Chapter 39

Another late start, after going to bed way past midnight and getting a full night of sleep letting my legs recover. This Monday was lining up to be a resting day.

I drank black tea, did a bit of yoga, and wrote. Going down the top 500 brought me to an effeminate blues rock album and a pretty cool husband-and-wife folk duo. Not bad music by any means, but I’ve heard way more interesting stuff across the music spectrum and especially in outlier genres that I don’t imagine will be featured a lot on this list. Still, some good enough music to put on while the girlfriend is home working at her desk on the other side of the room and wouldn’t take kindly to me blaring some black metal. Then it was Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, an album with a fun and catchy electropop dancing vibe but like it’s the case with a lot of pop albums, the highlights are the singles, by far, and outshine the rest of the album that ends up looking like filler.

I watched the UFC card. The co-main event lasted a whole 26 seconds before Cory Sandhagen assassinated Frankie Edgar with a flying knee, and in the main, 6 foot 7 Russian giant Alex Volkov bust Econoreem open and sent him down on all fours. Both men are likely to fight for the championship of their respective divisions next.

I kept reading the book about the Norman Conquest. It’s great. At times it’s a bit hard to follow the whole game of thrones between England, the Duchy of Normandy, and the peripheral players in Flanders, France, Denmark and even further afield, but at the point I am in the book now, the stage is slowly setting for the Hastings showdown.

The girlfriend wanted to eat bullfrog tonight, and it happens to be one of my favorites so off we went. The amphibians are cut up in bite-size pieces and cooked in a ganguo (dry pot) with lotus roots, sheets of tofu, rice cakes, potatoes, and tons of peppers. Truly some oily goodness.

We got back home and I kept reading and listening to the Top 500. Muddy Waters’s anthology was great, some very fun blues music, and then, at number 482, the first album of the list that I had listened to before, The Pharcyde’s debut album. I put it on anyway, like I’ll do down the list even if it’s an album I’m familiar with. The Pharcyde is a hip-hop group and their stuff is goofy, alternative, jazzy and quite fun, good to see them get some luv on that list.

An old friend was online, and at 10 PM we started videochatting. We worked at the same school 8 or 9 years ago, and he lives in Beijing now, after being stuck stateside through most of 2020. We ended up talking for a whole three hours, about history, futurism, politics, and old memories. The students we taught back then have graduated university since, have gotten married, and post pictures of their kids on WeChat. Time’s arrow marches forward.

I watched a few more videos on YouTube, from a channel called Dovahhatty. The guy makes minimalist videos about Roman history, full of offensive dark humor and 4chan memes. For instance, the Romans are represented as Chads and the Greeks as virgins, from the Chad vs virgin meme, and the plebs are shown as anonymous wojaks. Highly recommended if you like history and internet culture.