The car was traveling at high speed; all it took was for the driver to lose control for a single second. When the vehicle struck the utility pole, his spine snapped in two. Like a fortune cookie being cracked open, revealing its hidden prophecy, cerebrospinal fluid was expelled from his spinal cord. The windshield, bathed in blood and seasoned with tiny fragments of bone, shattered into an intricate spiderweb pattern.

His body bounced off the glass and landed facedown on the sidewalk.

What could cruel fate have wanted with this poor devil? Why was Death in such a hurry to move her midnight appointment forward, to brandish her scythe while the black mascara still lay unopened on the dressing table?

A few pieces of tomato fell onto the pavement. I stood there with my mouth open, staring at what had happened, while in my hand the sausage nestled in its bun waited anxiously for the green light. The scene unfolding before me froze in time. Worthy of any Hollywood shot, but seen through the director's camera lens. I couldn't tell whether the smoke was rising from the car's engine or descending from the sky, like a long curtain billowing in the wind. Rendered in graphite, charcoal, and chalk, it revealed the alarming condition of the driver. Behind the steering wheel, his face was buried in the front airbag. From his left ear flowed a little stream of red and purple, the result of the blow to his head when the car abruptly mounted the sidewalk. The drop slowly sliding down the glass pointed toward One-Eye. Blood had already spread beneath his entire body and threatened to consume everything. From the depths of the puddle, his prosthetic eye came floating toward me, stopping just two steps away; it never took its gaze off me. It rocked gently from left to right, like the swing of a pendulum. Not knowing where to look and overwhelmed by the situation, I raised my eyes toward the sky. The top of the utility pole, which had brought the aluminum beast to a halt, had lost its upright position and seemed to be sinking beneath the stars beginning to emerge in the twilight.

I didn't know One-Eye very well. The truth is that, to me, he was nothing more than another one of those homeless drunks who wander the streets at night looking for a bar where they can spend the day's collected change. Perhaps what distinguished him from the others was his friendliness (I don't remember ever seeing him become violent) and his moments of lucidity, which astonished those unprepared for such displays of knowledge from a filthy old man who clearly hadn't taken a shower in decades. He could even speak English, Mandarin Chinese, and a little German. What little you couldn't understand was due to the mucus that accumulated at the corners of his mouth and his worn-down teeth—or what remained of them—the result of poor nutrition and oral hygiene. People said that, back in the day, he had been the director of a renowned national company with offices abroad and that, because of his problems with alcohol, he lost control and ended up on the streets after losing his fortune. His family gathered whatever they could salvage and sought help among the contacts they had accumulated over the years. He never heard from them again.

A lie. He wasn't just another homeless drunk. Otherwise, we wouldn't have been fond of him; we wouldn't have given him a nickname. There were many afternoons when, after a hard day's work at the office, we laughed and drank beer together until we couldn't tell one hand from the other. A happy hour without One-Eye was nothing more than a gathering of failed colleagues around a little round table, whose sole purpose was to complain in unison about the problems that cropped up every day at work. A couple of drinks, then home. The rest of the evening promised nothing more than a mediocre dinner reheated in the microwave and jerking off to the tits of whichever American actress happened to be on television. Depressing. When One-Eye showed up at the bar, the place came alive. The most enthusiastic among us would put up their month's wages and buy several rounds for everyone (surely this was the only reason the owner allowed One-Eye inside to share a table with the other customers). With our arms around each other, we forgot about the grumpy boss; the pretty secretary who winked at us whenever we passed her desk but would never give us so much as a sloppy kiss; the old woman from accounting who was constantly demanding reports even though there was still a week left before the deadline; the $300.000 multifunction printer that worked whenever it felt like it; and the coworker whose sole purpose in life was to undermine you so he could earn a few extra bills.

Reality turned into a dream. A place where borders don't exist and there's no need to cling to anything; all you have to do is let yourself be carried along by the currents of the unconscious and float aimlessly through the void. Words leave the mouth without any need for prior thought; it doesn't matter whether they're hurtful or childish. They travel in every direction, contracting and expanding, until they run aground in some harbor. The response that follows is equally primitive, but honest: a nod of the head, a laugh, or a dry fist straight to the snout. Lying on the grass, you pull up blades of it with your hand and watch the clouds crossing the blue sky. One after another, they leave your field of vision, as though the opening crawl of Star Wars were running in reverse, except the film never stops and no clock exists capable of recording the passage of time. Or rather, the very concept of time loses its meaning because, in the absence of thought, the only machine capable of interpreting it disappears. According to contemporary scientists, neither the present, nor the past, nor the future exists; past, present, and future are all the same thing. Not an arrow pointing to the right, but a record spinning so fast that every track occupies the same place, no matter where you put the needle. But how could we live by abandoning the notions of what seems so logical to our senses? One-Eye can no longer ask himself these questions or suffer the consciousness of existence. Even if he is somewhere else now, that other place follows different rules, and everything I've written here is nothing more than an illegible jumble of scribbles.

I'm in my bed, awake, sweating and overheated. I touch my forehead to check whether I have a fever. I turn on the bedside lamp and sit on the edge of the mattress, my hands resting on my thighs. I think about One-Eye. The same terror that tormented me in my dreams is suffocating me now. They say that every human being, in the deepest recesses of their heart, wishes for the end of the world. I myself have often fantasized about the earth splitting in two and swallowing me until I disappear into absolute darkness. But thinking about One-Eye, about his motionless body on the sidewalk and his glass eye, I break down crying because, in truth, I want to cling to life at any cost. I don't want to miss anything it has to offer me. I want reality to bite me and leave the marks of its fangs on my skin. I want to love and be loved, to feel the morning breeze in my hair, the warmth of the early sun, the adrenaline of doing something wrong, to put my thoughts down on paper, to run through parks, to receive an unexpected kiss...

Today I ate a completo, but it was no ordinary completo. I hadn't had a bite to eat all day, and it looked truly appetizing. But above all, it was the first completo I've eaten since One-Eye was run over.

PD: I was checking my old wattpad short stories and I stumbled uppon this one I wrote around July 2017. I like how it came out, I hope i can regain this kind of prose.

Lately, there's something that's been bothering me. I've been aware of it for quite a while, actually. I have this impulse to please people. Or, more precisely, to be liked by them.

I'm very conscious of this tendency, but I still don't know how to get rid of it completely.

