Chapter 31

BOOM!!! BOOM!!! BOOM!!! I got pulled out of my sleep as fast as if I got a bucket of cold water thrown in my face. It was still dark outside, I peeked at my phone, 6:04. I hope the cunt released the firecracker too late and he lost fingers in the process, boy would that be grand.

For whatever reason the remainder of the morning was quiet, and I got a few more hours of sleep until a triangle-faced animal poked me on the cheek and nibbled on my earlobe. I played with him a little bit, throwing his piece of rope around from my supine position for him to fetch it.

I put on some good hip-hop to start the day properly: first a compilation of remixes from MF DOOM, the great prolific mysterious lyricist who passed away a few months ago, and then a mixtape from Action Bronson, the big fat former cook and eccentric MC from Queens NY. I reheated some of the spaghetti from the night before, and watched some UFC fights from last week that I had missed. One of them featured Roxanne Modafferi, one of MMA’s strangest fighters. She is unathletic and unorthodox, has poor vision which causes her to be constantly blinking and squinting when she’s not wearing her thick glasses, and is a former English teacher with a corny, upbeat, endearing personality far away from the alpha-macho stereotype of pro fighters. Still, she’s been fighting for almost two decades now (which is even more impressive given how niche and underground women’s MMA was when she got started), alternating wins and losses. I for one think she is cool as shit and always root for her, but this wasn’t her night, as she got pieced up by a muscular Brazilian chick who is better than her in every facet of the game.

Then we went for a drive, as we needed to put gas in the car. The pump attendant put the nozzle on automatic and then went to another car. When the nozzle clanked, I added a bit more gas manually until it got to a round number, but I went a teeny bit over, to a total of 240.01 yuan. Now, the way things work in China, they nearly always round up or down to one decimal point, as the 0.01 yuan coin (the fen) is all but obsolete and in fact, the last time I’ve ever seen one in circulation is over 10 years ago. So I handed the lady 240 yuan cash, but she told me I still needed to pay the 0.01. Areyoufuckenkiddingme.jpg... The girlfriend paid the 0.01 with her phone.

After that we went to the huge municipal gym complex to play badminton for an hour. We both love badminton, and it’s been a while since we played. On the way out, I asked the women at the counter if there are any amateur tournaments taking place, and she told me to talk to a group of guys playing in the corner court who seemed pretty badass, I got their contact info and they added me to a group chat for my city’s badminton club. Now that Brazilian jiu-jitsu is off the table for the time being, might as well keep my options open.

The girlfriend and I seldom if ever argue, and I’ll give her most of the credit. She has a very patient and forgiving nature regarding all the stupid shit I do, and she almost never irritates me. And when there’s a disagreement, more often than not we communicate honestly and solve it. But I have to say, ever since we got the car from her parents, the number of shouting matches have increased drastically, usually stemming from a dangerous or clumsy maneuver she makes and me giving her constructive pointers (how I view it)/nagging her (how she views it). That’s something we need to work on, both her and I.

That said, she’s been improving a lot, and now my butthole is puckered to only about 10-15% of its puckering capacity when I’m on the passenger seat. We went back home, put the leash on the dog, and walked a half hour to our favorite Japanese restaurant. Our city has a lot of Japanese expatriates working in factories, so it also has a few strips of seedy bars servicing that clientele (where Westerners are marginally welcome if not banned altogether) and a number of badass authentic Japanese restaurants. The one we always go to is all decked in a Japanese wooden decor, with bilingual staff yelling an effusive “Irrashaimaseeeeehhh!!!” when you open the door. We ordered the same thing we always do: pickled seaweed, shrimp tempura, a seafood pancake, a mixed plate of sushi pieces, and my favorite, fried breaded shrimp sushi rolls. She got a large glass of plum liqueur, and I double fisted it with a Kirin beer and some sake. When you are a regular customer, you can just buy a large bottle of sake or whisky or whatever and leave it at the bar with your name on it, my 1.8-L sake bottle was labeled 蛋头 “egghead” because I had just shaved my head last time I bought one.

On the way home, there’s a new wine bar I wanted to check out, and when we peaked inside, my Croatian coworker was there with his girlfriend, perusing the wine bottles. So we had an impromptu double date over a bottle of white sauvignon from New Zealand. The place also sells an eclectic selection of imported food like marmalade, cheese, sausages, cookies, and British crisps, we bought some goodies to go.

The Croat was asking me about the PGCE (post-graduate certificate in education) that I’ve done two years ago, and that our company subsidizes. I told him how it feels like a big heavy vinegary set of genitals slapping you in the face repeatedly for weeks at a time, but ultimately it’s worth the effort. Doing that course while working full-time and prepping a brand new curriculum (teaching British A-levels after years of teaching American AP) sure wasn’t good for my sanity but I was well supported and I am glad I did it, both for my own professional development and for my future employment prospects.

We got home and I put on the album Synchronicity by The Police while writing this. January is now almost over and I didn’t skip a single day, writing almost 37 000 words for this little diary. Let’s keep it up until the end of December!

Chapter 30

This morning, the hordes of illiterate peasants really ramped up the explosions, as now more and more people are on vacation and thus those inconsiderate pieces of shit can cause maximum disruption. Some of them were so loud they made our windows rattle.

I made a strange dream about a taxi driver overcharging me, my memory of it was deconstructed and confusing, at times the language used in the dream was Russian, then French, then Spanish, but it had that general story arc. If it was a normal year we’d be out traveling by this point, we’d been talking about going somewhere tropical to snorkel, or Japan for hiking and skiing, and also Iran, which is one of the girlfriend’s dream destinations (and one of the few in the world where it’s much easier for Chinese than Canadian passport holders to visit).

It got me thinking about travel scams and double pricing, which has been the bane of my existence when I was out vagabonding in certain countries of the world, and how weirdly enough it’s not something I think about in my day-to-day life or when traveling in China. One would think that such a cut-throat culture that has birthed countless scamming schemes, combined with a xenophobic government that doesn’t give half of a shit about the potential plights afflicting foreign visitors, would lead to an endless barrage of official (double pricing in tourist sites) and unofficial (general scumbag shit from shopkeepers and touts and cab drivers) widespread scamming but no, such incidents do happen here and there but nowhere near as much as elsewhere I’ve been, and I’m thankful for that.

I watched some of Styxhexenhammer666’s videos while drinking water and stretching my sore old man muscles. He talked about that stock market short squeeze, and from what I gathered it seems to be one of the rare events that unite people across the political compass, relishing in the despair of the wealthy parasitic finance speculators. Aside from a handful of neocons, of course, but fuck the neocons. I for one am awaiting Biden’s administration’s response to this, whether they cave in to Wall Street’s demand for regulation and even outright bailouts, which would piss the fuck out of people.

I also watched a YouTube video analyzing the episode Xerox Of A Xerox in the last season of Bojack Horseman. Bojack might be one of the very best TV shows in history, and that guy Johnny2Cellos makes fantastic analysis.

I worked out in my home gym. I added another 5% to my rep numbers: 60 push-ups, 60 lying leg raises, 12 pull-ups, 12 handstand push-ups, and 30 kettlebell swings. Then repeat for another set. I had a bit of blurry vision after that, as I came out of the shower, not sure if it’s the exertion or not wearing my glasses for a bit. All the while I listened to a “Sovietwave” playlist, a quite interesting mishmash of Soviet-era melancholic music, 80s beats, and dreamy electronic loops. There’s really all sorts of weird music out there and I love it.

I made eggs and cream cheese bagels. I brought a plate to the girlfriend, who didn’t move out of bed until well in the afternoon. Nothing wrong with that, she’s been overworked at her job, squeezed out like the Chinese worker ant she is. I ate my brunch while watching videos about MMA on YouTube.

