I work IT at a hospital, so as you might imagine, I’m living a nightmare. Yesterday morning at about seven in the morning, some dickhead working for CrowdStrike decided to push an update incompatible with certain builds of Windows (not sure about the specifics), causing dozens, potentially hundreds of PCs on my hospital to be unable to load into Windows. The only way to fix it is to walk over to the computer (which may be located in any of the numerous buildings of the hospital complex), claim a working computer to access remotely my office workstation, and perform the following steps on the inoperative PC:

1. Reset it until, instead of constant blue screens of death, you get the chance to restart it in Safe Mode.
2. Enter the base admin’s credentials, which regularly change, so I need to access my office computer remotely to retrieve them.
3. Remove every instance of the file C-00000291*.sys located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike.
4. Restart the PC and hope that everything is solved.

That might not sound like much, but given how slow the computers around here are, solving each case might take about thirty minutes, and that’s not counting the process of locating them then heading over there and back.

It’s not just the users’ computers, though: both local and remote servers have gotten screwed as well. These last few months I’ve been tasked with coordinating three technicians to replace about 930 printers. Yesterday, the print server was down, meaning that only those PCs physically connected to a printer could print. Some obscure servers in unknown locations have also died.

An hour ago, the engineer on call has informed me that all user permissions have gotten wiped, meaning that thousands of employees can’t access some basic applications. I can only hope that the relation of permissions still exists somewhere, or else I’m talking months of work returning everybody to normal.

On top of that, which is the worst issue I’ve come across so far, some odd stuff has stopped working: the card readers installed on some warehouses don’t read cards all of a sudden, and we don’t know why; Some obscure apps related to medical specialties don’t work properly, maybe because they’ve lost connection to wherever they usually reached, etc.

Until yesterday morning, I already considered my regular life a nightmare, due to the constant pressure upon my mental health and poor heart caused by managing three technicians and dealing with about a couple dozen random users (nurses, admins, doctors) every day, so they would allow us to change their printers. Even years from now, I bet I’ll still have nightmares about users whining, “You’re changing my printer? Whyyyyy? It works well right now! Can’t you change it for one in color? I don’t like the new printer, I can’t cancel the printing process fast enough when it’s printing something I don’t want to print. The new printer is too noisy, can’t you make it quieter?” I already disliked human beings to begin with, but this process has cemented the notion that most people will annoy or make things more difficult for you if they can, even if all they get in exchange is to feel slightly superior for a moment.

One a less despairing note, I’m surprised by how many people greet me by my name. I come up to some random medical department and face some person (usually a woman) whom I rarely recall ever seeing (due to this face blindness of mine), and sometimes that person smiles at me and calls me by my name. I don’t retain people’s names, partly, I suppose, due to my lack of interest in humans. But I can only assume that most people genuinely do enjoy interacting with others in person and that brightens their day somewhat, even if the person they’re interacting with is a computer technician that an employee recently described as “big and bearded” (he didn’t know he was talking to me on the phone).

Anyway, I want this contract to end so I can return to blessed unemployment, which I’ll spend writing, producing songs, reading, watching shows, walking in the woods, and jerking off to pure filth. But I must earn money monthly, money that each year is worth less, hundreds of which the government steals from my paycheck to fundamentally change my society into something hostile for my kind. How grand!

Whoever is reading these whining words, I hope you’re living it up not having to work for a living, relying on someone else to pay your bills, hopefully a beautiful, big-breasted mommy type who calls you a good boy or girl in bed. Just know that I’d strangle you to take your place.

I’ve been quite busy this month. Regarding the responsibilities that add money to my bank account, I’m heading a project to replace hundreds of printers in the hospital complex where I work, and that’s on top of my usual tasks as a computer technician. For the first time in my life, I’m in charge of two subordinates. Of course, I don’t want to be involved with any of it, but I haven’t managed to land a better job. Anyway, I like the printer technicians just fine. Most interesting detail for me: the last name of one of them is Lorenzo; one of those coincidences that have happened often with my creative projects. If the name Lorenzo doesn’t mean anything to you, you must not have been listening to my songs. I’ve used and listened to that name an unhealthy amount of times ever since I started producing songs with Udio.

