The beta-blockers that I take for my heart issues put me out of commission by eight in the evening (if I’m that lucky). Last night I fell asleep at nine, only to wake up from a nightmare at midnight. Didn’t sleep a wink the rest of the night. At five I finally dragged my weary old bones to my desk and freewrote the remainder of chapter 112 of my ongoing novel. At six I prepared myself some decaf, took a shit, showered, then left for work.

Such nights, I try to force myself to sleep, but usually my brain falls into sequences of daydreams slash intrusive thoughts that I don’t recall entering. They force me to confront all kinds of nasty crap, from bad memories to hypothetical situations from which I could need to defend myself.

Among the many things that my brain bothered me with last night were a couple of questions: you’re supposed to be a novelist, right? Then how come you disdain most novels you come across? Well, brain, if you should know, I abandon most novels I start because the majority annoy the living hell out of me. The modern ones are much worse; the author is in a hurry to assure the reader (but mainly the gatekeepers) that he or she is onboard with the Sole-Allowed Ideology, the secular god of the godless (and I say that as an atheist). As many writers have said, you won’t get published these days if you don’t belong to the right demographics and don’t believe the Right Things. I’m an ethnic European dude who wishes that the Romans had never tolerated the growth of Abrahamic religions, so I’m pretty much toast. I also write smut, though, which is hard to publish.

Politics aside, I feel that most writers waste my fucking time. I’m a hedonist: I care about beauty and about having fun. That’s not to say that I elude bad thoughts (as if I could); there’s plenty of beauty in the black depths, often more than in the light. But my point is, I can hardly remember what novels gave me what I sought from them.

In my early twenties I fell in love with Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, which is, curiously enough, the least Murakami-ish of his novels as far as I’m aware. Years later I found out that he got the urge to write that novel after a girlfriend he cheated on and abandoned quite cruelly ended up killing herself; Murakami was in his mid-thirties or so when he found out about her death, and it impacted him. Destroyed him, perhaps.

I’m trying to remember what other novels impacted me in a similar way. Maybe John Fowles’ The Collector, and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. To a lesser degree, Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity. Can’t remember any other at the moment. For me, they have in common that you live through those novels. You see what the protagonists see, you touch what they’re touching, you feel what they’re feeling, and they rarely pull you out of the then-and-there. That’s what I inject into my own stories: the experience of sensing the world through a peculiar person, forcing me (as the writer) to deal with their feelings, neuroses, delusions, as they try to better or ruin their life. I want to be there, mainly because I have never felt “here” in my own life. The vicarious escape allows me to forget for a while that after all this time I’m still me.

Last night’s rumination made me think about my previous novel, first one in English, titled My Own Desert Places, about some ghost who comes back to life because she fell in love with a suicidal person. I remember moments from that fictional life as if they were memories of mine, stronger than most moments I’ve actually lived through. I think that for some people, maybe just defective ones, the act of immersing themselves in producing such narratives convinces their brains to record those moments as real experiences. I remember eating a lemon ice cream with the protagonist’s beloved while staring at the bay of a neighboring town. I recall when the protagonist lost her mind during a long trip to Asturias. I remember hanging out in the balcony of a house that doesn’t exist while looking at and talking to someone who never existed. I feel pangs of pain and regret for the griefs that the story contained. In a few months I intend to revise the whole thing (mostly to catch glaring errors) and republish it, but I suspect that I will need to take advantage of a couple of weeks of unemployment to withstand the mood changes to which the process will subject me.

As I kept thinking last night, I remembered a series of books that I truly enjoyed, that I looked forward to reading as a teen: Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. What a clever, funny bastard that guy was. I wanted to continue reading those novels if only to find out what witty thoughts or images he would come up with, many of which made me smile or laugh. Why did I stop reading his stuff? Back in my early twenties, it became obvious that Terry was dying of whatever brain shit ended up sending him to his grave, and that someone else, likely his daughter, was writing his books. But as an adult, I think I never returned to his works because I associated them with my miserable middle school and high school years, of which I remember very little likely due to trauma-induced amnesia. I’m not sure if I’m exaggerating with that, given that I was constantly slipping in and out of psychosis; I was an undiagnosed autistic teen who lacked a place to be himself and do the things he needed to do, and who was never left alone. I despise my teenage years to the extent that I threw away the vast majority of my writings from that era (and I was close to reaching a million words by the time I was nineteen), as well as the letters I received from people I knew. That last part I regret; years later, I wished I would have gotten further insight into some people I knew from back then (as referenced in my free verse poem “A Ghastly Scar”).

