Today was one of those summer days in which the weather is good enough that I would feel like I wasted it if I stayed inside, but I was progressing nicely on the 69th chapter of my ongoing novel. I decided to go to the balcony and lie down in front of the privacy screen to read in peace for a while.

The peace lasted two minutes. Some guy starts screaming on the phone right under my balcony. Whatever conversation he was having with his girlfriend kept getting more and more heated; apparently the girlfriend didn’t want to come to the date with this charming individual. He insulted her on the phone loud enough that every person at the nearby park kept shooting glances, and people were avoiding the plaza where the shouting was taking place. Eventually the guy said on the phone that he was breaking up with her, that he never wanted to see her again, etc. Once he terminated the call, he stuck around to grumble for a while.

I was trying to get back into reading when I heard that moron’s voice again. His stupid girlfriend decided to come and meet someone who only failed to hit her before because he was talking to her on the phone. It didn’t take longer than a couple of minutes until he started screaming at her semi-incoherently with the kind of stuff these cretins shout in such circumstances (“you must have been with some other guy”, “you don’t do anything for me”, “I ask you to do something and you ignore me”, etc.) I couldn’t hear the woman saying anything.

Then he starts breaking stuff. First his cellphone against the plaza’s pavement, then some other item (possibly her phone). Then he wanders away a bit to kick as hard as he can the roller blinds of the office right under my balcony. I hear her warning him in a meek voice that someone will call the police. He screams that he doesn’t care, that nothing is going to happen to him, etc.

A moment later I hear the noise of something hitting wood: the guy is punching and/or kicking the bench that the woman was sitting on. Then I hear the noise of flesh getting punched. I stood up and got a still shot, through the branches of a tree, of the woman protecting herself with her arms while leaning to the side, and the guy standing next to her and screaming at her.

I go back into the apartment, then walk all the way to the landline. I call the police while I still hear the guy screaming in the background. They asked for my name for whatever reason. When I return to the balcony, it was one of those situations in which the moment you call the police, the altercation stops immediately. A middle-aged guy is standing nearby. He asks the woman, who seems to be in her late twenties, possibly hispanic, if she needs any help, if someone should call the police. She doesn’t answer. I recall vaguely that she was rubbing her arm.

A patrol car arrives less than a minute later. Either someone else called as well, or they were in the area. Every single police officer I’ve seen in this province is well-built and fit, including the women; they kinda look like models (so they haven’t gotten around to lowering standards yet).

The police officers look up at me. I point down at the woman, who’s close to the bench, crying in silence. Then the guy who started this whole shit made the mistake of returning. The moment the police officers lay eyes on him, he became all meek and reasonable. “Did you verbally or physically assault your girlfriend?” the police guy asks. “No, no, nothing of that sort. Just a simple argument.”

Turns out he had hashish on him. The guy tries to school the police officer on its use (here it’s only legal to smoke it at home or at certain clubs). I was sitting behind the privacy screen of my balcony. Although I couldn’t hear much else, one of the police officers took the woman aside to speak to her in private. When that police officer returned, the woman was gone, and I heard the police officers tell the guy that they were going to wait for another patrol car.

When that new patrol car arrived, another couple of officers came out and informed the guy that he was getting arrested for domestic violence. I heard that she would visit the hospital to assess the injuries. I didn’t leave until I saw the handcuffed guy getting helped into the patrol car.

I suspect that if anyone other than the police had interfered, the woman in question would have sided with her boyfriend. That seemed very clear from her actions and demeanour. In such cases it’s far better to force her hand. However, if she baited him to have this confrontation in public because she knew how both of them were going to end up, good for her.

So all’s well that ends well, I guess.

EDIT: I realized that the last sentence of the latest chapter I uploaded is, “Well, let’s make sure we don’t give anyone cause to call the police.” Life is one strange bitch.

I’m not sure if anyone besides me cares about it, but I haven’t posted a chapter of my ongoing novel for two weeks. Although I’ve already forgotten the details of that first week, the week that just ended was hellish due to work: I spent the first half of every morning on phone duty (and by far, the worst part of my job as an IT guy at a big hospital complex is dealing with human beings), and the remaining half rushing to solve weird issues. Last Wednesday I got so stressed that if extreme anxiety was an immediate trigger for my heart issues (atrial fibrillation), by mid-morning I would have had to endure a new episode. It didn’t happen, though, which saved me from another trip to the ER.

Three of those workdays, after I got home and ate, I was forced to take a nap so I wouldn’t waste the rest of the afternoon fighting sleepiness. It’s a good thing that I lack a social life; back when I had to maintain a romantic relationship and a job at the same time, not only I passed out twice at my then girlfriend’s place, but I also came to resent how exhausted her need to meet nearly every day made me. I can only consider this job tolerable because I leave the office at three in the afternoon (but I work some Saturdays, including this week), and because I’m not forced to interact with other human beings in my spare time.

Regarding my then girlfriend, the relationship was already doomed at that point. I think I only ever dated because I thought I was supposed to; I’ve never gotten enough out of intimate relationship as I assume normal people do, and sex didn’t feel that great, maybe because I wasn’t particularly attracted to the ones I could get. Thank the heavens for virtual reality and my right hand. I’m guessing most men are driven to pursue women because their balls are full. Once that’s taken care of, I just want peace and quiet.

Anyway, even after I woke up from the naps last week, I barely managed to write a few sentences. I figured that once the weekend came I would be able to push out the current chapter, which at that point felt cursed. However, when I woke up at nine in the morning on this Saturday, I realized that I simply didn’t feel like writing. My subconscious hadn’t produced any new notes for a while, which means that the core of my being was currently disengaged from the material.

I have always had a terrible time trying to focus on anything I honestly couldn’t care about; back in high school I did terribly not only because I was surrounded by savages, but because the material felt pointless to my goal of either programming or writing for a living. During my first few jobs, the tasks they assigned to me felt so boring and pointless that I knew I was wasting my life there. The whole time I was aching to sneak in as much writing time as I could to assuage my despair (which is in part how the whole deal of my current protagonist, Leire, came to be; I’m quite sure that there’s a Japanese verb that means both “to write” and “to jerk off”, which psychologically for me serves a similar purpose).