In my spare time, I’m either working on my ongoing novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, that unfortunately very few people seem to like, or else producing songs thanks to the aforementioned revolutionary AI service Udio. I’ve loved creating songs through it from the very first beta, that offered you 33 seconds-long chunks of music that you had to either accept or discard; I recall the frustration of loving a part of a segment, only to want to curse at the AI because it blurted out gibberish at some part of it. However, ever since they included the ability to trim and inpaint, I’ve worked with my characteristic obsessiveness at every damn detail of them to ensure that the songs end up 99% like I wanted them. You should see the list of functional tags I’ve collected, including myriad genres and subgenres I didn’t even know existed. I’ve done more research into music this month that I’ve done about any subject in recent memory, even for my stories. I’ve wanted to create songs ever since I was a child, but I only know how to play the guitar. I also dislike dealing with human beings, so involving actual musicians in my musical endeavors was out of the question. AI is a godsend in that regard, and it seems that people are enjoying plenty of my songs as well.

I’m one of those people that can barely spend an hour at work without thinking, “I could be working on my stories or songs, which provide meaning not only for me but for others, but instead I’m wasting my limited lifespan trying to fix computer issues and dealing with annoying users.” It’s such a shame that the stuff I was born to do can’t be monetized (I have the completely wrong background and opinions for any publisher to accept my stuff these days, even if they found my stories palatable to begin with). I also hate networking, as part of my general aversion to humans, so my blog has barely grown in years. It always baffles me when I notice WordPress blogs that post less than me, and usually far less let’s say elaborate material, only for them to have thousands, or even tens of thousands of followers. What gives?

Being busy also distracts me from how horrid the world is. Wars aside, Europe is going down the toilet, the people who could do something significant about it either get fined, jailed, and/or shot, and we’re heading for Plandemic 2.0: Bird Flu Edition, no doubt as manufactured through gain-of-function research as the other one was. That’s what happens when you don’t hang people responsible for killing millions, they’re bound to try it again.

I wrote a whole paragraph about this insanity, but I deleted it, because ultimately who the fuck cares about what I have to say about it. I’m at work right now, handling three things at once, and I should focus on that stuff. Bye until whenever.

As of today, I’m thirty-nine years old. Most people out there seem to want to celebrate their birthdays, but I don’t: every passing year, I feel increasingly worse regarding my age. In a very real way, mainly due to my neurological handicaps, I doubt I have aged much mentally and emotionally beyond eighteen years old. I didn’t expect to live past that age either. But I find myself as a middle-aged person who others have unironically referred to as a “gentleman.”

I have felt sick for the last two or three days, as if I’ve been beaten up, but I can’t tell if I have caught something or it’s just the mounting stress. Apart from issues at work that refuse to get permanently solved and that keep me dreading the next time some issue will pop up, one I will have to figure out how to solve, I have been put in charge of the maddening task of having to replace about 960 printers in the whole hospital complex. This happens every four years or so due to the contract that our health organization has with the company that supplied the printers. The last time one of our technicians was put in charge of it, he looked miserable every single day, and by the end he refused to continue working as a technician for the hospital, choosing instead to do administrative work somewhere else. I don’t even have that choice, as I can’t speak Basque.

A few days ago, my boss and I received the delivery driver who was supposed to bring the first batch of printers. The company, instead of hiring a regular van dude, sent a truck driver. He barely filled one-fourth of his trailer with our hundred printers, and his gigantic vehicle struggled to maneuver through the inner roads of the hospital complex. We ended up blocking traffic for a while as we hurried to unload the pallets of printers and guide them through the corridors and elevators to the second story of a nearby building, to put them in storage. Turns out that the stacks of printers didn’t fit through some doors, so we found ourselves having to dismantle the stacks and remove the printers one by one. As someone with a heart condition, this isn’t something I should be involved in, but someone had to do it.

So, starting from this Monday, I’ll find myself, an autistic man who can barely tolerate interacting with human beings, in charge of two younger technicians to coordinate going from department to department convincing the users to let us replace their printers. And because human beings are exasperating like that, I’ll have to deal, as I’ve had to already, with the usual, “If you’re changing the printer, why don’t you put a color printer instead?” and “Now that you’re here, you should solve this other issue I have as well.” Some users engage you in conversation because that’s what they’d rather do other than work. The more I deal with human beings, the more I’d rather live in the middle of nowhere, growing and raising my own food.

