Today and tomorrow I’m on the afternoon three-to-ten shift. This morning I woke up at half past eight. When I got up from bed, my body felt twice as heavy. It didn’t take me long to wish I could just crawl back into bed. I barely pulled off a paragraph of my ongoing novel before I quit, because pushing myself when I’m not feeling it is a recipe for me to end up hating a task. I ended up browsing YouTube idly throughout most of my spare time.

At half past one, when I needed to walk up to the bus stop to take the vehicle that would carry me to a train that would carry me to another bus that would carry me to the hospital complex where I work, I desperately wished to be asleep. The prospect of enduring through a whole afternoon and evening of bullshit at work seemed like a genuine torture. The midday light was too bright, everything irritated the hell out of me, and when I finally got to the hospital, answering my coworkers involved fishing words out of my throat, and my voice came out raspy. I felt numb, confused, slow, unable to focus properly on my tasks. A cold ache in my chest wouldn’t go away. I had to face reality: my oldest, most loyal friend had returned for a visit.

If I only went to work when I feel like I can endure half a day of that bullshit, I would be on medical leave through most of my contracts. This adulting thing is beyond me. Who would want to do it? I guess if you must support a family, kids and such, you have that drive, which I can barely understand. But if you already know you’re going to die on your own, without burdening anyone with your faulty genes? What’s the point of all this? I’m basically working for the privilege to continue existing, even though I don’t even like being alive.

Pointless musings, as usual. Besides masturbation, I’ve only felt good this last couple of days while I was immersed in the manga I was reading (about three different ones), so no wonder I’m so attached to them. I’ve tried to get back into playing the guitar, but, man, my fingers are slow. I’d love to buy a new VR headset, but I’m waiting for a reliable new generation to come; I have the HP Reverb G2 Mark I, and its ability to track the controllers is simply not good enough, which has made me miss lots of interesting experiences. One of the best VR experiences I had involved playing through the first act of Cyberpunk 2077. I felt incredibly immersed, but by the end I decided that I didn’t want to compromise the quality of the experience; I don’t have a good enough GPU to run it similarly to the original, so I’m waiting for the nVidia 5000 series. It’s going to make a dent into my savings, but if anything I have is money. Too bad money can’t buy a brain that doesn’t make me feel terrible most of the time, or a body in which I want to live.

Yesterday I saw a stupid time travel movie from 2023 about a girl who goes back to 1987 to stop her mother’s killer. I have something of a savior complex, and I love time travel stories particularly if they involve saving someone. However, the movie ended up being a reminder of why I hate the modern West. If you’ve watched it, you probably know why. I don’t want to waste time detailing my problems with it. I also tried to get into that The Fall Guy movie, starring Ryan Gosling, whom I usually like, but it didn’t hold my interest. Not sure why. Most movies feel too artificial, too fake. It certainly doesn’t help that I don’t like seeing human beings even on a screen, so every movie and show has to counteract my innate disdain for my own species.

Anyway, it’s eight in the afternoon and I’m alone in the office. My coworker has already left for the day. I’m lounging here, writing these pointless words, hoping nobody calls with an issue. That’s all I had to say, I suppose. I feel like I’ve become a Minoru Furuya protagonist, and that reminds me of the sad fact that Furuya hasn’t worked on a new manga since 2017.

I fear I’ve reached the end of the line when it comes to my work on my Python app neural narrative. All the significant features it seems to need are implemented, and I don’t find any issue while using it that makes me feel like I have to stop and implement something. That’s a huge problem for my brain; I always need to be progressing creatively, because that’s the sole bulwark against the vastness of despair and hopelessness that lies at the bottom of everything. I’ve been feeling it these past couple of days: right after waking up, I just wanted to lie down again, cover myself from head to toe with the bedclothes, and pretend I didn’t exist. I’ve done that for an hour or so these past couple of days.

My main thing has always been writing, even in times when I was so down in the dumps, sometimes for years at a time, that I couldn’t produce anything. Right now, though, I feel reluctant to engage with my ongoing novel again. I also have a song half-produced on Udio that I feel like I can’t return to. I fear this mental state is related to the episode I suffered at work back in September, for which I’m getting an MRI done some time this month or the next. In general, I’m falling into utter apathy.

Every day, I try to go out and spend at least a couple of hours walking around, which usually ends with me sitting at some quiet place to read, but the state of society only increases my sense of hopelessness. There’s nothing out there for me, and I feel more and more like a stranger in my own country with every passing year. If I could organize myself to do so, and had those kinds of funds, I would move somewhere more isolated, but I’m not sure where that could be. It’s a pointless daydream anyway.

What to say, what to say. Some YouTubers I respect recommended The Penguin, a spin-off show of that newest Batman movie. I didn’t even enjoy the movie; I turned it off after forty minutes or so. However, Colin Farrell, an actor who is always compelling, does an amazing job as the titular character of the series, and it’s very cleverly written. I’ve just watched a couple of hours of it (the first two episodes), but I intend to watch the rest. Regarding movies, I can only recall having watched two movies this year: the Deadpool one, which was fun, and The Substance, which seemed intriguing enough. Well, I don’t know if I can recommend that last one to anyone. It’s a severe body horror tale with very good cinematography but a script that believes itself to be far more clever than it is. The dialogues are atrocious, and most male characters are a combination of predatory, retarded and oblivious. However, the movie did manage to make me feel plenty of things, like utter disgust at food, and extreme discomfort. I consider both good things, because for these past twenty years or so, most of what Hollywood has spewed out has been nothing but ideologically-driven garbage, ever since marxists went full masks-off instead of more-or-less cleverly disguising it. They’ve been doing this from the beginning; check out whom they based the character of Victor Laszlo off in Casablanca, read about the plan that original guy had for Europe, a plan that ended up getting financed by “American” bankers and turned into the so-called European Union. But that’s not a subject I want to get deep into at the moment.

Anyway, my brain feels seriously off. I’ll get recalled to work any day, but I feel completely unprepared for it. I keep watching YouTube videos of people who died young, who mysteriously disappeared, who have become near unrecognizable due to the passage of time… Man, bring me back to the fucking nineties. Modern civilization fell with those two towers.