The way my brain works, I have to take advantage of what little free time I have to write as much as possible, because soon enough I’ll find myself in a blizzard in which I will feel unable to move or see anything beyond a few feet in front of me. During such periods I can do nothing but wait until the weather clears up. The circuits in my brain that produce meaning are faulty and unreliable, and of course this universe is meaningless beyond what the brains of living beings assign to certain stuff. During this last week and a half or so, it wasn’t only the act of writing that felt pointless; as I tried to fill my free time with board games, books, mangas or other interests that have satisfied me in the past, nothing felt worth the effort, so I spent most of last week at home in a catatonic state while my brain felt filled with lead. I still haven’t recovered fully; it’s taking me a lot to put my thoughts down, and I doubt I’m doing it coherently enough.

A bottomless hunger in me drives me to write every day, or else I’ll have to deal with a growing despair that may eventually kill me. This strange, somewhat demonic creative force gets bored or distracted from time to time, sometimes for a few days, weeks or even months, and abandons an obsession to sink its claws into something else. It did it again during these past two weeks: I suddenly felt an urge to get back into the COIN series of games, order the Tru’ng bot for the “Fire in the Lake” game and play it for four or five hours-long sessions on the Vassal engine.

I also got interested in Android Netrunner again, one of the most intriguing Living Card Games I have come across, but that I couldn’t play because it’s a player-versus-player game that uses hidden information and bluffing as some of its most notorious mechanics, so the game can’t be played solo. It had also been discontinued by its company despite having a loyal audience, but I was stunned to find out that a group of fans had rebranded the game, produced whole new series of cards and improved past ones while learning from the mistakes that the original company made. This rebranded version is called Nisei (this is its official page), it’s supported in the netrunnerdb page for reliable deckbuilding, and the cards can be printed for relatively cheap at a couple of partnered companies. More importantly, some hero has programmed a browser app that allows anyone to play the game against an AI opponent using the main sets of new cards: here’s the site.

I could feel my hunger wanting to sink its claws into this new subject to turn it into an obsession. How about I get back into programming and implement bots for one of my favorite games, maybe one of the COIN ones, which should be video games in the first place? Or surely I could design my own deckbuilding card game and implement it digitally. I wouldn’t even need to commission the artwork now that I can exploit an AI to produce the images, and the license states that you are free to use the generated images for commercial purposes.

However, I stopped myself. I know what awaits me further down that path: programming has never fulfilled me enough, not remotely to the extent that writing does. I’d start a new programming project only to abandon it halfway through as if I had never bothered to start it. So instead I forced myself to focus on progressing through the draft of the current chapter. Thankfully, I finished it; the chapter is now at that state in which I would consider it good enough for publication, but as usual I’ll subject it to another creative pass line by line, which will take a couple of days. The events and interactions depicted in this chapter aren’t particularly hard to handle (nor that compelling, to be honest). I fear that my difficulties with it stem from the fact that I may be sliding down into another depression, even though the previous one ended three or so weeks ago.

Unexpectedly, last Thursday I received the best news in a good while. When they hired me for my current contract, I was told that it would last until October, and possibly until November if they could work something out. However, the big boss of my department called me in and told me that they had failed to mention that my current contract actually ends this Sunday (I work on Saturday), because they guy I’m covering for, who has been relieved of his tasks for an special project, has three weeks of holiday, so I can’t legally cover his schedule in the meantime. That means that I have three weeks of (unpaid) holiday as well.

That will be the first time in my adult life in which during a period of unemployment I won’t be either trying to get hired or waiting for my place of employment to call me and offer a new contract. However, I’m not guaranteed to be offered the next contract that will last until October or November; they will use the public rankings for that, which change from time to time. Some kid who just got his degree but knows how to speak Basque may rank higher than me; the regional government grants 18 points to people who can speak Basque, while I have only accrued about 3 points due to professional experience after the three or so years I’ve spent working here. We don’t even need to speak Basque at work, it’s a political matter.

The next day, my direct boss called me into his office. He told me that he wasn’t aware that I wouldn’t be working here for those three weeks in August, that he was counting on me, and asked for my permission to figure out how to secure a contract that would keep me here for those weeks. Fuck no. Emotional manipulation doesn’t work on me; these people don’t even know me, they have only interacted with the mask I’m forced to wear to survive in society. If they knew my true self, most of them would be horrified. It’s almost insulting to expect me to be grateful that I would have been “rescued” from three weeks of holiday because I would be paid in return, when my coworkers have spent the past two months counting the days until they could finally escape from this office.

I may take a trip somewhere for a few days. Apart from that, I intend to spend a whole day or two in Donostia (I live thirty kilometers away, and I also go there 5 to 6 days a week for work) to research specific locations where Leire and Jacqueline will hang out soon. Both of the novels that I have written in English (one ongoing) are set in cities or general areas that I’ve known personally; I think the farthest that my characters went was Asturias during a bittersweet sequence in my beloved previous novel (self-promotion!). Although I’ll have to study for an upcoming public examination during my holidays, I hope to cram as much writing time as possible. At this rate it will take me a whole year to write this cursed novel; I started it back in October of 2021.

Yesterday I got together with my family to celebrate my father’s birthday. He’s in his seventies. I wish I dared to avoid these reunions entirely, but I think some of my family members would go out of their way to annoy me even more in that case. I don’t have anything in common with my family beyond the genetic links. I barely got along with them before, but ever since my nephew was born five or six years ago, the experience has worsened. I can’t relate to that kid at all. I will never have children and I don’t want to deal with other people’s kids either. I can tell that the person I have to call my sister-in-law, with whom I’ve never talked more than a minute at time, resents that I refuse to accept the role of uncle. She’s also the passive-aggressive type; if I had ended up dating someone like her, let alone being married to one, I would have wanted to cut my balls off.

Anyway, we went to the Hondarribia marina for lunch (the restaurant visible to the right at this point of the linked video). Whenever I visit such places, I feel like a prisoner on a prison furlough (if that’s how they are called). The heated air of a sunny day, the smell of brine and sunscreen, the beautiful views that included attractive tourists in summer dresses… Such sensations nearly made me teary-eyed.

However, the older I get the worse my sensory issues become (mine, autism-related, have to do with noises), and as usual, human beings were the worst part of that experience. As if I didn’t find the conversation of my family members intolerable enough, other people decided to bring their screaming babies to the restaurant. I suppose they are entitled to. By the time I got back home, I was drained, crabby and sad. Fortunately I managed to finish the first draft of my current chapter by nine; by ten I need to go to bed, or else I won’t get the potential eight hours of sleep that I desperately need to avoid feeling like a zombie on Mondays.

Anyway, this whole load of pointlessness ended up longer than the chapter I’ve yet to post. I suppose that I needed to get my thoughts in order. I don’t know why you (yes, the nosy stranger who’s reading this) went through the trouble of taking time out of your day to get through this text, but I hope I didn’t waste your time as much as I’ve wasted my own this past couple of weeks.

