Chapter 5

It was time to refresh the music in my mp3 player, so I uploaded a few albums of recent and classic music. On my way to work, I started with the latter, and blasted the album Bones by Cypress Hill. Cypress Hill has been the platform for many metalheads to jump into the world of hip-hop, with their dark imagery and excellent collabs with rock and metal musicians. I firmly believe that Rock Superstar is one of the greatest songs of my generation.

I had only one class this morning, so I spent most of my time in the office doing a bit of admin work and compiling questions for the final exam. I checked my email, my dad sent me a link to a Radio-Canada interview with a university professor named Gad Saad. He was commenting on the rise of intersectional SJW shit and the “woke” culture, and didn’t make his position ambiguous, using words like “pathogenic” and “infecting” and “it really takes a bunch of intellectuals to come up with something that stupid”. For the longest time, my dad was pooh-poohing all that bizarre postmodernism and ethnomasochism and cultural marxism as just a bunch of isolated nonsense on US liberal arts campuses, but in light of recent events and the adroit reporting and commenting of French-language sources like Mathieu Bock-Côté and that professor Saad, he’s starting to be aware of how important of a cultural phenomenon the whole thing is.

In the same radio show, there was also an interview with Yves Lambert, Quebec’s great folk musician, mostly known for his time fronting La Bottine Souriante. A man of immense musical culture and passion, and I thoroughly enjoyed hearing him talk.

Then I went on YouTube looking for something to drown the office noise with, and blind-clicked on an album by Sorcier Des Glaces, which turned out to be a very good slab of black metal. I’ll check the other releases by that great Quebec outfit.

I went home for lunch, listening to a few tracks from the album Chapter Chaos Begins by Anonymus. Anonymus has a career spanning three decades and has been churning out frantic thrash metal in French, English and Spanish (the frontman is the son of immigrants from Spain), including some absolute classics. I bought that particular album when it came out about fifteen years ago, it’s got some great, recognizable riffing, but also some attempts at anthemic vocals that are more miss than hit.

I cooked some bacon in a pan and made myself a BLT sandwich, that I ate alongside one big carrot dipped in hummus. I watched a YouTube video about overlanding from a channel called The Road Chose Me, an Australian guy who’s been driving his Jeep around Africa for three years, and makes very informative no-frills videos. I’d love to go on a long overland self-driven trip one day, it’s in fact one of the reasons I’m in the process of getting my license.

I then put on the discussion between YouTube political commentator Sargon Of Akkad and the two people behind the channel China Uncensored. Those people really, really hate China. I’m myself a sinophile so I don’t see eye-to-eye with all of their views, and of course as a long-term expat with boots on the ground I have a different perspective than theirs. One thing that grates me to no end is how they attribute cartoonish ill intent to everything, as if the big communist boogeyman was only capable of evil. For instance, they talk about how there’s been a campaign of modernization of public toilets “just to impress tourists and distract the population from more serious issues”. Well, my city has zero tourists, domestic or foreign, yet is constantly spending a lot of municipal money to build parks, turn gutted old husks of buildings into something presentable, and yeah, modernizing the infrastructure in general. That’s what local governments fucken do. They also crap on and on about how China offering to donate all those masks and medical equipment is soft power with the express intention of, I don’t know, poison everyone or some shit. Maybe it’s not a completely selfless act, but name one, just one, instance of pure philanthropy in the history of international relations.

That said, I obviously fucken know that the Chinese political system and the society it overlooks is far from perfect, and I have to contend with serious ethical conundrums at times. But it’s also undeniable that a lot of the information that the west gets about China is fallacious, exaggerated, biased and laden with hateful propaganda. I at least am willing to give a point to that chubby Asian-American woman for pronouncing Beijing properly as opposed to all the derps who say “beige-ing” with a soft j sound.

I went for a short walk with the dog, and started playing a Jocko Willink podcast on my mp3 player. He is a former Navy SEALs officer and a big scary gorilla of a man, but also very erudite and well-spoken. He gained a bit of prominence in recent years with his books and his podcast, where he talks about various memoirs from soldiers from yesteryear and the horrific reality of combat told within, promotes self-improvement and a good mindset, and is generally very motivating, encouraging his listeners to “get after it!”. In this particular one, he talks about D-Day from the perspective of a few American servicemen. I like military history, the lessons we can draw from it, and the perspective it gives me, making me realize that a lot of the problems I have are quite trivial in comparison.

In the afternoon, I had one class with the low-level eleventh-graders. The students are tiered and placed in groups based on ability and academic results, all the highest performing in class 1, and so forth. You don’t need to be an educational expert to know that there’s all sorts of things wrong with such a system, but I know I can’t change it so I have to smile and go along. Regardless of their lower ability and motivation, they are a pleasure to teach, and are constantly, sometimes effusively polite.

Then I went back to the office and did a bit of writing for this very diary as well as a travel story about my time in American Samoa that I will publish soon on my other blog over at www.quesstuvascrisserla.com, go take a look if you read French. I put on Busta Rhymes’s latest album on a friend’s recommendation, but the file I downloaded was full of annoying watermarks so I listened to a death metal band called Cadaver instead. It was okay, a friend put it in his top 5 best of 2020 list but it didn’t give me as strong of an impression.

I taught Attitude Class in the last period. Six or seven students were absent. Perhaps they have caught acute senioritis, a disease that plagues twelfth-graders.

I got home, ate a few pieces of jackfruit, a weird tropical fruit that for some reason I can buy for cheap here even though it’s wintertime and this part of China is far from the tropics. Then I went into my home gym, put on some gloves and did three 5-minute rounds on the punching bag. Nothing crazy, just breaking a sweat and moving around a bit. All the while, I was listening to Fuck The Facts, a great grindcore/metal band from Gatineau, Quebec. After a hiatus, they released an album this year to near universal acclaim from the underground, and it made me want to revisit their discography, so I put on their 2006 offering Stigmata High-Five.

I took a quick shower, cracked open a Japanese beer, and made spaghetti carbonara, supercharged with big chunks of pork and the bacon that was left over from the pack I opened at lunch. I used two full eggs and two egg yolks, I kept the whites to make a foamy whiskey sour after dinner.

I ate until I was close to rupturing, in front of the TV, watching UFC 6. I’m a big fan of MMA, and as the UFC is on a holiday break, I watched a half-hour edit of that early event, which took place in 1995. It’s night and day compared with the modern incarnation of the sport: an eight-man tournament format, no gloves, no time limits, huge weight and skill disparities, and as there were very few established rules, you see brutal shots on the back of the head and lots of fence grabbing. On that card there were a few names that made it to MMA lore: Ken Shamrock defeated Dan Severn by guillotine choke in a superfight, and the tournament finals was a grueling 17-minute fight that Oleg Taktarov won over Tank Abbott, who was making his debut that night and instantly became a fan favorite after two brutal KOs in the quarter- and semi-finals. Both Taktarov and Abbott were absolutely exhausted after that gutsy effort, which was made even more impressive by the fact that it took place in Wyoming, at high altitude.

Then the girlfriend got home, a bit later than usual, she went out of the city for her job today. I plated some spaghetti for her, she loves pasta as much as I do. We watched an episode of The Office. The Scranton branch was rumored to close, to great elation and great sadness, depending on which employee. But head office changed their minds.

Today's picture is a silly one: I put my tea bottle on top of the hot water dispenser, went to take a piss, and when I came out, it looked like it was frowning at me.