Chapter 29

I woke up way, way too late. There were explosions outside throughout the whole damn morning but I always managed to fall back into my ethylic coma. I made a stiff banana daiquiri with 4 oz of white rum and ate some fried chicken leftovers, starting the day well. Some people in a craft beer lovers Facebook group I’m in were having their weekly Zoom conference call, and I joined for a bit, talking about beer (of course), our pets, and the fucked up real estate market in Canada. Some of them are in Hamilton, Ontario, and were talking about how the rents increased astronomically in the past few years, as many people get priced out of Toronto and now are driving the prices in neighboring Hamilton up. I didn’t want to rub it in, but I told them about the teeny amount of money I pay for my large two-bedroom place in China and how it allows me to save so much money even on a modest salary. I can’t imagine how much my life would suck ass if I had to spend half my paycheck on a shoebox shithole and still have to spend hours every day commuting, like is the sad fate of so many people.

Th sun was shining through the windows, so as soon as the girlfriend came back from dropping the car at the mechanic, we went outside with the dog to run some errands and enjoy the nice crisp weather. We bought Ziploc bags, French fries, bagels, and then went to a craft beer shop to have a nice afternoon beer by the canal. I had a lager from Amsterdam Brewery and she drank a passionfruit-flavored brew from Moovan. On the way back we went through a superb little park, with bamboo groves, pagodas, impossibly cute little paths, and ponds. At the eastern end of the park, there’s an area with swings and exercise equipment, I did a set of dips on the parallel bars and stretched a bit. There’s also an old Cold War era jet plane there, on stilts, and I laughed remembering an incident that happened a year or two ago, when I had two friends visiting and we walked around all day, intoxicated out of our minds. One of them, a burly American guy, started “slapping the plane”, Chinese vulgar slang for masturbation. That prompted a small kid to ask:

“Mama! What is the foreigner doing?”

“He is... uh... uuuuurrrrrggghhh!” She sighed audibly and dragged her child away. We laughed until it hurt. Three men in their early thirties, de facto acting as cultural ambassadors for foreign countries, day-drinking in the park and making such dumb jokes. I feel very proud.

 

We got home and did a bit of cleaning, rearranging the stuff in the fridge and freezer. We also noticed that the dog had a nail cracked in half and that seemed to bother him, but he was thrashing and shrieking in panic when we held him and tried to cut his nail. The girlfriend had a genius idea, filling his bowl with food and putting it on the dinner table, and while he was wolfing down his food, *SNIP* and he didn’t even notice, focused as he was.

For dinner, I made poutine with the gumbo gravy and cubes of gouda cheese. The traditional recipe calls for the use of cheese curds, but culinary orthodoxy be damned, I for one think that chunks of mozzarella or gouda or other light white cheese are an acceptable substitute, if they’re cut large enough and the gravy is not piping hot. I also made a salad with lettuce, tomatoes, black and green olives, chives, garlic, and a mustard vinaigrette. We ate our vittles watching The Office.

We still have a jar of chicken stock in the fridge and I was looking for soup ideas, so I watched some cooking videos on YouTube.

“Do you want me to make hot and sour soup?”, I asked while she was doing the dishes.

“What’s that?”

I told her the name in Chinese.

“Why? We can buy it for 0.50 yuan”

And this is true. That’s why I don’t cook a lot of Chinese food, there are hundreds of restaurants in town who do it cheaper and better than I can. Another video piqued my interest, about Greek avgolemeno soup, I’ll likely do that one.

I also saw that Paul Joseph Watson dropped a video and was stoked. His videos are hilarious but also extremely depressing. In this one, he talked about Joe Biden’s inauguration, and how it’s ironic that so-called progressives celebrate a president who’s on the side of the military-industrial complex and global corporations. He also highlighted how the way mainstream media talks about him can be creepy and reminiscent of North Korean propaganda, using comically hyperbolic language and metaphors. Quite a change from how they were treating Orange Man.

I went to bed quite early with a glass of whisky and my Kindle, and kept reading Homo Deus. All in all a pretty nice vacation day.