Chapter 47

The bombarding started at 5:27 this morning and was sustained for more than two hours. But hey yOu hAvE tO rEsPeCt zEiR cULtUrE. I have often toyed with the idea of buying a big crate of fireworks and blowing one or two every time I’m awake past midnight.

I started reading a book by Dan Grec, the Australian guy who took long overland trips with a Jeep and has an informative YouTube channel called The Road Chose Me. His first book documents his two-year trip from Alaska to Argentina, I guess after all this forced sedentarism I am looking to travel vicariously.

The girlfriend prepared a breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausages and dim sum. I wolfed it down while dicking around on the internet and listening to music. I’m almost done with the first 10% of the Top 500, next up was Nine Inch Nails, I never listened to a whole album nor paid that much attention to them, despite the fact that they are somewhat metal-adjacent and some of the guys in high school who were into the same nü metal bands as I was liked NiN. Their bleak and nihilistic industrial sound is quite interesting and no doubt influential, but it doesn’t sound very scary to my ears after all those years of avid extreme metal consumption. Still I have to appreciate that at least a little bit of alternative music made it to that Top 500, there’s been some serious fucken unsalted mashed potatoes blandness in there thus far. The Supremes came next in a very different register, and I bobbed my head to all their hits, many of which I had heard before like Where Did Our Love Go, Baby Love, You Can’t Hurry Love and Stop In The Name Of Love. You can’t say the themes of their lyrics are tremendously varied but it’s fun music.

The temperature rose a bit compared to the frigid weather of yesterday, and it was very sunny, so we went outside. She rode her electric scooter, I was on my longboard, and the dog happily ran along. We went to a bakery that makes bagels, but they were closed for the holidays, so we went to another bakery, one that unfortunately doesn’t make bagels. Then we rode home. I saw a meme the other day that said “You know you’re an adult when going on an errand counts as going out”, I dislike a lot of that depressive millenial humor but this one I can totally relate to it. We considered staying out a bit and perhaps sitting at the plaza around the fountain having an early afternoon beverage but the fucking retards in charge of the place are always blaring the most inane and dissonant music on outdoor speakers, the kind that makes me want to claw my face off.

The confines of our apartment are infinitely better, here I can choose the music. I kept going down the Rolling Stone’s Top 500, with Roberta Flack’s beautiful soul music, a Paul McCartney solo album, and The White Stripes. I only knew Seven Nation Army, with its supremely catchy guitar riff that got overplayed to the point of being annoying, but the rest of the album is great stuff. I worked out in the home gym, a bit of punching bag and then the two rounds of calisthenics, then did more writing.

I wrote a story for my French blog about a visit to Bergen, Norway, in 2008. I’ll reread and proofread with fresh eyes tomorrow. The girlfriend cooked a dinner of stewed beef and fried rice cakes, it was amazing. I washed it all down with a can of Patagonia Weisse, a beer I enjoyed in Argentina and somehow made its way to the imported section of my supermarket half a world away, and then a large bottle of my homebrew. We watched another double episode of The Office, what a great show, and it has aged quite well.

I finished the album by soul musician Otis Redding, and then put on the next one while I did the dishes. It was a godawful mumble rap piece of shit, in Spanish. Mumble rap in a Top 500 of best music of all time?! What’s next, a pubic hair sandwich in a foodie’s list? I angrily turned it off after two tracks, failing the self-imposed rule of listening to the albums to their entirety as much as I can. So I put on Joe Rogan’s podcast with Francis Ngannou, and his insane rags-to-riches story.

I took the mixture of hot peppers I had been fermenting, drained them, and made hot sauce. I improvised the recipe, throwing a bit of mustard, wasabi, beer, rice vinegar, chili powder, black pepper and dried mango pieces in there before pulsing the whole thing into a homogeneous goo. I dipped the tip of a spoon and tasted, it was crazy spicy. Success! I’ll wait for it to rest overnight before doing a proper taste test and adjustments, if needed.

I didn’t feel like listening to more albums from the Top 500, so I retreated back in my comfort zone and put on a mixtape by Celph-Titled, a badass underground MC with an extensive catalog (or gatalog, like his collection of mixtapes is called) and then the album Two Hunters, by an atmospheric black metal band called Wolves In The Throne Room. I did some Chinese studying, about car parts, and then a negroni cocktail by my side, I read chapters from the Norman conquest as well as the overland travel books before crashing early.