Then I read on the couch, listening to a few albums. Someone on a metal Facebook group posted something by Black Breath, an American death metal band, and I enjoyed their later offerings, which were pure death metal, as well as their older stuff, which had a lot of crust/hardcore elements.

I got dressed and took the dog out. I also took out the trash, but now that they’ve built those garbage collection cabins, I can’t just dump it anytime, I have to go during the small window in the morning and in the evening, for whatever reason. That displeases me a lot. As I talked about yesterday, there are aspects to my China expat life that are very uncomplicated compared to if I stayed where God put me on this planet. Low cost of life, absence of crime, and a general lack of rules and restrictions which might seem paradoxical to the average Western moron who reads too much media propaganda and mixes the PRC with the DPRK. But now, by centralizing garbage collection and removing all the large garbage cans around the apartment complex, they add a thin layer of complication to my carefree life. Some people just leave their garbage bags and boxes outside the locked trash collection cabin, and I thought about doing that until I saw one of those huge cast iron barrels on the side of the road, that are used by the shit-shoveling peasants when they blow up their morning fireworks. So I threw my trash in there.

I browned pieces of beef and simmered them in marinara sauce to make spaghetti. All the while, I watched a few YouTube videos about poker tips for beginners, as I was going to the bar to play Texas Hold ‘Em after dinner. I won some, lost some, and ultimately went all in with a pair of fives and lost the few chips I had left. It was fun though.

I got home and watched a few YouTube videos about history, music or deathmatch wrestling, because I can be a bit of a sick fuck at times and there's something fascinating about that ridiculous form of "sports entertainment".

Chapter 29

I woke up way, way too late. There were explosions outside throughout the whole damn morning but I always managed to fall back into my ethylic coma. I made a stiff banana daiquiri with 4 oz of white rum and ate some fried chicken leftovers, starting the day well. Some people in a craft beer lovers Facebook group I’m in were having their weekly Zoom conference call, and I joined for a bit, talking about beer (of course), our pets, and the fucked up real estate market in Canada. Some of them are in Hamilton, Ontario, and were talking about how the rents increased astronomically in the past few years, as many people get priced out of Toronto and now are driving the prices in neighboring Hamilton up. I didn’t want to rub it in, but I told them about the teeny amount of money I pay for my large two-bedroom place in China and how it allows me to save so much money even on a modest salary. I can’t imagine how much my life would suck ass if I had to spend half my paycheck on a shoebox shithole and still have to spend hours every day commuting, like is the sad fate of so many people.

Th sun was shining through the windows, so as soon as the girlfriend came back from dropping the car at the mechanic, we went outside with the dog to run some errands and enjoy the nice crisp weather. We bought Ziploc bags, French fries, bagels, and then went to a craft beer shop to have a nice afternoon beer by the canal. I had a lager from Amsterdam Brewery and she drank a passionfruit-flavored brew from Moovan. On the way back we went through a superb little park, with bamboo groves, pagodas, impossibly cute little paths, and ponds. At the eastern end of the park, there’s an area with swings and exercise equipment, I did a set of dips on the parallel bars and stretched a bit. There’s also an old Cold War era jet plane there, on stilts, and I laughed remembering an incident that happened a year or two ago, when I had two friends visiting and we walked around all day, intoxicated out of our minds. One of them, a burly American guy, started “slapping the plane”, Chinese vulgar slang for masturbation. That prompted a small kid to ask:

“Mama! What is the foreigner doing?”

“He is... uh... uuuuurrrrrggghhh!” She sighed audibly and dragged her child away. We laughed until it hurt. Three men in their early thirties, de facto acting as cultural ambassadors for foreign countries, day-drinking in the park and making such dumb jokes. I feel very proud.

 

We got home and did a bit of cleaning, rearranging the stuff in the fridge and freezer. We also noticed that the dog had a nail cracked in half and that seemed to bother him, but he was thrashing and shrieking in panic when we held him and tried to cut his nail. The girlfriend had a genius idea, filling his bowl with food and putting it on the dinner table, and while he was wolfing down his food, *SNIP* and he didn’t even notice, focused as he was.

For dinner, I made poutine with the gumbo gravy and cubes of gouda cheese. The traditional recipe calls for the use of cheese curds, but culinary orthodoxy be damned, I for one think that chunks of mozzarella or gouda or other light white cheese are an acceptable substitute, if they’re cut large enough and the gravy is not piping hot. I also made a salad with lettuce, tomatoes, black and green olives, chives, garlic, and a mustard vinaigrette. We ate our vittles watching The Office.

We still have a jar of chicken stock in the fridge and I was looking for soup ideas, so I watched some cooking videos on YouTube.

“Do you want me to make hot and sour soup?”, I asked while she was doing the dishes.

“What’s that?”

I told her the name in Chinese.

“Why? We can buy it for 0.50 yuan”

And this is true. That’s why I don’t cook a lot of Chinese food, there are hundreds of restaurants in town who do it cheaper and better than I can. Another video piqued my interest, about Greek avgolemeno soup, I’ll likely do that one.

I also saw that Paul Joseph Watson dropped a video and was stoked. His videos are hilarious but also extremely depressing. In this one, he talked about Joe Biden’s inauguration, and how it’s ironic that so-called progressives celebrate a president who’s on the side of the military-industrial complex and global corporations. He also highlighted how the way mainstream media talks about him can be creepy and reminiscent of North Korean propaganda, using comically hyperbolic language and metaphors. Quite a change from how they were treating Orange Man.

I went to bed quite early with a glass of whisky and my Kindle, and kept reading Homo Deus. All in all a pretty nice vacation day.

Chapter 28

I woke up at 8:45, just in time for the live Metal Minded podcast. After a few technical issues, the boys and their guest, a fellow metal reviewer, went over the new offerings by Ektomorf (a bland thrash/nümetal band), Therion (some weird sympho shit that has very little appeal to me), Nervosa (an all-girl band I’ve never heard of and won’t investigate much, based on their negative review) and Asphyx (a kickass legendary Dutch death metal band).

In the news, there was a lot of talk about a bunch of day traders who loosely organized a takeover operation on Reddit and managed to transfer huge amounts of money from big Wall Street hedge funds to small stockholders. Memes were circulating online and some of my buddies into this kind of stuff were excitedly talking about it in our shitposting Wechat group. I felt way out of the loop so I spent some time reading and watching videos, until I could understand a little bit more how it all happened and the jargon that they use. From what I understand, big billionaire hedge funds were borrowing large amounts of stocks from a video game retailer for predetermined periods of time, selling them and counting on the value to go down, which means they’ll make a profit upon buying the loaned stocks back in order to return them. But if the stock value actually goes up, well then they’re a bit fucked, and if a lot of stocks are shorted (as they call it) that can cause the price to go up exponentially, as more funds are forced to buy the stocks at a higher price. I’m a broke dead dick who doesn’t do day trading and barely has any understanding (or interest) into how it all works, so I might be wrong. Most of my retirement money is in lower-risk index funds, holding mostly Canadian stocks, and my finance-junkie friend told me it’s unlikely it will be adversely impacted.

Going down that rabbit hole, I watched a presentation by a guy I’ve vaguely heard of before who goes by Mr. Money Mustache and has a “financial independence, early retirement” blog. He mostly talked about a minimalist mindset and the idea that retirement doesn’t mean doing fuckall all day, but rather not needing money to merely survive and therefore being able to do jobs that are more fulfilling and enjoyable.

And speaking of avoiding idleness, I’m only on day 2 of this “staycation” (to employ one of those stupid millenial buzzwords and to contrast with my usual holidays that involve travel) and I feel like I have to establish some kinds of ground rules. I don’t want to go all Nazi and ban TV and videogames from my schedule altogether, but for sure I should strive for (mostly) doing things that are either productive or intellectually stimulating. I should also refrain from drinking beer until either 1) nightfall, 2) I have been exercising or 3) I’m doing something social.