I daydream often about vanishing from the memories of everyone who has ever known me, and for situations in which I’ve been involved to get magically reorganized so that I wasn’t present. It would be such a relief if nobody knew I exist, if I could just drift from place to place anonymously. Nobody would demand from me more than I can give. In such daydreams, however, I tend to end up shacking up with some wealthy mommy type who’d take care of everything in exchange of regular intimacy. As a thirty-nine-year-old man, such a woman would be a bit younger than me, but in my daydreams I’m younger as well.

What else can I say? I may be depressed at the moment. I’ve been begging the spider goddess to let me die already, but I suppose I have stuff left to create. Other than being left alone, losing myself in creative endeavours has been my main need in this stupid life. I can’t produce songs for a while, because I hit the monthly output limit, but I have progressed a bit more on my novella about a long-dead aspiring motocross rider, a story that apparently nobody likes.

Anyway, I’ll have to keep my head up and force my aging body to perform what’s required of me.

If I had told myself yesterday that today I would be writing an entry about a girl I see on the bus, I would have believed I was deceiving myself as I do regularly. But I must admit that I, a nearly 39-year-old middle-aged man, have a crush on a girl who shares my afternoon commute.

She must be in her early twenties at the most, and if any of you hapless people reading these words were to look at this human creature, you likely wouldn’t consider her a bombshell: she wears hoodies or similar attire; has glasses; her long, black hair in a half-up bun; very pale skin; and a lovely face. A tomboy of sorts. I’ve never heard her speak, so, to be honest, this person could be a beautiful dude that doesn’t grow facial hair. If that’s the case, I guess I’m bi. I’ve been into crazier shit.

Anyway, fantasizing about attractive girls (or I guess humans) lessens the horrible burdens that being alive imposes on me, but in the case of this bus person, for the entire ride, my attention was continually drawn to her. An antsy sixth sense suggested we were both thinking about each other, but neither would do shit about it because we aren’t crazy enough to approach a stranger for no good reason. I’m aware, however, that such an impression is likely testosterone talking; I grew up with little to no testosterone, and I never experienced such thoughts until they discovered my pituitary tumor and I started treatment. I will never get used to the notion that although I feel sure that something is going on, I may be imagining it because my hormones are deceiving me.

Last weekend, as I was walking by a park on my way home, I spotted her sitting on a bench. She looked at me, but my gaze didn’t linger. Today, as I was paying the bus fare, I got the feeling that someone was staring at me, and my gaze landed on her eyes. She reacted with a neck twitch and darting eyes, an universal sign of “Oh shit, I’ve been caught staring.” I walked by her and stood about a couple of meters behind her. When my stop was approaching, she moved to exit here, earlier than her usual stop. For about half a minute, she stood close enough that our arms almost touched, which I very much wanted to do. Then she exited, and we both went our separate ways.

Why am I even writing this? Because I never get interested in people. Of course, I notice attractive females and I fantasize sexually about them on a regular basis in order to feel better. But this bus person feels special: she’s someone I would like to know and not just imagine myself fucking. That’s a departure for me, because I can barely tolerate human beings.

She resembles Leire, the protagonist of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked, at least during the first half of that story. Is that why I care? Did my subconscious craft Leire’s image from some instinctual attraction? I don’t have the answers. All I know is that I look forward to seeing this human being again tomorrow at a quarter to two in the afternoon.

I’m not delusional enough to believe that anything will come out of my crush other than hyperactive daydreams. I will never be in another intimate relationship again: I’m middle-aged, in constant psychological and physical pain, my body is ruined in numerous ways, my Irritable Bowel Syndrome keeps me bloated and with my guts burning in relation to how anxious I am (and I’m always anxious, increasingly so, the moment I step out of a room where I’m alone), and I’m incapable of forming normal connections with people. Still, one can daydream. If we couldn’t even cling to delusional hopes, we would all have died out long, long ago.

