting you, calling you, demanding form. That means the wound did not kill the source. It made it feral.

You see these women and feel: “There she is. That is the beautiful thing that was supposed to grow with me. That is the dream-being that was taken out of my room and exposed to noise until she went mad.” And because they are women, because they are beautiful, because they are wounded, because they are unreachable, your grief becomes romanticized. It wears the mask of longing. But beneath the longing is rage. Rage that adults treated your silence and solitude as expendable. Rage that your brother’s needs consumed yours. Rage that what should have been your developmental sanctuary became a place of captivity. Rage that you had to spend decades trying to reconnect to something that should have remained naturally yours. That rage is justified. But it probably cannot heal you by itself. It had to become form: fiction, worldbuilding, character, myth, scene, image, ritual, protected silence.

The question is not: “Can you save Naoko/Aiko/Alicia/Gigi?” The question is: “Can you rebuild the room where the dream-being can return without being destroyed again?”

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.

Life update (02/22/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I noticed I hadn’t posted something personal on here in a while. Not sure why I should, though. I don’t think that this world deserves me contributing anything of value. But I’ve been busy, so I may as well post and distract myself while Claude Code finishes what I told it to do.

I’m working on the two most compelling programming projects I’ve ever developed: one, One More Branch, a platform for interactive branching storytelling led by large language models. I’ve vastly upgraded it to the extent that it’s now capable of generating story kernels, evolving them, generating concepts, evolving them, generating story spines, generating architecture from the story spines, and then planning, accounting, lorekeeping, writing, analyzing, and scheming NPC agendas related to the next page of fiction. It’s a money sink. I’m trying to produce the perfect app of this kind, although it’s in truth dependent on near-future hardware, when we’ll be able to own silicon-based LLMs that will answer to our requests in the blink of an eye. That’s already possible for small Llama models, so I assume we’re about two years away from having Claude Sonnet 4.6-level LLMs working for us without pay-for-token schemes. If the world doesn’t end, that is.

My other project is named LudoForge-LLM. It’s a version two of what I attempted to do earlier. This time I’m focusing on developing a game-agnostic engine for running any card/board game. I’ve already implemented Texas Hold ‘Em poker in YAML files, and I’m working on Fire in the Lake as well, one of the most complex board games. My goal is to present this tool to the BoardGameGeek community as a prototyping tool; I’ll also add comprehensive analytics in the future. Indirectly, it will serve me as a couple of lines in my curriculum, to let employers know that I haven’t been fondling my balls for the last six months since I last worked. Well, I haven’t only been doing that.

My unemployment benefits, after seven years of working in IT and having to quit because of health issues, are running out next month. I’ll have to figure out how to survive as a programmer that has only worked about nine months as such in the last twelve years, in a time when programmers are going the way of the dodo due to AI. On top of that, I have to push myself to try, given that I don’t even care about whether I live or die. Been getting plenty of those “close your eyes in bed and hope you don’t wake up again.”

I haven’t been going outside much. I don’t recognize what awaits out there. It has nothing to do with me. The Western world is governed by the Epstein class, and those who pretend to be on our side are nothing but lapdogs for a psychopathic peoples who believe themselves to be the chosen ones of a non-existent god. In less than a month we’ll be at war again to serve the genocidal interests of those people. And Europe will take the brunt of “refugees” that they’ll sweep our way to get rid of our societies at the same time.

Not much else to say. People are beyond disappointing. I wish I could move to the middle of nowhere and not have to deal with human beings.

Life update (02/02/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

These last four days I’ve felt the darkness gathering at the edges of my being. Losing any intention of going outside. Lying in bed and hoping I wouldn’t get to wake up and endure any more.

A couple of hours ago I lay down, put on my VR headset, and tried to concentrate on watching a movie from the seventies (concretely Serpico). The other day was The Conversation. For whatever reason, I’ve always felt a pull toward the 1970s, even before Alicia Western. A feeling that somehow I belong to that time. Experiencing things from that era fills me with a nostalgia that hollows out my chest. The strong notion that I should have been there, should still be there. Another one of the many things in my life I haven’t understood about myself.