I haven’t been able to write anything of value in days. I’d say that I haven’t had such a dry spell for a long time, but I barely remember what I did yesterday. When I get home from work I’m so exhausted and deflated that I can only slump in the chair and waste the rest of the afternoon in a vegetative state. Yesterday I went a bit further: I got in bed and fell asleep as I listened to storm sounds. I was glad to be gone at least for a while.

Half of the days that I’ve woken up at six in the morning recently I’ve regretted that I didn’t die in my sleep. Such is my mental state when I get to the office and I’m forced to deal with people and their computer problems. I’m sluggish, I have trouble thinking, and I can’t remotely begin to care about anything. I don’t know how people even approach me, because as I sit at my desk I’m burning in the black flame of my misery. As usual, the worst part of this job is dealing with human beings (it has always been the case in any setting I’ve been involved in), whether they are my coworkers or the generally clueless users.

The following are examples from a single day:

-Someone asked to get the professional version of Access installed in his computer, which is fine, but then he emailed me because the upgraded version of Excel (we install the whole upgraded Office package) no longer allowed him to do something it used to. He turned out to be the only person I’ve come across on this job that sets up Excel workbooks as data sources for his personal Excel projects at the office. I talked with HQ and it seems that this will fail with every upgraded version of Excel for all the regions of my country that HQ covers. I’m still dealing with reverting the upgrade so the guy can do what he used to, nevermind upgrading Access. I was tempted to tell him that if he’s using Excel in a way that nobody else is at work, then he should do it at home. In any case, his boss took the opportunity to ask me personally to upgrade Access in other computers (they know they should mail our office, and not individual workers, when making these requests), but then he gave me the names of computers that already have Access upgraded. I told him that if there’s any issue to call HQ so they open a ticket.

-A user stated something of the effect of, “our computer no longer opens [a program related to sterilization]”, but failed to mention any detail about the computer or its physical location. I emailed her for details. After she failed to reply, I ended up phoning her department until they located her. She gave me the computer’s name. The network connection for that computer was down, so I likely would have to check its physical connections. When I asked for its location, the woman told me that she had no time to handle my problem now, and that I should call some time later. That sentence took longer to say than what it would have taken her to share where in the hospital the computer is located. In the end one of the corresponding cables at the network rack was faulty.

-Someone told me that a vitals monitor was failing, but she also failed to tell me its physical location. It’s amazing how often we are assumed to be omniscient. I think some people just have a hard time understanding that we aren’t in their heads.

-Some request stated that “the Maintenance Department has finished the installation that should allow you to move the computer of X room at Y building”. Of course, I had no foreknowledge of this move, nor the specifics of what the Maintenance Department has done (which means I’ll have to waste time going there and getting the specific details that they should have provided). I email her asking if that X room is the origin or the destination of the move, or both (in case they want to move it from a table to another), and if the computer has already been moved (they know they have to call the department that handles moving installed material from one place to another; they get paid for that, we don’t). She tells me that the move is from a table in that room to another one in that same room. Later on her supervisor tells me that the move is from one room to another. They fail to mention if anyone has already moved the computer and its unmentioned associated devices (such as a phone, a printer, etc.) to its destination; my department is only supposed to handle hooking up the computer to the network and making sure it works properly when it’s already at the location. I expect that when I show up later today with a cart, they’ll tell me to come later, even though I will have arrived at the time they specified (they do this relatively often).

My basic psychological defenses, the “callus” that allows me to withstand the regular assaults of noise (usually in the form of incredibly annoying interactions between childish coworkers), the high light levels that people want to work under, and the closeness of so many humans, are worn down, and I force myself to resemble a functioning human being although in the background of my mind I keep hearing that I need to die. If there’s such a thing as a medical leave for mental illness, I should probably be on it, but in that case I would disappear from the office for weeks at a time every month and a half or so (maybe even more often). I’m simply not built to exist in such environments nor deal with human beings to this complexity of interactions and for the required length of time every day. I’m the kind of person who would have been posted at a lighthouse a couple hundred years ago. I also want to masturbate as I gaze into the eldritch light of some fancifully designed lens.

At times like this I wonder why on earth did I ever think that I was capable of handling the responsibilities of a normal adult when I’m 52 percent disabled according to our regional government, was diagnosed with so-called “high-functioning” autism (by a couple of psychiatrists that said that my autism was obvious, something that previous therapists missed completely) and I was also diagnosed at different times with avoidant personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (apparently OCPD and OCD are not the same thing), a generalized anxiety disorder and a clinical depression “resistant to treatment”.

My current period of cyclical depression has coincided with the confirmation that my heart has a physical problem, even though it may be among the mildest possible: atrial fibrillation. My health has failed me from birth: my first memory was of waking up from an operation in which they had to fix a couple of physical issues. Then in my twenties I discovered that I was born with a pituitary tumor which has fucked me up permanently, and throughout I’ve had to endure an Irritable Bowel Syndrome that only gets worse with age. You can usually tell who has serious IBS from their pictures, because those people look worn out and miserable, as it befits the human beings that a few times a day are a distraction and a loose sphincter away from shitting themselves. Now my fucking heart is compromised. I suspect I’ve been in shock, or affected somehow, ever since I spent hours at the Observation Unit of that Emergency Department. I’m waiting for the next time that my heart will fuck me over again, and unfortunately the two treatments I’ve been offered for it are troubling prospects.

I’m also in the kind of mood in which I’m eager to get rid of any person that annoys me even slightly, from online contacts that somehow have ended up in my friends lists on social sites, to coworkers that bother me unnecessarily or disturb my peace of mind in any way. There’s no point in compromising my mental health and principles except to the absolutely minimal extent required to keep a job. Anyone else can rightly fuck off, especially those who have made me up to be someone I’m not to fit a mental image of theirs. I’m sick of dealing with the delusional projections that human beings regularly force upon others. Just stare into a fucking mirror and leave me alone.

Lately I’ve been in a daze, trying to daydream my way through the workday, or at least operating as mechanically as possible, while I feel that nothing going on in this world has anything to do with me. I only look forward to the moment I’ll be able to sit down in front of my PC at home and continue working on my current novel, or else lose myself in another board gaming session.

