Chapter 50

Up early, not because of retards blowing up fireworks for once, but because the girlfriend started working today and left just after 7. I stayed in bed a bit, enjoying the warmth of the covers and reading, then got up and watched documentaries about the Battle of Hastings. The book I’m reading just covered that pivotal event.

A friend of mine posted something on Facebook about a book that just came out, written by a young woman from Quebec who got kidnapped by terrorists in Africa and held hostage for over 400 days. As an avid traveler who’s been to fucked up dangerous destinations in the past, this topic is close to my heart. Another piece of news that made waves a year or two ago was about the two Americans cycling through Central Asia and getting rammed by a car driven by ISIS cunts, I remember watching a video by right-wing political commentator Paul Joseph Watson who called it “the tragedy of cultural relativism” and “pathological altruism” to deny that some parts of the world present a serious danger. I think he exaggerates a bit, but I also really dislike the sugar-coating you often see in travel publications, urging inexperienced solo female backpackers to go to Pakistan or Egypt or whatever and underplay or flat-out deny that huge parts of the world are giant shitholes where violence, chaos, poverty and dysfunctional governments are the norm more than the exception. Yeah, the vast majority of people are welcoming and hospitable and friendly and babadee babada and that’s the reason I like to travel, but in a lot of third-worldy places I have been, I had to be extra vigilant, and even then the higher level of risk put me in an obviously much higher danger than if I stayed home in Quebec or China. Also another thing I noticed, the guy from the excellent overland YouTube channel The Road Chose Me always talks about how wholesome and fun and rewarding travel is, but in his book, whole chapters are dedicated to nightmarish border crossings dealing with scamming scumbags.

So I’d like to see what is that woman’s perspective on the subject, if her (presumably) hippie worldview has changed after being captured and held against her will by bloodthirsty religious zealots. I looked up the book on Amazon: 18 dollars for the Kindle version. I guess I’ll wait.

There’s a craft beer and metal enthusiasts group on Facebook, they do a weekly online meetup that I rarely attend because I usually work on Friday mornings. I logged in, and had a chat with them. One guy is in Texas, apparently there’s been a crazy cold wave and a bunch of people are without electricity there. And because their houses aren’t prepared and insulated for subzero temperatures, their pipes clog with ice or even burst. Shit.  

I proofread and published my blog post about my trip to Norway. It’s on https://quesstuvascrisserla.com/2021/02/18/bergen/. More than twelve years have passed since, man, time goes by.

I ate a big lunch: a quesadilla with three dips (sour cream, homemade salsa, homemade hot sauce), a bowl of vegetable soup and dried up mango slices. Hell yeah. Then I watched 7 Jours Sur Terre, the three topics were Saudi Arabia, Canada pussyfooting around regarding the vaccination campaign, and the development of satellite internet. I spent the afternoon doing mostly nothing, watching YouTube videos and reading. At some point, the internet was down, so I couldn’t listen to the vaporwave playlist. I put on a Soilent Green album, with the awesome title A Deleted Symphony For The Beaten Down.

There’s a stripper pole in our living room, as the girlfriend started taking pole dancing lessons. I had an idea, it would be cool to see if I can ever do the flag. I looked up videos on YouTube, an impossibly sinewy and muscular black British guy went through basic exercises one can do to work up to the full flag. I tried it, and there’s a lot of work to do still.

In the afternoon I went on a longboard ride with the dog, meeting the girlfriend when she finished working. We drove home, dropped off the animal, and rode our bicycles to the mall where I ordered a mountain of fried chicken. I intentionally ordered way too much, so we’d have leftovers to munch on for the upcoming days.

We discussed travel plans. We’ve been talking about taking a long sabbatical, driving a van to Europe, hiking the Camino in Spain, taking a cruise across the Atlantic, hanging out in Quebec for part of the winter, and then hiking the Appalachian Trail. Ambitious, but more than doable. I’m starting to get some serious wanderlust now, I haven’t left China and barely left the region for a year now.

She told me of a story she heard, a private kindergarten in Shanghai doesn’t accept children of obese parents, and their justification is that if the parents are so damn fat they clearly don’t have their lives together and are unlikely to be good role models to their children. I’m trying to imagine how many lawsuits they would crumble under if that happened in the West. I told her about “fatphobia”, she’s vaguely aware of the fact that western countries are gangrened by baizuo bullcrap but doesn’t know about that particular symptom. To exemplify it, I told her about Adele and how she got lambasted by “fat activists” (oxymoron?) online after she went on a diet and lost weight, and also the people who try to convince the world that morbid obesity is not in fact a health problem.

That said, I don’t think flat-out discriminating against fat people, like in that case, is something I agree with. Especially as I sat there, having devoured so much fried chicken I was about to rupture.

She ordered two 24-packs of Perrier, and they had arrived at the gate of the apartment complex by the time we made it home. With all the foam casings, they were enormous boxes.

“Should we go park the bicycles, and come back?”

“Are you crazy, woman?” I put one of the boxes on her bicycle crossbar, she could reach the handlebars and clumsily pedal home if she pointed her knees outwards like a duck. I did the same with the other box. I’ve been a cyclist for so long, I can carry things on a bicycle nobody would think possible.

We got home and, contrary to my habit, I didn’t pour myself an alcoholic drink. It’s been two and a half days since I got the vaccine, and them telling me not to consume any booze is probably just a precaution, but still I’ll play the game and abstain for a bit. The next album in the Top 500 is by Britney Spears, the one with “Gimme gimme more, gimme gimme more” on it, and it surprised me, it was quite enjoyable. Then Loretta Lynn came in with her infectiously catchy country music, I remembered that duet “Mississippi Man, Louisiana Woman” from one of the radio stations in a GTA game.

I did a bit of writing, and a Chinese lesson from ChinesePod. It was about the Shaolin Temple and zen buddhism. Then I was too full of fried chicken to do yoga so I plopped on the couch and watched a history video on YouTube before going to bed, reading a bit more, and then sleeping like a zhu.