I’ve returned to work after the Holy Week holidays. I’m one of those authors who can’t earn a living through his works, and who clearly never will: I only write because my subconscious demands it, and I find myself disquieted by human company (to put it mildly), so networking is out of the question. My job as a computer technician at a hospital forces me to interact with non-technical-minded people who are generally also chatty, which is by far the worst part of my day, and I hate working at an open office, which forces me to absorb inane bullshit from coworkers. However, my job puts me in front of a computer for hours, and it allows me to edit my texts between tasks. I’ve settled into the routine of waking up at five in the morning to freewrite the next part of my story, then editing it at work. My editing process takes about fifteen times as long as producing the first draft, and it would likely drive anyone else insane, as I sieve through every single word to ascertain their place in the scene as well as the story at large. I also consider many alternatives along the way. Thankfully, due to autism and OCD, I find that process comforting; I’m uniquely suited to such painstaking tasks.

Also, I have experienced the private shame of returning to past texts and finding them awfully written, even though I was sure they would be good enough. The worst recent example was when I was commissioning the cover for my previous novel in English, titled My Own Desert Places. I linked the artists to the first couple of chapters, back then up at this site, warning them that they would require a revision. When I reread them, I was appalled to find out that the first few chapters were abysmal, nearly incoherent, to the extent that I questioned my mental state back when I uploaded them in the first place.

I think that during a shortish period of time back in 2020-2021, I prided myself in pushing out 4,000-6,000 words out a day, which isn’t hard at all to do if you rely on an outline, lack a social life, and freewrite everything. My Own Desert Places ended up being about 100,000 words long, and I finished it in a couple of months. Compare that with my ongoing narrative titled Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, that has reached 20,000 words in nearly four months. For me, though, the difference in quality is extreme. Although I loved that novel and I’m generally proud of it, one day I intend to revise it, republish it, and lead readers toward it again, but I dread what I’m going to find there.

Anyway, I’ve come to the troublesome realization that, although I dislike working as an IT guy at a hospital, it’s probably better for a writer, regarding the quality of their stories, to keep a full-time job unrelated to writing fiction, as long as it allows you to edit your texts. When you’re constantly aware of how little time you have to produce something meaningful, you don’t pad it with crap. Many full-time authors become self-indulgent, end up believing that anything goes. They are also required to push out books on a regular schedule to support themselves, therefore imposing extraneous deadlines on the material. I’m of the belief that a story takes as long as it needs to take, and somehow I’m always surprised when my stories end up ballooning far beyond my expectations, while feeling that what I have to include is necessary. For example, I was quite convinced that Motocross Legend, Love of My Life would take about four chapters, after which I would return to working on my ongoing novel. However, it will likely reach sixteen chapters, and along the way I have had to discard many moments that would have been good enough, but that ultimately weren’t necessary.

Although I write stories that in general terms could be considered literature, I barely read novels these days, opting for manga instead. In the last few years, I have failed to finish, or even get far into, the novels that have landed on my hands. More often than not it’s because the author is confusing their duty of telling a story with that of propagandizing a political ideology, which seems to be the default position in this rotten modern world. You likely won’t get published otherwise. Japanese narratives, at least manga, are free from this rot, and if you want Western stories that won’t stink like someone is just checking boxes and pleading not to be canceled (assuming they don’t have a far more sinister goal in mind), unless you come across a special author, you have to delve into the pre-2001 stuff, before the last remains of sanity were demolished.

I can count on one hand the amount of novels that have affected me as if I had lived through those events, that have connected with me so meaningfully. One of them, read when I was twenty or so, was Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. Unlike in most of his other stories, that one felt to me like Murakami was expiating a sin, as if he truly needed to tell the tale of a doomed girl and the adrift young man who loved her. Many years later I came across details of the author’s life that clarified for me that he was indeed expiating something: he had betrayed a college girlfriend of his, only for her to end up doing something irreversible. Norwegian Wood is, at least for me, clearly imbued with that regret, with the need to go back in time and save someone. I have something of a savior complex (plenty of my dreams or daydreams over the years have had to do with literally going back in time and saving people), and I’m hopelessly attracted to doomed females, with goes a long way to explain my attachment to that book as well as to other narratives such as my favorite manga series: Inio Asano’s Oyasumi Punpun.