Anyway, I figured out the reading order of Pratchett’s City Watch series, and since then I’ve already read through twenty percent of his Guards! Guards!. Either Pratchett influenced what I wrote later on, or he just had the same notions about what I want out of fiction: the joy of coming across interesting “images,” and being amused and intrigued by silly and/or absurd situations. Those are what I look forward the most when I’m writing my own stuff, and I usually feel that a chapter is good enough when I have come up with a few such instances.

Tomorrow I have to visit my cardiologist for a check-up, and I’m still not sure to what extent I will share that I feel in a daze during most of my workday (even woozy at times, like today when I was fixing a printer’s network connection), perhaps due to the beta-blockers I’m forced to take in apparent perpetuity. Also, that ever since a certain jab, the pressure I feel in the area of my heart has gotten worse over time, although I don’t feel it daily. Last week, after five days of covid, when I left the house to figure out if I had recovered enough to take a walk, for a long minute I felt a stabbing pain in my old ticker. And I’m reluctant to share that with my appointed cardiologist because the fucker got annoyed at the reality that the jab caused my heart damage, which a different cardiologist confirmed. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if any of these days I simply pass out suddenly and crack my head open against the floor, or end up with ventricular fibrillation, which would drop me in seconds. Just today, one of my female coworkers was missing because her brother, as he was jogging near his home, passed out for no apparent reason and broke his nose, and now he’s in Intensive Care. Months ago, a different coworker’s brother, a football player in his early twenties who was getting regular check-ups, dropped dead in the shower. His remains were found about a week later, hot water still running.

I’ve barely started the current contract and I already yearn for it to end. I’ll never get used to the life of an adult. I want to wander around while daydreaming and scribbling nonsense in notebooks like I spent my days doing as a kid.

Last night, at one in the morning, I was recovering from covid by playing Starfield; I went through a compelling mission with Sarah Morgan in Cassiopeia to find debris from her past. I needed to take a shit, so I quit the game, shut off my computer, and went to the bathroom as the last thing to do before bed.

It turned out to be one of those annoying shits that I have often, and that involve wiping over and over. After one of the first attempts to stem the presence of fecal residue on the toilet paper, I noticed that it didn’t smell like anything. I thought, “Curious. How could I have eaten so differently these past few days that my shit doesn’t smell like anything?” Alarms went off in my head. I tried to smell the soiled toilet paper from an inch away. It didn’t smell like anything at all.

As someone with IBS, which has in plenty of ways ruined my life by itself, I didn’t think I would miss the smell of shit. Shortly after, I checked other normally odorous stuff around the apartment, only to further solidify the realization that, indeed, everything smells as if their “smell” property had been set to null. Realizing that I had lost my sense of smell was one of the oddest moments of my life.

It’s also very common with covid, apparently. A couple of online articles suggested that sixty percent of those infected with this bioweapon end up losing their sense of smell, only to recover it in about one to three months. About twenty percent of those who lose the sense of smell, though, apparently never recover it properly, or entirely. That would be very unfortunate.

It’s my fifth day with covid, and I’ll likely still test positive, but this is the last proper day of rest/leisure before I consider whether or not I should return to work. I don’t like the prospect of going to the office and sitting between two coworkers while I’m wearing a mask and them knowing that I can still share this wonderful gift with them. However, as much as I’d like to give myself the rest of the week off, the thought makes me feel guilty; my current contract started last Wednesday.

I’ve barely seen the light of day in five days, but thankfully I’m used to tougher periods of reclusion; during my worst times in my twenties, I think I didn’t leave the house for about three weeks. I would do quite well in solitary confinement, if any of my crimes ever land me in prison.

Anyway, Starfield is cool; the internet has been shitting on it quite unfairly. Fantastic set designs, good gunplay, better writing than Fallout 4 and most of Skyrim (except for the in-game books, which suck ass), convincing facial animations (although not remotely as good as the motion-captured ones from Baldur’s Gate 3).

Starfield lacks the magic of Skyrim, but so did Fallout 4, and over the years I’ve gotten the feeling that it’s impossible to create a “magical” game universe unless it’s literally a fantasy world that features magic. Besides, Skyrim itself wasn’t as magical as its ancestor Morrowind, which still has an active community that mainly plays through a fan-made engine called OpenMW. That damn game is twenty-one years old.