It was barely 11:30 AM and I had swept and mopped the floor, I made myself a quick lunch of scrambled eggs and a grilled cheese sandwich, that I ate while watching a lopsided UFC prelim fight between relentless wrestler Ricky Simon and some European newcomer. Then I spent the whole afternoon reading Homo Deus while listening to music. I played albums by Nero Di Marte (an avant-garde post-metal band that was highly recommended by Gorguts’s Luc Lemay but failed to excite me as it was more prog than metal), Acid Bath (a sludge metal with a creepy atmosphere), Membrane (a great French noise rock outfit that reminded me a lot of Daughters’ eponymous album), Jingshencuoluan (the goofy Chinese grindcore band I talked about two days ago), Put (a Russian atmospheric black metal band with a really cool album cover featuring a hood-wearing skeleton playing accordion in the snow) and Cruel Fate (my friends’ band, who expertly play a mixture of old-school death metal sounds).

After a gumbo and rice meal, I put the finishing touches to my pub quiz questions and went to the bar. Five teams of four competed for the cash prize, over five rounds: geography, theme music from TV shows, a game where they need to accurately answer questions about one another, exotic sports, and history. It was pretty fun and I got some good comments, people seemed to like it.

I got three free beers for being the quizmaster, and it was welcome, as I’m dead broke now after transferring all my money to my Canadian account. I was planning on leaving soon after the quiz wrapped up but a big bunch of my buddies were also in a festive beginning-of-the-holiday mood and bought rounds of beers and disgusting Red Bull cocktails. Soooooo I ended up leaving the bar at 3 AM. The banter and the alcohol flowed, I went 1-1 in foosball games against one of my most ardent opponents, and I had a long discussion with a Pakistani-British pal about the fucked up current state of the world, the botched Covid response in the West, and other such jolly topics.

Chapter 27

I woke up around 10. Weirdly enough there were no loud explosions today. I assume that the superstitious manure-shovelers don’t want to waste their fireworks and will wait for the weekend, when they can disturb as many people as possible. We were out of water, the tap water in China is not drinkable so we get 20-liter bottles delivered, and it hadn’t arrived yet. So I couldn’t really hydrate my hungover brain properly, there was a thermos of hot water by the bed but I had to wait a bit before sipping it.

I chatted with an Australian friend on Facebook. He said that it’s Australia Day, the commemoration of the arrival of a British fleet in 1788, and of course some SJWs want to erase such a holiday and its celebration of colonialism. In Quebec, and I assume elsewhere in Trudeaustan, you similarly have people who constantly apologize for being on "unceded Native American land". The whole thing is so wrong on so many levels. Even if it was ceded by a treaty, ceded by whom? Some local chieftain who himself "stole" the land from the tribe who was there before? And it shows a flawed understanding of history, how my French settler ancestors worked for generations to turn patches of forest into arable lands, established trade routes, and formed alliances with the Natives that spanned centuries, to the point that those guys fought alongside the French in all their wars against the redcoat-wearing evil Britcunts. And more importantly, what do you wish to fucken achieve by uttering that empty sentence, aside from virtue-signaling? How does it address or begin to solve the problems experienced by the Native American communities in the 21st century?

Well to play devil's advocate, from what I understand of their nomadic cultures, the fact that nobody owns land also means, conversely, that everybody owns it. So the 17^th French dude who got discharged from his service in the colonial army and given a patch of land as per the contract agreed upon will spend all his life removing roots and rocks from near-frozen land, build a cabin, plant potatoes, and not let people go through. So of course some Natives might go "WTF m8?"

But again, most of New France aside from the river valley and the parts near the sea was a vast expanse with a few forts and trading centers. The Indians were our allies. They didn't even think of the French settlers and traders as "colonial oppressors" for the most part, that idea wasn't in their reality like, say, inhabitants from India who were already in a settled society where all of a sudden the leaders are from elsewhere. Paleolithic, constantly warring Native Americans thought of the world as a bunch of hostile and allied tribes, and all of a sudden another nomadic tribe, but with strange-colored hair and boom-boom-sticks, turned up and they all went "hey maybe we can ally with those guys against the evil bullying Iroquois who come to raid our shit". And likewise, the British with their more permanent, agricultural, settled colony allied with the sedentary Iroquois.

And it goes without saying that American Indians and Australian Aboriginals got buttfucked through unfair treaties, although those that are relevant to the current at-times dismal situation have little to do with the early colonial era, but rather modern governments and their avarice. And also a lack of good leadership and a toxic culture, but we can't mention this, because after all we're supposed to infantilize the fuck out of them and absolve them from personal responsibility, y'know. Some parts of Indigenous Canada and USA are truly third-worldy, and I've seen with my eyes (albeit in a very limited manner) how sad the Aboriginal situation is in Stroya. I don't know what the solution is, but for fucken sure making a bunch of empty condescending gestures isn't a part of it, nor is hopping in a time machine.

Those are my off-the-cuff thoughts on the matter. Of course I could elaborate, as a history buff with a pretty damn extensive knowledge of New France/Lower Canada/Quebec history.

I listened to a live set by Rotting Christ, a Greek band categorized as black metal but with a pretty special sound, mid-tempo and very melodic. Then I put the leash on the dog and we went out, I rode my bicycle and he ran along like the predator of the great plains that he is. I stopped at the bike shop to fix the loose stand, as I don’t have that caliber of Allen key at home, and I oiled my chain. Then for the reminder of the ride I put the dog in the basket and we went to Subway. I love Subway, but I seldom go, as my city’s only franchise of the sandwich chain is in a shopping mall a bit far away, in a part of town I don’t go to often. My first time going to a Chinese Subway was more than twelve years ago, when I left the small impoverished central Chinese city I was living in at the time and took an overnight train to Shanghai, where I binged on all the non-Chinese food I couldn’t get back in the boonies. I remember how it was creepily the exact same thing as a Subway shop in Quebec, down to the distinctive smell, aside from the language spoken of course. It can be a bit hard to order Subway for many foreigners in China, as it requires a bit more communication than other fast-food chains, and the 2008 version of me barely managed.

I had a footlong on parmesan bread, half ham and half Italian cold cuts. They didn’t have olives, the girl said that too few people were asking for them and they would go to waste. Chinese people don’t like olives. I ate outside, feeding little morsels of deli meat to my triangle-faced companion. The weather was pretty nice, yesterday it rained and cleared out the smog a bit.

I stopped at the little market to buy meat and vegetables to make a gumbo. I browned duck legs, then made a dark roux with the rendered fat and a few swigs of oil, and then added chicken broth to make some kind of gravy. I removed that from the pan and put it in the slow cooker, and then browned some slices of sausage that I imagine will be an acceptable substitute for Cajun andouille, and sweat the holy trinity of onion, celery and peppers, along with a pinch of thyme, several cracks of fressshhhhly ground black pepper and a bay leaf. I mixed everything and simmered it for a few hours, occasionally stirring, and added shrimp after a while.

All the while I listened to an album by Grima, a Russian atmospheric black metal project. Just like Panopticon the day before, they integrate some folkloric elements, and being from the great frozen Siberian taiga, their instrument of choice is the accordion. A good discovery, I’ll check out the rest of their discography.

I had slept only about 6 hours, so I felt a bit tired and still a bit hungover. I laid in bed playing a bit of GTA IV and then had a long nap.

I was just ready to leave to go play soccer when there was a knock on the door. Four women wearing coats from some municipal government body were there to ask how many people live here, and check the expiration date on our fire extinguishers. They were a bit confused by my presence initially, I should have pretended I can’t understand Chinese to have a laugh.