I picture myself arriving at a friend's apartment. I say hi and briefly introduce myself to everyone. They all seem like cool, interesting people. But one of them, for some reason, is particularly unfriendly toward me.

I panic.

Sometimes it makes me anxious. Other times, sad. Sometimes both. But I can't quite put my finger on why.

So I find myself trying harder to make this person like me. Maybe I change my tone of voice. Maybe I smile more. Maybe I listen more carefully to what they're saying, making an extra effort to show that I'm paying attention.

All of this happens almost unconsciously. Until I notice what I'm doing.

And that's when things get worse.

I become even more anxious because I realize that none of it is working.

At this point, you might be thinking: "Well, since he's such a reflective person, and now he's conscious of what he's doing, he must feel disappointed in himself. Surely this is the moment when he starts acting normally again."

But I don't.

Realizing that this person doesn't seem to like me only makes me more anxious. Sometimes I try even harder to "win them over." Other times, I do the opposite: I avoid interacting with them as much as possible.

I can't even stand making eye contact.

On my way home, I find myself wondering why this particular person didn't like me.

Maybe it was something I did or said? Maybe it was something so small that I didn't even notice, but that somehow mattered to them. Maybe it's my looks? The way I talk? What could I have done differently?

I know how crazy all of this sounds. Believe me, I'm aware of it.

Being a reflective person is generally a good thing. But there's a point where reflection turns into something else. Where questioning your own behavior stops being a way of understanding yourself and becomes a way of tormenting yourself.

And I think I've crossed that line.

There's a big difference between reflection and rumination.

What's funny is that sometimes, after getting to know this person better, I end up telling them:

"I thought you didn't like me."

They look at me, astonished.

"Not at all! Why would you think that? Maybe I was having a bad day, or I had something on my mind..."

And there you have it.

Neither of us can really know what's going on inside someone else's head. We can make guesses, interpret gestures, read facial expressions, but that's about it.

So why do I keep trying to be a mind reader? A telepath or something?

Maybe it's not simply that I want people to like me, but that I struggle to tolerate the possibility that someone might not.

Although, thinking about it, I find it much easier to move on when I know for certain that someone doesn't like me, especially when I know why.

When that happens, I can evaluate their reasons, decide whether I care about their opinion, and eventually just say, "Fuck this person."

But when I don't know why, things get complicated.

It's the reason that I need.

I need to solve a problem that might not even exist, as if every ambiguous social interaction were a puzzle with a correct answer.

But what if there isn't one?

What if the person was just having a bad day? What if they genuinely dislike me? What if I'll never know why?

I can spend hours examining my own behavior, reconstructing conversations, searching for something I might have said or done wrong. And for what?

I've become pretty good at recognizing what's happening inside my head. Apparently, I'm not nearly as good at doing something about it.

I think it's time to seek some help.

The room beside it... nobody cares about that part.

This space has an "illogical function," as its architect, Kazuo Shinohara (1925-2006), calls it.

Oh, I forgot to mention something. This is a house. Well, half of a house. The other half? We don't care about that part.

What we care about is the dirt, the slope, the roof, the timber structure...

We need to make some sense of this.

Let's do a quick exercise. Let's try to name this space.

A doma?

You know, the earth-floored space found near the entrance of traditional Japanese farmhouses?

It looks like a doma because of the exposed earth, but it doesn't function like one at all.

Where's the furnace?

Maybe if I could see a shikidai leading into the raised interior, or a tetsubin hanging over a hearth nearby...

More importantly, this earth isn't even packed.

It's not that this space doesn't make sense at all. It's that it doesn't make sense inside a house.

Even less so as the largest room in it.

There's an aphorism by the architect, Kazuo Shinohara, that makes me think about this house:

"A house is a work of Art."

I'm writing Art with a capital A on purpose, because I think that, with this aphorism, Shinohara was making a statement not just about what a house should be, but about what an artist's purpose should be.

A conventional house is meant to be comfortable and predictable. Every space in it has a function and, therefore, a specific name associated with that function. The BATHroom, the LIVING room, the BEDroom... But Shinohara's philosophy goes against this: a house should also take you out of everyday domestic life, give your mind room to question it, and allow you to imagine new possibilities.

I forgot to mention that Tanikawa House was designed for the famous Japanese poet Shuntaro Tanikawa (1931–2024). So, if I had to guess, the exposed-earth space—or Summer House, as Shinohara called it—was meant to be a place for contemplation. A sort of sacred space hidden in the middle of the forest, away from noise and distractions, where you could connect with your inner self.

And why the earth floor?

To remind you that you're not just inside a house. You're inside a work of Art.

Then, this aphorism works both ways. It tries to define both the House and Art, or at least their purposes.

What should the purpose of Art be, then?

I think it should aim to produce a certain discomfort in the spectator. Not discomfort for the sake of making someone feel uncomfortable. Actually, I'm trying to distance myself as much as possible from works like The Human Centipede, which seem more interested in provoking a reaction from the audience than in having anything substantial behind them.

What I'm saying is that Art should show us something that makes us question our lives, our surroundings, society, or even reality itself. It can do this by opening up new perspectives, revealing something that was previously hidden, or reflecting something within ourselves that we'd rather not see.

Does this discomfort have to be unpleasant? I think that depends on the spectator. It could be an "ugly" work of Art or a "beautiful" one. It doesn't matter. It's up to the artist to decide on the medium, form, and aesthetics.

But I think that if artists keep this purpose in mind, it becomes easier to make decisions along the way.

But if the artist tries to control the audience's reactions, I think it will only hinder the work. It will make it less interesting. It won't generate as much discussion, and it won't challenge culture as much as it should.

Meaning should remain in the shadows. Let the critics try to figure it out.

This also means that artists should accept that some people will completely misunderstand their work. Either because they haven't put much effort into thinking about it, or because, although they might not recognize it themselves, the work threatens their lifestyle or worldview.

They might feel so uncomfortable when confronted with something they've actively tried to avoid seeing that they could even become angry at the work, and at the artist too.

In the case of Tanikawa House, we have to acknowledge the fact that it was designed for a poet, a famous one at that. But I think there must have been days when Tanikawa-san woke up and asked himself, "Why did I agree to this?"

I'm pretty sure he got plenty of inspiration from just standing or sitting on that exposed earth. But I wonder if, from time to time, it all just seemed stupid.