I think plenty of players just landed on a random planet, ran through a few of the procedurally set dungeons, which are bleak and generally lifeless, and let that color their impression of the whole game. Many people went to Skyrim and Fallout 4 for the aimless exploration of a county/province on foot, and that doesn’t exist as such in this game. It’s like an open-world Mass Effect but without the aliens.

It’s evening on a September Sunday, and I have covid. Turns out that covid, as far as my thirty-eight-year-old body goes, isn’t that bad. On Friday, I suffered a bit in the office; I always feel like shit whenever I leave a room where I’m the only person present, but on top of that, I had to deal with a runny nose, hot flashes, and severe diarrhea. As I was waiting for the train to carry me back to my rotting city, I suspected that the thermometer, once I made use of it at home, would have registered 37,2ºC or so (98.96 Fahrenheit), but to my surprise, I had a fever of 38,7ºC (101.66 Fahrenheit). In previous cases, a fever of 38,7ºC would have felt like I was close to slipping into delirium.

Since then, I have been taking medicine that I won’t bother to name, thanks to my ex-nurse drug dealer who also happens to be my mother. The fever has been reacting weirdly to the drugs as well; it should have decreased significantly in less than an hour, but it took like two hours and a half to react. Other than having a nasal congestion, a throat ache, and feeling a bit weird, I’m quite fine, at least when it comes to lying in bed or sitting on a chair located next to the bed.

I’ve dealt with passive suicidal ideation for as long as I can remember (thank you autism, OCD, and a shitty existence in general), so regarding surgeries and diseases, I have Ivan Drago’s attitude:

But it does seem that I will survive this one. Still, fuck you China and some Democrats in the US for creating this monster.

According to what I’ve looked up on this matter, I’ll probably test positive for about five days, so at the earliest, I could be able to return to the office on Thursday. I will have to wear a mask for about five more days or so, unfortunately. It’s funny how the entire world (or at least the “elites” and their goons) has its collective panties in a twist due to CO2, but they’re fine with breathing in your own CO2 for the length of a workday.

Anyway, why are you reading this? Don’t you have better things to do, like prancing in the sunset, making love to your partner on a balcony, or whatever you normal people do? I swear, I don’t know how I even keep the 124 subscribers with which I have ended up.

Last Tuesday I was playing Starfield when I received a lovely call: I was needed back at the office. Ever since, I have wasted invested three days of my extremely limited life serving the province or whatever the hell I’m doing there. Some shit happened on Wednesday, but that’s besides the point today. You see, I was working the afternoon shift when I started feeling that the hours were stretching longer and longer. My nose was leaking. I was shivering. The back of my head hurt. I exploded with diarrhea a couple of times, hopefully scaring the custodians. I couldn’t wait to leave.

On the couple of rides back (a bus and a train), I felt like I was losing it a bit. Hot flashes kept coursing through my body. This decaying society loomed even more repugnant than usual. When I got home, the couple of thermometers displayed 38,7ºC (101.66 Fahrenheit). A quick test later proved that I have covid. Hey, perhaps the latest “booster vaccine” didn’t give me atrial fibrillation for nothing.

I called my mother (former nurse) for some advice. She said, “I told you to never call me again, freak.” I didn’t ask to be born.

Anyway, I’m going to steal a few phrases from Inio Asano’s magnum opus for this development: “When it’s my time to leave, I’d like to to vanish like an insignificant bubble, and fade away from everyone’s memories as well.”

I won’t be able to see the Milky Way this year or the next, and all future Tanabata nights will be too cloudy, and yet the world won’t end nor will humanity perish.

I have wasted most of this Monday morning anxiously waiting for a call from the office; last week someone took a medical leave, but they didn’t request a replacement because the secretary in charge returned to work today. However, I haven’t been recalled to work, even though I’m first in the rankings. No idea why.

It’s not like I want to, of course. In fact, even though my last contract lasted about a month and a half, it burned me out socially; either I had to tolerate the usual group that behaves like schoolchildren in recess, or else I had to deal with the fact that two people, one of them my main boss, didn’t want me there, even though I’m not sure what changed in the meantime. My ability to read the intentions and motivations of human beings is very limited.