I went to see a cardiologist due to my recent episode of atrial fibrillation. The guy seemed annoyed already, but he got even more testy when I merely informed him that the first instance in my whole life when I experienced these “heart hiccups” was the same day that I got my latest booster vaccine. He proceeded to assure me that the vaccine had nothing to do with it. When I looked up the matter a few days ago, I came across medical articles such as this one that state, “reported data shows a possible correlation between the Pfizer COVID vaccine and [atrial fibrillation]”. As small as it might be, it doesn’t invalidate the factual reality that I got my first instance of such issues after I got jabbed, as my fever was rising.

He told me that enduring through another episode of atrial fibrillation was a matter of when, not if, and the treatment would depend on their frequency. Apparently the treatment consists on either prescribing me flecainide to take it if the episode of atrial fibrillation lasts a few hours, or else I should undergo ablation. When the word ‘ablation’ came out of his mouth, the image of a clitoris popped up in my mind, and I couldn’t pay attention to the following sentences. According to the internet, the procedure consists of “[using] small burns or freezes to cause some scarring on the inside of the heart to help break up the electrical signals that cause irregular heartbeats.” Wonderful.

So it’s either heart surgery or taking flecainide, a drug that “[has a] chance that [it] may cause new or make worse existing heart rhythm problems when it is used. Since it has been shown to cause severe problems in some patients, it is only used to treat serious heart rhythm problems.” Another site states, “if you’ve had a heart attack within the past two years, flecainide may raise your risk of having another heart attack, which can be fatal. This drug should only be used if you have a life-threatening irregular heart rate.”

I don’t trust people in general, and I’ve already been treated as a guinea pig by smiling psychiatrists, one of whom prescribed me an anti-depressant that caused permanent physical scarring, and another one who prescribed me hypnotics for my terrible insomnia issues back then (which thankfully I’ve managed to regulate thanks to extreme exhaustion from work as well as regular masturbation), and who stated that I could keep taking the hypnotics for months or years (by the way, this video is the closest depiction I’ve found of how it feels to be drugged with that stuff); I ended up experiencing even worse depression, which felt like I was wading through mud every second, and lo and behold, the indications of the drug stated that it shouldn’t be used for more than a couple of weeks, because it could vastly worsen depression and other nasty stuff.

The reaction of such professionals to the notion of covid vaccines causing any health issues at all is just another case of normal people being terrified of social suicide and of potentially losing their jobs. That’s how the vast majority also fall in line with mass migrations that are ethnically cleansing the native populations, with the increased influence of certain religions, with the pronouns craze and such. Increasingly totalitarian regimes, as virtually all Western governments are becoming, work not only by directly punishing their citizens but by inducing in them such social pressure that they’ll eagerly police other citizens so they keep their mouths shut and agree with whatever insanity they otherwise reject in private. In my case, I already avoid human beings, so if someone stops interacting with me they are usually doing me a favor.

As a single, unattached man with a regular wage, I have some money to spare. I love living card games, and my favorite one so far is ‘Arkham Horror’. However, they revised the original living card game they made of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ back in 2012 or so. I bought the entire series of revised products, which consists on the revised core game, the ‘Dark of Mirkwood’ scenario, the four starter decks and the ‘Angmar Awakened’ hero expansion. So far I’ve only succeeded at one of the missions, the very first one of the core campaign, thanks to my custom decks ‘Monster Hunters of the Realm’ and ‘Scouts of Mirkwood’.

Right now I look forward to playing more of this living card game than of ‘Arkham Horror’, although part of it must be the novelty. I love, however, the art on these cards, the synergies that you can build with them and the sense of leading bands of fantasy peoples against a whole variety of monsters and treacheries. Although the ‘Lord of the Rings’ LCG has a simple Location system, with only one active location to explore at a time instead of a board made of cards as in ‘Arkham Horror’, I’ve always had the nagging feeling that the other game overcomplicated the matter. As usual, as much as I’ve loved videogames, few things beat entertainment-wise the tactile and brain-burning experience of having a well designed problem to solve with some fancy tools at my disposal. It’s to a certain extent how I feel about putting texts together, whether they are poems or scenes for an ongoing story, but in that case I use words instead of cards.

Otherwise, I’m at work and I wish I wasn’t. Having a job sucks, having to deal with people is harrowing, and I can’t rest nor be alone remotely as much as I need.

Last Wednesday I went through my first hours-long episode of atrial fibrillation, which confirmed that my heart has a physical issue. I already suspected it because I had been experiencing weird heart hiccups. I ended up lying in a bed of the Observation Unit at the local hospital for hours, and the episode of atrial fibrillation only passed because they gave me 300 mg of flecainide, an apparently hardcore medicine that comes with plenty of warnings against its use. That medicine made me unable to even sit down for the remainder of the day, unless I wanted to break in cold sweat and get dizzy and nauseous. It took two days to get the drug out of my system.

I didn’t go to work for those two days, but I intended to return the following week unless I endured through a new episode of atrial fibrillation, which would have suggested that my heart was in an even worse state than I suspected. The doctor and nurses that attended me told me that I should monitor my heart rate in my spare time with a pulse oximeter, which I have access to because my mother was a nurse. I have a scheduled visit with a cardiologist in August, but apart from that, they told me that if another episode of atrial fibrillation starts, I should leave whatever I’m doing and go immediately to the nearest Emergency Department to get an ECG and possibly take some medicine. The related information I’ve found online is confusing and often contradictory, but in general people who suffer through atrial fibrillation are much more likely to suffer terrible issues such as ischemic strokes and other conditions caused by irregular blood flow or clots to vital organs.

This Sunday I woke up, prepared myself a cup of coffee and monitored my heart rate. It was in the mid 40s, the lowest I had ever noticed it. I walked around for a bit and it increased to the high 50s and low 60s, but it quickly fell to the 40s again. My heart still felt (and still does) sore, weird and weak in general. The doctor had told me I should monitor my heart rate, and this seemed like a bad sign, so I called to ask what I should do. They told me to visit the Emergency Department and get an ECG, at least to record that my heart rate had gotten that low, in case that factors in when I visit the cardiologist. After I lay on a different bed of the Observation Unit for half an hour, an attractive doctor in her early twenties told me that I shouldn’t worry about such a low heart rate, only if it fails to go up after some movement. She suggested that I have an athlete’s heart because I walk around quite a bit in the hospital complex where I work, and because I’ve lifted weights semi-regularly for years. I doubt that anyone who looks at me would seriously think that I’m an athlete of any sort.

Also, getting touched by the warm hands of attractive young women made me face that although I can’t stand to be around human beings for long, I do need to get touched. If I wasn’t so ashamed of my penis, I may consider visiting some professional.

