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!

How are you all doing? Here’s an update in the life of currently unemployed old me. My last contract ended on the sixteenth of this month, and ever since (and for a couple of weeks around that time as well), I’ve been busy:

Good times. By the way, I mentioned that some bug had gotten behind my LCD screen, then shat and died there. I had been tolerating its presence for a few weeks now, but today I discovered that two more bugs had crawled their way in. I have OCD, so this sent me into overdrive. I looked up videos on how to disassemble my monitor, then I set to work immediately. Well, that was a fucking terrible idea.

Thankfully I’m rich, so I just ordered a new one. It’s supposed to arrive tomorrow. I’m currently writing this entry through the mostly defunct monitor. Apparently when you ruin a corner of a LCD screen, most of the remaining screen shows horizontal lines that resemble some monitor from the seventies or something.

I’m a bit pissed with myself. Even though I haven’t felt like writing in a while, this morning I was supposed to push myself to start the next scene of my novel. Unfortunately, right as I was reading through my notes, I noticed the bugs.

I think I’ll take a nice, long walk this afternoon to cool down. I’ll also have to figure out where people are supposed to throw away big pieces of hardware like computer monitors.

See ya.

After I spent the last hours of yesterday afternoon playing Baldur’s Gate 3 (a 97 on Metacritic, well deserved), and this morning on the train rereading Asano’s Nijigahara Holograph (one of his earliest, lesser works), I entered the office only to be greeted by the secretary and a coworker giving me a weird look. I greeted them, I walked to my workstation, then I heard them speaking in hushed tones, which, as far as I’m concerned, is extremely disrespectful in an office. I felt someone looking at me, so I glanced over my shoulder only to realize that the secretary was staring at me. What the fuck is wrong with people so early in the morning?

What was wrong is that the prick whose medical leave I’m covering has returned to work, and is currently sitting at his workstation. I have covered his suspicious leaves plenty of times (they sometimes take months, for no apparent reason), and whenever he returns, he never informs anybody of it, which is the least you can expect from a worker who knows that someone’s contract will end the moment he comes back.

I started laughing, then walked to my boss’ office. He had noticed that the prick was back. My boss seemed more pissed than me. “If we had known that he was going to return, we would have hired you to cover the vacation of X coworker, and instead we’ve gotten someone who has never worked in the field before. It’s not right.” Nothing we can do; it’s legal to refuse to inform in advance that you’re returning to work, and I’m not sure that the guy is aware enough to realize that others will get pissed at him because he’s screwing them over.

You see, this idiot is one of the craziest motherfuckers I have ever met, that are still somewhat able to hold a job. Whenever he has nothing to do, sometimes for hours, he browses Explorer windows idly, looking at the same files over and over (I know it because often I have sat down at a workstation from which I could see his computer screen). Other coworkers have told me that they think he speaks to himself on the phone, maybe to pretend that he’s working; most of the time he does talk very low into the receiver, and the snippets of conversation didn’t seem like the kind produced in the process of trying to solve a ticket. To be fair, though, we also had a coworker who would take calls and waste about fifteen to twenty minutes talking to users about her personal problems, to the annoyance of my boss and everyone around her (at least me).

Regarding the prick, he’s also done more troubling shit like following coworkers around in the hallways, standing very close while staring them in the face, and waiting outside of the bathroom when the coworker he was following clearly intended to lose him. When asked irately what the fuck he was doing, he answered with some variation of “Oh, nothing.” My main boss doesn’t engage him anymore, because the one time he yelled at him, the prick sicked some union guys on him and nearly got his job in trouble.

As you can imagine, most coworkers avoid that guy, and pray that they won’t get paired with him alone during the afternoon shifts; the times I had to endure that shit, I was forced to do the work of two people, usually because he refuses to do any work that his bosses don’t explicitly assign to him, even though the bosses, who don’t work afternoons, have made clear that in the afternoons the worker on the phone is the one assigning the tickets, so when I’m on phone shift, I would end up forced to resolve those tickets because the users would chew me on the phone otherwise. He has also resolved erroneously some tickets to the extent that my boss, suspecting the results, assigned me his tickets, only for me to realize that either he was incapable of resolving the incident, or screwed up deliberately. And those are the cases I know about.

Anyway, I’m thirty-eight years old and I’m always glad when I become unemployed. That means more time to write, to read, to play Baldur’s Gate 3, to work out, to go on walks in the woods, and to masturbate to vile shit. What’s not to love? I don’t have a social life nor expensive hobbies, so I have dozens of thousands in savings for when the world inevitably comes crashing down on me.