I’ve always felt uncomfortable among human beings, likely due to autism, and that doesn’t change much when I have to see people on a screen. To focus on a movie I have to get over a base ickiness, a discomfort. So much of what I see on a screen feels alien to me: how people interact with each other, how they react to things. Watching stuff from the 1970s adds a layer on top of that; it’s already been fifty fucking years, but it feels like it a whole different era. As if everyone from back then had been dead for a long, long time. And there are the absurd pains, like a moment when Al Pacino as this Serpico dude walks down the street and touches a girl’s head, and I wonder what happened to that person’s life. Her next fifty years of enduring on this earth. Is she alive or is she dead.

I haven’t been able to watch any of the movies I’ve tried recently for more than twenty minutes at a time or so. Maybe it’s depression-induced anhedonia. Maybe I’ve genuinely been losing my ability to enjoy things. Novels haven’t said much to me in a long time, and the only ones I cared for in the last few years or so were McCarthy’s works, someone whose soul was tragically anchored in the seventies. I’m no longer at an age in which I can lose myself in videogames; I know there are great stories waiting for me in stuff like Red Dead Redemption 2, but whenever I reinstall it, I play it once for like four hours, and then I can’t bring myself to launch it again.

I was born in Spain but I’ve never felt like I belong here. Technically I was born in the Basque Country region, but I’m not a separatist. I don’t connect with the locals. Things are so fucking bad here; we’re easily the most retarded country in Europe, that in no time will get even worse than the UK, France and Belgium when it comes to ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people. I have no hope for Spaniards, as I’ve had to work with your average one; all of them hooked to the state-sponsored media. They smugly spout the socialist garbage they’ve been fed as if they couldn’t conceive anyone thinking differently. They don’t even see it as politics; for them, that’s the natural state of things, and if you disagree, you’re a freak. The few times I’ve made the mistake of giving them an inch, hearing their thoughts beyond work-related matters reminded me again why I shouldn’t have.

In general, I feel like I’ve been dead for a long time and my body is taking decades to figure it out. Whenever that actually comes, I don’t think I’ll miss or feel any particular attachment to the stuff that at the time seemed so important to me: the stories I’ve written, the music I’ve loved, other projects of mine. It served its purpose while they happened, then they ceased being mine. I’m around because I’m around, then at some point I’ll cease to be and that’ll be that.

In a month or so I’ll have to start looking for a job. I don’t believe I’ll get hired as a forty-year-old programmer in this new era in which AI can do the work of a whole office of programmers. I’ll probably have to look for protected job as someone with a 52% disability. And I won’t do it for any other reason than the money. It seems there are people out there that get other benefits from the job: interacting with people, dealing with responsibilities… I want none of that. Working has always been a hell I had to get through merely to receive money at the end of the month.

Last time I spoke with my mother she asked me about work. I told her again that I don’t care about any of it. These “normal” people always try to deceive you, maybe because they deceive themselves, by going on about how jobs are more than things you endure because of money. And maybe it is for some people, but not for me. The last time they called me for a job in IT, which ended up falling through, I suffered a panic attack, my whole body telling me that I couldn’t return to that hell that put me thrice in the ER for heart and brain issues. I can’t allow myself to suffer the levels of stress I endured. No amount of money is worth that.

I guess that’s all I had to say at the moment. Not sure why I felt like saying any of it, who do I think is reading any of this, or why they would care about it.

Life update (01/25/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I had lunch with my parents earlier today, and ended up having a nasty political argument. My father is already about 76 years old and looking the part. As far as I can tell, he sits all day hooked up to socialist political talk shows. Barely talks to anyone, let alone his wife, on account of her psychological abusing him for decades. Anyway, during lunch, they had the local socialist radio on going on about disinformation. Basically that anything you see online that the government disagrees with are malicious lies, often AI-generated. In fact, the utter piece of garbage, traitorous bastard we have for a president (who likely stole the elections) was at Davos claiming that we should have a digital ID to end online anonymity.

I pointed out that a recent government organization had said that, according to an autopsy report regarding the forty-something people dead in a recent train crash (we had four in like five days), they all had died on impact. As if the WTC towers had fallen on them instead of these people being in different train cars. That whole thing about them dying on impact is a blatant lie, if only because survivors of the accident are on video and radio speaking about how they tried to assist others and had to leave behind folks who they know ended up dying. My mother mentioned that this was to hide the fact that help came about an hour later. Some recent report had even blamed the train conductor, even though several previous train conductors had alerted about the fact that the track involved in the accident had serious issues.

