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.