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.