This is why I say it's up to the critics to sort out the meaning(s) and consequences of a work of Art. The artist needs to produce. There's no time to overthink. And thinking too much about a piece could eventually kill it.

As I said before, the artist shouldn't aspire to have everything under control.

The artist's job is to create.

Hopefully, something uncomfortable.

It was raining. X and Y had picked me up at Plaza Egaña, just outside the mall. I didn't even know they were soplaos, as they say. The car did have a weird vibe, though. It just took me a while to figure out what was going on.

After watching them snort ketamine, I decided not to make a big deal out of it. I ignored my increasingly stressed brain and asked if I could put on a song. It was "Lamborghini" by NORO$T.

Damn, they got excited when the beat dropped. Y's car had a pretty good sound system, and the bass hit hard. So there we were, speeding down the street in the rain, windows rolled down, bouncing up and down to the music. And the night was just getting started.

What made the situation really disturbing, though, was how X rationalized the whole thing.

"People think it's dangerous to drive while consuming ketamine, but it's actually safer. Everything seems so fast, but you're actually driving at a third of the speed you perceive."

So now he was snorting ketamine to drive slower than usual? It didn't make any sense at all.

Thankfully, we arrived at the party safe and sound. Actually, I went inside before them. X had to find somewhere to park, and I was just too eager to dance. So I got out at the corner and knocked on the club's door.

It was my first time there. The place was a small, black, three-story house on a corner. The first floor had the coat check and the bar. The second floor had the "dancefloor" (basically a tiny living room) and the bathrooms. The third floor was mostly for smoking and chatting.

Oh yeah, one more thing. This club doesn't allow talking or taking pictures or videos on the dancefloor. They even put a sticker over your phone's camera when you enter.

And then X and Y arrived. Lost gazes. Big smiles.

They must be superhuman, because I've seen far worse. Someone fainting in the middle of a dancefloor. Someone else sitting alone in the corner of a room, looking completely lost and troubled. Just this summer, I had to help a girl down the stairs because she could barely walk. I can't know for sure what each of those people had taken, of course. But those scenes have become part of what I associate with nights out.

It all feels so common, though. Some people mix ketamine with alcohol. Others combine ketamine, alcohol, and ecstasy. My heart would probably stop if I did that. I guess you can build up tolerance over time. Taking a drug for the hundredth time probably doesn't feel quite the same as taking it for the first. But does that make it any less dangerous?

I've never tried ketamine (and I don't think I ever will), so it makes me wonder: what's the appeal of it? Consuming it at an electronic music party, I mean.

Ecstasy or M make sense to me, at least from how people describe their experiences. They can intensify your connection with the music. Ecstasy can make you energetic and euphoric. You want to jump around and dance all night. M, in the way people around me talk about it, gets you all moody, puts you in sync with the music, and lets you flow with the tune. Of course, those names can refer to the same substance, MDMA, and what people actually take isn't always what they think they're taking.

But ketamine? From what I've read, it can dissociate you, distancing you from your body and your surroundings. Aren't you essentially pushing yourself away from the very experience you came looking for? Then again, maybe I'm missing something. An altered sense of your body, time, and sound might make music feel more immersive to someone else. I don't know. That's partly why I'm asking.

What makes a rave meaningful to me? Well, it's a mix of things.

I love dancing, but I rarely dance alone in my room. I need to be in the right space. And by space, I don't just mean the physical container, but also the people occupying it. If there are only a few people around, my energy isn't nearly as high as it would be in a bigger crowd. There's something about being part of a larger mass, moving and connecting with it, that makes the experience special to me.

And obviously, I need to vibe with the music. I particularly like venues with multiple little stages (at least two), where you can move around and choose what you want to dance to. Maybe someone else comes looking for a completely different experience. Fair enough. But I still find myself wondering what happens to the collective experience when so much of the night seems to revolve around getting more and more intoxicated.

After the party, X asked me if I wanted to go back to his place with him, Y, and Z to listen to some music.

"Okay," I replied.

I knew I probably shouldn't have, but he was my ride, and I kinda wanted to keep partying.

In the middle of the drive, X asked me another question.

"Yuna, we need to go make a deal at the Pantano. Would you come with us?"

"Okay," I replied. Again.

I didn't really know what else to say. I was already in the car with them.

The Pantano was a neighborhood in La Pintana known as a dangerous place to buy drugs. X, Y, and Z started arguing about who should get out of the car. Funny enough, X and Y had already decided that someone needed to accompany Z. The only question was who.

In the end, X and Y went, while Z and I stayed in the car.

A homeless man started putting on a little show in front of us, juggling a coin or something like that. He also offered us a beer for a couple of bucks.

"They're cold," he said.

It felt like an eternity went by.

Suddenly, X and Y swung open the front doors.

"Go, go, go!" Y shouted.

X put the pedal to the metal, and we were out of there.

"Someone showed us a gun," X said while we were stopped at a red light, looking back at Z and me.

I had no idea what was going on.

"Naaaah," Z replied.

"Some guy lifted his shirt, and he had a gun tucked into his waistband," Y added. "We'd just bought the ketamine when this guy appeared out of nowhere."

"'Hey, guys! What do you have there?' he shouted at us while showing us his gun. We didn't even look at him. We just kept walking in a straight line. And when we turned the corner, I told Y, 'Run!'" X explained.

X and Y seemed frightened, but they just laughed it off. As if they now had a cool story to tell their friends. Judging by their reaction, I had a feeling they'd be back there in a few days. They didn't seem to grasp the gravity of what had just happened.

They could've died.

When we finally arrived at X's house, I stepped in dog shit right after slipping through the gate.

What a fucking night, I thought to myself.

I asked X if I could clean my sneakers with a hose, but he told me to just use an old towel he had lying on the floor.

Inside, Z tried to teach me the basics of DJing while X was figuring out how to "cook" whatever they'd just bought. It was some kind of white powder. I couldn't tell what it was or whether it had been mixed with anything. I don't remember this part very well, but I think he put the powder on a plate, poured some water over it, and started mixing it with a spoon???

Once the "thing" was ready, the guys snorted some of it while I lay on the sofa listening to music. The cushions were swallowing me whole, and I almost fell asleep.

Suddenly, X announced that he had to go out and run some errands. I wanted to say something to him, but I didn't. As soon as he left, I ordered an Uber home.

