Chapter 40

Another idling day. I spent the morning reading and listening to music, then I heated a plate of linguine carbonara for lunch. I cut a piece of beef in slices, seasoned it, and let it rest on the counter to use at dinnertime. I also roasted a green pepper and made salsa with green onions, tomatoes, garlic, lemon juice, chilis and spices. The stovetop was getting a bit dirty, so I removed the cast iron base and used degreasing liquid to remove all the shit that’s been caking there in the past few weeks.

I kept ploughing through the Top 500, and I was enjoying Selena’s Amor Prohibido when the internet started shitting sprays of diarrhea in its own mouth. My VPN works well most of the time but sometimes it malfunctions or crashes. Nonplussed, I put on a Soilent Green album, from a discography I downloaded recently and had been sitting in my BitTorrent folder. Soilent Green is a band from Louisiana that mixes sludge metal with grindcore, what’s not to love about that?! Their 1994 debut album Pussysoul is a great slab of extreme metal and just what I needed.

In the mid-afternoon, I started a Chinesepod session, with the PDF attached. It was about an ad campaign for diamond jewellery, a topic I give 0.01% of a shit about but there were some useful vocabulary words in there. But then, a fellow dog owner friend of mine texted me, she was at the park next to my apartment complex. So I went out to get some of that sunshine and watch our two little pooches chase one another. I brought a can of Preussen hefeweizen, of course. After 40 minutes of that, I got back and resumed my Chinese session, copying those moonrunes in my book.

The girlfriend came home, and together we moved the sofa and removed the enormous amount of shit that had been accumulating there. Might as well use this vacation time to take care of places that we seldom if ever clean.

I usually don’t care that much for 1960s music, which just hasn’t aged very well to me, with the weird vocal harmonies, percussions that always seem to incorporate too much tambourine, and shitty quality of the recording, but The Kinks’ Something Else was a fun listen and I went to download it alongside two other of their early albums. Then it was an even older album at number 474, by a bluesman named Howlin’ Wolf.

A friend sent me an article about the prevalence of mental illness among transgender people, and the possible roots of transgenderism in autism and narcissistic personality disorder. Now that’s a controversial topic, as it’s bound to put people on a defensive foot, thinking that you want to invalidate their identity or justify hatred. The author, who himself lost a transwoman friend in tragic circumstances, seemed to adopt a rational scientific approach as well as showing empathy and the desire to help, but still I doubt those ideas would be well received, case in point the fact that Facebook blocks the sharing of that article, and my friend had to send it through WeChat. We talked a little bit about the irony of using WeChat (an app heavily monitored by the Chinese government) to circumvent censorship.

Ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery, Islam is a religion of peace, transwomen are women, repeat after me seven more times. Here’s my stance on this whole thing: I think allowing transwomen to compete in women’s sports is unfair at best and damn near criminal at worst (in the case of MMA, for instance) and there are stories about hormone therapy prescribed to minors that are more than creepy, but aside from that, I don’t care if someone is transgender or non-binary or pansexual or whatever, and will gladly use the pronouns he/she/they/zir/xe asks me to.

I opened a liter bottle of homebrew and headed to the kitchen. I made nachos and beef tacos for dinner and we ate it while watching a movie called Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Apparently it’s a cult movie, and it’s several shades of retarded, with a dumb plot and clownish overacting from the three bimbos who got cast in there because of their big tits and certainly not because of their acting chops. The constant emphasis on the tits makes it look like a softcore porno at times, which must have been a big deal in 1965 when the movie was made.