Anyway, I figured it was time to get back into reading novels, but I didn’t want to waste my time with stories that wouldn’t affect me meaningfully. I went the route of searching for novels similar to Norwegian Wood. Unfortunately, book recommendations rarely work for me; too many times I’ve been recommended stuff like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which I found abysmal. My brain works differently to other people’s, so necessarily I don’t enjoy nor want the same things others do. Regarding stories, I want the author to put me then-and-there along with the point of view character, to experience their lives as they do. The narrative usually has to delve deep into mental issues, solitude, attempts to understand the world, and so on. I hate authors who waste people’s time with unnecessary material for pseudo-ideological reasons, for example forcing you to slog through paragraph after paragraph of noise because the real world is like that. Plenty of postmodernists fall into that category. No thanks: I’m fully aware of how annoying and ultimately meaningless the world is, and I read to escape from it. Also, any story has to compete with my daydreams; if they can’t offer me something more engaging than what I can effortlessly picture in my mind, I won’t struggle through it.

Unsurprisingly, some of the recommendations included Murakami’s other books. One of them, Sputnik Sweetheart, published in 1999, was the second of his I bought in Spanish after Norwegian Wood fascinated me. I have the distinct memory of having read through the book twice over the years, but apart from a few quotes that I likely came across on Goodreads, I couldn’t remember any single detail of the story. Now that I’ve gotten three quarters of the way through it, I’m disturbed to have found out that, indeed, I have forgotten every single detail of the story, as if I had never known anything about the aspiring author slash love interest that most of the narrative focuses on, nor the woman that the author was interested in, let alone the generally plain narrator. It makes me wonder about my state of mind when I read the book those two previous times, or if I’m genuinely losing mental faculties. I remember very little about my life, I suspect due to my lifelong issues with clinical depression; most of my twenties draw a blank. But at least I could rely on stories making a lasting impact on me.

Anyway, I think those are the only impressions I wanted to post on here for reasons that aren’t clear to me. Work is underway on my ongoing novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, which I should be able to bring to a satisfying conclusion, even though I suspect very, very few people care; I have never had such a low engagement with a story as with the sad tale of one aspiring motocross rider and the man who was left behind. I have no idea why, because I think it’s quite good. Check it out if you want.

I spent most of last weekend, that lasted three days, sick with some respiratory issue. I returned to work on Tuesday only to wake up the next day with a fever, and I tested positive for the flu. I must have caught two separate diseases, but it doesn’t surprise me, because literally every single coworker was going through a respiratory issue of their own. I suspect that when I return to the office tomorrow, I’ll find out that we’re forced to mask ourselves up for the duration of the work hours.

Apart from being sick, I have been significantly depressed. Having to attend family functions due to the holidays only worsened my mood: the noise contamination for someone with a sensory processing disorder, the absurd amounts of food we’re supposed to gobble up, being forced to listen to their mind-numbing opinions, etc. Ever since I was a child, being around family members only made me feel alone. I don’t have anything in common with them, and when they attempt to relate to me, they make it clear that they believe themselves to be dealing with someone very different from the person that exists in my brain.

For as long as I can remember, I have yearned to distance myself from my family, as well as from everyone I’ve known, even putting whole continents between us, but I became a lousy adult with a deficient capacity for self-organization due to my brain issues, so I have never strayed far. On top of that, because my life must be some kind of cosmic joke, I even work with a loudmouth family member, which frays my nerves for most of the work hours. I also suspect that it contributed to triggering at least one of my episodes of arrhythmia. Unfortunately, I don’t work at the kind of office that allows you to isolate yourself with noise-canceling headphones.

Some months ago, I used to make myself available to online acquaintances to have a chat from time to time, but for a good while I haven’t felt like dealing with human beings in any capacity. Having to force myself to interact with people at work only reduces my willingness to do so in my spare time.

Although I’m a thousand words into the current scene of my novel, I’ve had to trudge through the mental fog characteristic of depression, and I haven’t had much energy to do anything other than sit at my desk, read manga, or play a video game. I can’t count how many times I’ve found myself this week shedding tears to a song, often to the same song on repeat. When I go to bed, my brain treats me with elaborate nightmares related to my lost youth and/or failings. I’m nearing 39, and it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that growing old will consist on accumulating more and more regrets and griefs until I break one way or another.

On a happier note, I’ve managed to distract myself thanks to the UEVR tool that a certain “praydog” and his team put together: it turns Unreal Engine games into VR games natively, even though they weren’t made for VR. Obviously the performance of plenty of them will depend on your rig, and I haven’t upgraded to the 4000 series (I’m waiting for them to release the new generation, that will hopefully prevent me from having to upgrade my PSU; the 4090 is an energy hog). However, I played through most of Life Is Strange, that silly teenage drama that released now nine years ago, featuring interesting plot points related to time-bending powers, but also featuring godawful, embarrassing dialogue along with one of the most infuriating, if memorable, characters from the fiction of that era: Chloe Price, a terrible brat that reminds me of my sister when she was a teenager. At least Chloe can use her dead dad as an excuse.