"Let's hope X didn't lock the gate," Y said.

And, of course, it was locked.

"Sorry, dude. He's got the keys."

The Uber had already arrived, but I had no choice but to cancel it.

I just wanted to lie down in my own bed.

I don't even know how to finish this entry. It just seems like an awful drug. Frequent, heavy ketamine use can seriously damage the bladder and urinary tract, sometimes leading to severe urinary symptoms, including incontinence. Kidney complications and liver problems can occur too. That doesn't mean everyone who uses it will suffer those consequences, but the risks are real.

I've told people around me about these risks multiple times, but I don't think they're listening. Maybe some are already dependent. Maybe others just don't see themselves that way.

I just remembered something Y told me. He said he didn't abuse drugs nearly as much as he used to. His explanation? He used to do falopa (cocaine), which, in his mind, is much worse than ketamine.

Maybe he's right about some risks. I don't know. But how much better can it really be if you're snorting something all day anyway?

I don't want to sound like some moralist telling people what they should or shouldn't put into their bodies. That's not the point. Drugs have been part of electronic music culture for a long time, and pretending otherwise would be ridiculous. I don't think everyone has to enjoy a rave the way I do, either.

But there's something about the way risk gets explained away that bothers me. Everything is a microdose. Everything is under control. Everything could be worse. Even a guy showing you a gun becomes a funny story five minutes later.

And I can't pretend I was outside of it all. I got into the car. I stayed in the car. I said "okay" again and again, even when I wanted to say something else. My reasons weren't the same as theirs, and the risks weren't the same either. But I was making excuses to keep the night going.

I went out because I wanted to dance. Somewhere along the way, I stopped having fun. By the end, I wasn't thinking about the music, the crowd, or the next party. I was thinking about my bed and a locked gate.

I still don't understand the appeal of ketamine at a rave. Maybe I never will. What I understand a little better now is how easily a night can become a series of things nobody really stops to question.

And how hard it can be to say, "No, I'm going home."

I think I first came across Sunbather — and Deafheaven — in a review by The Needle Drop on YouTube. Although I wasn't very fond of "inaudible" screams, I decided to give it a try, and I'm so glad I did. I listened to it from start to finish, and then again and again... I wasn't even looking up the lyrics. I just let the screams fill my insides. It was like the sound waves were acting as X-rays passing through me. It gave me chills. I didn't care about the band, I didn't care about the history behind each song, I didn't care about what it all meant. I just needed to feel all the emotions this album was making me feel.

I'm almost crying as I listen to "Irresistible" right now.

This album... In retrospect, this album was the beginning of something I'm only starting to understand now, at 33. We all have a cancer deep inside us that we need to remove. Somehow, we have to open up our bellies with a hook, stick it in, and pull it out with all our strength. Doesn't matter how gory it gets. It has nothing to do with sin. It has more to do with the layers and layers of toxic waste that society feeds us. One day you wake up and feel so lost that you don't even know who you are or can't even tell what you're feeling inside. Sunbather did something like that to me. It uncorked something that was stuck in my throat.

I am my father's son
I am no one
I cannot love
It's in my blood

— The Pecan Tree

When I was a kid, I used to cry a lot. Everything affected me so much. I wouldn't say I had a hard childhood, at least not materially speaking. My parents work a lot and have good jobs. Both accountants. My mother works at a law firm and my father has his own consulting firm, so they could afford to give us more than everything we needed. Christmases were apotheosically good. You want that console that just came out? Add it to your letter to Santa. You want that toy you saw on TV? Same thing. But not everything was all sunshine and rainbows. My parents had — and I think they still have — their issues. Not only within themselves, but also between them.

Listening to Sunbather, the memories come rushing back to me. We're in the car on our way to school. My little brother can't remember the basic multiplication tables. My mother turns around and reaches out her hand. She grabs my brother by his hair and starts shaking his head violently, both of them screaming their lungs out, and all I can think is that we're all going to die. Spoilers: thank God we didn't crash that day.

Then, some years later, Christmas came. My father got both of us a set of golf clubs. We used to play at the top of a small beach town called Papudo. I tried them out to check the fit. "These are great," I said, "but I think they're too big for us." My father's face changed in a second. He was furious. "You're fucking ungrateful!" he shouted at me. I was shocked. I didn't know what to do. So I got on my knees and started crying and begging for his forgiveness. And that wasn't the only time.

Do you feel like you're reading something so personal that you shouldn't be reading it? That's how Sunbather makes me feel. Clarke opens up his inner world to us in such a beautiful and dramatic way. I feel like I shouldn't be listening to this, but he wants me to hear it. Love, drugs, father-son relationships, obsession with wealth, personal demons... I can't say I understand Clarke, but I can relate to all these issues. And all of them flow so naturally throughout the album. Once you start playing it, you can't stop until it ends by itself. I also really like how he puts bits of "real life" into some songs.

By the precious blood of Jesus Christ, her sins will be judged
And God will cast you into the lake that burns with fire and brimstone
Where there is weeping, and gnashing of teeth
Where the fire is never quenched and where the worm dieth not
It is a place called Hell, and Hell is real

— Windows

When I was little, I used to go to church every Sunday. I mentioned it in my last entry, but my dad is a Pentecostal and my grandfather was a pastor in the same church. I grew up with the weight of guilt heavy on my shoulders, and it kept accumulating inside me for decades.

At that time, I liked to read a lot. In my father's church, sometimes members of the congregation can also give their own sermons. I remember one Sunday, a "brother" standing behind the altar and going on a monologue about how we shouldn't read any book other than the Bible. Not only was it the only book worth reading, but all other books were impure and full of sinful ideas. That was the moment I decided I didn't want to go to church anymore.

And I thought I was done with church, but toxic Christianity wasn't done with me.

Years later, I would go down a religious conspiracy theory rabbit hole so badly that one night at the beach with friends — and very, very drunk — I had a messianic delusion that scared everyone. Hell, even I was very scared by it when it was all over. Although my father didn't know everything about this episode, he encouraged me to research all this stuff. We could talk for hours about the secret plans of the Catholic Church and the secret religion of the rich. I think it was the time I felt closest to him.

Now I can barely hug him. It's like my body rejects him. Same thing with my mother, but I feel it's worse with my father. I just don't like what I inherited from him. I've been trying to cut all of that out of myself for years.