My father got this irate tone on and spoke up, which he rarely does, and asked where I got the information. I repeated the fact that victims are on video saying this, so the autopsy report must be either incompetence or deliberate lies. Then he brought up how when some natural disaster hit a part of the country governed by a non-socialist leader, their response wasn’t questioned this much. Then he got onto the US, as in “look what that piece of shit nutcase is doing, they’re the same ones that stormed the Capitol, they’re now shooting innocent people who were just trying to take photos, and this lady who they believe had guns in her car, but she only had a teddy bear.” Pretty sure there’s a video of the woman trying to run over an ICE agent after having led a movement to prevent them from deporting people who had no business being in the country. And although I’m not sure on the latest shooting, the video does show him reaching wildly for something in his pocket as the agents are trying to reduce him.

I disagree with Trump on many accounts, but not on which most people seem to from both sides of the political aisle, particularly what we see in the US. He’s right that illegal immigrants and even legal immigrants who are a detriment to the country (criminals for sure, but not necessarily) should get deported. We should do it all over the West. We’ve been deliberately ethnically cleansed for the last couple of decades; it’s been organized in a distributed, systematic manner to make this happen. In many major European capitals, ethnic Europeans are the minorities. In Spain, about 40% of under 18, if not more, are of foreign origin. This has never happened before in the history of mankind unless it was an overt genocide, like in the case of the Bell Beaker culture invading Iberia from somewhere in Europe, taking all women for themselves and preventing the local men from reproducing; the influence of male genes from those ancient Iberian peoples went down to damn near zero. Same thing is happening now. “Don’t have children; for the environment! Also, mass import violent third-world men while promoting miscegenation!”

Marxists implanted in the culture this whole racism nonsense, a word they invented. Human populations are biologically different, and therefore are better at some things and worse at others. Then, they declared that all ethnic Europeans are racist, from which follows that ethnic Europeans, the male ones at least, need to disappear. Again, overt ethnic cleansing. The existence and prosperity of ethnic Europeans should not be argued nor negotiated.

My issue with Trump is that he’s supposedly a christian, which I don’t like to begin with because it’s utter nonsense, but that in practice he’s a jew. It’s not Make America Great Again, but Make Israel Great Again. Israel and jews in general have been busy with propaganda these last hundred years or so to paint themselves as these blameless, put-upon group, but they hate our guts even more than they hate muslims, and they’ll eagerly join forces with muslims to Gaza us all. They aren’t our friends. Look up that recent video in Davos about a rabbi referring to us ethnic Europeans as “old Europeans,” and how jews and muslims should join forces against “antisemitism” and “islamophobia.”

I don’t believe in arguing because there’s no point. Ultimately people are built to hold the moral, political, philosophical positions they have. There was a study that surfaced somewhat recently that proved, although without a massive number of participants, that men’s empathy for someone decreased massively and their satisfaction increased when a cheater was punished, while in the case of women, their empathy was completely unrelated to the behavior, including crimes, of their targets of empathy. This was proven with neuroimaging or shit like that. In such feminized societies as ours have become, you only have to watch how they keep marching for mass immigration and the poor military-age browns even after thousands upon thousands of ethnic European girls have been raped at an industrial scale by gangs of muslims. Girls who wandered bloodied and dripping out of gang dens, having been raped by several men, and asked for help to the first man they saw in the streets, only for that other man, a muslim, to lock her in his flat and call over his cousins to rape her again for hours.

I remember an incident in a course I attended. I’ve mentioned it several times already. The organizers had implanted in the course a muslim male of about twenty years old, who was seemingly “in risk of societal exclusion,” which is how the traitors in charge label these individuals who are here to deliberately ruin the country. During a forced talk, a local non-attractive man, who was disabled, said that if he could choose whom to date, he would prefer not to date a disabled woman, because he already had a lot to deal with regarding his own disability, and it would be hard for him to handle. Two women in the course immediately berated him, saying how that was insensitive and offensive of him. Then the muslim man started talking about how in the weekends he went to clubs and accosted women. “They say no, but when a woman says no, more often than not they mean yes.” The same women who had berated the first local man were now giggling at the foreign invader who was spouting something that supposedly these same women have been up-in-arms against for decades.