We had three teams of six and played 10-minute games, rotating. It was good fun but I came out with a few more bumps and bruises than usual: a twisted ankle from blocking a point blank powerful kick, a deflected ball that hit me right in the eyebrow, and I fell hard on my tailbone at some point. But like Gloria Gaynor, I will survive. I rode back home on cycling paths and deserted roads, opened a 1-L bottle of homebrew, and took a bath. The water was so hot I got in slowly, and was sweating profusely as I was lying there nursing my sore limbs. I took a cold shower to rinse off and fixed myself a plate of gumbo with white rice, it was delicious. I watched the 7 Jours Sur Terre weekly news show on YouTube, I see these guys going far, with their quality journalism.

Chapter 26

I was chatting online with a German friend this morning, he was considering paying the membership fee for CouchSurfing, after getting locked out of his account like hundreds of thousands of users. I joined the famous hospitality website in 2007, stayed with people around 120 times throughout my travels and have hosted 80 times in various cities I lived in. So it’s fair to say it used to be a big part of my life. Last year, they started charging money, and I said “no fucken way” and have left my profile dormant ever since.

I have such a hard time accepting the idea of giving them any money, even if yeah it’s only about $10 for the year and I spent more on a single rare craft beer more than once. Bollocks with their bullshit motive of "operating costs", those cunts will for sure make an enormous profit, and for what? For turning the whole site into pure wet dogshit? Nearly every fucking update or revamp they've made in the past decade made the whole thing worse. You used to be able to search by region and the coolest thing was you could exclude a region (like, hosts in Slovenia who are not in the Ljubljana municipal area) to search for rural hosts. There was a forum, most of it was immature flame wars between unhinged losers, but it was also full of info. There was a time when foreign letters (well, foreign to those San Francisco hipster twats) like é, ã, ü, were not supported and would just appear as ascii gibberish code. And foreign scripts like Cyrillic and Chinese? Ha! Fuck you, peasants, learn English. They started overloading the minimalist interface with graphics and embedded videos that made the whole thing unusable in third-world countries with shit internet. And the worst of all is how they took a giant steaming dump of diarrhea on the reference system, which was prefectly adequate but now is a fucking questionnaire that you need to fill within 48 hours otherwise you get bumped down the algorithms.

The straw that broke my back was a shit-gargling horribly condescending automated e-mail sent by self-proclaimed community organisers that went like “hey we know you're a newbie, but we can help you navigate the site”. I replied curtly that I’d been active for well over a decade, and even if I wasn’t, the whole thing was phrased in a very condescending way, and I also pointed out it’s a bit irritating to be sent a message in English by a French-speaking Belgian. The fat woman was even more condescending in her reply, and defensive too, as I wasn’t the first one to tell her to take that “newbie” e-mail and shove it.

Fuck them. If I could log in I'd delete my shit, or just plaster my profile with FUCK YOU. CouchSurfing is dead to me, too bad the alternative options (Hospitality Club, BeWelcome, etc.) have nowhere near the user base.

Rant over.

I got to the office and made myself some pu-er tea. If you’ve been paying attention through my near-autistic chronicling of everything I do, say, eat and drink, I don’t drink coffee, seldom drink juice, and almost never drink soda. The only things I drink, aside from my substantial consumption of alcoholic beverages, is water and tea. Pu-er tea is one of my favorites, I like its strong earthy aromas.

The water dispenser is in a corner near the toilets, and the lower parts of the walls are covered by an ever-expanding unsightly patch of black mold. It goes much deeper than a surface-level infestation. A lot of Chinese buildings have this problem.

I listened to a two-hour album by Panopticon, a one-man project from Kentucky. It was a fantastic mix of modern black metal, bluegrass and neofolk that somehow was cohesive. A lot of new-school black metal evokes nature and a return to a more simple life, and mixes quite well with folkloric or ambient music.

I felt like listening to something a bit more straightforward  after that, so I went grindcore mode with Soil of Ignorance from Trois-Rivières, Qc, and their sick but too short 2020 release. In the YouTube sidebar, there was a suggestion for a split between Pulverizing Lethal Force and Last Days Of Humanity, two bands who play very different subgenres. Texas’s PLF churns out blasting, technical and tight traditional grindcore, while The Netherlands’ LDOH are pioneers of an extremely unsettling form of goregrind that is closer to noise than music. Their “songs” are all sub-one-minute, filled with downtuned instruments, a CLANG CLANG CLANG triggered drum sound and inhuman pitch-shifted vocals, and have titles such as “Overwhelmed by the Infect and Deteriorated Putral Sinus as a Result of Bodily Forged Decay”. Goregrind is completely stupid and I love it. I also listened to a few tracks by another Quebec grind band called L’Habit Me Suce Le Moine, which is on the more goofy and groovy side of the tracks.

I went home and made a huge smoothie for lunch with two bananas, a large apple, a kiwi, a scoop of protein powder and milk. It filled me up quite well. I watched a Vice documentary about All Gas No Brakes, the popular YouTube channel featuring a young guy who goes to various weird places like flat Earth conferences, porn conventions, anti-covid protests and the like, to interview the wacky people who congregate there. I’ve watched a few of his videos and they’re hilarious, truly a fascinating anthropological study of the underbelly of American society.

In the afternoon I resumed my grindcore session with one of the few Chinese bands of the genre, called Jingshencuoluan. It translates as “mental disorder”, but in English they go by Delirious, which is also pretty cool but not quite as much as their original moniker. They are cool as shit and I’ve caught them live twice, I was supposed to see them perform at the Nanjing Craft Beer Festival as well but their frontman got way too drunk, I think he even had to get hospitalized. Their material isn’t available on Western websites, so I also gave myself the mission of giving them a bit more exposure by uploading it on YouTube. While I was listening, I was transcribing the song names (mostly humorous nihilistic self-deprecating stuff, in Chinese) and noting the time markers.

I got home, made a huge gin-tonic, and kept scouring the Chinese website Douban for music. Douban is a place where Chinese hipsters and artsy types congregate online, and bands can upload pictures, songs and videos. I remember fondly going to gigs in Jinan as often as I could when I lived there a few years ago, there were a lot of good local bands as well as touring artists who would stop in the city. Now, where I live, there is zero live music and I need to go to neighboring cities a few hours away to attend concerts.

At around 6 PM, the dog and I went out. I rode my longboard and he trotted along, we went to a bar for a get-together with my coworkers to celebrate one guy’s birthday as well as the end of the semester. My Zimbabwean colleague was sitting at the bar, nursing a Hoegaarden, we shook hands and toasted to the beginning of the holiday. All the others came soon after and we had a pleasant boozy dinner. That bar has a pretty good Western food menu and is pretty popular with the locals, all the tables were full with groups of Chinese people sharing plates of sausages, salads and pasta dishes. I had the margherita pizza.

Someone wanted a picture taken so I went to ask a skinny guy with a K-pop effeminate haircut sitting at the bar if he could take it for us. He replied curtly in broken-ass English “Why me take-uh photo? Why?” and just went back to look at his phone, so I just asked another guy who was happy to help, like the non-sociopath that he is. I don’t know what was emoboy’s problem, maybe he’s menstruating, or racist.

We then moved to another bar, and then another one, until only the principal and I were left. I get along very well with him and count myself lucky, having a shit boss is one of the worst things and eats your quality of life like gangrene on an infected limb.

I got home, more than a little tipsy at that point from the beer and whiskey, and drank water while watching a bit of YouTube with the sound turned low to not disturb the sleeping girlfriend in the bedroom. The dog puked on the sofa, a big red liquid puddle. He’d been eating a lot at the bar, little bits of whatever people were giving him, and that must have upset his stomach.

Chapter 25

I listened to some political analysis in the morning while taking a nasty shit. Joe Biden is passing executive orders that are very unpopular, and now some so-called progressives are having buyer’s remorse. Sorry guys, all sales final. One of them is about allowing anyone who identifies as a woman to compete in women’s sports, which rekindled the fight between the two factions of radical feminists, the trans-exclusionary and the intersectional. The whole thing is peak Clown World.

