Chapter 46

I wanted to eat cereal for breakfast but we ran out of milk so I went out to get some at the corner store. It was cold as fuck, the weather has been playing weird games recently.

I ate my cereal while watching some stupid meme compilation on YouTube. I read the news and answered emails while listening to music. Sinead O’Connor’s album at number 457 of the Top 500 was OK I guess, and then I listened to an EP by Salò, a French band churning out grindcore/crust with the coldness and unsettling atmosphere of industrial music, with keyboards and samples. After that I listened to their interview on the Metal Minded podcast, it was live on YouTube at 5 AM China time so I caught it later. Pretty interesting stuff, like a lot of bands from that musical sphere, they take their inspiration from the disgusting and saddening aspects of humankind and they mentioned a few documentaries that I’ll check out.

The blogger who interviewed me put it online at https://jonathanleprof.com/blogue/enseigner-en-chine-cest-le-monde-a-lenvers/, you can go check it out. He changed the format of my answers, breaking all my paragraphs into single sentences, like is the norm for a lot of blogs apparently. A lot of people don’t have the attention span to read paragraphs, and also something about SEO or whatever. Still, the content wasn’t changed, now that would have been dumb if it were.

In the afternoon, a friend came over and we watched the UFC main card while eating nachos. Middleweight Julian Marquez snatched the victory out of the jaws of defeat with a submission less than a minute before the end of the third round, and then bantamweight Brian “Whitey Mouse” Kelleher got outwrestled by Ricky Simon, which was a bummer, since I put a small bet on him. Both men usually compete at 135 pounds, but now since the fight was on short notice, they were 145 pounds at the weigh-ins. Weight cutting has got to be one of the dumbest things about the sport, the two guys are the same size, why do they have to drain themselves?

Then Kelvin Gastellum dominated Ian Heinisch, snapping his long losing streak (albeit one against top-level competition) so it was nice to see him so relieved. Alexa Grasso edged a boxing-heavy victory against Big Carb Barb, and then in the main event, Kamaru Usman retained his championship by dispatching Gilbert Burns with piston jabs combined with elite wrestling, which seems to be an excellent base to be a dominant welterweight title holder. I’m sure GSP watched the fight and nodded with appreciation.

We took the dog out to run in circles at the park like the spaz he is, and soon after I got changed and went to play badminton. On the way, I made a slight detour to go top up our gas, there’s some kind of ATM where I insert a card, scan a QR code with my phone, and buy units of heating gas. I played several doubles games with two guys with serious skills and another one who, like, me, was slightly below their level but could still hold his own. It was a lot of fun, everyone hooting and hollering when someone would pull off a sneaky shot or do an impressive save.

Back home, I ate dumplings and steamed brussel sprouts with a weizen beer. I watched an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, the previous ones I had seen were true crime stories but that one was about a UFO sighting in Massachusetts in 1969. The now middle-aged or elderly people talking about it seemed lucid and in possession of their mental faculties, and the records from that time show that several people over a large area, who didn’t know one another, all reporting seeing some weird large shiny ball in the night sky. Two people even pretended having been abducted and dumped back, confused and with lapses in memory. It was pretty weird.

Throughout the day, and late at night as I was reading, I listened to more music from the Top 500. Al Green’s album (another Greatest Hits? should that even be allowed for such a Top 500?!) was a nice and uplifting piece of soul and funk, and then it was a Bo Diddley proto-rock album from 1958 that was simplistic to the point of being childish and sounded like it was recorded with a potato. At number 454 was an album by Can, whom I’ve listened to a bit in the past and are one of the most notable bands of the genre called “Krautrock”. It’s some weird shit, especially put in the context of the early 1970s, a mix of psychedelic rock and deconstructed noise that no doubt influenced, directly or indirectly, some of the more avant-garde metal I listen to so I have to give those drugged up Germans (and their Japanese singer) credit.