Fuck you, Chloe. I liked you better when your father was alive.

The game also features the following moment, related to beans:

Anyway, playing in VR confuses your brain into believing that it’s more immersed in the experience: scary situations become terrifying, tender moments become heart-warming, and sad moments can wring quite a few tears out of me (in Life Is Strange, the whole sequence involving the protagonist returning to her tween self, and the consequences of altering that past; in Cyberpunk 2077, when I played it in VR, the beginning of the second act, when V finds out that she has contracted a brain guest that may end up replacing her). Also, I’ve had better orgasms with VR sex than in real life. Too bad that it can’t replace intimacy (yet).

Not sure why I felt like sharing any of this information with you, stranger that for whatever reason took time out of your life to read this post. I hope it was worth it.

This entry will mostly be depressing, so if you’re one of those people who prefer to pretend that life is different than what it actually is, you may want to skip this one.

Last night I went to bed a nine, hoping to fall asleep soon and wake up at five to start writing the next chapter of my ongoing novel. Unfortunately, my poor cat had died half a day earlier, so I spent about two hours grieving some more. Although it doesn’t surprise me anymore, I felt like a worthless creature because I can barely remember three or four moments of an entire life with that cat. I have often wondered if my brain is damaged when it comes to whatever process stores memories, because on a day-to-day basis, I feel like I’m floating in the present with only the flimsiest connection to my past and the living beings in it. Why love someone, if when the relationship comes crashing down, not only will you have forgotten almost everything about that person, but in her place you will only find pain? I look back at my thirty-eight years of living, and it feels like I’ve blazed through it without making more than a couple of memories that I would consider worth it, and one of them is visiting an amusement park a few months ago. Maybe that gives you an idea of what level I’m at.

Rolling around in bed, crying for a loved creature that I would never hold nor see again, the usual objections about me continuing to live took the opportunity to assail me: why do I still stick around when I’m miserable most of the time, when my body tortures me, when I have never felt comfortable among human beings, when none of my efforts will ever amount to anything? Like in previous times, my brain forced me to answer why I refuse to die, which, it likes to remind me, I should have done a long time ago. At this point, the only reason I would “regret” dying is that I wouldn’t finish this current novel of mine; nothing else adds meaning to my otherwise meaningless existence. Then again, if one doesn’t exist, no meaning is needed. As for everything else, other than passing entertainment, I can hardly care less.

While I tried my best to fall asleep, I gave my body permission to cease operations in my sleep. I can’t count the amount of times that I’ve wished for that to happen over the years. That’s how I’ve always wanted to go, and that’s how my cat went as well, or at least I hope so, because I wasn’t there to witness it.

Instead of dying, I woke up spontaneously at the witching hour (meaning 3 A.M., although definitions vary). I doubted that I would fall asleep again, so I planned to sit at my desk and use the time until six in the morning to freewrite some paragraphs of my next scene. However, as I shuffled to the bathroom to pee, I found myself in that state that promises that if you don’t squeeze more sleep out of the night, you will suffer for the rest of the day, so I went back to bed. Once the alarm finally hit at five, I felt like utter shit, but I dragged myself to my desk and pulled off three paragraphs of fiction, which would allow me to feel fulfilled for the upcoming many hours of sacrificing my time, energy, mental health, and physical health for another day of meaningless drudgery.

At twelve, I was setting up a couple of computers and a network printer. I couldn’t help making stupid mistakes, for example missing that I had access to two additional ethernet wall jacks, or that all but one of the network cables wouldn’t reach the connection I had patched into the network. On all fours under that desk, stretching my arms to reach for cables, I felt utterly miserable, the “let it be over already” kind. I couldn’t get either of the computer to log in with the admin account; some changes in HQ made it so that if the computers have been off the network for a long time, you lose access to the variable password of that user, and the recovery software we have rarely works. That meant I would need to tell the department chief, the person who requested the operation, that I barely left anything working, and that I would need to rely on another department to finish it.