Speaking of feminists, Ryan Long was talking on his podcast about how forced diversity can actually work to the detriment of women and minorities, because people end up assuming that they are “diversity hires” who got fast-tracked to the top even if they’re legit. That’s a whole problem with that anti-meritocracy approach, it doesn’t fool anyone.

I got to the office and listened to Narakam’s live album. Narakam is a kickass melodic death metal band from China, one of the stalwart leaders of the genre in the country. The tracks are expertly played and recorded with a decent sound quality, but as the band only released one album in their 25+ years, this lacks the “best-of/compilation” aspect of most live albums, they just play the tracks from Burning At Moment but in different order and with extra ad-libs.

At 9 AM the Metal Minded live podcast started, and Luc Lemay was their guest. A true musical genius who’s been around the game for three decades, and a funny convivial man on top of that. The conversation lasted two hours, and then I quickly rode home and joined them in an after-party on Zoom. The guys slowly tapped out and went to sleep until there were three of us left, then I got back to work, or should I say “go back to the office”.

Part of me thinks about planning and fine-tuning my upcoming lessons, but I also really am not in the zone now, with the three-week holiday starting tomorrow. So I spent some time writing, reading, listening to Gavin McInnes’s show, and putting music online. I uploaded a Chinese brutal death metal compilation, the Narakam full-length which wasn’t on YouTube for some reason, a mixtape by Wuhan rapper MC Big Dog, an EP by poppy-punk/indie rock band Paper Memory, and some tracks by a funk rock band called Yezi. Yezi (Leaves) is a now-defunct band from the northern Chinese city of Jinan, where I used to live, I’ve seen them live several times and they were great. It’s a bit sad that their music lays on an obscure corner of the Chinese internet, so I’m doing my part to share their art.

I had so much time, I wandered around and had a chat with coworkers. Everybody is happy that the winter holiday is after the corner, but they all agree it’s a bit anticlimactic, as we can’t travel anywhere. In all my years working in China, I’ve visited Russia, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Philippines, Italy, Nicaragua and Sri Lanka during those three-week vacations, and last year I went to visit the family and friends in Quebec. But hey, gotta look at the bright side of life, we’ll save money, get some serious rest, and have time to indulge in various hobbies.

I got home, walked the dog, and reheated a bunch of leftovers. On the recommendation of a friend, I watched a movie called Méchant Party, a low-budget dark comedy about a guy who gets dragged into the criminal underbelly of Montreal. It came out in 2000 and had semi-well-known actors, but I had never heard of it until now. I love Quebec cinema, most of my favorite movies are from my homeland and never made it internationally.

I also opened one of my homebrews, and it was seriously delicious. An amber-colored, old-school British IPA. It might need a teeny bit more bottle aging though, it’s been less than a week, and the recommended resting time is 10 days. 

Then I played Dead Space 3 for half an hour. The marooned spaceship setting and the jump-scares with the creepy zombies attacking me and getting dismembered by my plasma gun were pretty cool, but I kept getting stuck in a room and having to find how to get out. I wish videogame developers would one day realize that this shit is the opposite of fun, and that I’m not here to solve frustrating mysteries about how to open the goddamn door, I’m here to explore the universe and kill some zombies.

Later that night, a British friend came over to watch the UFC. We couldn’t watch it live on Sunday, so we kept it on the backburner and said we’d watch it together later. Of course it’s damn near impossible to steer away from spoilers when it’s a McGregor card and all the filthy casuals come out of the woodwork, and I’d seen the result of the main event already just by scrolling on Facebook. Ah well.

An underrated Marina Rodriguez derailed the hype train of her fellow Brazilian Amanda Ribas with a knockdown and follow-up shots, and when the ref made a move towards her she walked away thinking she was victorious, before told by that goof to go and finish the job. Which she did in a few seconds, with a barrage of undefended strikes on the dazed Ribas. Herb Dean is a veteran ref and he’s often credited as one of the best, but he keeps fucking up with late stoppages, early stoppages, and ambiguous moves like this. Then an Uzbek middleweight named Makhmud Muradov beat the shit of his mulletted opponent, and Joanne Calderwood beat Jessica Eye in a clinch-heavy, grueling affair. She was next in line to fight the champ (and part-time KGB assassin) Valentina Shevchenko, which is far from an enviable position to be in, but now there is a small Brazilian farm girl, Jessica Andrade, who most likely jumped to number 1 and that’s a fight I need to see. Andrade is one of my favorite current fighters, male or female.

Michael Chandler was champ in B-league Bellator FC, and when those guys make it to the big show, there’s always a question mark regarding whether they might be overrated due to the weaker competition they had in the past. Well he buried those doubts by KTFOing lightweight top 10 Dan Hooker and putting himself right in the title conversation. Then the main event was the Poirier-McGregor rematch, I was astonished to see the betting lines putting McG as such a heavy favorite, and put money on my fellow Frenchman. Must have been the betting sites anticipating a flood of casuals betting on McGregor, thinking he’s invincible. I for one didn’t underestimate him, but I also know Dustin Poirier is a battle-hardened badass so I saw the fight as a toss-up. I made a $75 profit off a $30 investment, not bad not bad, when Poirier knocked out the Irish bigger-than-the-sport superstar against the fence.

“What’s next for McGregah?” my British homie asked. “Do you think he should fight Tony Ferguson next?”

I sat up suddenly and had to adjust my boner. Now that’s a fight I didn’t know I needed. The Irishman said he’d stay active in 2021, so we’ll see.

Chapter 24

I got awakened by loud explosions outside, and looked at my phone on the bedstand. 7:49 AM. The Chinese new year holiday is coming, this shit will ramp up exponentially and I can’t say I’m looking forward to it.

I managed to sleep a bit more before an ugly triangle-faced animal jumped on the bed and rubbed a drooly toy on my face. I threw it around for a bit.

The first half of the day was pretty lazy, I ate pan-fried dumplings, drank two beers, and watched various videos on YouTube about music or late medieval history. I also did a bit of cleaning and laundry, while listening to Gorguts, a cult progressive death metal hailing from Sherbrooke, Quebec. I had listened to their classic Obscura a while ago and found it too weird, too chaotic, too deconstructed, but Erosion Of Sanity has an unmistakable Suffocation vibe that is riiiiight up my alley. I also listened to Pleiade’s Dust, their EP from 2016, and Colored Sands, their latest full-length released in 2013. They had a much more experimental and avant-garde vibe, while still being, y’know, listenable. The mastermind of the band will be interviewed on my friends’ podcast tomorrow so I thought I’d dive in their discography a bit.

I rode my bike to the mall with the rock climbing wall, in a bit of a grey haze. The app on my phone describes today’s weather as “slightly unhealthy”, which I find amusing. I’ve seen much worse. Along the way I listened to Jocko Willink talk about the My Lai massacre, in which American troops gunned down, raped and bayonetted Vietnamese civilians, one of the most infamous skeletons in the closet of US military history.

The climbing area was packed with children, but I could still climb my route without having to wait too long. Most left not long after I got there, as my buddies arrived. We played a bit of hacky sack and I climbed until my grip strength was completely gone.

I bought a 10-kg bag of dog chow on the way home, and then, famished, we went to another mall where we gorged ourselves on Korean fried chicken. There are street stands by the mall entrance, and one of them sells stinky tofu, the most abominable snack in the whole wide godforsaken world. The stench is enough to gag a maggot.

Back home, I put the final touches to a travel story for my other blog, while listening to Gorguts. It’s about crossing the border between China and Kazakhstan more than 10 years ago, and having to deal with illegal taxi drivers trying to rip me off ike the vermin that they are. Go take a look if you can read French, it’s on http://quesstuvascrisserla.com/.

Among my numerous back-burner projects, one I’ve been thinking about for a while is to create a YouTube channel and upload obscure music that has little to no online presence. I did just that, starting with Nagzul, a great Chinese black metal one-man band that released one album in 2011 before fading into complete obscurity. I’ll try to upload one or two albums a day in the near future, especially as I have so much free time now.