As a somewhat random comment, suffering through a physical heart issue reminded me of Hisao Nakai from my favorite visual novel/dating sim ‘Katawa Shoujo’ (an obscure reference). I could swear that I played the game back in 2008, but the information I’ve found suggests it was released in 2012. Anyway, its protagonist suffers a heart attack in the very first scene, then he gets diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmia and congenital heart muscle deficiency. He ends up getting sent to a private school for disabled students in which he may get to befriend, romance and possibly frick some peculiar, pained students who endure their own unfair disabilities. The director of this game suffered from the same heart issues, and he ended up passing away due to them a couple of years ago.

Back when I was lying in bed at the Observation Unit, I asked every professional who treated me if the stress I have to deal with on a regular basis contributed to this sudden health issue. They told me that atrial fibrillation is purely a physical matter, unrelated to stress. However, those professionals (all of them suspiciously young) were either ignorant or bold-faced liars, because every article I come across online states the opposite. For example, the following article says that stress and mental health issues may cause atrial fibrillation symptoms to worsen, and it adds that “there is a complex relationship between atrial fibrillation and anxiety and depression. Some research shows that people with atrial fibrillation may be more affected by depression and anxiety.”

I was born with high-functioning autism (formerly Asperger’s), dealing with increasing anxiety is a constant struggle from the moment I leave the safety of a locked room in which I’m alone, and I endure through cycles of a depression that a former psychiatrist diagnosed as “resistant to treatment”. Obviously I’m fucked. I have to assume that heart failure or a serious stroke is on the horizon for me. I don’t think I will go through the pain of trying to find another job that I can tolerate better. I am too old for that already, and although my current job as a computer technician at a hospital only keeps me employed for eight or so months out of a year, it’s still the most reliable job I’ve ever had. Previously I was a programmer; when I managed to get hired, half of the time I worked as an unpaid intern, and exploited as such.

These last four days I’ve rested as much as I could. Instead of writing as feverishly as I used to, I played a couple of sessions of my favorite card/board game of all time: ‘Arkham Horror’. I’m halfway through the ‘Edge of the Earth’ campaign with my personal decks for Zoey Samaras (who’s an OP beast with the Cyclopean Hammer; I suspect it’ll get tabooed at some point), Monterey Jack and my beloved Jacqueline Fine (unrelated), whose ability to manipulate the Chaos Bag makes for a very peculiar playstyle. I’m already playing with premium tokens from BuyTheSameToken (I had to pay sixty-five or so euros just to import them from the UK, though), and I’m waiting to receive in the mail additional 3D-printed stuff such as this fantastic deck/discard holder combo.

In general, movies and shows fail to grab my attention enough (in part because I can’t connect with people); I have very little patience with books and I bail on them if they annoy me, which happens more often than not; and videogames these days are almost fraudulent, or the dreaded FOMO causes me to wait until some vital updates/mods come out. I’m waiting for the Elder Scrolls mod to come out for ‘Crusader Kings 3’, and I’m also waiting for ‘Victoria 3’, the Steam version of ‘Dwarf Fortress’, and ‘Starfield’ to be released. Board games give me a tight, tense two-to-three hours of gameplay, which can go up to four in the case of ‘Arkham Horror’, then I can shelve them for another day.

Anyway, I’m trying to get back into writing my current novel. Plenty of increasingly deranged stuff to come as we head into what will pass for a traditional third act in this tale. I’ll also try not to die, at least until I finish what I must.

I woke up at half past two in the morning and I figured that I may as well tell the tale of how I spent most of the previous afternoon in the Observation Unit of the local Emergency Department.

On Tuesday night I went through a routine that I have repeated from time to time at the lowest points of my life: as I was climbing on the bed to sleep, I thought to myself, “this was the last time I’ve stepped on this floor or any other. I’m going to pass away in my sleep. I’ve seen all the things I wanted to see, I’ve done all the stuff I wanted to do. Let it end already.” Well, it feels like I nearly got my wish.

Yesterday I ended up waking up anyway, at six in the morning. I prepared myself in a hurry to walk through my decaying city, get on the train, then on a bus so I could reach the hospital complex where I work. I’ve been feeling even more stressed than usual lately; on top of the maddening routine as a computer technician at a hospital complex where anything can go wrong at any moment, where most people consider their problems the most urgent, and where half of the users I handle are complete idiots no matter how good they may be as nurses, doctors or however the hell they ended up working at the hospital, I had a quarrel with a coworker because he locked me out of books related to a public examination that we bought together (I bought most of them, actually), for no good reason, which made me face I couldn’t trust this guy, which in turn made me realize I have to cut back on involving myself with people in person unless it’s absolutely necessary to earn a paycheck.

Anyway, for whatever reason my job kept piling up tasks on me, some labeled as urgent, while I was already having to schedule operations at specific times and half of my coworkers were free; the trio of loudmouths who spend most of their time at the office blabbering, ruining everyone else’s concentration, seemed to have worked half an hour at the most. Going through the emails I’ve received these last couple of days:

-A laptop located at an operating room of the Ophthalmology Department wasn’t loading their needed apps reliably. Their supervisor had refused to open a ticket about this beyond the first one weeks ago, and instead she was either emailing specific technicians (I was one of them), or phoning our secretary and naming technicians so we would handle the issue. I happened to be one of the technicians who had already seen this problem and was in the office at the moment, so I ended up dealing with this irate supervisor. She was right, though, because the usual solution for this common problem (restarting the computer so it can set up the network drives properly) didn’t work *all* the time; such intermittent issues are the most troublesome to handle. I ended up opening a couple of tickets to HQ so they would review all the basic details about that laptop’s presence in the general network of our organization, and they detected that its specific build of Windows was outdated. Great, I thought, that’s the solution. I convinced my boss to just exchange their oldish laptop for a new one. Eventually, though, when I got there not only the new laptop had the same issue of not loading the network drives reliably, but also did a laptop from a neighboring operating room. Now I think that the problem is more likely due to Wi-Fi coverage, a whole nonsense to diagnose that will involve coordinating ourselves with confused and chatty nurses to move the laptops around (most of the time such devices are under lock and key, because plenty of patients have stolen stuff) so the guys at HQ can check how strongly the specific MAC addresses receive the signal. This will take hours of a single technician’s time, and it hasn’t been done yet.

-Some doctor from a department that does some kind of animal testing complained that she couldn’t open certain Google Drive invites in Chrome, so she requested it to be updated. When I handled the issue I found out that the invites were getting loaded in Internet Explorer instead. I taught her to copy and paste the hyperlinks to Chrome, which opened them properly. However, she ended up calling me later because Google Drive wasn’t letting it open certain files, and it was due to certain idiots from Network Security at HQ that consider it necessary to block stuff from Google Drive, so I had to open a ticket to let that doctor’s requests pass through the firewall.