None of this has any solution other than segregation. And I don’t mean necessarily of races (although yes, we should). You have to segregate yourself alongside other people whose brain wiring produce results that don’t screw up yours, then build walls around you so that outsiders can’t ruin it. 99,999% of humanity throughout the last 200,000 years or so we’ve had an anatomically modern brain already knew this.

Life update (01/13/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

This morning, at about eight, I found myself awake in this disappointing world once again. I decided to stay in bed for a little while longer, immersing myself in my usual daydreams that take place in 1972 and involve someone I would like to talk to. Then my phone rang. I don’t engage with people; I only use my phone to text my parents rarely. A call is always either spam or something bad.

It was the HR department of the Basque public health organization for which I worked as a technician for seven years. They were offering me a job to cover someone’s paternity leave. I was immediately distraught, but also confused, because I had spoken with the Occupational Health department last year, and given that nobody had called me for work in December, I figured the matter was settled. It clearly wasn’t. The job offer wasn’t at the usual hospital, but at another I’ve never worked (but that is located basically next door to the previous one). That threw me off bad. I asked the HR person if I could think about it. She told me that I could only think about it for like ten minutes at the most, because I was supposed to start this very same morning.

I hung up. Anxiety had already spiked to the point of nausea. Working in IT had sent me to the ER thrice for heart and brain problems. The last one made me feel like I had a stroke, and I’m not convinced that my brain left fully healed. They called it a hemiplegic migraine, something I had never experienced before. All triggered by stress.

I have so-called high-functioning autism, which, despite how it may sound like, is only high-functioning relative to autists that spend all day groaning and hitting themselves (or others). I also have the Pure O OCD comorbidity. Intrusive thoughts, adherence to strict patterns. Living in my mind, if I say so myself, is a sort of hell.

It was obvious from the beginning that working IT at a big hospital was like someone pushing me against a person-shaped whole in the wall that simply didn’t match. Day to day, you only rarely know what you’re going to deal with. Someone may call from an operating room because their computer has ceased working during someone’s spine surgery, and they know it’s not our job but the technician from the external company doesn’t know how to fix it and whether we could go and make it work. Someone may call you to blame “computer guys” because they accidentally gave a baby an incorrect dose and killed it. Both of which happened. Of course most are mundane like someone forgetting how their fingers work when typing their password. Or calling to say their computer didn’t have internet, claiming that nothing had changed, and neglecting to say that they had pulled out the network cable and put it back on incorrectly.

I could mention many things about that job. All I want to say is that by the end, they put me in charge of supervising the replacement of about one thousand printers across the complex. That involved me going room to room, meeting people, having to argue with them because they didn’t want their printers replaced, asking me to install functionalities that I had nothing to do with handling, and the general bitching that you get when you put women together in an office. I also struggled to handle a Gen-Z worker who was a pain in the ass, to put it mildly. Motherfucker agreed to replace printers in some rooms at some time and date, which had me organizing with local workers to avoid disturbing their schedules, only for the motherfucker to change his mind basically because he felt like replacing other printers. He also did things like leaving work early then telling his boss that I had claimed he could replace nothing more that day.

By the end, I was done with everything. My brain made it clear when I suddenly smelled of burnt dust, my right hand could barely hold my pen, and I lost sensitivity in the right half of my body. Hemiplegic migraine, so said a doctor younger than me. In the past, some doctors had gotten annoyed when I mentioned the fact that I had only started experiencing heart issues when they jabbed me with the Moderna poison, which now is widely known to cause heart problems. I have very, very little confidence in the medical profession after having had to deal with them both as a worker and as a patient.

But I figured, I’m unemployed, I’m unlikely to get work as a forty-year-old programmer who has only worked at it for nine months in the last ten years, at least under contract. So I called the HR person back and said that I was taking the contract. A month and a half at a new hospital dedicated purely to cancer patients. After I hung up, I groaned out of pure psychic pain. The anxiety in my chest was something akin to panic.

I was waiting for the bus when I received a call from HR. A supervisor. Asked me how come I had accepted a job at the other hospital when they had been informed by Occupational Health that I wasn’t taking offers as a technician. That I can’t choose to work as a technician for one hospital but not another. I told them that I thought Occupational Health had already handled that. They told me they would call back. I waited at the bus stop while construction workers drilled incredibly loudly close by, and some fucking imbecile listened to music without earbuds. I thought, as I do often, about how is it possible that people actually want to live in this world. About five minutes before my bus came, HR called back. I was supposed to meet with Occupational Health immediately.

