It’s eight in the evening and I’m stuck at work, thankfully alone because during the last two hours of the afternoon, I’m the only technician on duty. I have spent most of my spare time studying for an upcoming test on the 16th, but I have managed to pull off two full paragraphs of the next scene of my ongoing novel, which is quite a lot considering how much returning to work has disturbed me.

On the first day back, about twenty minutes from the end of the working day, I received a call. That late, we usually don’t pick up, and I seriously considered just pretending I had already left, but the call came from HQ. They told me that some technician from the electromedical service was in need of a computer technician because the monitors that handle the delivery rooms in the maternity ward weren’t “receiving data.” That’s too convoluted of an issue to start investigating so late in the evening. I considered just creating a ticket and leaving a note for my boss to decide next morning what to do; I certainly wasn’t going to interview the technician from the electromedical service so that he would rope me in past my schedule; they don’t pay me overtime. However, I ended up contacting the engineer on call.

I had tried to forget about that incident, but the following day, that engineer approached me and told me that she had been dealing with the issue from 22:00 to 1:30. Turns out that the monitors weren’t “receiving data” because none of them would turn on. It was an electrical issue. The technicians on duty from the electromedical service seemed to be newbies, and they insisted that we were responsible because a switch (related to the computer network) was nearby, but that apparently was also dead because it wasn’t receiving power. Basically, it was the same situation as complaining to your internet provider that you can’t browse the internet, even though your computer doesn’t even turn on. Eventually the engineer managed to convince an electrician to go and deal with the situation; it was their responsibility, after all.

The supervisor of the maternity ward was fuming for hours, fearing that any of the newborns may die, and had to call in additional nurses. If I hadn’t taken that goddamn call, nor called the engineer on duty, my ass may have been toast. On my first day back.

Have I stated enough times that I hate this job? I’m autistic, for fuck’s sake. What the hell am I doing dealing with constant chaos, an open plan office in which half of the people act like they’re in high school or middle school, and with such a lack of training and documentation that you must pursue other technicians around to figure out how to solve plenty of tasks? My only hope in this organization is that I may receive a call to work at a smaller hospital, and get stuck working there with an indefinite contract that would allow me to pay my bills reliably. I’m too old and generally uninterested to get back into programming, because I’d have to learn lots of shit I don’t care about (such as programming for mobile phones and websites).

This segues awkwardly into the following: a few days ago I had a conversation with an autistic gal from the US I’ve been talking to online for a while. Not sure how it came up, but I told her that when I was a kid I felt compelled to drown in cold water (not a particularly odd subject among the ones we bring up). She was stunned, because she felt the same way back then, specifically in cold water. She suggested that in a previous life we may have drowned in the Atlantic. I proposed that we may have been citizens of Atlantis. In any case, I have always felt like there was something waiting for me in the cold, black depths of bodies of water. Perhaps a kind of home.

In my beloved previous novel, My Own Desert Places, my protagonist, Irene, killed herself by jumping off a cliff, intending to crush her skull against the rocks below. Instead of that, she became crippled, and lay there until the tide drowned her. This isn’t much of a spoiler, because she starts that novel as a ghost. That was somewhat autobiographical. Back when I was twenty-one or twenty-two, I had such a harrowing experience at my first paid job, that one morning I couldn’t muster the strength to get on the bus and face my bastardly bosses and the tasks that I wasn’t trained properly to fulfill. I had survived until then by luck; middle school was bad, but I spent most of my high school years in a psychotic state. I skipped most classes to wander around town, sneaking into random apartment buildings and spending hours in the stark darkness between flights of stairs, listening to the echoes. A few of those times, I prayed for real (never again afterwards): I asked whatever omnipotent creature may exist in the vast darkness of the universe to come down and kill me. She never came. That indifferent bitch keeps herself busy somewhere out there, spinning her web.

That day, when I refused to take the bus to work, I had a realization: my life until then had sucked major ass. My longest relationship had ended with her gaslighting me about a guy who “was like a little brother” to her. She cheated with him and left. I remember vividly the humiliation I tolerated afterwards; I had no self-esteem left, so I took her calls. The whole thing was a terrible mistake; I shouldn’t have met her to begin with. I hadn’t healed from that pain, and my first job suggested that the rest of my adult life would be strewn with even worse nightmares.

