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.