I’m back at work after two weeks of vacation that, as these things usually do, passed by way too fast. Most of my first week was spent in Barcelona, a trip originally intended for research but that caught me not caring much about writing. I’m glad I went, and I got some interesting experiences out of it, but when I returned home, I realized I didn’t really care to write about it. Right now, at about eight in the morning on a Monday, sitting at my office desk, I may as well point out a few things. First of all, Barcelona is a multiculti hellhole. I already expected it to be, but walking through Las Ramblas (don’t do that) exposed the multiculti dream, that as far as concerned has been thoroughly exposed: no “melting pot” (not that it was ever a good thing to begin with), but a fuckton of ethnicities competing for spaces, resources, and eventually, who rules. In a territory that was solely meant to be for the Catalan people, now increasingly less every passing day. Same thing is obviously happening throughout Europe, but it shocked me to witness it on such a grand scale in a huge city. I don’t know why anyone would want to live in such a city, by the way. As far as I’m concerned, they’re designed to drive you crazy.
Catalonia has a bad reputation for making most of its identity be about its regional language, which made me wary of going there, and while most things are indeed solely in Catalan, I had no trouble interacting with people in Spanish. That’s partly because plenty of the vendors I interacted with were foreigners, some of whom could barely care about Spanish, let alone the regional language. But anyway, walking down along Las Ramblas while Pakistani/Indian-type men (all of them were) constantly pestered passersby to eat at restaurants (that seemingly served regular food, but I have to assume they are Pakistani/Indian owned) was a chilling reminder that people from backwards places bring their backwards shit wherever they go.
Anyway, I visited churches, museums, the zoo, the top of the Tibidabo mountain… and instead of missing those sights, I found myself missing the attractive females I came across and whom I’ll never see again. The sporty, fresh-faced college-age woman who took the same elevator as me in the building where I briefly lived. The cute teenager wearing a cap and jeans who kept glancing my way with curiosity, for whatever reason, in the vivarium of the zoo, as well as at the mongoose enclosure. The woman who ran around the neighborhood wearing very tight, very short multicolored shorts. All those amazingly gorgeous tourists, isolated islands of blonde hair and blue eyes in an increasingly non-ethnic-European hole. Plenty of tourists who weren’t blonde and blue-eyed were also very attractive. Ultimately, attractive females are the most valuable “thing” in the world, and plenty of what any man (and some women) consumes on a regular basis, other than food, are substitutes for not having access to such a female.
The rest of my vacation was spent playing the guitar and programming. During this time, I was reminded of the fact that I don’t care about human beings or society in general. When I went out, I hurried to the mostly deserted wooded areas, while avoiding looking at anyone’s face. As I played the guitar, whenever any person approached, I got increasingly tense, which lessened as they left. It’s always been like this, but now, as a forty-year-old man going through some sort of middle-age crisis, it has become blatantly obvious that not only it’s going to be like that for the rest of my life, but that I’ll become increasingly crotchety about it as I grow older.
As the train carried me through the mostly deserted interior of Eastern Spain (about 70% of the country is unoccupied, mainly the interior plains, with the exception of the Zaragoza and Madrid areas), made me yearn to live in a quiet town somewhere in that isolation. I’m sick of having to share my spaces with so many people, even in a city like mine that isn’t remotely as fucked as Barcelona.
Don’t know what else to say. I hope I manage to return to writing my novel soon, but I’m not feeling it. I have been working hard at my programming project, mainly because it was a very compelling challenge, and just a couple of days ago, I managed to involve large language models in it, having them act as characters in a turn-based simulation. There’s a ton I can build upon that, but as the hardest part (by far) is already solved, I assume my interest is going to descend from there.
I’m tense about how I’m going to adapt to the office after this illuminating vacation. Working here as a programmer has illustrated that I absolutely do not, under any circumstance, want to return to working as a technician. I hate every aspect of it, and it’s completely ill-suited to my nature. But dropping that would likely mean having to find a completely different line of work at forty. But it’s not like I have any future here without knowing Basque; after the changes they made to the ranking system, I have been pushed down many places because of my lack of knowledge of that stupid language, so soon enough I would have found myself not being called for work anyway. Down the line of working as a technician, new visits to the ER await (three so far: two for arrhythmia and one for a hemiplegic migraine), and any of those visits may end up leaving me with permanent consequences. I suspect that at least one of them did.
Anyway, I guess that’s all for now.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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