I had enough. At that point I intended to head to some cliff and throw myself off. Plenty of such spaces around. In my mind, I signed off on everything. But because I’m a coward, instead of that I went to the library, and as a result I’m writing these words. I must say, though, that earlier this afternoon, as I was violently expelling diarrhea in the bathroom because my IBS wanted to ruin my day even more than usual, I lamented, as I have done often, that I didn’t kill myself any of the many, many times that I have wanted to. Hell, even as a kid I remember clearly walking alone in the rain, under an umbrella, and wondering why did I have to be born and tolerate this cold, this grating world, and the constant pain.

Anyway, plenty of my stories have involved cold water. Diving into cold water and coming across a downed UFO. Being dragged into the cold depths by a sort of siren (in a novella I wrote in Spanish). Having to rescue your suicidal wife from the cold water because she doesn’t want to live in your manufactured paradise (in another novella I wrote in Spanish). Pretty sure there have been quite a few others. I also wish I could run some LiDAR on the continental shelves that went underwater at the end of the last ice age, when the sea level rose about 120 meters (400 feet). Atlantis went to shit when the North American tectonic plate got subducted and locked like a thousand meters underwater, submerging the Azores plateau, due to the catastrophic melting of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Or at least, that’s what I prefer to think.

Not sure why I felt like sharing these thoughts. Maybe because I wanted to give myself a break from studying, and I needed to get some stuff off my chest. Until next time, stranger who is reading this for reasons that would likely annoy me if I ever found out about them.

Today, at about one o’clock in the morning, I was thinking about food, but also daydreaming about winning the lottery so that I would never have to work for others again (I daydream about that often). Five minutes later I received a phone call. It’s usually either a family member or spam. Today, though, the phone number was a valid one, originating from my province. The fourth and fifth digits were zeroes, which meant that someone from a government-run organization was calling me. That likely meant one thing.

Oh no.

Someone at the office where I’ve worked on-and-off for a few years had taken a sick leave, and my services were required for this very day, on the afternoon shift, and until the guy returned. I’m familiar with the particular fucker, and he’s either gone for two weeks or an entire year. I was already fifteen minutes late from when I need to start preparing myself to leave the apartment, walk through the chaotic city center, get on a train to Donostia, then take a bus to the hospital complex where the office is located.

Back to the grind, back to either waking up at six in the morning or returning home at eleven at night. Back to wasting eight hours in an office, surrounded by about fifteen people even though I’m basically a hermit, having to avoid shitting myself due to my virulent IBS (as if the universe didn’t hate autistic people enough, IBS and other disorders such as OCD are more prevalent in folks like us), and having to meet strangers to solve their issues, issues that will come suddenly, and that I will be expected to know how to solve so that the tense users can return to doing whatever the fuck they were doing. On top of that, due to my vaccine-induced heart problems, I’ll likely end up in the ER again one of these days, because stress is a trigger.

Plenty of people out there struggle through far worse nightmares on a daily basis, but working for others has been my most dreaded one. My brain and body are unsuited for office work. Programming I can handle to a certain extent (I love programming, but doing so for others is a different matter). However, those jobs ended up letting me go, or not hiring me after an internship, due to some variation of “you can’t work well in a team.” Now I’m too old, unfamiliar with most modern technologies other than Rust and Python, and unwilling to get back in the game.

Hell, in my twenties, for long periods that I can’t remember properly, I likely classified as a hikikomori. I became that sort of beast that ceases to clean itself and stores its pee in water bottles, for no reason that I could discern. It’s been about 12-15 years since then, but I’m barely keeping it together as a human being, and that’s unlikely to improve.

So I’m writing this from one of the outrageously, maddeningly slow computers we are supposed to work with (they take about 5-7 minutes on a good day to reach the Windows desktop, and this is an upgraded line of computers from three years ago). I’m on phone duty, having forgotten most of what I learned during the few years I’ve dealt with this nonsense, and dreading the next moment when the work phone will cry out for me to solve some stranger’s problem, even though most of my problems, certainly the most pressing ones, have remained unsolved for my thirty-eight years of living (not for lack of trying, but psychotherapy didn’t work for me, and neither did pills).

Some people out there can write for a living. How lovely that must be. If you are one of those lucky ones, please jerk yourself off to oblivion. You probably deserve it. I can’t even masturbate in the bathroom down the hallway, because someone may call me in the meantime. Anyway, expect a new chapter of my novel, if you care about that shit, in like two weeks or so.

Are there any rich mommy types out there that may want to adopt and feed me? I only require a bed, a computer with WiFi, and a steady supply of milk.