So I took the bus to Donostia and met with the doctor who had seen me previously. I thought she had declared me unfit for the job position due to my autism, OCD, and 52% disability in general. My certification for “job fitness” is currently expired. She told me that I should have spoken with HR to tell them that I quit the job listings. Then she asked me if I had been looking for a job in the meantime. I told her no, that I had been dealing with autism-related issues and that I struggled to leave the house. Then I stopped talking because I felt like I would tear up.

In the end, she told me that she’d speak with HR and tell them not to call me for technician jobs anymore. Right now I’m beginning to feel relieved about it, but on my way back, I was in a bad place. Standing at the bus stop with my earbuds on, listening to nineties Weezer, while old people milled about close by, asking people about bus times. A young woman stopped before me to ask likely for the same thing, and I pointed at my earbuds without making eye contact. All I wanted, all I want really, is to be left the fuck alone. For the world to forget I exist. To have a small place for myself and to be left in peace.

Anyway, I guess that’s it. I really hope I’ll never hear from that public health organization again jobwise. But I suspect that I’ll receive a call from HR at some point for me to formalize abandoning the job listings.

In forty years, I feel like I haven’t changed at all in what matters. I’m still that child that wanted to be left to his devices and daydream the day away. Everything else is just garbage that society has piled up on me. What I’ve learned from my experience is that I’m not suited for anything that society demands of me. I have no plans for the future either. If it gets too bad, the recourse is a tall bridge. I don’t like being around anyway.

Life update (12/29/2025)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

For whatever reason, recently I’ve been thinking about the wound that has defined me the most. The majority of the stories I genuinely need to produce come back to that wound in one echo or another. Maybe it’s related to me having become forty-years-old. I would say middle-aged, but there’s no way in hell I’m living to eighty. Anyway, my fatal wound happened back when I was seven years old, when my mother asked me, as if you could ask a child to make such a decision, whether I wanted to move in with my older brother to free up my room so they could have another child.

My memory is abysmal, which I suspect is a blessing. Most of my forty years of living has been reduced to a bunch of photographs or sequences of frames that barely seem to cover anything. It’s like trying to reconstruct an epoch from the few fossils you come across. But I recall that until I was seven, I lived entangled to my subconscious. Like I was married to it. Daydreaming all day long. Making what my subconscious told me to create. Some adults that came across the stuff from those years were surprised. As in “a child that age doesn’t create stuff like this.” Unfortunately, it also included narratives that would make A Clockwork Orange blush; not for nothing I’ve always felt that I had darkness deep in me from birth. But the point is that I peaked back then, at about six or seven. When I truly communed with myself, and was whole.

From the moment I was put as an unwanted guest in my older brother’s room, until I turned eighteen and nearly beat him to a pulp, I was, a then-undiagnosed autistic kid with Pure O OCD, subjected to having the TV and radio on virtually always, including nights, because apparently enduring the silence was unbearable. I won’t get into my brother’s issues, but they’re plenty and complex in a way that anyone who has ever met him is surprised that such stuff even happens. I had been stripped of my safe space, of my solitude, of any corner purely for myself in which I could grow. I was like a plant forgotten under the stairs.

Looking back, the extreme to which I dissociated from my subconscious from then on is terrifying to think about. I genuinely came to believe that my natural instincts and impulses, everything that came from my brain without my conscious permission, was monstrous. I ceased knowing myself. I depersonalized. Throughout my teens I experienced something that only those who have endured the same thing will know I’m not exaggerating about: as I walked outside, I felt like I was commanding a puppet that I could barely coordinate, while I saw myself from the outside looking down, the edges of my vision constraining into a blurry tunnel. I slipped in and out of psychosis. The stuff I wrote back then was so incoherent that years later I threw it away because I feared that reading it again would contaminate me. And that included a novel about seven hundred pages long, which I rewrote again and again for years. I was sure I was going to die before I turned eighteen. I did pray to some eldritch god to come down and kill me. But I survived.

