Chapter 38

I woke up a bit late and read in bed for a bit. Then I made hash browns and ate them with a couple of runny eggs. I watched an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, some half-black, half-Mexican dude in Kansas went to a party at a farmhouse and presumably got in a fight with some rednecks there, as he disappeared and his body was only found weeks later, by a creek nearby. He didn’t have any broken bones or traumatic injuries, and his body wasn’t as decomposed as it would have been if he had died the night of his disappearance, which led people to speculate if he was kept prisoner somewhere, or if his body was in a freezer the whole time. To this day, nobody knows what happened. Except the scumbags who did it, of course. I wonder if somewhere in the midwest there are a couple of rednecks watching Netflix and laughing through their rotten teeth.

I joined a badminton club, and on Sundays they play from 2 to 4 PM. I paid the fee with an app and went to the enormous municipal gym complex. When I play with the girlfriend or with students or staff at the school, it’s not very challenging for my level of skill, so I wanted to get pushed a bit. Well, pushed, I did get. My first opponent was a chubby woman in her forties wearing a tracksuit, and she slaughtered me effortlessly. Then, as more people came in, we played some doubles, and I held my own.

Three boys were watching the game.

“Woah! Look at that! Is he a laowai?”

“No! I heard him, he said chuxian, he speaks Chinese!”

“He looks like a laowai”

Chuxian means cross the line, a word I’m all too familiar with after derping the driving exam. Just like I’m familiar (and incredibly amused) with people, usually children or “rural” folks, who are confused and wonder “Wait, wait, are you sure this brown-haired, bearded, very European-looking person is a foreigner? He can speak our language!”

After two games full of fast exchanges, I took a short rest, and then saw that the three 10-year-old boys were alternating on another court, which meant one was without a partner.

“Come on, xiaohar, I’ll play you”

And damn, though he was half my size, even when I turned it on and played to the best of my ability without giving him any chance, he’d sneak one on me from time to time. His dad was watching and yelling pointers, I assume the little guy had been handling a racquet before he could even walk.

I played for nearly two hours then said goodbye to my new pals and rode home. The weather was incredibly sunny and warm, hard to imagine it’s February. I put the leash on the dog and went to the park, where I sat with a can of Goose Island IPA and watched him run around.

I got home and started watching a documentary called Hypernormalisation, by a British guy named Adam Curtis, on the recommendation of a friend. It started with two seemingly unrelated stories occurring in 1975, one about Wall Street bankers in NYC ruining the whole city and turning it into an even bigger shithole than before, and one about Henry Kissinger fucking Syria. Then, as we chronologically progressed, there were segments about more seemingly unrelated things, like how Donald Trump built his real estate empire, UFO sightings, the rise and fall and rise and fall of Colonel Gaddafi, punks in the USSR.

The whole thing was three hours long so I had to watch it in two parts. First order of business, make linguine carbonara with sausages, then eat the linguine carbonara with sausages, and finally take a nap, drowsy with the effort of digesting the linguine and the sausages and the bacon cheesy sauce.

I woke up and rode my bicycle to the far southern outskirts of the city, where there is a rooftop soccer pitch. Eight of the boys got together to play touch football. We normally do flag football but now we didn’t have the flags. I scored two touchdowns, one as receiver, one as QB, with a rather prodigious effort by my teammate, who used to play as tight end in college and dove to catch my pass that I overshot to get past the defender. It was good fun.

I was sore as hell when I made it home, even after a half hour on the bicycle, that never fails to loosen me up a bit. Nearly four hours of stop-and-go heavy sports today. The girlfriend was in bed talking to her parents on WeChat videochat, after a day spent playing majiang with her friends. I mixed her favorite cocktail, a modified breakfast martini, with gin, plum-infused baijiu, triple sec, lemon juice, apricot marmalade and blueberry jam, and made it a double so I’d have one to sip while soaking my messed up joints and muscles in a hot bath.

I kept going down the top 500 list. The Stooges and Black Flag were there consecutively, finally some alternative music! The two albums were good, but not that great in my opinion, if you take them for their intrinsic value rather than their pioneering status. But I guess that criteria plays a big role when music critics want to make a list of the best albums ever.

I finished watching Hypernormalisation, while sipping various alcoholic beverages. It was interesting but a bit disjointed, and I was puzzled by the narrator’s logical progression and conclusion:

The USA has been fucking heavily with the Near East and Libya, putting it in a nearly unsolvable state of warfare and chaos

and

The internet was developed by a bunch of nerds as a government tool, then became a free and uncontrolled means of communication, and later became controlled again, by monopolistic corporations tied to the government, using algorithms to push content

therefore

ORANGE MAN BAD AND WE SHOULDN'T BREXIT (because, like, that condescending cunt Steven Colbert said he has a friend in London who reassured him that the UK has a small core of rich douchebags detached from the reality of the rest of the country, who are just no-good stupid racist gammons anyway).

Uh, OK I guess.