I held my breath and drove through a maze of wealthy homes
And I watched how green the trees were
And I watched how green the trees were
And I watched the steep walkways and the white fences

— Sunbather

At the age of 11, my mother decided I should go to another school. Somewhere "closer" to home and with "better" teachers. Basically, somewhere that would guarantee me a place at a good university. So my brother and I transferred to a more expensive school.

I was used to a very childlike environment. All my classmates and I cared about was playing and getting hyped about cool kids' stuff. Then I arrived at my new school, and the only things everyone cared about were girls, boys, alcohol, and parties. Lots of alcohol. I would say I had arrived at the most alcoholic school in the whole city. I knew of some older students who already had ulcers at the age of 18.

I had a very hard time adjusting to this sudden change. On top of that, although I was a very handsome boy, adolescence hit me like a truck. My face was covered in pimples, and my mouth, for some reason, was now too big for the size of my head. It was like my whole body somatized everything I was going through at the time and decided I should be "ugly" now.

I suffered a lot of bullying. Compared to other students, it wasn't so bad, though. I remember one student from another class whose peers would chase him down the hallways trying to stick a finger up his anus. All excited and laughing. Fucking weirdos.

So I coped by drinking a lot of alcohol and crying at parties. I used to cry a lot at night in my bed, too. All I thought about was getting into university, getting a very well-paid job, and becoming richer and more successful than all these assholes.

And one night, I just couldn't cry anymore. No matter how sad I felt, not a single tear would come out. I started having problems with empathy. I could only feel sad about things that happened to me. I never stopped being a very "intense" person, but some door in my heart had closed.

Until I listened to Sunbather, and something got unstuck.

This album will keep me company for the rest of my life. I wanna know more about it. I've already downloaded a copy of one of Clarke's favorite books, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) by Milan Kundera, and I'm reading it right now while listening to Sunbather for the second time. I think I'm obsessed, and I wanna dive deeper.

He looked at me with a smirk.

"Nah bro, I discovered it and I don't want other people thinking you listened to it first."

Then he laughed really loud, as he always did, while shaking his USB MP3 player in front of my face.

What a fucking gatekeeper.

I can't blame him, though. Maybe I'm just feeling nostalgic today, but I remember the relationship we had with music back then being much more personal.

That song —I think it was from Linkin Park— was HIS song.

And I was gonna find a way to steal it anyway.

When I was little, I had very little exposure to music.

We didn't have any sound system in the house. If I'm not mistaken, we had a little radio in the kitchen, but it was mostly used to listen to the news in the morning.

My father is a devoted evangelical, and a phrase I heard a lot when he took me to church was: "the things of the world" —the mundane— "aren't meant for us."

On top of that, my grandfather was a pastor, so whenever he and my grandmother visited us, we had to hide every electronic device that could raise concern.

One day I came home from school and there was my grandma, sitting on my father's bed, watching TV.

What was the point then?

What a lame and stupid religion.

Anyways, the point is that I was very ignorant about music growing up.

But I had a friend from school: Mario.

And Mario had a collection of CDs in his room.

It was small, but for me it was a whole new world.

I remember the first time he played one of them. It was Marca Chancho (2000) by Chancho en Piedra. I immediately fell in love with that bass and guitar. The lyrics were also so funny to sing along to.

"Eligiendo una Reina" mocked the beauty pageants that were so popular back then. I'm not talking about the ones where women wear elegant dresses and answer questions. I'm talking about the ones where basically the "hottest" woman wins.

Another song was called "Historias de Amor y Condón."

"Durazno y Melón" discussed whether it was better to drink wine mixed with chopped peaches or drink it straight from inside a melon.

"Patá en la Raja" was about kicking asses...

They were fascinating themes.

At the time, I didn't understand much of the actual meaning behind the songs. But, as I said, they were very funny to sing along to.

Another friend, Felipe, had a bigger sister —one of my first platonic loves— and she possessed something even more fascinating: a CD binder full of "burnt" CDs.

But these weren't regular albums like Marca Chancho. These were mixes, or playlists as we would call them today.

She would play them on the car stereo on the way from school to their apartment. So when I was invited for the first time to play with Felipe after school, I heard Britney Spears, Black Eyed Peas, Gwen Stefani... one after the other.

It was fascinating.

I loved how she would write the artists directly on the CDs and give each mix a name. So you could find Britney Spears across different CDs, but the song she selected had something that connected it to the rest of the tracks.

Sometimes it could be something obvious, like a genre or a mood. Other times it could be something much more personal, like "Songs from the Summer of 1998."

She was a curator, and those were her songs.

Then my parents bought me my first computer, and I could finally get my OWN songs.

There was this P2P (peer-to-peer) program called Ares, through which you could download everything from music to videogames. All you had to do was type what you were looking for into the search bar and every available file with a similar name would appear.

Usually, you would just choose the most shared file. But if you were looking for an unpopular song, things got a little more uncertain. You didn't really know if you were gonna get the song, a virus or a porn video.

One trick was learning how much an MP3 file was supposed to weigh according to its length and quality (kbps). Eventually you could look at a file and think: there's no fucking way a four-minute song is 200 KB.

Thanks to Ares, little by little, I built my own music library.

I remember that most of the files had barely any metadata, or all the information was just crammed into the filename. Something like:

LINKIN PARK - IN THE END - HIBRID THEORY - 2000.mp3

So you had to rename it and search online for whatever information you wanted to add to the file: artist, genre, album, track number, release date, songwriters...

But the most fun part was choosing how your digital music player was gonna look.

There was another program called Winamp, where you could organize all your music, create playlists and, most importantly, play your songs. It had nice features like an equalizer and a little screen that displayed all the metadata.

But Winamp also had skins.

And that was a whole different thing.

There were whole communities of people who dedicated their spare time to making them. Thanks to them, you could make your Winamp player look like a cyberpunk artifact, your favorite anime or some videogame interface.

I would spend entire afternoons online looking for new skins and new bands I had never heard of.

The funny thing is that both activities felt almost the same.

I was customizing my player while also customizing my taste.

Next came the step into the physical world, so for my birthday I asked if I could get my own USB MP3 player.

My father, as expected, looked at me with concern, but it didn't take much to convince him.

The most typical ones were rectangular with rounded corners and came in all sorts of colors. Unlike Winamp, mine didn't have a shuffle button, so if you wanted to find a specific song, you just had to go through the whole mix until you found it.