At 10 PM I had a Skype conference call with my father and my brother. We talked about recent stuff happening in our lives, personal finance, and the possibility of having a vacation together in the winter of 2022. We’ll see whether this will be feasible, who knows how long the world will be tits up with all that pandemic crap.

Chapter 23

Finally I could sleep as much as I wanted, and I didn’t regain consciousness until 11 AM, though I went to bed just a bit after midnight. I stayed in bed a bit longer, and fired up the PlayStation game I just bought, Dead Space 3. I’m playing as some kind of soldier from the future, shooting zombies in a futuristic city or in space. I’m not sure I quite understand the whole plot, as I didn’t play the first two installments, so I just follow what they tell me and dismember zombies with my gun when they appear.

The girlfriend brought me fried noodles, that I devoured. Then I got dressed and went to the gate of my apartment complex, where the guy from the driving school picked me up. I failed the driving test on my first try like a total derp and don’t want it to happen again, so I went to get a bit more practice and clarifications about how the computer in the examination car will operate.

I got back, bought some groceries and cleaned the kitchen. I ate some bread and nutty pepper dip while watching some videos about the upcoming UFC card. The UFC does a series of short videos called Embedded that follow the fighters and their entourage on the week before a big PPV event, and I enjoy these a lot. One thing I particularly like about MMA is the personality of contestants really shining through, whether they are gregarious and approachable, hyper-focused, goofy, thuggish, or mysterious (especially in the case of foreign fighters who don’t speak English) and it’s interesting to see how the whole machine runs backstage. Dustin Poirier and Conor McGregor fought once in 2013 while they were both going up the rankings, and had been hostile to one another throughout the whole build-up, getting in each other’s face and exchanging insults. Now, they are very cordial and even friendly. Either way, there’s no doubt that they will try to rip each other’s head off when the bell rings.

One black metal band that has received a bit of hype recently (well, as much hype as something in that restricted of a niche can get) is Ferriterium, from France. I listened to their album Calvaire and it is excellent, a fast-paced and harsh yet beautiful piece of music.

I went to the martial arts gym. Two Chinese men were training, one came to me with the ear-to-ear smile that is the main symptom of the fascination they have with my foreign face, and he told me that my beard looks like Santa Claus’s (which in Chinese translates as “Christmas old man”). It’s a bit of an exaggeration but I thanked him for his compliment. I trained takedowns and takedown defense with my Ukrainian buddy for about an hour, focusing on attacks on the collar and on the gi belt.

The girlfriend cooked chicken wings with Coca-Cola, a cool hybrid Chinese recipe, alongside rice and steamed broccoli. I felt drained from the training, but after taking a few glugs of Goose Island IPA and taking a cold shower, my energy came back and we ate our meal while watching two episodes of The Office. The dog was a bit restless, and we realized he hadn’t been out today, so we got dressed and went outside for a bit.

“We were supposed to go to Japan and Indonesia this winter holiday. Now, because of the Chinese virus, we can’t even leave the city!”

She flicked me in the testicles with the back of her hand. “I hate you! Stop calling it the Chinese virus! That’s racist!”

I like pushing her buttons. She is convinced that covid-19 is an American conspiracy.

We got home and I washed the dishes, as per our unwritten agreement. She cooked, I clean, and vice-versa. I kinda like doing the dishes, the hot water on my hands, the scrubbing, the feeling of accomplishment seeing a pile of sticky dirty plates and pots and utensils turn clean. I finished listening to a mixtape by DJ Muggs of Cypress Hill, that’s been playing intermittently all day.

We sat on the couch and watched cooking videos. If it’s not obvious by now, I love cooking, and so does she. Our favorite cooking channel is Food Wishes, Chef John’s two most recent videos were about peppercorn-covered pork chops with a pepper relish, and a mashed potato and cod gratin. Expect to see me make both  these dishes in the very near future.

Chapter 22

I listened to an old-school Japanese hip-hop compilation this morning while getting ready to head out. I love hip-hop in foreign languuages, I love hip-hop in general, but with the different flow and cadence and pronunciation and rhyme schemes, it can get quite interesting.

I’ve been listening to episodes of the Boyscast by Ryan Long, he usually goes solo and I like his high energy comedy as well as his commentary on male-female relationships, but on the eighth episode he had a guest on. He talked about covid conspiracies, a topic that’s clearly a bit dated and has been beaten to death since (I listen to the podcasts in order and this one was recorded last summer or early fall) and that mouthbreather was droning on and on about the Wuhan virology laboratory, claiming that the virus was engineered by “the Mandarins” to eradicate “the Cantonese” in Hong Kong, as if these were ethnic groups. That’s one of the very dumbest takes I’ve encountered since the whole pandemic started. I stopped listening soon after.

The only thing remotely related to work that I had to do was to send a reference letter for a senior student’s university application. I had sent it months ago, but just now the university asked me to print it on letterhead paper and send it from my work e-mail. So I had to create a work e-mail first, with the help of someone from HR in Shanghai. I was surprised that it worked, in some previous schools I worked at they would get me to use an intranet or professional e-mail platform that was always a clunky malfunctioning piece of shit.

I spent the rest of my morning in the office compiling questions for the upcoming pub quiz. Once in a while the main expat bar in town does one, and I volunteered to be the quizmaster next Thursday. Plenty of time left, but might as well do it now. During that time, I listened to Kyle Kulinski and Gavin McInnes, two commentators who probably agree on very little politically, but both of them were condemning Trump for not pardonning Julian Assange, the Wikileaks guy, on his way out. Gavin McInnes is pretty much banned from every platform in existence so you have to go on his own website, they say it’s because he “incites violence” but it’s mostly because he is a provocateur who says meanie things. And though I don’t agree with a lot of his libertarian politics and his typical Canadian smug comtemptuous views on Quebec (you don’t have to dig very deep to find out that those squareheads are just bitter and jealous), I like his punk rock DIY ethics and find him absolutely hilarious.

We got summoned to the library because some senior students wanted to film the foreign teachers say “happy Chinese new year” and other stuff. Because I can actually speak Chinese, she gave me the hardest bits, so I just recited my lines to the camera like a good dancing monkey.

For lunch I made some pasta with sun-dried pesto, black and green olives, chopped salami and prosciutto, and shredded gouda cheese. I drank it with a König Pilsner beer, it was heavenly. I was in fact uncomfortably full after finishing my bowl, I tend to overeat, but all the exercise I do and the fact that I only eat two meals a day keeps me at a healthy weight. Still, I should avoid that, it’s not fun to clutch my stomach in pain because I’ve been stuffing myself like a sausage casing.

While I was eating my meal, I watched a video by music critic Anthony Fantano, in which he answered questions and addressed hot takes from his audience. I like Fantano’s erudition, eclectic tastes, hard work and entertaining approach to music reviewing, and have discovered a few artists over the years watching his content. But last year he gave a very favorable review to the track WAP by Cardi B, going as far as putting it at number 2 on his best songs of 2020 list. I for one think it’s one of the absolute shittiest pieces of music ever recorded, and thus I have a hard time to take Fantano’s opinions seriously from now on.

There’s an investigating journalism video by Le Monde that’s been circulating around, about alleged concentration camps in Xinjiang. It mostly consisted of triangulating info from social media accounts, government websites and satellite pictures, that showed that some Uyghurs have been transported from one city by the border of Kyrgyzstan to agricultural or industrial areas, through government-sponsored work programs. Far from a smoking gun that proves their allegations of ethnic cleansing or slave labor, there are tens of millions of migrant workers all over China, going where the jobs are.