I felt like writing this post due to something I have done wrong today, that speaks volumes about my life and my general state of mind these past few days. The thirtieth of June is when my city celebrates that in the nineteenth century we frustrated an attempt by the Napoleonic army to invade us, or whatever. Can’t say I care much about the actual details. I don’t celebrate festivities in general, nor my own birthday, but I dread such days because I’m forced to keep the peace with my family by attending the reunions. This time I was tasked to do one single thing: grab a take-out order because my parents were busy. I was told when I was supposed to walk into that store and grab the order. I wrote it on Google Calendar. After a morning in which I barely managed to write anything, let alone study for my upcoming exam, I went out and appeared at the store, only to be told by the shopkeeper that the order was supposed to take an hour longer.

The guy started apologizing, suggesting that he probably heard the order wrong or got confused when writing down the time. I told him that it was my fault. In any case, he was kind enough to cook the order and have it ready fifty minutes ahead of time.

When I left that shop, I was feeling like shit. How can any thirty-eight-year-old guy be able to fuck up something as easy as getting to a place at the specific time told a few hours earlier, written even on his calendar? I’m not surprised, of course, because stuff like this has happened over and over throughout my life. It’s pure executive dysfunction, a common part of being autistic. Your brain drops part of sequential logic of organizing something, to the extent that you screw it up as if you were a child. To curb this natural tendency of my brain to sabotage my life, at work I constantly walk around with a notebook and a pen. I write every step of every task, and when I’m applying a solution, I triple-check the results. I still screw up from time to time. Maybe I should give myself a break; I’m 52% disabled according to the local government. Doesn’t change how I feel, though.

And this happened after a few days during which I’ve been in a “fuck everything” kind of mood. I can barely write. I haven’t studied for the exam that I must pass in sixteen days so that I keep getting called to work as an IT guy at public hospitals, a job I don’t want to do and that I can’t tolerate for long periods of time. At the family reunion, I have kept my head down, unwilling to make eye contact particularly with the couple of relatives of my brother’s wife, who brought over their screaming baby (not the kid’s fault, of course). Yet another psychological and sensorial assault I had to endure so that my family members don’t make my life less manageable than it already is.

Unfortunately, I’m up-to-date with the mortifying riots in France, that are happening next door and that have spread to Belgium because they share the same demographic problems. I expect us in Spain, as well as throughout Europe, to suffer similar riots in about ten years. The president of France, that weasely minion of the WEF, has blamed the riots on video games, and has pushed for more censorship of social media. For all we know, they wanted riots such as these to present themselves as saviors by proposing digital IDs, a central digital currency, a social score system, fifteen-minute cities, etc. They openly talk about wanting to get rid of most private cars; during the riots, the government suspended public transport. Good luck fleeing anywhere when these video game addicts, armed with AK-47s and screaming islamic battle cries, burn down the stores in your bulding block, if not set fire to your entire apartment building. Ask what happened to many Swedes who couldn’t move out of their conquered neighborhoods. George Orwell said that if you want a picture of the future, you should imagine a foot stamping on a human face, for ever. To picture it more easily, just watch the movie Children of Men.

I have been wanting to feel a bit better, partly to ease the guilt of knowing that I should be studying but I can’t be arsed to (it has always been extremely hard for me to focus on anything I don’t care about). I put on a couple of movies, but they didn’t hold my attention. Same with a twenty-five-minute-long anime episode. Played through the intro of Baldur’s Gate 3 yet again to check out recent updates, but knowing that the full game is coming out in August made progressing further quite pointless. In the end I relied on the tried and true: I put on my VR headset, loaded up some 3D porn and masturbated the pain away. These silly brains get tricked so easily that VR-induced orgasms feel better than the real thing as I remember it from my wilder youth. During my time off writing, I don’t know why I bother doing anything else than masturbating. People are unbearable, and the world is going to hell.

Congratulations on bothering to read this shit.

To me, the world feels like it’s becoming increasingly horrifying. The Russia-Ukraine war has gotten more unstable, the US government and its media are utterly corrupt (which matters a lot even for us in Europe, because whatever idelogical bullshit they come up with they end up spreading it), AI is getting nuts but the powers-that-be are focusing on trying to censor it to fit their ideology, insiders knew that the virus was a lab leak and yet they deceived us all, the WEF and the 2030 Agenda motherfuckers keep working every day to turn the entire world into a worse version of communist China, people are waking up regarding UFOs but whatever groups have the remains became a more entrenched power than that of public servants, etc. We’re living through the shoddiest dystopia imaginable.