I’m falling more and more into my old recluse slash hikikomori mindset, which is how I spent most of my twenties: I don’t want to interact with anyone, neither in person nor online, and whenever I try to push myself to leave the apartment for a walk, I do so despite the knowledge that there’s nothing for me out there. I’m a stranger in this society that is progressively getting more dangerous; today, a street away from my place, I witnessed a couple of police patrols come arrest two shirtless guys in their early twenties or so, who were yelling loudly in their language. I came in late and didn’t stick around, but the feeling of danger stands, as well as the notion that soon enough I will find myself old in a city that has gradually turned into another Marseille.

Two weeks ago, I took a bus to the opposite outskirts of my city so I could see some horses (wealthy area with private clubs and such), but the sights along the way dishearten me a bit more every time. It’s not like I could spend much time walking around that quiet neighborhood; whenever I leave the safety of a closed room in which I’m the only person present, my digestive system, due to anxiety or whatever, sets a countdown timer for the next time I’ll have to suffer in a bathroom.

It’s just more of the usual complaining. No wonder I daydream often about being someone entirely different. My need to write fiction is likely part of it. I’m done with life in general; the only reliable way I can fight against that feeling is by losing myself in artistic endeavors, which is why I’m trying to focus on starting the next scene of my novel that’ll eventually end up as a self-published ebook, so I can move on to the next project that’ll keep me going for a while longer.

Anyway, I just wanted to get this off my chest for whatever reason.

Yesterday I heard through the grapevine that someone at work had taken a medical leave. Knowing the guy, it’s probably his back, which would mean a contract of two weeks or so for the (un)fortunate person who would get hired to cover him. It just happens that at the moment I’m first on the rankings, so I anxiously waited all morning for the phone call. It never came. That’s weird.

I haven’t been called today either. I considered two possibilities: they pushed some political bullshit so that the person who would cover him would need to know Basque, a language I don’t speak. The second possibility involves my main boss doing some shady shit to jump over me and hire someone else; during the last contract, that boss refused to acknowledge my existence, as far as I know only because I refused to accept a new contract under much shadier circumstances last January, as I needed to rest due to my heart injury.

I wasn’t worrying too much; after all, I have money saved, and I’m a recluse who can barely tolerate spending fifteen minutes around people, let alone a whole working day. Then I noticed that I had received my check for August. I worked until the sixteenth, but they have paid me as if I had worked the entire month. What the hell?

I visited the intranet to check if they had screwed up which days I had actually worked. It does reflect that I haven’t worked all month, but in addition, to my annoyance, I’m registered as if I hadn’t worked on the 16th. You see, I was covering the leave of a complete dickhead who never calls in advance to inform that he’s returning; whoever is working in his place finds out that very day, at the office, that he has gone to work for nothing, because nobody will pay him for those eight or so hours as the contract officially ended the previous day. I still worked that entire day, because my boss, who also can’t stand the other coworker, assured me that he would talk to the proper department so that they end up paying me for that working day. I also finished a meaty ticket that had kept me busy for days, so it worked out for my boss. However, as mentioned, I don’t appear in the intranet as if I had been present at the office that day.

What’s going to happen is probably the following: the next time I get hired to cover someone’s leave or vacation, I’ll find out that I haven’t been paid for about two weeks of work. If I cared to contact the corresponding department, they’d tell me, “we screwed up, so you owed us money.” It already happened to me once. In addition, I would find out that they counted the sixteenth as not worked, which would solidify my decision, no matter what any of my bosses say, to get my things and leave the next time the coworker whose leave I’m covering suddenly returns for his shift.

Do I care much about this matter? Not really, because instead of wasting my day, as well as my mental and physical health, at work, I got to sit at my desk and finish the latest chapter of my ongoing novel (I write them with one hand; that’s why they take so long). Too bad I will never earn a living wage through writing.

If you live in the Basque country and are considering working for the public health organization, well, you’ll probably end up working there anyway. But just know that they will screw you over, and the whole experience will likely suck balls. Plenty of doctors and nurses have complained around me. On the bright side, I also heard through the grapevine that one of the coworkers I can’t stand is taking a transfer to Vitoria, so that’ll be one less headache.

Anyway, now to more important matters than whether or not I have a job: what about that Starfield, huh? Early Access launches in one day and six hours. Can’t wait to find out if the makers of Skyrim and Fallout 4 have been wasting their time and energies by planning this new universe during the last twenty-five years. As long as I can visit some random planet of the thousand or so available and just enjoy a peaceful, solitary time by wandering through a barren alien wasteland, I’ll consider the money well spent. The faction questlines are likely great as well.

Check out the launch trailer:

Ad astra!