Chapter 7

As far as my day-to-day goes, the virus has been mostly an afterthought ever since the end of March last year. Yeah, it’s all over the international news like sand on a wet towel at the beach, and once in a while there will be a sprouting of a few cases in a distant place elsewhere in China, but in my city, everything is open and though I carry stupid little masks in various jacket pockets, I’m rarely if ever asked to put it on. The only, the ONLY thing left over from anti-covid policies that I have to go through daily is getting my temperature checked by the security guard when I enter the school in the morning. It takes about two seconds, I just need to expose a wrist and he points a little thermometer gun thingy at it.

Well this morning he just waved me through from inside his little cabin. Why? Because it’s cold. Sometimes it makes me wonder what the whole point of “rules and regulations” is, it’s not always to make society better.

I had three classes in the morning, which consisted of going through old exam questions. The students were mostly attentive, as the final exams are around the corner.

I also had one hour in between. I listened to my friends’ metal podcast, they reviewed four new releases of various subgenres. It was live (Thursday morning in China is Wednesday evening in Quebec) so I could write comments and shitposts in the chat box. Live streaming is a pretty cool technology, they can broadcast on the internet like that and get a following, only a few years ago it would have been impossible, they’d have needed to get on a community radio or some shit, and subjected to all sort of restrictive rules. Plus it’s not nearly as interactive.

I was also browsing the news, apparently a mob of Trump supporters has descended upon Washington and is occupying federal buildings. Regardless where you stand politically, the whole thing gives off some pretty serious failed state vibes. You’d imagine something like that in Nicaragua or in Guinea-Bissau, but not in the USA.

A bunch of my Facebook friends are saying that “the silence is deafening”, urging Trump supporters to condemn those actions, and also bringing up when Trump himself talked about law and order, and promised a world of punishment for blacklivesmatter and antifa rioters. The few right-wingers or libertarians I have on Facebook are saying similar things, like “hey if you were applauding the riots 4 months ago it's not the time to condemn the ones happening now”. Probably some degree of false equivalency there but it's undeniable that the conversation between both sides is broken and has been for a while. But generally there are way fewer right-wingers in my Facebook feed than left-wingers and I assume it's the same for you. Those I know either post very little (or very little with a political slant) or if they do, they're constantly getting into flame wars that they don't really seem to be the instigators of.

Either way let’s just hope that the mob goes home, satisfied that they had their 15 minutes on TV, and that this is not the continuation of an increasingly slippery slope towards the fall of the American democratic system. Or even worse, that it’s not the event that will get the whole thing in third gear and that it’s nothing but race wars and destruction from now, and that the survivors will look back at that January 7^th 2021 the same way that we remember September 11^th  2001. You might have picked it up by that point, I’m not a generally optimistic man when it comes to the big picture.

I went home for lunch and this time I took the dog for a little stroll. I ate leftovers from the Hunanese feast I had the day before, watching a YouTube video about the rise and fall of ska by a guy who goes by Punk Rock MBA. It made me want to listen to my cousin’s band, The Cardboard Crowns, so I fired up a few of their music videos. Their punk rock is catchy, well-written, with both a professional and DIY aesthetic to it, and I enjoy the hell out of their two albums, not just because my young couz is handling the bass and singing on a few of the tracks, but because it’s genuinely great. I feel like their stuff is as good if not better than a lot of bands that have made it in that niche, they have all the elements, except from that one spark of luck that would get one of their tracks play at the right place at the right moment to the right person, which seems to be a crucial yet unpredictable, and therefore somewhat unfortunate, part of the music business.

I also finished Jocko Willink’s podcast, he was talking about motivation and how it doesn’t necessarily equate drive or enthusiasm, but rather, at the etymological level, having a motive to do something. Like, when you’re about to work out, maybe you don’t feel like it because you’re sore or lazy, but you know it’s good so you do it. He’s 100% right. Discipline is more important than “motivation”.

Then I switched to Slayer. Reign In Blood is the greatest album in the history of metal, but this time I put on the follow-up, 1988’s South Of Heaven. The thrash giants slow down the beat a bit and introduce a few nice mid-tempo grooves, while still peppering the listener with an unrelenting riffage assault. Slayer’s first two albums feel a bit embryonic and too deeply rooted in early-80s heavy metal, then Reign In Blood set the tone for what modern metal and also hardcore could be, and the next two feel a bit more “mature” in my ears. Unfortunately, like so many bands of that era, they fell hard in the 90s before redeeming themselves somewhat with OK albums in the 2000s, but by that time metal had passed them by and the fans were still crowding their shows but only for the classics. I’m giving myself the mission of revisiting those albums and give them an objective chance.