Let me be as fucken clear as I can here: I’m no commie shill and I’m not saying it’s impossible there is some fuckery going out there in the far west. I’ve been to Xinjiang, more than 10 years ago, and there was a lot of segregation, sinicization and a heavy police presence that felt a bit creepy. But I’ve also talked to plenty of Uyghurs, including a doctor practicing in Shanghai, cops, students on scholarships for being Uyghur, people married to a Han Chinese, businesspeople who seemed pretty damn well off. And as I said a few days ago, there is a small community of Uyghurs in my city and in nearly every city of a certain size in China. If there were efforts to eradicate them, they would be pretty damn half-assed.

Let’s just say it’s a nuanced, complicated thing. And pardon me for being a bit cynical of whatever Western media outlets say about China, with their piss-poor track record of bias and fallacies.

My afternoon was mostly spent double-checking calculations and entering exam scores in a spreadsheet. I listened to an album by Cleric, who plays “avant-garde metal”. It was a chaotic riff soup alternating between fast and very slow parts with little build-up or rhyme or reason, layered with inhuman screams. I felt like I was falling down stairs for an hour nonstop. It was still a pretty interesting listening experience, I just wonder how those musicians remember how to play those songs.

I got home and drank an espresso stout from Kiuchi Brewery while watching the prelims from the Wednesday UFC card. It had quite the international flavor: Manon Fiorot, a hyped French newcomer to the women’s 125-pound division, gave a striking clinic and finished her opponent with a sweet no-switch front kick to the head followed by a barrage of punches against the wall; Umar Nurmagomedov, Khabib’s cousin, made his UFC debut and showed a complete game, striking in the first round and wrestling in the second before choking his Kazakh opponent to sleep; two unranked lightweights had an incredibly gutsy and skillful back-and-forth fight, showing the incredible depth of that division; Sumudaerji, a skinny Tibetan, kept the hype train rolling with a dominant decision win.

The girlfriend got home, but wasn’t feeling well so she wanted to stay home. I went by myself to our South African friend’s birthday dinner, well, me and the dog. He trotted beside my bicycle for a bit, then I carried him in the basket I have tied on my back rack. I listened to Katalepsy on the way, a slamming brutal death metal band, I enjoy this style but find it very formulaic and repetitive.

The restaurant was a bit out of the city, and the road I used was under construction, with huge cracks and puddles. I rode in the light rain, drops of water obscuring my vision through my glasses, and eventually made it. About 25 people were there, most of them fellow expats I know from around, and the evening was pleasant, the dog received a lot of attention, with all those people who wanted to pet him. I ate roast chicken and a small piece of cake, drank three beers, then rode home.

Chapter 21

I emerged from the warmth of my blankets, haggard and underslept, and took a nasty shit while listening to politics stuff from YouTube. Some people are really mad that Joe Biden just got inaugurated, I’d say cut the man some slack, he probably doesn’t even know where he is right now and all he wants is to eat oatmeal and watch daytime TV. And on a more serious note, trumpers seem a bit dumb and paranoid when they engage in mass hysteria in the same way that all those NPCs who thought that Trump would round up transgenders and Mexicans (and transgender Mexicans), let’s be real, very little is likely to change in the day-to-day lives of most Americans, it’s been like that since the inception of modern politics.

I got to the office and quickly put on the sweet sounds of a crust punk band called Dömesticrust, from Indonesia, a recent discovery, oftentimes it pays to click on random links in the YouTube sidebar. It only lasted 25 minutes, then I put on Scorpion Circles by Genelec and Memphis Reigns. I normally avoid using the word “underrated”, it usually just means “I like this and I’m cool for liking this and people are not cool enough to like this” but in the case of that underground hip-hop album, it totally applies. Those two mysterious rappers just appeared out of nowhere, dropped this absolute masterpiece, and then faded to obscurity. It’s got ridiculously catchy beats infused with Middle Eastern sounds, a great back-and-forth between the two MCs, and uplifting lyrics. It’s a fucking awesome piece of music.

The Metal Minded podcast started at 9, with reviews of Fractal Generator, Ritual Moon, Bloody Hammers et Malakhim. I liked the Ritual Moon album, but it was the most poorly received of the four, as neither guy is a big fan of lofi black-thrash.

I finished the Genelec and Memphis Reigns album, and then watched a few Grind Mode Cypher videos, with a variety of MCs predominantly from the northeast spitting bar upon bar upon bar, most of them are more talented than 99% of rappers that make the XXL Freshman list. Some of these cyphers have an established rapper closing the show, and one of those I watched today featured Joell Ortiz, who absolutely murdered it.

My coworker asked me to buy him some of the bottled iced tea that he guzzles through the day, on my way back from my lunch break. I have no idea how he does it in his fifties, I’m a full generation younger but sugary beverages send me into twitchy convulsions. So I went to the store and bought two large bottles, along with those Japanese rice chips that I became addicted to and am snacking on constantly like a stoned pig.

I got home and ate two more beef n’ cheese burritos, the beef had dried up a bit in the fridge and the meal would have been infinitely better if I had sour cream. Still, I consider myself fortunate to eat homemade tex-mex food while so many in the world suffer from hunger or malnutrition. Also my dog eats the same meal every single time and still gets excited when I rattle his bag of dried pellets.

I finished the UFC card from last weekend. Due to the time difference, I usually don’t watch it live in one shot, I watch it throughout the week, starting with the main card and watching the prelims later. The prelims were a bit underwhelming, compared to the action-packed main card. I was stoked with the UFC coming back on a weekly basis but I might not watch every card whole if I don’t feel like it or don’t have enough time, especially if there’s a Wednesday event like this week. I look at the website FOTN.tv, which gives user-submitted ratings of each fight without spoiling the result. If the fight scores in the 80s or 90+%, you know it’s going to be a good one, and worth the detour, and I’ll also watch the fighters I’m interested in, but might otherwise skip some.

I got back to the office, even though I finished all my grading and have dickall to do. Life of a salaried worker ant, I’m not paid to deliver my expertise, I’m paid to be present. Again, looking at the bright side, things could be much much worse, many people don’t even have an income or they’re paid less than I am for doing something worse than sitting in a cubicle listening to music, writing and browsing memes online for three hours.

My mood worsened a bit when I received some terrible news: the Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym is closing. I’ve been practicing BJJ since last year and it is a truly addictive and functional way to exercise, I suspended my membership in mid-December after a few overlapping nagging injuries forced me to sit out a bit. I have recovered, and was planning to start again after Chinese New Year, but the gym will be gone. Bummer. I was semi-expecting it in fact, the overhead must have been too high for the low number of students enrolled. Ah well, they’ll give me a refund for the time left on my membership, and I will find another hobby. Some other martial arts gym or normie gyms have mat space too, that could be borrowed or rented if I want to go roll with my partners for old times’ sake.

I listened to old Fear Factory songs, a metal band with a very unique industrial sound. They have a track with B-Real from Cypress Hill called Back The Fuck Up that I really like, a mixture of dark gritty hip-hop, machine gun drumming and heavy riffage. I also put on an album by Obtained Enslavement, a symphonic black metal band, one of the few who still seems to get respect from the extremely gatekeeperish black metal community.

I tried to find something to listen to that isn’t music or political whining, and I remembered that Olivier Aubin-Mercier, the former UFC fighter, went on Mike Ward’s podcast. Mike Ward is the most popular comedian in Quebec, and has a show where he interviews various personalities, mostly comedians. I got annoyed and stopped it after less than an hour, OAM is a funny dude but Mike Ward and the other guest, an attractive raspy-voiced female comedian with a knack for vagina jokes and an army of simps in the comment section, kept interrupting his stories and giving their dumb-ass normie takes about the world of MMA.

I got home, opened a Lindemans apple lambic and heated some sesame flat bread I bought yesterday from a street stand on the way back from the bank. I ate it with the nutty pepper garlic spread, then took a long nap. Why take a nap at 6 PM? I had a Zoom session scheduled with the extended family at 11 PM, and I was already damn sleep-deprived, so I got to bed with the dog curled against me and slept for almost three hours.