-They opened up a new “reports room” at a department that handles operating kids. I managed the move, but one of the computers that ended up there was ancient, one of those troublesome kinds who use very specific software that has never been updated for newer operating systems and that some of the time isn’t maintained anymore because the company no longer works with the healthcare organization. Anyway, this computer had a proprietary set of cables that went to specially mounted sockets on the wall, but the cables didn’t make clear which cable went where. I had to locate technicians from that random company and return to that “reports room” (a process that involves me dressing myself up, because it’s a sterile environment) and snap a few photos of the damn cables to mail them. They haven’t answered yet.

-Someone from a clinic located a couple dozen kilometers away wants to be able to print in a different printer, “just in case”. It takes me a good while to coordinate myself with her so she can free up her computer. When I finish, she asks, “hey, can you do that for this coworker and this one and this one too?” I tell her that they should open their own tickets.

-Some barcode scanner works intermittently. Half of the time the users are handling it wrong. The ticket doesn’t say anything about the model of the scanner nor its physical location, so I email the person for details.

-Suddenly nobody in a whole wing of the ICU could print on their assigned printer. Yesterday afternoon they called my department because there were blocked documents on the queue, but whatever my coworker did screwed stuff up for everybody. I connected remotely to the print server; it was still open on the list of printer addresses and focused on the one with the issue: my coworker linked the name of the printer to another IP address by mistake.

-Some lab technician can’t open certain attached images because it gives an error regarding virtual memory. The technician insists on me checking her disk space. It’s partially a RAM issue, but also there may be some weird allocation matter, because restarting the computer (she said she did, anyway) hasn’t solved it. I still haven’t finished dealing with it.

-There were also a few more mundane matters that don’t warrant me writing about them.

I really dislike my job, but it’s the only one that has employed me semi-reliably. As a programmer I ended up working half of the time as an unpaid intern, but even when I was getting paid, I barely made minimum wage. By the way, this is a country where some people can enter illegally from certain continents and earn three times minimum wage just for existing. Such are the ethnic backgrounds of more than half of the people that hang out at the Maternity building of my hospital complex.

Anyway, at a quarter past two I was heading to the Ophthalmology Department located in one of the farthest reaches of this complex to hand them a new laptop. Right as I reach their floor, I start sweating, feeling light-headed and getting a weird pressure in my chest. My heart goes arrhythmic. I feel it jumping, and as I check my pulse, it’s clearly all over the place.

The first time I experienced such arrhythmia was the very same day that I received my latest booster vaccine (which I was forced to take because I wouldn’t keep getting hired as a computer technician at any hospital otherwise). From then on I experienced such “heart jumps” semi-regularly, moments in which my heart seemed to hiccup in a disturbing way, but it had always passed a couple of heartbeats later. This time it didn’t stop. I could tell it wasn’t normal in any way, but I figured that I would give the Ophthalmology crew a new laptop to solve the issue they had been badgering us about, then visit the Workplace Health department or however it’s called in English.

As I waited for a few nurses to get me some disposable operating room clothing, one of the chatty nurses (have I said enough times that talking to people in person makes my skin crawl?) approached me and asked me, “by the way, do you work for [our Healthcare Organization]?”. Me, wearing a lab coat that features prominently the logo of said organization: “Yes.” “Can you help me with a problem? I haven’t been able to print reports with my credentials in forever. My coworker can’t do it either. We keep asking around and going crazy because nothing works and we have to ask other nurses to let us enter with their credentials.” “Have either of you opened a ticket for it?” “Well, no.” I realized quickly that they hadn’t assigned the printer correctly in the program like virtually every other department is told how to do.

I was expecting any of them to point out that I seemed sick, because I was sweating profusely, my pulse was trembling, and in general I must have looked like death. But they just ended up giving me one of those disposable sets of clothes. When I found myself alone in the locker room, my heart kept going crazy, I was getting weaker and weaker and experiencing weird electrical pains along my collarbone and shoulders. I thought, “I’m having a heart attack. I’m having a heart attack and the last thing I’ll do in my worthless life is set up a laptop for these motherfuckers who have been pestering us for weeks without following any proper protocol.” I wanted to cry, or throw myself out of the window. Instead I got dressed and walked to the operating room. There I discovered that changing the old laptop for a new one didn’t solve the issue, and I explained to a few nurses that we’d have to coordinate ourselves to arrange a Wi-Fi coverage study in the following days.

When I left that department, it was already time to go home. My arrhythmia hadn’t stopped; if anything it had gotten worse. I felt dizzy and confused, and I can’t remember almost anything about the ride home. I realized that my heart issue was serious; although usually I would avoid going to a hospital for any reason because it would be too much of a bother, this time I got my father to drive me to the Emergency Department of the local hospital at Irún. By then I could barely stay upright, so an orderly wheeled me to the Observation Unit in a wheelchair. They hooked me up to a vitals monitor that kept beeping because my heart rate was out of whack, jumping wildly from the 80s to the 140s, and beeping even more urgently when it hit the 140s. The main nurse that treated me had the same name as the girlfriend that fucked me over the worst, but this young woman was very kind. They referred to my condition as atrial fibrillation. I have forgotten most of the stuff they did to me, but they made me swallow three flecainide pills and told me that I would lie in bed for the foreseeable future. If in six hours my heart hadn’t gone back to normal, they would defibrillate me.

I lay there for hours (most of the afternoon), staring at the hooks hanging from the ceiling and at the curiously designed ventilation slits, which looked like the bidimensional version of one of those spiky balls that they use to detonate minefields. On the opposite box some woman in her forties was being treated for covid. I would have supposed that these observation units were reasonably quiet due to the rest that the patients require, but the son of a bitch they had on the box immediately to my left kept groaning in an obnoxious, obviously fake way every few seconds, annoying everyone to the extent that the nurses kept saying, “we have to do something about the guy from 7”, and even other patients were shushing that idiot. I figured he must have been an elderly man with dementia or such shit, but the orderly that later wheeled me around to get an X-Ray of my chest told me, “he’s a Hispanic guy, just forty years old. I don’t know what is it with these Hispanics, but we get such kinds all the time: habitual drunkards who sometimes come in also drugged up to their eyeballs.”

After the nurses had to rush at the Hispanic guy because he kept trying to get up and even push stuff around, they decided to move him to another box. Regarding where they had to move him, they specified that he should be “distanced from the guy on 6 (me); he has a heart condition.”