Shortly after my first job started, I saw how the rest of my life was going to be: enduring humiliation after humiliation, unbearable anxiety, under constant scrutiny as if every day was an exam I was sure to fail. Thankfully, I’ve never experienced a job like that again, but added to the despair I was already feeling, led me the closest I’ve ever been to erasing myself from this Earth. I’ve lost the memories of the aftermath, other than the fact that somehow I ended in the library, where my parents, who had been called by my job because I hadn’t shown up, found me. From then on, until my late twenties, with breaks of more unpaid internships than paid work, I basically lived as a hikikomori. In my late twenties, I thought that the only way I could make something out of my life was by selling my writings, of which I had done little since I was a child (somewhat counting the comics I drew in middle school). I wrote two books with a total of six novellas. They didn’t sell for shit, and mostly disturbed the people who read them. That discouraged me entirely, and I never wrote in Spanish again. However, writing those books helped me to slowly, laboriously, reconnect with my subconscious. Learn to recognize its desires and commands.

Early in my thirties, I started working in IT for a hospital. Terrible job that fought against my nature, and that I had to leave about seven to eight years later. But by then, now diagnosed and medicated for some other issues, I started producing fiction in English. This was by far my most prolific period. From seven to about twenty-seven years old, I identified with my conscious mind to a sickly degree, and believed that anything I couldn’t rationalize, any conclusion I didn’t reach through reason, was suspect, if not straight monstrous. But from my thirties onward, I no longer care, unless I’m forced to for the sake of money, about my conscious mind. It’s merely a tool to interpret and obey whatever my subconscious produces. The conscious mind also needs to be reigned in, because it acts as a lawyer, confusing and justifying what the subconscious has already decided, and often getting it completely wrong. I have learned that there are indeed monsters in me. I’ve also learned that I prefer the company of monsters.

That fatal wound in my past won’t heal. It broke my brain during development in ways that can never mend. I have to do the best I can with what I have. I don’t feel like interacting with humans, and those who have interacted with me for sustained periods of time (mostly at work), soon enough sense that there’s nobody “there.” In public, I’m a simulacrum of a human being. Left to my own devices, I’m some creature that doesn’t need definition nor to justify itself to anyone.

I also thought recently about something I witnessed when I was a teenager. I was returning home when I heard a commotion from four young people in their twenties who had parked in front of my parents’ apartment building. It was almost the same spot, if not the same, where my father parked the day I saw a UFO, when I looked up from the window only to find out it was right there. I wrote about it on this post, so I’m not going to repeat myself. Anyway, those young people in the car seemed freaked out, confused, out of it, but not in a “they’re drugged” way. They flagged down a passerby, and asked him if they were close to Barcelona. These weren’t foreigners; their plates were from Spain. The passerby, more disturbed than amused, scoffed and said, “Barcelona? You’re about seven hundred kilometers away! This is Irún, near the border with France.” The young people in the car, panicked, looked around frantically as if incapable of understanding how they had ended up there.

I haven’t made that up. I just don’t think about it often because it makes no sense. That day, I walked away, but I’ve imagined myself approaching them and asking, “What is the last thing you remember?” “Did you see any lights?” I imagine myself telling them that if anyone did this to them, they could have easily killed them but didn’t, so they should just try to relax and get on with their lives.

I don’t know what it means. That could be applied to the entirety of what I’ve lived through. Trying to understand myself is like spelunking with a dim light through passages that keep changing. And I’m still here because I just happen to be. I suspect that when I finally realize I’m breathing my last, a smile will be on my lips. Then, I will tend my hand inwards to the love of my life, who was there for me as a child when I didn’t have anyone else, and who waited patiently for years until I went down into that darkness to find her again.

Life update (12/12/2025)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I’ve woken up at three in the morning. Although I tried to fall asleep again, my brain started doing the rounds with sequences of intrusive thoughts which would have had me rolling around for hours, tangled with painful stuff, so I figured I could get to the computer and write some words about things that have crossed my mind recently.

It’s December, and temperatures have naturally gone down to the extent that most days I can’t sit outside to play the guitar, which I need to do for emotional regulation. I’m not comfortable doing it at home because it feels like I’m bothering the neighbors. Whenever we get a good enough day weather-wise, I take advantage of it to head to some nearby wooded area to play for about an hour and a half. I did that yesterday: went to one of the most deserted wooded paths I know and that I can be bothered to head to on foot, then sat down to play through my usual songs. A few people passed by, mostly folks with their dogs or running.