But the one thing that really defined these objects was their storage size.

You couldn't carry all the music you had on your PC with you.

You had to choose.

You could buy a more expensive MP3 player with more storage, reduce the quality of the songs so the files took up less space, or simply decide which songs deserved to come with you.

The second option was unacceptable.

You could invite your friends over and show them your favorite albums, your burnt CDs, your digital music collection, your Winamp skins...

I feel like music had such a power to build connections between people.

I mean, it still does. I've made a lot of friends this year thanks to electronic music. But I still have this feeling that those ties were somehow stronger because you could make the whole experience much more personal.

Maybe I'm just nostalgic.

But if you compare all of this to platforms like Spotify... yeah, it was much less convenient.

You had to search for the song, download it, fill in the metadata yourself, choose how your player was gonna look, organize your library, burn the CD, buy the USB MP3 player, decide which songs you were gonna put on it and then carry that thing around on top of all your other gadgets.

All of this stuff took time.

All of this stuff took space.

And now almost all of that friction is gone.

That's obviously more convenient.

But sometimes I want to go back so much.

That's basically your average AI drug addict: someone whose whole life revolves around this new "commodity." People are losing the ability to search or think by themselves, bla bla bla. Same thing told for the 1000th time.

What I wanna address in this entry is the High Functioning AI Addict, because I think I'm one of them. It's very probable I'm gonna double-check this with ChatGPT.

I mean, English is not my first language and I'm writing this in English as I think, so it makes total sense that I use it, right?

Yeah. That's denying and rationalizing, for sure.

I wrote an entire master's thesis without AI, so how can't I do the same thing with a piece of text that's not even 1/6 of that?

So what is the thing I'm addicted to? What do I think AI is doing for me?

First, I think AI is gonna make this blog entry "better."

Under which standards? No idea.

Something about it also tells me that, productivity-wise, it will speed up my rewriting process. Which is probably true. But then comes the second part.

I like it when it gives me information or concepts I hadn't thought were relevant to the piece. I love it when it adds phrases I hadn't thought about. It feels so good. I want—I need—that yummy yummy heavy algorithmed anthropic sauce.

Cause it suits me so well.

I can see that for other people AI makes their work shitty, but for me? Mine just gets "better."

Sure.

Third and last: conversation.

Remember the first time you saw your friend programming or DJing and you wanted to try it too?

So you both talked about programming or DJing. You asked them questions. You showed them what you understood, they corrected you, you disagreed, they explained it again.

Back and forth, back and forth.

That's the main thing about AI for me.

It makes you feel like you're having an actual conversation with someone who is extremely friendly, receptive and patient.

You can bring it some half-formed thought and it will take it seriously. You can ask the same thing again. You can obsess over some tiny detail nobody else gives a shit about. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't get bored. It doesn't have somewhere else to be.

You think, it responds.

You doubt, it reassures you.

You write, it evaluates.

You get curious, it keeps going.

Maybe that's the actual commodity.

Not intelligence.

Responsiveness.

And it's probably gonna get better at it.

Or worse.

You already know I'm sending this to ChatGPT to see what it "thinks" about it.

It’s dark. It’s dirty. It’s tekno with a K, as Delia calls it.

My mind wanders off.

If there is such a thing as “under,” is this it? This music, these people, this space?

What even defines something as underground?

Does it even exist?

I recall that night, that feeling that told me: “If there is something called under, then this must be it.”

So, what made that night feel so under?

From my experience, when people talk about the underground scene, they often talk about the upbringing of the artist. There seems to be this idea that someone rich could never truly be under, no matter if they have almost no followers, no fans, no recognition at all. But I think that is a very narrow definition.

In fact, that night I wasn’t even thinking about the DJ when these questions struck me.

It had more to do with the secrecy of it all.

You arrive at a dark, anonymous street. You knock on the door of a small old house. Inside there are barely any lights. There’s even a “dark room” where the bathroom is supposed to be. As far as I know, almost everything about this is illegal—or at least exists somewhere outside the normal infrastructure of nightlife. There are restrictions on how late parties can run, permits for selling alcohol, regulations around venues, noise and events.

So there is a legal aspect to the underground, but there is also an architectural one. The feeling of the space itself is important.

I remember another party I went to. This one was literally underground. Even with a couple of big fans running all night, the air wasn’t going anywhere. It was just moving around and around. I was basically inhaling the breath of everyone in that room.

And then there were the walls.

They were wet.

That night felt very under too.

Let’s imagine for a moment that the exact same party took place somewhere else. Same DJs, same music, same people, same clothes—everything stays the same, except for the space. Now we are in an established club: perfectly ventilated rooms, legally licensed, subcontracted security, corporate sponsorship and a giant LED screen.

It doesn’t feel very under anymore, does it?

So maybe there is no single thing that makes something underground. Maybe the underground only emerges through a particular arrangement of things: the music, the people, the space, the architecture, the law, the money, the technology, even the air we are breathing.

Change enough of those relations and, at some point, the underground seems to disappear.

All of this reminded me of Actor-Network Theory. I’m no expert on it, but what I recall is that society is built upon relationships, and those relationships aren’t only human. Objects, technologies, spaces, institutions and even elements of nature participate in these networks too.

In this way of thinking, what we usually consider peripheral things aren’t really peripheral at all. We can’t assume beforehand that the DJ is important while the hot air in the room is just background. Both are actors in the network, affecting other actors and changing what that particular night can become.

The DJ plays the music, but the architecture contains it. The speakers move the air. The law pushes the party behind an anonymous door. The lack of ventilation makes our bodies sweat. The crowd heats the room even further. The room changes how we behave inside it.

None of these things alone is the underground.

But together, somehow, they produce it.

We are moving away from “what is the underground?” and into “how is the underground produced?”

Think about it. The party doesn’t exist isolated in outer space. The DJ needs a promoter or organizer to call them to play; the promoter needs a space; the space needs money; money requires an audience. And the audience is finite. There are only so many people, and there are a lot of parties happening at the same time. Artists and DJs compete for bookings, venues are scarce, and cops and regulations determine which spaces are allowed to exist under the law.

Let’s stop here for a moment, because I think this is extremely important.

Secrecy and scarcity are crucial aspects of the underground.

There is not enough space for everyone.

