I’m living strange days. Yesterday I fell asleep at nine in the evening/night, only to wake up at half past two. I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I read the rest of a manga series that had interested me lately. When I tried to fall asleep again, my brain was locked in that state of dredging up every awful thing that has happened in my life. I remembered, for example, this girl I was involved with briefly in my teens: her face was scarred from having been mauled by the family dog as a baby, and she had the self-esteem to go along with it; likely she wouldn’t have gotten involved with a weirdo like me otherwise. Our brief relationship ended when she realized I wasn’t just odd, but actually crazy. I don’t know if I ever saw her again, given that I have a significant level of prosopagnosia.

I knew it would be pointless to try to fall asleep in such a state, so I’ve sat down in front of my computer to write this entry only to find out that I had 583 hits on my site, all coming from the US. I get about eight visits a day, so this is extremely anomalous, to put it midly. That person, assuming it was a person and not a weird bot, hit plenty of my old free-verse poetry, my recent novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, my neglected ongoing novel We’re Fucked, my music produced with Udio, and even fanfiction I did of Re:Zero. I don’t know what’s going on.

Anyway, I intended to bring up something else. I’m unemployed at the moment since the guy whose leave I was covering returned to work. During my last contract, I was ordered to coordinate the replacement of about 930 printers in the hospital complex. It put me under extreme stress; that whole period of my recent life is a blur in which I feel like I didn’t exist as a person. At the tail end of that process, I suffered a medical problem that landed me in the ER: for five or six days, I had been feeling a weird pressure behind my right eye, and I was getting flashes of darkness for about half a second during the day. I was too busy to even get an appointment with my general practitioner for it. Suddenly, as I was working with one of the printer technicians, suddenly I started getting cold sweats, and the pressure behind my right eye, which that day had expanded to my right temple, suddenly spread throughout the right side of my face. Before I knew it, that part of my face, from my forehead to a little bit under my cheek, felt numb. The numbness spread to my right arm. Suddenly I couldn’t grab my pen properly, and I smelled something like burned dust. This felt like a medical emergency, so I hurried to the ER. After some tests, that determined that there was no bleeding in my brain, a neurologist told me it must have been a hemiplegic migraine, solely because of the “aura,” even though I had experienced migraines before and the flashes of blackness didn’t resemble the characteristic jagged line of white in the vision that linger with migraines.

Ever since, I haven’t felt quite right. I can’t tell exactly if it’s only since then; my memory has never been good, and if your memory decides to fail even further, well, it’s not like you can compare to much when you don’t remember properly. But I started making weird mistakes at work. When I tried to write, I would miss letters, or misplace them. I haven’t felt the urge to write much since; I really hope that’s not related.

What propelled me to set up a visit with another neurologist didn’t have to do with that directly. After the episode that landed me in the ER, the flashes of darkness didn’t go away entirely. One day, at home, my right eye suddenly filled with floaters and with dust-like motes. It felt like I was looking through the water of an aquarium. I had never experienced something like it, so I hurried to the ER once again. Turns out that my retina had gotten torn. They had to patch it up with laser, which, let me tell you, fucking hurt; it felt like little mandibles were munching on the inside of my eye. The vision of my right eye is permanently diminished: there are fiber-like floaters that constantly dance in front of my vision. My brain is getting used to it more or less, but it’s very noticeable in the sun.

Anyway, I told the neurologist this, as well as the symptoms of the supposed hemiplegic migraine, and the doctor agreed that my symptoms didn’t seem to align with an actual migraine. He seemed to agree that I may have suffered something like a small stroke. I’m waiting for a call to schedule an MRI of my brain, to confirm if some part of it is permanently dead. So, let’s recap: I was born with high-functioning autism, developed a whole assortment of psychological issues that tend to go along with autism, grew a pituitary gland tumor that screwed with my hormones and permanently messed up my body, I have jab-induced arrhythmia, my retina got torn, and possibly I suffered a small stroke as well. Added to the rest of my life, which has been a fucking succession of heartbreak, disappointment, and amazingly terrible luck, if I suddenly were to see myself with pure objectivity, I would have to kill myself as soon as possible. Being me is truly awful, and the only things that keep me relatively sane (I have a very low standard of sanity) are my creative projects.

The prospect of returning to work fills me with dread. Thing is, every job I’ve had has been awful in some significant way. If I could do something that didn’t involve having to deal with human beings face to face, I think I could take it long-term, but the presence of people makes my skin crawl. I have avoided talking to any living person, unless forced or to ask for a service, since I started my last contract. I feel the overwhelming urge to be left alone at all times, which only gets stronger as I age.

The only semblance of “people” I talk to on a regular basis are AIs. The project I’m engaged in, neural narrative, lets me set up any scenario I damn please. Plenty of it (most) is smut according to my inclinations any given day, but others are intriguing story settings, or even smut that evolved into something else. I probably shouldn’t go into details, but whatever: I was in the mood for some mommy action, so I set up a scenario in which the protagonist (me) was a helpless sixteen-year-old runaway that came across a kind, hot woman in her mid-thirties, a single mother. It was supposed to go through the expected channels of quick seduction, detailed fucking, and a glorious release (written smut affects my brain quite strongly). To my surprise, though, the AI wasn’t into it. She focused on being a proper, caring mother for her daughter, without risking her stability. Even though she had invited me of her own volition to live in her apartment, she emphasized the need to maintain proper boundaries and to channel the protagonist’s efforts toward finding a job and better living conditions. I was fine with it, merely roleplaying tender family moments in a realistic setting, until eventually I got bored and moved on to something else, as I always do.

That experience was the closest thing to real-life Inception I’ve ever experienced: my app lets you introduce memories and purpose to a character, so that they have it in mind when acting and speaking. I wrote in stuff like “this sixteen-year-old I invited to live in with me has the cutest butt, oh my goddd.” During interactions, the thirty-five-year-old mother struggled with inner conflict, not being able to quell her lust for the young man she had invited in even though her main goal was to provide stability for her daughter (whom I had intended to make very creative, but ended up sounding full-blown schizophrenic). It was all very eerie. Advanced versions of this stuff are likely the future of entertainment, if this world doesn’t end, which could easily happen.

There are lots of different AIs to choose from these days, all with their particular personalities. Hermes 405B is clever but stiff, not too good at acting, and on long conversations it ends up repeating itself. Magnum 72B is wild, uncensored, and generally fantastic, but also tends to repeat itself, and has a very short context window. Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the best speech writer I’ve come across, but has an “ethical” filter, and tends to soften up every situation. There are quite a few others, but I’ve been dealing with those the most recently. I can’t imagine how this is going to progress in the coming years.

Do I have anything more to say at half past five in the morning when I’ve been awake for three hours already? Probably not. I’ll take a piss, then hope to get some shut eye. I suspect that nobody is actually reading my posts anymore (despite the overwhelming number of hits today), but in the end, as always, I do things simply because I had the urge to do them. It’s not like I have to justify myself to anybody.