Suddenly, as I was sitting on a chair, a massive pain hit the left side of my chest. It felt as if my heart was expanding. It lasted for about fifteen to twenty seconds. I couldn’t check my heart rate, because I had left my portable EKG monitor at the office. I haven’t clarified it yet: my heart was damaged by a certain experimental jab that I was coerced into getting to keep my job, and I’ve gone through three episodes of atrial fibrillation (arrhythmia) since, one of them thankfully reverting in fifteen seconds or so.

Anyway, this pain felt like a big one. Cold sweat, white noise concentrating in my jaw, getting woozy… I checked out the symptoms of a heart attack, and other than nausea, I had all of them. I hate bothering people for any reason, especially when that may lead to them feeling pity for me (I know I complain a lot online, but I rarely if ever do it in person). However, I wasn’t sure I could reach the ER in such a state, so I asked the kindest of my coworkers to accompany me there.

During triage, they told me that it likely wasn’t a heart attack, because that pain I described would have lasted about a minute and a half. So they put me waiting in a packed room in order to perform what ended up being quite a lot of tests. The electrocardiogram was clear. Although I had some trouble breathing, they didn’t notice anything wrong during auscultation. Neurological tests okay, except for one: whenever I stood straight and closed my eyes, my body immediately tended to fall backwards. No idea what that means, and they didn’t explain it. The nurse, doctor or whatever she was also pressed several parts of my body for mysterious reasons.

When asked if I was going through some period of stress, I had to explain to three people that my cat died the day before. Every time I said it, it bothered me more. I also opened up about the fact that recently I had found a mass inside my scrotum; because I was injected with some poison that damaged my heart and that in others have caused turbo cancers, I considered that maybe the mass, which has the size of three quarters of a testicle, would be linked to my sudden heart issue. She smiled and said that she would check out my scrotum. To my dismay, I realized that I was in the presence of a fiend that wakes up five to six days a week fully accepting that during that day she may fondle a random stranger’s balls. I told her that I wasn’t ready for it, and besides, I have already scheduled a visit with my GP for later this week. In the end, I didn’t explain the possible link of this scrotal mass to my heart issues, and I wonder if she got the impression that I was a deviant trying to get my balls fondled by a young doctor. I’m not that kind of deviant. I also hate the idea of showing my genitals to anybody in case they laugh at them.

They extracted my blood for an analysis. During the hour and a half that I waited in a packed room, I feared that my troponin levels would come out high; those signal heart damage, likely myocarditis. Millions of poor bastards who have gotten jab-induced myocarditis, if they didn’t die soon after, have a life expectancy of five to ten years. I noticed the irony of fearing that I had myocarditis, when last night I had wished to die. I don’t want to deal with the pain, but apart from that, there are certain ways I don’t want to die: as one of the victims of a worldwide plan to decimate the population is one of them.

Anyway, the analysis was clear: none of the stuff they tested tended toward the extremes in either direction. The final doctor, nurse or whatever he was, told me that I may have had a very short episode of arrhythmia that I didn’t have time to check. I doubt it, because the previous ones didn’t feel like it. He also said that they’ve seen such localized pains in patients who are incubating one of those strange respiratory viruses that have been flying around recently. He added that I should check my temperature for a few days, particularly if I start coughing, producing phlegm and such. I have never heard of respiratory diseases producing pain localized in the heart, but what do I know.

When I told my mother about it, she suggested that otherwise it could have been an anxiety attack or severe heartburn, but none of the symptoms fit what I experienced. Perhaps everybody’s time was wasted: mine and that of the five or so professionals that attended me, all of whom, sadly enough, were younger than me. I may have also wasted your time, you nosy bastard.

It’s seven in the afternoon. Tomorrow I’ll have to return to work, which will involve answering plenty of questions from the many coworkers that were present when I asked for help. I also feel like shit at the moment, but at least I’ve gotten recent proof that my heart keeps working more or less properly, and that the chemical stuff in my body hasn’t gone haywire.

Was that an appropriate way to end this entry? It better have been.

In the most recent entry of this “diary,” I wrote that my eldest cat had gone senile suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped. For three days she did little else than wander around in a daze, get stuck in corners as if she were a robot with broken programming, pee herself, and fall face-first from chair or sofa-tall surfaces. Although something has broken permanently in her brain, because she has forgotten some basics about life such as not peeing herself, and likely no longer recognizes me nor her daughter (which may have been a blessing in disguise), she will get to live for a while longer.