Eventually my heart stopped hiccuping. The main nurse talked to me about the health issue assuming that it would happen again in the future, and that when it does I should go immediately to the nearest Emergency Department to get an ECG. They also told me I should make an appointment with a cardiologist. I asked them if my stressful routine may have caused this, but they told me it was a purely physical issue. I asked them if I should end up carrying with me the kind of pills they made me swallow, in case I experienced such an episode again when I was out there in the wild. They told me no way.

Later on I googled flecainide; most of the websites warn against its use with notices like this one: “This drug has a Black Box Warning. This is the most serious warning from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). A black box warning alerts doctors and patients to potentially dangerous effects. If you’ve had a heart attack within the past two years, flecainide may raise your risk of having another heart attack, which can be fatal. This drug should only be used if you have a life-threatening irregular heart rate. Tell your doctor if you have atrial fibrillation or atrial flutter. If you have these conditions where your heart does not beat correctly, you have an increased risk for developing certain types of irregular heartbeats. Flecainide is not recommended if you have chronic atrial fibrillation.” So either my nurses (or their hospital) were incompetent, or I’ve gone through a life-threatening irregular heart rate. Good to know.

They gave me the following report:

When they told me I could go home, I quickly discovered that I couldn’t even sit down without breaking in cold sweat and getting nauseous. I felt like I would pass out at any point. The same orderly wheeled me out to my father’s car. Soon after I got home, I emailed my boss to tell him that I would take it easy the two following days and that I would contact my GP to figure out what to do about this matter. Shortly after I went to bed and passed out.

I woke up at half past two in the morning and I decided to write this account, as I had nothing better to do. My heart feels physically weak and sore. Of course, I’m paranoid about it failing at any point. I read up on atrial fibrillation, and the following stuff bothered me the most: it’s associated with an increased risk of heart failure, dementia, and stroke. That’s on top of my regular migraines, which are also linked to an increased risk of stroke. The two fates I fear the most health-wise are dementia, Alzheimer’s and the likes, and strokes. One of my favorite writers, John Fowles, who wrote ‘The Collector’ and ‘The Magus’, suffered one in his sixties. Fowles never wrote another novel again, and stated that the stroke had “robbed him of his imagination”.

It’s nearly six in the morning, when I would need to wake up to go to work, but I’m going to sleep. I won’t have to work, which will likely cause me untold issues next week. However, as far as I care at the moment, it can fuck right off along with my failing body and my pointless life.

Last week was rough, but then again I don’t recall any week of work that hasn’t been grueling for one reason or another. I have been enduring stress-related pains such as upper back strains; many years ago I ended up getting such aches checked, and they confirmed that they were caused by stress. Last Monday, as I was standing on the bus on my way to the hospital complex where I work, I got the characteristic migraine aura that impedes my sight. In addition, every migraine seems to reduce my IQ for as long as it lasts, likely due to changes in the blood flow to my brain. Whenever I get one I fear that I’ll end up with permanent brain damage, which is apparently possible. Anyway, I always carry some ibuprofen with me, but I still had to deal with the resulting headache, that lasted two days.

I have forgotten the details of the many problems I had to solve at work; they have blurred into the general hellish sensation of navigating around in a hospital complex during a record-breaking heat wave while wearing a lab coat. I’m likely still depressed, which may explain part of why I’ve found half of my coworkers utterly unbearable these past few weeks. A group of them ruins whatever passes for peace in the office whenever they are present; although they are in their forties and fifties, they behave like children in a playground, bickering about stuff unrelated to work or goofing around with each other so loudly that if I were in charge of this place I would have admonished them almost daily. I’m forced to wear earplugs so I can concentrate on whatever the hell I’m doing.

The most bitter moment for me was a quarrel I had this Friday with a coworker. We are both preparing to pass a public examination in a few months, which requires the students to buy about twelve expensive textbooks. This guy and I decided to divide the purchases between us. He bought four and I bought about eight. It happened that way because he had already bought the first four, and I went ahead and bought the remainder. He decided to go through the trouble of paying a stationery store, or however they are called in English, to remove the spines and covers of the books, then use the industrial printers we have at the office to scan them, a process that he said took like a minute and a half per book. He then gave me access to a single folder of his Google Drive that only contained the scanned books in PDF format.

This guy is more than a bit paranoid, the kind who’ll get weird with you if he realizes you are talking to someone who may dislike him or have an issue with him for one reason or another. He told me that under no circumstance should I download the books on my workstation, because some other coworker may snatch them. I obliged him. After all, I could just go to the shared folder and open them there. I didn’t download most of them at home either, because I could access that folder.

I’m the second person that enters the office every morning. This guy is always the first one; he starts an hour early because it’s more convenient for him. Anyway, four of the five days of the week he wasn’t at his workstation when I came in, which was odd. We only greeted each other in passing otherwise.

At about ten in the morning on that Friday, I tried to open one of the PDF files located in the shared folder, so I could study for a bit between tasks. I found out that this coworker had revoked my access. This was a folder of his Google Drive that contains the digital versions of eight books that I paid for, and four that he did. Nobody else had access to this folder. He made the very conscious decision of shutting my access down.

Through Google Drive’s interface, I sent him a petition to regain access, saying that I hadn’t downloaded all the books. From my position I can see enough of his screens that I’m quite sure that he opened that request (I recognized the layout of the website), and let out a derisive chuckle. He wasn’t talking to anyone.

I gave him five minutes or so to grant me access again, but he didn’t. I was fuming. It was such a pointlessly malicious thing to do, to revoke access to a folder that just contains stuff that both of us had purchased, and for a shared purpose that won’t be resolved until October or November. There was no way I couldn’t interpret this except as a “fuck you” to me. In truth, I hadn’t gotten so internally enraged for good while, and it harkened me back to the years I had to live with my seven-years-younger sister, who stole money and jewelry from her family members to fund her drug habit, and in general started arguments and conflicts of every kind because she couldn’t tolerate boredom. I also grew to understand that although I’m a laid back person and I want as little conflict with people as possible (internally I’m often on the verge of brutally murdering someone), some will step on people like me because they consider us easy targets that won’t retaliate. I knew I had to confront my coworker about this immediately.