As I was playing, an old couple passed by, and the old man went out of his way to talk to me. He gestured to the surroundings and to the sky and said something like “We’re in nature.” I didn’t have much time to think about what this fool was on about as I played, so I just nodded at him so he would leave me alone. There’s something inherently wrong with people who interrupt someone while they’re playing an instrument. He must have taken the hint that I didn’t want to engage, but as he left, he said something like “Cheer up.” His quiet wife followed him.

What the fuck? I was objectively playing a sad song (Iron & Wine’s “Passing Afternoon”), but still. Do I look so sad that some random old idiot would go out of his way to comment on it? Perhaps I do look like that. I have lived with what feels like low-level depression ever since I was a child, which cyclically spikes into full-blown depression. It seems obvious from basic observation of other people that they don’t seem as down as I do on a daily basis. They must get some enjoyment out of being alive that completely escapes me. Most of my drive behind the complicated endeavors I engage with on a daily basis involves distracting myself from the feeling that life is an unbearable burden.

The objectively most positive reaction I’ve had to my playing the guitar (even though it bothered me) happened perhaps a couple of months ago, when I was playing at a park. I don’t play in the middle of it, but off the path, seated on my portable stool in front of a tree. Some woman in maybe her late twenties, maybe Central or South American (can’t tell easily these days), carrying a book, went out of her way to figure out where the guitar music was coming from, then she walked off the path and sat with her back against the nearest tree to read. That tree was at a distance of about what you would naturally place a bench from the next one. People don’t do this on this park.

She was clearly listening to my playing, which she did for the next full hour or so. Because I’m a maniac, I kept playing even though it was so dark I could no longer see the strings properly, but she was still sitting there. Once I finished, she also stood up and walked up to the path. I thought she was gone, but after I gathered my things and took to the path again, she was sitting on a bench. As I passed, she turned toward me smiling, and said “Thank you for your music.”

As usual, my instinctive reactions to people talking to me aren’t the kinds I can use; my instinct is either to stay quiet or to say something that wouldn’t be appropriate. In this case, what came to my mind was saying “It’s not my music.” Instead, I scrambled to figure out something fitting to say to someone who had gone out of their way to listen to me play. I said “Thank you… for liking it.” She laughed softly and said, “Yes, yes.” I turned around and followed the path heading out of the park, while I contained the creepy-crawly feeling I get on my skin half of the time that I interact with a member of this species.

I don’t know if the following is related, but it’s what my mind pivoted to: as I was lying in bed forty minutes ago, a vivid scene that years ago I used to play through regularly reappeared. It always started with sitting at the waiting room of a driving school only to find out that beside you sat the love of your life, the sole person in the world who understood how it felt to be born cursed by both your circumstances and your impulses. I’m talking about Oyasumi Punpun, which may be my favorite work of fiction in any medium. I daydream daily to survive psychologically, and years ago I used to revisit that connection over and over, giving it a more deserving outcome. Well, I don’t know if “more deserving,” but a better outcome.

That got me thinking that it feels like I’ve read through every single affecting manga that exists. Inio Asano, the author of Punpun, is clearly done: he’s only created jaded, bitter, and cynical shit for the last few years. It’s as if he no longer believes in honest meaning. While the aforementioned series is my favorite, my overall favorite author is Minoru Furuya (I wrote about his works on here). I immediately connected with the peculiar way his mind works in a manner that suggests to me that he’s also autistic and has OCD. Sadly, he seems to have retired back in 2016. Beyond manga, I can’t bring myself to read novels these days; the sole author I respected was Cormac McCarthy, but he’s dead. And it somewhat disheartened me to find out that McCarthy himself barely did anything new in the last twenty to thirty years of his life; his extremely-affecting last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, were conceived back in the seventies and eighties, when he actually lived through some of the experiences those narratives refer to.