Today I returned from work to find that cat’s daughter, sole surviving child, dead. She had been wasting away for weeks if not more. The vet couldn’t find anything wrong with her other than being super old. It seems that her heart stopped beating while she was sleeping.

I wonder for how long I will remember how it felt to hold her dead weight, or how devoid of light her eyes were. Goodbye, my little one.

This morning I woke up spontaneously at three in the morning because my balls hurt. At this point I’m quite sure I’ve got an inguinal hernia, and trying last night to push the protruding fold of intestine back into my body wasn’t that good of an idea. I’m supposed to visit my general practitioner about this on the 13th. I was already awake, so instead of going back to bed, I sat at my desk and worked on my novel until six in the morning.

After a tiresome day at work, I returned home to find out that my elderly cat, about seventeen years old, had jumped out of the balcony. Although she’s on her last leg and at times I’ve feared that a simple scare would end her, she managed to survive wandering around the neighborhood for hours. One neighbor recognized the cat, so I have her back. However, since a couple of days ago, it’s like a switch has flipped in this cat’s brain, and suddenly all she does, apart from sleep, is either roam around the place as if she’s looking for someone, or stare slowly at her immediately surroundings as if in a daze. When you put her down on a surface, she lies there in the same position, as awkward or uncomfortable as it may be. She doesn’t purr anymore either; I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t recognize me. Maybe she had a stroke or something. Three weeks ago she went through her first scary illness, some sort of pneumonia. She wheezed constantly for about five days, but she had seemed to recover fully from it. Her current behavior came out of nowhere.

My other cat, the previous cat’s only surviving daughter, has looked even worse for weeks. She started peeing out of her box, in other rooms, for no apparent reason. She also meows at me as if to point out the fact that she peed somewhere else. She has gotten thinner and thinner, practically skeletal, and her meows have become weak mewling. The vet didn’t seem to find anything wrong with her other than being old. She’s on special food, but she isn’t improving.

Years ago, my first cat was killed by a pitbull. I suffered the first breakdown of my adult life, after a total mental breakdown at about 18 when I realized that life wasn’t going to get any better. After that cat died, I cried and cried for what seemed to be hours, and ever since, I only need to remember her in order to get teary-eyed again. I don’t even remember good moments that aren’t tainted by the fact that she died. Although these surviving cats won’t die the same way, I anticipate that my brain will store their memories in a similar fashion: the associated pain will get added to the mound accumulated in these last thirty-eight years of living, and to keep sane, I’ll have to forget them as best as I can.

I’m not coming up with any original idea when I say the following: I’d rather have a loved one die suddenly that waste away to the point that death would be a mercy. I haven’t experienced anything worse than creatures I loved becoming so sick or broken that I couldn’t do anything but put them down or wait for them to die. I have decided that I won’t get any new pets after these ones; I have a very limited capacity to tolerate daily anguish without losing it, and I have always been on a tightrope in that regard.

My brain is likely broken when it comes to memory-making: I barely remember any good moments, as if genuinely I hadn’t had more than I can count with one hand, while the bad memories are like a hill I’m regularly forced to clamber up, thanks to intrusive thoughts and insomnia. I’m not sure if a lifetime of chronic depression is responsible for that. In any case, you become a cautious human being: why would you risk meeting new people or having fancy experiences, when in the end you’d only add to the growing pile of misery?

I’ll never be a father, but there’s that cliché of fathers refusing firmly to get a cat or dog for the kids. Soon after the pets appear, though, that father becomes enamoured with them. Of course you are going to love them. And when they die, it’s going to break your fucking heart.

Although I sound like I’m despairing, I’m either not, or I’ve adopted over the years a sort of automatic stoicism because the alternative is losing your mind and jumping off a cliff. I expect everything to get progressively worse, and as if to prove me right, it more often than not does.

Regarding this whole thing, I think about the following Jason Lytle song somewhat often:

Anyway, tomorrow Saturday I’ll wake up at about six or seven in the morning to finish editing the next chapter of my ongoing novel. It’s going to be a juicy one. After two years of living vicariously through that tale, I have no clue how I’m going to find myself once I can’t look at the world through that framework anymore.