I woke up just before the girlfriend came back from work, took the doggy around in the misty rain, and put a simmering pot on the stove with carrots, celery, onions, garlic and old leftover bones and bits of meat carcass to make stock. I put on the UFC 257 press conference on YouTube, there’s always something a bit special about a McGregor fight week. He and Poirier were showing humility and respect to one another, and I have to say that while shit-flinging hostile rivalries can be entertaining at times, I prefer that professional vibe. The live comment section was pure AIDS-infused cancer though, and for whatever reason Khabib was constantly mentioned, either by name or implicitly with “29-1” or other stupid crap.

I blanched asparagus cut in bite-sized pieces, fried it for a bit with garlic, hot chilis, cumin and Sichuan peppers, and mixed it with scrambled eggs. It’s one of the most satisfying things to eat, and I devoured it with a Goose Island IPA while watching the end of the press conference.

I was the only person of my generation on the Zoom conference, aside from my cousin who was there for the first few minutes. My dad and his three brothers were there on their separate devices, and there was some serious boomer action, as they were trying to connect and turn on their cameras. It was a pleasant talk, about recent actuality (they all really hate Trump, which is a bit surprising, given that they are in his target demographic) and about old stuff from the generation before them, as they were going through boxes full of old black-and-white photographs. It’s always good to talk to them.

Chapter 20

This morning I listed to an episode of the Boyscast, and Ryan Long talked about “microaggressions”, some Asian girl he knows in New York got mad when an Uber driver asked her where she’s from. He said she probably wouldn’t have been offended if she didn’t get repeatedly told to be, and that’s the world we live in now. Here’s my take on this: as much as I agree that this shit is trivial and that intent should be considered, microaggressions do pile up and become very annoying. And I can say that from first-hand experience, as I get microaggressed on a daily basis. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to pose as a victim here, life is pretty good and Chinese people are nice and friendly, but getting asked a barrage of inane questions, having people point at me for being different and assuming I’m a bumbling idiot who can’t learn their language or even eat with chopsticks feels heavy at times, with the accumulation.

I got to work and plopped in front of the computer, a bit groggy. I’ve been staying up past my bedtime recently, as I feel already on semi-vacation mode. I put on some music, staying in the punk rock lane I’ve been in since yesterday, first with The Vandals and then No Use For A Name. After that I felt like listening to something a tad faster and more frenetic, and Spazz fit the bill. They play a stripped down, ultra fast version of punk called powerviolence, with short blasting tracks filled with dark humor. The world would be a better place if everyone listened to Spazz.

At times, the irony of having a day job where I tuck in a button-down shirt in my pants, sit in a cubicle and have to be cordial with people I would never interact willingly with in real life, yet I’m listening to extremely esoteric, violent, anti-social music in my headphones isn’t lost on me. I then put on something even more deviant, a Czech band called Eardelete. The Czech Republic produces a lot of grindcore with a very recognizable sound, with a bass-heavy slowed down beat, gargling vocals, infectious groove, techno or synthwave (before it was called synthwave) samples, and themes that move away from the template of goregrind and pornogrind. For instance, most of Eardelete’s previous albums (under the name Negligent Collateral Collapse) were talking about physics, and this one is about Satan.

Earlier in the morning I got a message from a South African friend, she is organizing a dinner party on Friday and is inviting us. I ran the idea to the girlfriend, she agreed, so I accepted the invitation. Then I got a message from the principal, saying that there’s a school dinner... on Friday. I told her I can’t go, as I already made plans, and I suggested that if they made it a lunch instead (with, possibly, y’know, an early start to the weekend afterwards), everyone would attend. Those cringeworthy dinners feel like work anyway most of the time, so why not doing it on the clock?

My American coworker agreed with the sentiment, and added “Plus, Friday is the day after tomorrow. If they told us ahead, we wouldn’t make plans. That’s called professional courtesy.”

“Why have professional courtesy when you can have passive-aggressive coercion?”

I listened to some political analysis talking about Kamala Harris’s many shortcomings and instances of shocking hypocrisy, the video was from 2019 and the guy was rejoicing in the fact that she was now out of the race for the DNC candidacy. The biggest irony: the video was titled “That didn’t age well”, boy oh boy! He used the words “mass hysteria”, in the context of all those people who thought they would literally die under a Trump presidency because... hmmm... because what? Anyway it triggered something in my brain and made me want to listen to the French metal band with that name. On YouTube there was a 50-minute video of a live set at the Hellfest, perfect coincidence, because 50 minutes is what I have left before temporary freedom from my salaried servitude. Mass Hysteria’s got a pretty interesting signature sound, with lots of groove, a hardcore aesthetic, and very danceable parts that feel like rave music but with guitars. They feel both headbangingly awesome and corny, not because they sing exlusively in French, but due to the constant over-the-top positivity in their lyrics that reminds me of Mormon missionaries.

When I got home, I saw that the dog had chewed up the box in which our handheld thermometer came. He was quickly put in jail. I made some cheesy beef burritos, that I ate while watching MMA analysis videos and drinking a wheat beer from a Chinese microbrewery.

I had an admin leave to go to the bank and transfer money, which required me to go to the taxation bureau first to get some documentation of proof of payment of taxes. Those used to be delivered straight to the office every two months, but they stopped doing that. Why? Fuck if I know. Probably some guy got promoted to the position of Joyless Bureaucrat In Charge and justified his position by adding a bunch of red tape everywhere. I filled out a form requesting a form, sat around for ages, watching the numbers being called and inching slowly towards mine.

A display on a table in the middle of the waiting room attracted my attention, the winners of a drawing contest open to the second-graders in the city. The artwork was seriously pretty good, my favorite was two hands holding a planet Earth with the character 税 (tax) on it, flanked by a guy in prison labeled in Chinese as “tax frauder” and a policeman and a young boy on the other side, standing proudly and saluting. Another one had a big pipeline with the word TAX on it, in English, with a modern bullet train coming out of it and a utopian city being built behind, with a multiethnic group dancing in the forefront, all smiles (well, multiethnic as in minority groups of China with their folkloric clothes, no Caucasians or Africans there although that would have been way cooler).

My number was called, and the lady quickly printed my document. I asked her how to use the newly developed phone app, she patiently told me and even wrote a short list of instructions, that she printed and handed me out. Then I rode to the bank, and did my thing. In the past, transfering money out of China was the absolute bane of my wretched existence, I’d tell some stories about the crass incompetence and unbelievable kafkaesque obstacles set in front of my path, but I’m afraid I’ll get a PTSD attack. But thank God, Mao and Buddha, at the branch of Bank of Communications where my paycheck is deposited, they have staff who got their shit together and the process, while comprised of many steps and a bunch of paperwork (and I would in fact be worried if it was too simple, after all we’re talking about wiring tens of thousands of dollars across international borders) is a breeze, especially compared to the 12 Labours of Hercules that I had to put myself through when I lived in more third-worldy parts of China.

That ate my whole afternoon, then I got home, relaxed a bit, and played some GTA V while sipping red wine. Ramming pedestrians with my sports car, blowing up rows of parked cars with a grenade launcher and getting into firefights with the NPC cops was a good way to vent my frustrations of dealing with that bureaucratic shit today. I fell asleep, and got up a bit before 8 to go play soccer. We played 7 on 7 and the games were great, with a final score of 13-12 after two hours. Then I rode back home on deserted roads, and saw that the duck stand was still open but just about to close, the man was removing the meat from its various trays and putting it in plastic bags. I bought two spicy duck heads. When I got home, I was surprised that the girlfriend was still up, engrossed in the puzzle she just bought. I took a quick shower, then ate the duck heads and crackers with cream cheese while drinking a cold Weihenstephaner hefeweissen.