Chapter 45

I woke up reasonably early, brewed some black tea and wrote yesterday’s entry, as I was too drunk to type when I came back home after the hash. I ate scrambled eggs while watching more history videos on YouTube, that Dovahhatty channel truly is special, an erudite knowledge of Roman history mixed with a caustic sense of humor. One thing that grates me sometimes about history books and documentaries is how milquetoast the narration is and how they go to great lengths to say we shouldn’t judge it with the standards of today, as if it wasn’t extremely obvious. Dovahhatty goes the opposite direction and takes a strong comically exaggerated bias for the Romans, to the point that his videos now have a disclaimer saying “Hey this is a work of parody OK, not a bunch of explicit calls to violence against Germans and other barbarians”

Today’s music was quite smooth, with Lorde, Kid Cudi and Jason Isbell. Then the girlfriend left to go play majiang at her friend’s place, and I listened to three albums by Windir, a respected black metal band I had never paid much attention to in the past. A semi-famous Quebec blogger sent me interview questions about my life in China, I spent a couple hours answering them and sent the Word document back.

In the late afternoon I rode my longboard to the bar, along with my triangle-faced companion. It was raining slightly but soon it stopped. A group of my friends were there to play poker, last time I managed to win a few hands but now I played like shit and got cleaned quickly, 200 yuan down the drain. Ah well. I stuck around a bit, finishing my beer, then rode home and gave the dog a shower to clean off all the mud and grime in his fur.

In fact the girlfriend had urged me to come home early enough so we could have a Valentine’s Day dinner, but she was the one who ended up staying at her friend’s place until 8. I was too hungry, so I ate a box of sardines with crackers and cream cheese and a spicy duck head while watching the UFC prelims, very romantic.

The prelims were a good display of up-and-coming talent in stacked divisions, and the best fight was the last one, in which a hype train got seriously derailed. An enormously muscular Brazilian jiu-jitsu world champion named Rodolfo Vieira had made quick work of his two previous opponents, taking them down and submitting them with his steroid-enhanced grappling prowess, and he started this fight in the same fashion, but young gutsy Anthony Hernandez defended the chained choke and armlock attempts and when they got back to their feet, Vieira was beyond exhausted and got picked apart by his Mexican opponent’s punches. In the second round he was moving through Jell-O and eventually got submitted himself.

The girlfriend came in, and we drank gin tonics while watching The Office in bed. We just started Season 4.