I’m about halfway through writing the current chapter of my novel. You know, in case you happen to be one of the very few people in this dying world that cares about my fiction. So I can look forward to waking up at six in the morning, sitting at my desk in my underwear, and losing myself in my inner world of unhinged depravity. Oh, what a joy! For a possibly brief time, I can disappear from reality and its many burdens.

What about that Baldur’s Gate 3, huh? Best, most immersive gaming experience since The Witcher 3 in 2015 and Skyrim in 2011. Some fancy game designer said that good games are a series of interesting decisions, and BG3 has taken it to heart.

A small example: at one point you come across the member of a society of intellectuals (two members of which I already met: one a hobgoblin and the other a mind flayer), who asks you to steal an egg of a brutish sentient species, so they can raise it in a kind, peaceful environment and prove whether their brutish ways are a matter of nature or nurture. My fighter, a member of that sentient race, suggested that we killed the stranger for her impertinence and devious ways. This issue seems black and white: stealing a future child for profit is a rather evil choice. But once you find the hatchery, you find out that the sole egg they have left has taken so long to hatch that they’re about to destroy it. Stealing it is right then? The face of my party is a beast at persuading people, so I managed to convince the custodian, who also wanted to avoid destroying the egg, to give it to me, after ensuring him that I would raise the child in a loving environment. After I left (more accurately, escaped) that building, I considered whether we should keep the egg and potentially ruin it, as we are a band of adventurers who know nothing of raising a kid, or give it to a society that wants to use the future child as a lab rat, but in a peaceful environment in which the child will be taken care of. What’s the right choice?

The team behind this game seems to have gone through every choice in the game and balanced the sides. There’s a point very early in the second act when you are supposed to meet the inquisitors of a race of multidimensional aliens who call themselves the githyanki. One of your team members stole an artifact from them, and they want it back real bad. They explain that the artifact, which belonged to them in the first place, is instrumental to stopping the evil designs of the worst people in the D&D universe. You should give it to them then. But the person inside the artifact tells you that under no circumstances should you return it, because the artifact is the only thing keeping your team from turning into mind flayers due to the parasite they put in your brains. Should you lose the one thing that keeps you and your friends alive in order to potentially save all sentient beings in the many dimensions? Are the githyanki lying? Is the sentient being trapped in the artifact lying?

Here’s one possible resolution to that extremely tense encounter, which involves meeting the goddess of those interdimensional aliens. This game has a cast of about three hundred voice actors, who were motion-captured as well to properly depict their facial expressions.

Regarding the people you come across in your bizarre adventures, treat them kindly or like a bastard, and you can be sure that you will experience the consequences, although often not in the ways you expect. During a potential siege by goblins, I convinced a couple of young people to be strong and fight. After I took care of the goblins by slaughtering every single greenskin freak I found (except one in a village, because he was cool, and another one who ended up in a cage), the two young people managed to get captured by some even worse people because they confronted them instead of fleeing. Now their remaining family member is pissed at me.

You have come across a special game when you want to avoid upsetting the nice characters in it, and want to brutally murder those who hurt others who don’t deserve it (like when, for example, someone pushed an innocent gnome lady into lava). Can’t wait to expend a significant part of the upcoming couple of weeks (hopefully) of unemployment losing myself in the grand fantasy that is far better than anything I have access to in real life. And in fifteen days comes Starfield, the next Bethesda RPG, biggest one they’ve ever done.

This morning, as I was reading on the train to work, I found myself unable to comprehend the printed symbols: I could tell that my eyeballs were capturing images, but my brain refused to process the contained information. I closed my eyes and tried to snap out of that confusion. In the darkness I spotted a jagged line of glitchy light. I was coming down with a migraine.

When I got off the train, I still had to drag myself to a bus stop, then stand inside, surrounded by dozens of people, until we reached the hospital complex where I work. I could barely process my surroundings; it felt like my brain was trapped behind a few layers of insulation. Performing any task at a human level becomes a huge struggle, so as soon as I sat down at my workstation, I gulped down some ibuprofen and hoped that my senses would return. Once they do, I know that it will come accompanied by a nausea-inducing headache that usually lasts a couple of days, but that’s still better than the experience of looking at words and being unable to process what they mean.

You see, I’m taking beta-blockers due to my heart issues, which should help prevent migraines as well. It’s a testament to how much stress I endured the previous day that the following one, soon after I woke up, I faced a migraine. Yesterday I was tasked with handling the move of a few computers and printers from the first floor of a building to the fifth and sixth. One of those computers was a custom-made workstation used by internal medicine for analyses and whatever else they do. I found myself having to carry a very weighty computer tower upstairs from the fifth floor (which technically isn’t part of my job, but the orderlies could have screwed it up). I also had to set up a dozen or so workstations and ensure that they were connected to the network (which involved visits to the corresponding network racks), that their programs worked, and that they could print through some of the available printers. Such a task involves coordinating with the local supervisor, nurses, and other types of human beings.