Regarding my personal life, I’ve been unemployed since January. I thought it would last a month at the most, but turns out that the rankings that determine if I get called to work as an IT technician for hospitals got updated due to some new laws, and because I can’t speak Basque, I got pushed down from first to eight or ninth. I have been glad that I can wake up at nine in the morning and write, and that the goverment is paying me unemployment benefits. However, this won’t last much longer: they updated the rankings, and a good bunch of people above me must have gotten hired, because now I’m second. I may get called next week to cover summer holidays.

Obviously I just work to earn money. I wish I could write for a living, but that will never happen. Working as an IT guy with my neurological issues means not only that my time and energies will be stolen, but also my mental health. On top of that, ever since one of the so-called boosters damaged the electrical lining or whatever of my heart, working at the hospital will likely also end up with me in the ER yet again due to atrial fibrillation. From those who were permanently screwed by the biological weapon or its derivatives, I’m among the lucky ones; the twenty-two years old or so brother of a co-worker of mine, who played for a football team, dropped dead in the shower from a sudden cardiac arrest with no priors. The football team was checking him up regularly as well. His corpse lay for a week under a hot shower; they had to rely on his dental records to identify him.

Anyway, I’m getting more anxious by the day, not only because I may have to return to work soon, but because in twenty-one days I’ll have to travel to Vitoria to pass a bullshit exam that will determine the next ranking for this public IT job stuff. I’m having a hard time retaining half of the material; it involves semi-arbitrary laws and normatives more or less related to the public health system. Obviously I don’t give a shit about any of it.

Ever since I became unemployed, I haven’t spoken in person with anyone other than my family members and service providers. As an autistic guy who deals with regular intrusive thoughts due to OCD (possibly also untreated PTSD), I need solitude and a solid routine to avoid falling apart. I write first thing in the morning, I study a bit later, and after lunch I walk to the wooded outskirts of town to read. When I return home, I either study some more or waste time on YouTube and Twitter. I used to play video games, but I have a serious case of FOMO (can’t get into CK3, Victoria 3, Dwarf Fortress and Cyberpunk 2077 for that reason).

Today, though, as I walked to my usual spot in the outskirts of town, I felt unable to deal with even the occasional dog walkers and old couples that pass through that area. I walked further into the forest, past the ancient Roman foundry (this used to be a Roman mining town). An isolated home stood next to the foundry, inhabited by an old couple. You could tell that that house would have been demolished long ago if the couple hadn’t refused to sell it. There used to be chickens walking around. Today I have found that home bricked up. A cement kennel was overgrown with weeds.

I walked up a path that I don’t remember ever having followed, but maybe my parents brought me here as a kid. I took some photos of that area with the shitty camera of my tablet.

I sat on that spot for about half an hour. I couldn’t hear anything but the river and the birds. I thought of how old I’ve become: thirty-eight years old, far longer than I was sure I would get to live. Inside I’m still a kid, or at the most about eighteen years old. I have no idea how I’m going to cope if my life gets significantly worse. I fantasize about moving out of the area and/or travel for long periods of time, once my parents die. But due to my issues with executive dysfunction, I have a hard time dealing with anything that breaks my routine. Obviously I’m alone (I can barely handle myself), so I won’t get any help in that regard.

As I started heading back, I felt the kind of nostalgia that I could swear is written in my genes: I belong here. Not among people, not among cement and glass and steel. I need the internet to get by, but other than that, I wish I could get some job that involved losing myself in the woods for hours at a time without coming across any human being. Given my luck, though, I’d end up eaten by a bear, or becoming a Missing 411 case.

Someone had set up a huge salt circle, possibly for an occult ritual.

On the way back, I noticed a group of people out of sight because they were speaking obnoxiously loud. Shortly after, I could hear the presence of more humans from a distance: another group was having a picnic and lounging near the river while blasting music from a speaker. I endure sensory issues; the worst ones are audio related (repeated sounds make me feel like I’m being poked by someone who wants to fuck with me, and loud sounds make me feel like I’ve just been slapped. People’s abuse of noise has contributed greatly to my disdain for humanity), although I also have issues with light (outside, often I’m forced to do Clint Eastwood impressions, even if the day is somewhat cloudy), and whenever someone touches me, I cringe and feel the need to squirm (which was great for my sex life when I bothered with intimate relationships).

Anyway, I’m back home, sitting at my desk in my underwear. I’m not sure why I felt the need to write this instead of studying or browsing YouTube idly.

Oh, I forgot: until yesterday and for three days, a single person from the US had racked up about sixty hits per day on pages of my site, from poetry to short stories and novels. Not sure what you were looking for, but thank you for the dopamine hits. Particularly noticeable given that I rarely get more than five or six hits a day.