Today is Saturday April 25th, 2026.
In October 7th, 2024 I was officially hired as Customer Service representative for Dow Jones; covering subscription services for The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch, among others; all under the proxy of the outsourcing services provided by an Ohio-based company named RDI (do not ask me what the initials mean, no one has told me). I work here at my home city of Hermosillo, Sonora in Mexico (just 3 hours away from the U.S. border).
Anyway, I have been put in a strange position since yesterday morning. I come here at 4AM Pacific Time to open the queue and receive calls from disgruntled customers on the East Coast -- where it would be 7AM--; or at least that is what I would usually do if it was a normal shift. I have been put in a position that I am not allowed to take calls "until further notice". I highly suspect they have put me in a limbo commonly known as "quiet firing", they are likely expecting me to quit. This very moment I am typing these words it's 7:38AM. It is going to be later once I publish this blog entry. My stomach is full of salt & vinegar pistachios, ice tea, a whole wheat deli sandwich, and figurative butterflies. I am scared of my economic near-future. I owe money to my long-distance relationship handicapped girlfriend; and our family has subscribed to another expensive health insurance plan for yet another year.
Right now I am sitting down typing from my mid-2012 MacBook Pro that I repurposed for ZorinOS Linux since 2 weeks ago or so. I have been writing a fantasy novel since February 2025. I am starting to consider using this strange work limbo time to write more of it. And yet right now I am typing down this entry because I am mentally uneasy. My workmates are out there attending dreadful calls and here I am in this strange privileged pocket of nothing. In an ideal world I would have been hired in a media arts studio somewhere in the United States since 2015, but that is just not the case. My big sisters begun their independent lives with their careers about a decade ago now, both are now married--one of them got two daughters now--; meanwhile I am here still taking "temporary" jobs that erode my soul and do not get me anywhere closer where I intended to be. To say I am frustrated is not enough. I graduated from college to precisely avoid this gutter I am now in.
I don't know what to do now. I don't want to stay here in my hometown anymore; I have wanted to leave this place for a long time now. I am 35. My "youth" is expiring fast. I have been wanting to move to Portland, OR for a while, my girlfriend Violetta is disabled with fibromyalgia, I want to aid her to get better and get her out of her abusive home she had no option but to return to after coming back from a previous bad marriage; and yet socioeconomic circumstances still remain less than ideal. The United States got a fascist problem, and it gets worse every passing second. Applying to jobs in LinkedIn is not getting me anywhere, especially as it turns out it is flooded now with useless "ghost jobs" now that are there just to add a statistic to a company without ever requiring to actually hire anyone at all.
It is now 7:57AM. I am running out of things to vent about. I guess I shall attempt writing more on my fantasy novel.
If you are reading this, whoever you are I hope you are well. The times of American Final Capitalism are strange and evil. Deliberately evil. They keep making conscious evil decisions just because they love being evil. Evil, evil, evil. That is the only word that describes this all. Evil.
May your time be bright and lovely, dear stranger.
-- Diego Moreno-Noriega
Artist, Writer, Muser, Dreamer.