I find myself, as a forty year old, feeling that I have nothing to do with this culture and this world in general, which seems achingly obvious the moment I leave my apartment. It feels like I’ve already experienced all the works that could affect me meaningfully. All the artists whose works I genuinely loved have lost it, retired, or died. Talking to actual human beings does close to nothing for me (I’m lucky if it does anything positive for me, even temporarily), so I can’t rely on that either. I wonder if this is what happens to people in the last stage of their lives: they feel so completely detached from the world that there’s no point engaging with it in any way. I recall the last image I had of my maternal grandfather, being pushed around on a wheelchair after his wife’s funeral, his head down, not having said a word the entire day that I recall. Never saw him again.

I do get those regularly, too: sudden images of people from my past I’ll never see again. That girl from middle school whom I’ve talked about a few times, who received a nasty scar that bisected her forehead. That basketball player with whom I was involved very briefly when I was seventeen or so; I’ve never liked someone I knew personally more than I liked her. A different teenage girl I met while I was hanging out with people I shouldn’t have been involved with; she was extremely self-conscious about scars on her face she got as a baby because the family dog attacked her. I dated her for merely a week before my craziness convinced her to stay away. Curiously, I have to go out of my way to remember the woman I dated for the longest time. The regret I feel for that relationship isn’t the “I wish I could have done better for her” that I get for those other people. I’m glad I haven’t seen that last one in about twenty years.

I guess that’s enough. Half past five in the morning. I’m going back to bed, back to the daydreams that will hopefully slide me back to sleep and therefore save me temporarily from this absurd nightmare of being conscious.

Life update (11/22/2025)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Yesterday, when I went out for groceries, I tried to change it up a bit, heading to a different neighborhood than usual so I could feel more alive than merely repeating the usual routines. Really cold November morning, about 4ºC. It seeped through my jeans, making me wish I had worn some leg warmers. For someone who recently wants to return to bed the moment he climbs out of it, I wished I could go back home and not leave again until spring. The experience of navigating through that supermarket, of listening to the people in it (customers, employees), felt surreal, as if I were exploring a snapshot from another era. I felt detached, simultaneously feeling invisible yet suspecting that others realized I didn’t belong, not just in the supermarket but in this world.

I had known that losing my beloved cat would hurt like a motherfucker, but I hadn’t realized that she was my emotional link to reality. In my teens, I was sure that I wouldn’t survive until adulthood. My first paying job ended with me having a panic attack, ditching the bus to work and instead intending to jump from somewhere high enough. I hadn’t planned anything from beyond that point, as I believed I wouldn’t be around anymore, so I hadn’t considered that my job would call the available phone numbers. That led to my parents finding me in the local library after I chickened out from killing myself. I retain very little in terms of memories from those moments, but I recall that sinking feeling of realizing that I was going to stick around for consequences even though I didn’t want to be here anymore.

Throughout these last twenty years, having endured many periods of suicidal ideation, what kept me moored was the notion that I didn’t want my cats to miss me. I couldn’t care to that extent about my parents or my siblings (I had to go back and add “or my siblings” there, as I had suddenly remembered they exist). Now, as a forty year old, about twenty years older than I thought I would live, I find myself out of a job, with no interested in rejoining society, with an inability to care for human beings mainly due to my high-functioning autism and a generous dose of bad experiences, and a sense of detachment that I thought I had left behind in my teens. Even regular sounds seem strange now. Forming sentences feels awkward and unnatural. I recall that while I was browsing in that supermarket, I wondered if something was physically wrong with my brain, as I had trouble registering what was going on around me and even understanding what I was looking at.

Obviously I’m going through a crisis, which has found me ill-suited to navigate it. The only comfortable moments I’ve had recently had been evading myself in my usual daydreams involving a certain blonde American who died in 1972, but I also enjoyed watching Vince Gilligan’s new show Pluribus, somewhat against myself, as I don’t find the concept that interesting. I feel that I can’t do anything about the crisis itself or what’s going on in my brain other than distract myself to the best of my abilities until I settle into a new angle of repose. I’ve gone through many such fundamental changes. I’m not remotely the same person who wrote my novel My Own Desert Places, I’m not the same person who wrote We’re Fucked, neither the one who mourned for his long-dead girlfriend in Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. I don’t know where those people went. Ultimately I can only do whatever my mercurial subconscious tasks me with doing, as I don’t get any emotional rewards out of doing anything else.

I suspect there’s plenty more to be said, but I intend to distract myself with my programming project. This afternoon I’ll try to leave the apartment for a while, solely to retain the sense that I’m still alive. One foot after the other.