And maybe this means that artists and DJs shouldn’t aspire to remain underground forever. They have to move—not necessarily abandon the underground, but move through it. An artist can still return, participate, organize, collaborate, play smaller parties and remain connected to the network. But they cannot be its face forever.

Someone has to leave the basement so someone else can enter it.

I think the underground is ephemeral.

It has to move. It has to constantly change. It is always running away from something: away from the law, away from hegemony, away from institutionalization, away from the current sound of the big spaces. The moment one version of the underground becomes established enough to be recognized, reproduced and eventually institutionalized, something else is already forming beneath it.

Maybe that is why defining the underground is so difficult in the first place. Every time we manage to point at it and say, “there it is,” it has already started moving somewhere else.

So when a party becomes very “successful,” moves to a legal venue, improves its sound system, gets sponsors, books bigger artists and attracts a larger audience, at what precise moment does it stop being underground?

And there’s an even more interesting question here: did it betray the underground, or did it do exactly what a healthy underground ecosystem is supposed to produce?

Stagnation might be a bigger threat to the underground than commercialization. If the same DJs, promoters, aesthetics and audiences permanently occupy the scarce spaces designated as underground, then the underground risks becoming a genre, an aesthetic or, even worse, a brand, rather than a space where something NEW can emerge.

This is why I think our obsession with labeling things “underground” can actually be unhealthy for the scene. Once the label becomes something worth protecting, people begin protecting the things associated with it: certain sounds, certain artists, certain venues, certain ways of dressing, certain ways of partying. We start establishing rules about what belongs and what doesn’t.

And, ironically, we stabilize the very thing that was defined by its instability.

So the underground isn’t necessarily running towards obscurity. It’s running from stabilization.

It has to move because its function is not to preserve a particular sound forever. It is to create the conditions from which something else can emerge.

The underground is producing the sound of the future.

So what is so valuable about the underground scene?

There isn’t yet a market telling artists exactly what works, an established audience expecting a particular sound, or a brand identity that has to be maintained. There is less to lose and, because of that, more room to experiment.

The rawer, the better.

But once someone—or something—succeeds, the network starts stabilizing around that node. Other DJs begin to imitate the sound. Promoters know it sells. Audiences know what to expect. Algorithms categorize it. Festivals book it. What was once strange becomes recognizable; what was recognizable becomes reproducible; and what becomes reproducible can eventually become an establishment of its own.

And I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing.

Maybe this is exactly what is supposed to happen.

The underground will never die. It will just keep moving and mutating. What worries me more is our desire to define it, catch it and preserve it. The moment we decide what the underground is supposed to sound like, look like or behave like, we begin building walls around it. We create expectations. We establish an aesthetic. Eventually, we create another market.

In trying to protect the underground, we might actually be preventing it from doing the thing that makes it valuable in the first place: changing.

Maybe the underground is like a fish moving downstream. It cannot stay where we first found it. It has to follow the river until eventually it reaches the sea. By then we might say that it is no longer underground, that it became too big, too visible, too commercial.

But more fish will come after it.

Nothing will happen, and everything will happen at the same time.

But if the underground depends on scarcity, illegality, unstable spaces, poor commercialization and constant experimentation, then aren’t we perhaps romanticizing poor conditions?

Let’s think again about that party with the recycled air and wet walls. I mean, it sounds very under, but those are also just shitty conditions. Would improving the ventilation make it less authentic? Having emergency exits? Better sound equipment? Proper bathrooms?

These things are valuable in themselves. I hope we are not agreeing that poor ventilation somehow produces better culture, or that a dangerous space is more underground than a safe one. We don’t usually call a nightclub where people get shot “under.” Quite the contrary.

And this reveals another contradiction.

Despite all the material precariousness I’ve been describing, underground spaces can sometimes feel safer than established ones. Not necessarily safer in terms of infrastructure, but socially safer. More tolerant. Less judgmental. Less concerned with how you dress, who you are, who you came with or how you are supposed to behave.

Maybe what we value about the underground is not precarity at all.

Maybe it is permission.

Permission to experiment with music, with aesthetics, with identity, with social relations, with the use of space itself. The absence—or at least weakening—of some of the expectations that govern more hegemonic spaces.

The wet walls were never the point.

We have to be careful not to think about the underground scene in superficial or frivolous ways. The establishment can reproduce the walls, the darkness, the scratched bathrooms, the weak strobe lights and the secret-location marketing. That’s essentially underground as aesthetic.

What is much harder to reproduce is the network itself: a network that genuinely permits things that haven’t yet been stabilized by the larger hegemonic culture.

And maybe this is the closest we have come to finding something constant in the underground: freedom.

Not absolute freedom, of course. The underground has its own hierarchies, gatekeepers, expectations and contradictions. But there seems to be a particular kind of freedom that appears when things haven’t been completely defined yet. Freedom to make the wrong sound. Freedom to dress incorrectly. Freedom to organize a party somewhere that was never supposed to be a club. Freedom to experiment without knowing whether anyone will care. Freedom to fail.

The establishment can reproduce the appearance of that freedom much more easily than the conditions that made it possible.

It can build the wet walls.

It has a much harder time building the unknown.

So what is the big difference between the underground and the establishment, then?

Maybe it comes down to risk—and the ability to afford it.

Established networks accumulate things they need to protect: capital, audiences, reputations, jobs, sponsors, venues, expectations. The bigger the network becomes, the more people depend on it and the more there is to lose when something fails.

A 5,000-person festival can experiment, of course, but experimentation becomes expensive. There are thousands of tickets to sell, artists to pay, workers whose jobs depend on the event, sponsors expecting visibility and an audience that arrived with certain expectations.

A tiny secret party in an old house has much less to protect.

It can book the DJ nobody knows. The DJ can play something nobody has heard before. People might hate it. The party might fail. Maybe fifty people show up instead of a hundred.

And that possibility of failure is precisely what gives the underground some of its freedom.

The underground can afford to be wrong.

The establishment increasingly needs to be right.

Maybe that’s what I was feeling at 7 in the morning, sweating my ass off with an empty bottle of water in my hand. It wasn’t the wet walls, the darkness, the illegality, or even the music itself. It was the feeling that, for a few hours, nobody really cared about what was supposed to happen next.

Eventually, the lights will turn on. The DJ will pack their things. Some artists will move on to bigger clubs, festivals, and audiences. The sound will travel with them, stabilize, become recognizable, and perhaps become part of the establishment itself.