I walked up to him as we were surrounded by six or so other coworkers. I told him that I give him the benefit of the doubt, but that he must reinstate my access to the folder, because I hadn’t gotten to download all the books. This guy usually turns around on his chair with a self-assured smile as soon as anyone approaches him, but this time he remained still for my entire part of the dialogue, as if he went “oh shit” internally. That was my impression anyway. He told me that he didn’t know what I was talking about. I asked him whether or not he had revoked my access to the folder. He told me that he had, because he thought I would have already downloaded the files (why revoke my access, though, to a folder that just contains those files, when there’s no security risk?). I reminded him how particular he got about not downloading the books at work; I’m not sure if he opens the books at the office, but I did tell him that I was studying them when I’m not busy. Anyway, he told me that he would reinstate my access. I proceeded to immediately download all the PDFs and store them in a pen drive.

He didn’t speak to me again, and in fact he still hasn’t, but when I got home from work I had received two emails. The first one said that he thought I would have downloaded the files already, and that he had meant not to download them at work. The second email, in a sterner tone, told me to download the files this weekend because he would revoke my access again early on Monday. I still have access to the folder, though.

After this nonsense, I want to cut back on dealing with people in person as much as humanly possible. Due to autism, my brain simply can’t tell others’ intentions as normal people apparently can, and due its inability to process and register people’s faces properly (prosopagnosia; bad enough that I have no clue if I ever saw again people I was romantically involved with), I can’t read much on their faces. I’ve always had to distrust people to survive; I get taught that lesson over and over again. I just can’t ever know when someone is going to fuck me over, and the intentions and motivations of people often seem incomprehensible to me.

Obviously my job isn’t fulfilling; I only work to add money to my bank account at the end of the month. And I can only consider it tolerable because I have no social life nor a family of my own. When I get back home, half of the week I barely have the energy to stay awake. At the most I can invest two hours and a half of lucidity into whatever scene of my novel I’m working on at the moment. During my last long-term relationship I was so exhausted and mentally worn out from my nine-to-five job that I once took the train in the opposite direction by mistake, and I didn’t find out for forty minutes because I fell asleep; and after I went to my then girlfriend’s place just to spend the afternoon together, I sat on her sofa and passed out. She was mad at me often during those last months because I barely had the energy to shamble around.

Having to keep a job is truly a disaster, as it steals the most valuable things of your life: your time and your energy that should be spent on stuff that matters. Obviously I wish I could write from morning to night, which I’ve done gladly whenever I’m unemployed. However, if you expect to make a living writing, you are delusional; you may as well base your future on winning the lottery. It’s always been in part about having the right connections, but these days you need to belong to some preferred group and have the right opinions as well.

I’m getting assailed by the intrusive thoughts that have visited me regularly for as long as I remember, and that suggest that I should kill myself and get this whole bullshit over with. When I think about why I still stick around, I can only come up with the following: I want to finish my current novel, I have some campaigns of Arkham Horror to play through, and one of these days both ‘Victoria 3’ and ‘Starfield’ will get released. Otherwise, the sensory issues that autism causes make navigating virtually any environment a low-level torture (or even trauma inducing), at least beyond the confines of a locked room containing only me. I’m always bloated and gassy, and several times during the workday I’m even on the verge of shitting myself, due to Irritable Bowel Syndrome that I can’t regulate because it’s linked to anxiety, and I’m always anxious whenever I’m around people. I deal with life-long health issues caused in part by the pituitary tumor with which I was born. Virtually every interaction with other human beings in person is damn near unbearable. The intimate relationships I got involved in, until I gave up in my early-to-mid twenties, were humiliating, painful, forced me to run on a treadmill to fulfill someone else’s wishes and goals although mine remained neglected, and in the end those girls/women just left. I don’t see myself ever wanting to have children, because I’d only curse them with conditions that make me wish I wasn’t born; besides, I’d be a horrible father because I can’t give enough of a shit about anyone, even myself. I can’t look forward to the future on this continent, because in a generation or two Europe will become an extension of Africa and the Middle East, and I lack any support system to move elsewhere. It seems inevitable that one day the growing mountain of painful memories and traumas will tip the scales in favor of getting the hell out of Dodge as soon as possible.

Right now I have to prepare a couple of computers and hook them up to the network, and this afternoon I’ll work on my next scene. I’m close to finishing its first draft already. How did Cioran put it? “Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”

Today I ended up getting sent home from work due to the health issues I experienced these past two days. Here’s how it went: yesterday morning I felt like shit at the office, although I can’t recall any concrete details beyond a weariness, mental fog and weird chest sensations. When I got home, I wasted the entire afternoon trying to stay awake. My body felt like it weighed twice as much. As expected, I barely progressed the current scene of my novel (writing is virtually the only thing that matters to me these days, because life in general feels like a ceaseless nightmare). I know what happens if I take a nap in the afternoons: even if I just sleep for an hour, it’s very likely that I will spend the whole night dealing with insomnia. The days when I’ve ended up going to work on zero sleep, or at the most an hour, are fucking harrowing.

Anyway, this morning on the train I found myself unable to concentrate on my reading, so I just closed my eyes and tried to disappear inside my mind by blasting storm sounds through my earbuds. Once I reached the office, I couldn’t muster the strength to look at my coworkers in the eye, and I could barely make sense of what was happening around me. I was experiencing hot and cold flashes. My chest ached, particularly the area of my heart. I wasn’t surprised about any of it, because a week or so ago I deduced that I’m depressed again.

However, as I was talking to a couple of secretaries to handle a ticket (and I was begging in my mind for them to please stop talking to me and let me return to the office), one of them mentioned a rash around my eyes. I looked in a mirror a bit later and I saw something like this (that’s someone else’s photo):

I’m not allergic to anything, nor had I touched or consumed anything in particular. I found the same spots on my neck. I went to the workplace health service, but they were only interested in ruling out whether or not I had covid, so they told me to go home and wait for the call that’ll provide the schedule for the covid test. I ended up receiving the call as I was waiting for the bus. When I got home, my temperature was higher than normal, although not to the level of a fever; however, it wouldn’t surprise me if I always ran a higher than normal temperature as I get back from the hospital complex to my place, given that the experience of venturing through this ruinous society is a feverish ordeal. The test turned out negative, although my symptoms started less than forty-eight hours ago. I don’t consider my symptoms covid related, but what do I know.

Anyway, right now I have no clue if I should go to work tomorrow or not, or if I even can. I called the help service for this whole covid nonsense and they told me to ask my general practitioner (or however it’s called in English), contact the workplace health service (they close at three in the afternoon), or just contact my boss. I wrote my boss an email, but he hasn’t answered.

I don’t know where my depression ends and other health issues begin. I can’t think clearly, and of course the baseline of everything feels meaningless and hopeless. It’s better for my brain if I push myself to go to work; otherwise I may just hide under a blanket and wish I didn’t exist.