I tried to get back into weightlifting recently (I own dumbbells and a barbell, along with plenty of weights). I used to train regularly years ago, but I have discovered that I’m much, much weaker than I used to be, in part surely because of my health issues, and that my heart is prevented from pumping fast enough in case it reaches the rates of 180-200 that it hit during my last episode of arrhythmia. I have never felt comfortable in this body with which I was burdened, but these last few years the decay has gotten to me. I feel old and broken. On the train I have felt myself wishing I could get away with telling someone to give me their seat, because my back was hurting. It’s such a relief to know that life only gets harder from here on.

My lack of energy is also troubling, although expected. By four in the afternoon I’m done for the day, and I must be content with vegetating (browsing the internet, playing video games, etc.) for the rest of the day. It’s a good thing that I don’t have a social life, because I wouldn’t be able to handle going out in the afternoons to spend time with people, and I’d quickly resent them. Also, because I’m extremely introverted, the interactions I’m forced to tolerate at work drain me quickly. I almost feel myself desiccating.

I haven’t written any single word of my ongoing novel in a week or so. To be honest, I have barely missed it. Baldur’s Gate 3 has kept me entertained. The current sequence of my story requires lots of freewrites along with heavy emotional investment, and real life insists on dragging me back to its vacuous mundanity that erodes the heights that I glimpse when I’m immersed in the artistic process. Whenever I feel guilty for stepping away from my “art,” I remember that I write because it allows me to survive reality, but if I’m keeping myself distracted in some other way, I can give myself a break. It rarely lasts for a couple of weeks anyway, until I start feeling like I’m losing my mind.

It’s two in the afternoon on a Friday, and the one thing I’m looking forward to the most is putting my VR headset on, pulling my pants down, and masturbating to some carefully-arranged porn scenario in Virt-A-Mate. Last time it involved Cammy from the latest Street Fighter; a have your cake and eat it too kind of situation. But in matters of the penis, one needs some novelty, or else the old stick can be hard to stimulate. It certainly doesn’t help that the beta-blockers vastly lower my libido. VR aside, some of those kinky ASMR artists do wonders. Oh, if only some MILF could whisper in my ear that I’m a good boy and that I don’t need to change anything about myself, while actually meaning it. In another life, perhaps.

Aren’t you glad you read through this stupid entry? Here’s a creative promotional video that Joel Haver did for Baldur’s Gate 3:

As I mentioned at least in one previous entry, ever since I returned to work after my six-months-long break, the vibe at the office has changed for me. Beyond objective changes like the main boss refusing to greet me nor look me in the face, and some other coworker doing pretty much the same (in addition to whispering and murmuring about me from two meters away), I’m getting the feeling that something else is at play: last Friday, as a different coworker was whispering nearby, I caught a glimpse of him glancing at me, and I felt myself going into fight-or-flight mode. What’s your beef with me, motherfucker? But that same guy had been talking to me normally the previous day. To this minor incident I had to add numerous other impressions I have gotten at the office since I returned to work. I feel that plenty of the coworkers, as they pass me by, are projecting malice at me.

On top of that, there was a moment when I realized that my bowels weren’t complaining as much as five minutes ago. But I didn’t go to the bathroom, did I? My rotten guts never stop hurting spontaneously. Yes, I recalled having taken the decision to get up and walk to the bathroom, but I hadn’t retained any single memory of having done so. I don’t remember any other recent instances of such clear-cut short-term memory loss.

Something else had changed in my life ever since my last contract ended: due to my heart injury (I got diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, which is the least dangerous kind of arrhythmia), caused by Moderna’s so-called booster, I’m now taking beta-blockers in perpetuity. They were a good fit for me not only because they would prevent my heart from going haywire like it did during my latest episode of arrhythmia, when my heart rate got as high as 190-200, but it also helps with migraines, tremors (I don’t have them yet, but both my father and brother do), anxiety and PTSD, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, which affect me to different extents.

Regarding migraines, I suffered them at work so bad that I couldn’t understand anything I was reading, and could hardly string sentences together. Migraines terrify me, as they offer a taste of how a stroke might affect a person permanently. In fact, migraines increase the risk of suffering one. John Fowles, a writer whose work I respect a lot (at least two of his novels), suffered a stroke that wiped out his need to write. He never did again. He said in an interview that the stroke had killed his imagination. If it happened to me, I can’t imagine myself living past that point.