That’s fine.

The underground was never supposed to stay still.

Somewhere else, behind another anonymous door, someone is already getting it wrong.

For me, drawing is first a way of thinking and observing. Techniques are not a personal signature but tools that accentuate certain aspects of the work—form, light, texture, perspective, rhythm. In this sense, style is not an inherent property of drawing but an emergent one: a consequence of certain decisions.

Drawing is not a cage or a form of self-branding. If it relates to identity, it does less by defining it than by allowing it to be explored.

MVNDY was born out of a book I was writing about an adolescent girl with psychonautic powers and a group of wizards from the south of Chile who unearthed corpses. But I could never connect the two things together.

Why were these wizards unearthing corpses? What was their purpose?

I could never answer that question.

Also, since I've mostly written essays and very short stories, my prose was basically all description. It wasn't good at all.

This year I started attending different techno events and underground parties, and something clicked after I saw Delia, a Chilean DJ, play.

What if the protagonist was a DJ instead?

What if these wizards kidnapped kids instead of unearthing corpses?

What if it was a comic and not a book?

So I grabbed a pencil and some letter-size sheets and started drawing and writing notes.

It all came out naturally.

First, the protagonist: Mandy.

Why Mandy? I really liked The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy when I was a kid, and I also loved Panos Cosmatos' Mandy from 2018. Then I thought the comic could just be called MVNDY, like what some DJs do with their names.

So I sketched Mandy, then a member of the Tribunal, and then some other characters. All very quickly.

It's funny because that first sketch of the main "villain" looks like a mix of Pinochet, Doctor Eggman and Doctor Doom.

Then I wrote some short stuff about the story and the world.

More drawings. More notes.

I even imagined some scenes that I found funny.

And that's how you start making a comic...

I guess.

By vision I mean the ability to look beyond what already exists. To imagine something that isn't here yet, and to see the possibilities that could emerge if you somehow managed to bring it into reality.

Technique matters, of course. It gives us the tools to materialize an idea. But technique without vision can only reproduce what we already know. Vision is what allows us to ask: what could this become? How could it change the current culture?

A powerful artwork doesn't end at the limits of the object itself. A drawing can become a comic. A comic can become a world. That world can generate music, images, toys, collectibles, communities...

This is where I think vision becomes something intrinsic to creativity.

For me, the most important thing an artist can do is change the course of culture.

Culture is constantly being built from ideas that, at some point, seemed strange, unnecessary, impossible, or simply nonexistent. Someone imagined a different aesthetic. Someone imagined a different sound. Someone imagined a different way of dressing, gathering, dancing, telling stories, or understanding themselves. Other people recognized something in that vision and carried it further.

This doesn't mean that every artwork has to change the world. I actually think approaching art with that expectation would destroy much of what makes creating interesting. Some of the most interesting works of art explore completely new possibilities, but they hardly ever connect with the general public.

To change culture, you need to connect with people. You need to touch their hearts or minds in some way. That's why, for example, I think musicians are more culturally relevant today than Artists with a capital A.

As someone pretending to be a comic creator, I'm making a bet that, in order to connect with people, you need relatable characters and a solid, interesting story. But not just an intellectually cool story. You need to bring things from real life into it. You need to give people something they can project themselves onto. Make them feel an emotional connection, but without forcing it.

When I work on MVNDY, I try not to think about it only as pages of a comic. The comic is the origin point, but around it I can imagine an entire constellation of possibilities: images, music, objects, websites, videos, fictional documents, collaborations, physical spaces, maybe things I haven't even thought of yet.

Whether all of those things eventually exist isn't really the point.

The point is being able to see them.

And perhaps that is one of the strange responsibilities of being a creative person: to spend part of your life looking at things that don't exist yet.

Then trying to bring some of them back with you.

September 18th is a day where we listen and dance to cuecas, drink terremotos, and eat choripanes and empanadas. Well, it's actually two days that, in many cases, extend to three hahaha.

To be honest, for some time now I haven't felt particularly hyped about Fiestas Patrias. I drink very little and I have a tiny, so-so stomach, and those are basically the two things we do the most during these holidays. Also, terremotos are very deceiving. You think they won't do much damage since they're just pipeño (an artisanal wine), grenadine and pineapple ice cream — although some people add pisco or whisky too hahaha — but after the second one they kick you out of nowhere.

What I'm trying to say is that, for a long time, I haven't liked getting wasted, and I also hate spaces where there are too many drunk people because they tend to become very toxic and ready to fight for no reason.

The places where we celebrate are called "fondas". Here, people eat and drink A LOT — and it isn't cheap at all — but they also dance and listen to live music, mostly cumbia and rock.

So, to start these Fiestas Patrias, I went to see KUKO on his ALL NIGHT LONG WORLD TOUR at Basel Venue. That's why people were calling it "La Fonda del Kuko".

Since I've been moving from hard techno and schranz into more groovy stuff, I didn't know how I was going to feel on the dancefloor. Because if you know me, I like to dance... a lot. I love to feel the music guide me through a journey and let my body sync with it.

I arrived alone, some minutes after Kuko had started, and it didn't take me long to start moving along with the music. I just wanted to leave my hoodie at the coat check, buy a bottle of water and start dancing, but I had to wait for a couple of friends who were just arriving — Jordan and Paulina.

I have mixed feelings about Basel Venue. This year I saw Regal there and it was awesome, but I think Kuko needed a bigger space, with more lights and bigger screens. Something more like what Kobosil or Klangkuenstler had on their shows.

Cause that's the thing: if I'm going to see a DJ like Kuko, I'm expecting a show.

So, in that way, I felt a bit disappointed. But the music was so good that, in the moment, I cared very little.

I danced all night, except for a couple of moments when we went to the terrace to breathe some air because it was so hot inside. I gave away some stickers and met some cool people, showed them the website, and when we came back inside I ran into some other friends.

At some point I needed "un subidón", so I bought a tropical gin, and that was enough to keep the energy going.

It was a great night.

I love you daddy Kuko and FELIZ 18!

This blog will be a place for everything that happens around the project: drawings, ideas, thoughts, experiments, character development, worldbuilding, pages, mistakes, etc.

The comic itself is still in development, so I won't be publishing the full story here. Instead, I'll use this space to share pieces of the process as MVNDY takes shape.

More soon.