My Thursday afternoon is very leisurely, no classes at all. So I spent it writing, reading various websites, and, well, doing a bit of work too. I finished compiling the final exam questions, formatted the whole thing, checked and double-checked it, and printed it before sending it for photocopying. It was a bit frustrating, because I included a question about material that has since been removed from the curriculum, so I had to find another one and tweak the formatting a bit.

All the while, I was listening to Svrm, a Ukrainian one-man black metal project that my friends talked about on the Metal Minded podcast. Ukraine bats way above the average when it comes to melancholic black metal. Then I played an album by Parlementarisk Sodomi, another one-man band. I bought his album Har Du Sagt A Får Du Si Nal (yes I had to go and copy-paste it) on a whim a long time ago, expecting some silly parodic or porno infused grind based on the name, but no, it’s some dead serious stuff, and some of the angriest and tightest grindcore I’ve ever heard, go check it out. That virtuoso also has produced tons of other LPs and splits, that I intend to check out.

I also listened to some political analysis, by a guy on YouTube who goes by Styxhexenhammer666. He was talking about the officers who shot Jacob Blake getting acquitted of any wrongdoing charges, the necessity of reforming the criminal justice system, and also addressed the current controversy involving Kamala Harris who is accused of making up a story of attending civil rights marches as a young kid and saying she wants “fweedom”, in line with her tendency to fictionalize aspects of her life to make herself likeable. Styx is an independent political analyst with quite a large audience and a staunch libertarian, a current of thought I don’t align with 100%, I agree with some of his views but recently he’s been rubbing me the wrong way. He really, really can’t get over the results of the November election and refers to Biden as “Beijing Biden”, which is already petty as it is but peeves me even more because of how he mispronounces Beijing. And now, talking about Harris, he crossed the line in my book by throwing a really sexist insult at her. I get it, you dislike Kamala Harris, I dislike Kamala Harris, your mom dislikes Kamala Harris, everyone dislikes Kamala Harris, but can’t we stick (styx?) to substantiated criticism rather than sexist ad hominems?

I have to say I’ve always tried to get my news and analysis from a diversity of sources, mostly independent as opposed to mainstream media, from various positions on the political compass. In the past year, I have given up on a lot of left-leaning commentators, finding them whiny and intransigent and fallacious. But now, some of the more center-right and right-wing and libertarians analysts grate me in a similar way, especially in the wake of the US election. I think I’ll start listening to some Kyle Kulinski, I heard mostly good things about him.

I pedaled home in the bitter cold, listening to Slayer full volume like the man of culture I am, and when I opened the front door, I saw that the dog had managed to climb on the dinner table and ate a whole bag of sweet popcorn. He looked at me with a guilty expression on his ugly face, and I put him in prison (in the bathroom).

With Kyle Kulinski’s Secular Talk YouTube show as accompaniment, I went through the same workout I did Monday, then took a shower. Kulinski seems OK, yeah he suffers from acute Trump Derangement Syndrome but most of his reporting and analysis on recent events seemed balanced enough.

I ate a bowl of cereal with a scoop of protein powder for dinner. Don’t judge me. The oily spicy Chinese food started to give me an upset stomach. I poured a raspberry lambic from Lindemans and watched the Royal Rumble 1992, I never was a big fan of wrassling but during the quarantine last year I kinda got into it, in small doses it’s a rather interesting spectacle, especially the classic stuff. There were some big names in that 30-man match: Hulk Hogan, Roddy Piper, Jake The Snake, Macho Man, The Undertaker, British Bulldog, and the eventual winner, Ric Flair. Hell, that’s already more than what I could name in the entire current WWE roster.

The girlfriend finished work at 8:30, it’s about a 25-minute walk away so I went to meet her with the dog. I played a new Jocko podcast, he’s talking about the butchery that was WW1. Now we’re back in our toasty apartment, I’m putting the final touches to this little diary while listening to an Indonesian brutal death metal named Death Prophecy. Indonesia is surprisingly fertile when it comes to guttural, gory, disgustingly low-pitched death metal.