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.