Anyway, I have become addicted to these beta-blockers the same way one does to any such drug that he or she has to take in perpetuity. There are serious risks involved with cutting back. And as I was reading up on the long-term effects of this drug, I came across this page, paper or whatever: Neuropsychiatric Consequences of Lipophilic Beta-Blockers.

Over time, common side effects seem to be:

• Fatigue: for sure. I can barely walk upstairs and by four in the afternoon I’m done for the day, which is why I have moved my writing time to five in the morning. I’m having a very hard time returning to weightlifting; I have found myself much weaker than I used to be.
• Depression: I wouldn’t know. I think I have integrated depression to such an extent that I only notice the worst cycles. I’m not sure I know how the world feels like without some level of depression.
• Sleep disorders and nightmares: I experience very vivid nightmares, or what others would likely consider nightmares, but that feel like more vivid versions of my usual OCD-induced intrusive daydreams. I’m somewhat immune to them.

Last of all, hallucinations and delirium. That’s part of the issue here: I may have become delusional, have slipped into psychotic thinking, and it’s very hard to prove your way out of that when plenty of elements in your surroundings contribute to those impressions. I endured through my late teens in full-blown psychosis accented by a couple of guys who were genuinely trying to ruin my life, along with a physical fight I got into with an older drug dealer who wanted to prevent any classmate of his stripper girlfriend from talking to her. I made the mistake of trying to mediate, as my mother taught me. I didn’t fully understand back then that some people just want a target.

I was pretty much raised by a single mother (my father is around, but has brain damage from abuse and possibly some degree of autism). I was taught that you can solve every issue by talking, that two people won’t argue unless both of them want to, that violence is never the answer, and that the worse someone behaves, the more justified they must be in doing so. A let’s say feminine mindset that she has never grown out of despite the constant evidence to the contrary, a mindset that I had to shed in order to survive in the real world. That’s the kind of bullshit that produces societies in which criminals rule and decent, now castrated people are persecuted, while those in charge of ruining everything believe themselves to be great human beings.

Anyway, this last month I have been getting an updated taste of how it feels to stew in impressions and feelings that you suspect may not have interpreted reality correctly, no matter how much your brain emphasizes that they did. Due to autism, I have always known myself to think and react differently, which has led me to question plenty of my internal processes; this is the cherry on top.

How could I solve this issue? I can’t stop taking the beta-blockers, so I may need, like during the worst periods of depression, to sit tight and get used to the dark. An expression that I’ve had to use plenty of times, and that also reminds me of those many hours I spent in the dark, sitting on the stairs of random apartment buildings, waiting for the school hours to pass until I could return home, because I didn’t think I would survive high school otherwise.

I haven’t started writing the next scene of my ongoing novel, that four or five people care about. I have spent the whole weekend playing Baldur’s Gate 3. What a masterpiece. I would have never expected a RPG to offer fully motion-captured dialogue for every single character you come across, and generally very well acted too. For example, the compelling first encounter with a shady devil, one of the many people in this game who offer you help in exchange of potentially even worse consequences.

Too bad that this player has his or her avatar walking around with that mask on; I always take it off the moment I stop disguising myself. This is a game in which you can talk to certain dead people, but they will refuse to answer if you were the one who killed them, so at times disguising your form comes useful.

The companions that make up your team are fascinating as well. It had become a trope in such grandiose RPGs, like the Mass Effect series, that you would grow closer to your companions only to end up having sex with one or more of them close to the climax of the story, and afterwards the relationship would stop growing. In Baldur’s Gate 3, the first intimate moment for me involved my female fighter pursuing my character for sex, which for that relentless alien only means physical relief. This is the alien in question:

I grew tired of that “fling” quickly (she’s too abrasive for me), but I delayed telling her that I wanted to stop having sex; I wasn’t ready to find out how she would react. There was also an uncomfortably intimate moment with my male wizard, involving magic. At the moment I’m considering getting burned by a half-demon barbarian who escaped from the hells.

You can tell that this game was made by people who love their craft. Best RPG-makers in the business at the moment, above and beyond and all that. They even designed every goddamn goblin individually. I’m about forty hours in, but it feels like I haven’t gotten through any significant quest yet. Those who have finished the game claim that the experience only improves after act one.

Along with Starfield, that comes out in a month, I feel that we may be in the best year of gaming since 2015. I can’t wait to get home and keep discovering the strange stuff that this game will throw at me. That first encounter with a beholder nearly made me shit myself.