Chapter 52

Last day of freedom. I decided to get up at 8 to get gradually used to early starts but in fact I was wide awake in bed way before sunrise, suffering from insomnia and overthinking a bunch of stuff. When the girlfriend got up around 6, I still couldn’t fall asleep so I stayed in bed a bit, reading. There were birds chirping outside my window, that’s something I don’t hear that often.

I did a kettlebell workout. I have three kettlebells, the biggest one must be around 60 pounds and is in a weird spot, being too light for deadlifts but too heavy for everything else. I still find creative ways to use it, that’s the fun thing about those strange cannonballs with handles.

The UFC was on, and I watched it live. The fights were decent if not exactly as exciting as those from the previous few shows, and in the main event, Derrick Lewis nearly decapitated Curtis Blaydes with an uppercut. That man really has insane one-bomb KO power. It’s been a while since I watched a UFC live as it happened, usually I replay it through the week and skip the downtime, but now I had to wait sometimes 20 or 30 minutes between fights, watching promos or ads. I read a few pages of the book about the Norman conquest to pass the time in between bouts. I attended several UFC events in person, and with the prelims and all, they last about 6 or 7 hours total. 100% worth it but it’s long and tiring.

I listened to a ton of music, clearing positions 435-430 on the Top 500. First it was the Pet Shop Boys, whom I have had a soft spot for since going to parties in college where people would play oldies ironically, then a nice indie rock album from a Californian band called Pavement, and LCD Soundsystem. That’s another album I was familiar with, I had downloaded it on my mp3 player and we put it on a few times during a road trip with the girlfriend’s parents, I can’t say the vocals don’t eventually get on my nerves but the electro beats are catchy and fun. Usher’s entry was full of RnB bangers and ballads, then Los Lobos and Elvis Costello played some good ol’ rock n’ roll, the former with a cool Mexican twist. After that I felt like listening to Gronibard for whatever reason. Gronibard is a French grindcore band with a ridiculous sense of humor. Though they play technically proficient and ultraviolent music, the vocals vary from gargles to high-pitched barks, there are hilarious samples from deviant porno movies, and the song titles look like they’ve been written by a bunch of perverted 14-year-olds. The Satanic Tuning Club EP is my favorite of theirs. Then I put on some classical music, orchestra pieces by Jean Sibelius, one of my favorite composers, his Concerto Number 47 is awesome, with dissonant creepy parts and hair-raising epicness. A quite eclectic selection overall, if I dare say so.

The weather was astonishingly nice today, blue skies with an incredible 25 degrees on the thermometer! I rode my bike an hour to Metro and back, I only had a hoodie on but even just a t-shirt would have been okay. I wouldn’t be surprised if it drops back to subzero on Tuesday or even tomorrow, the climate is playing weird games with us these days.

The girlfriend wanted to eat hamburgers for dinner, and we needed buns. Usually when I go to Metro I buy a bunch of cool imported beers and a bottle of spirits or two to replenish our home bar, but now I’m on my fifth day without a drop, about 4.5 days longer than my previous period of sobriety in years. I don’t miss alcohol per se, at least not in an addict’s way, but I do like to have a nice beer in the late afternoon and with dinner and also a glass of whiskey or rum or a cocktail before bed so now, drinking only tea and water, my days feel a bit incomplete. I bought a few bottles of juice, trying to get the stuff as close as possible to natural juice and not the shit packed with additives. On the way out, I tried to use the self-checkout machine, scanning my items was easy enough but when it came time to pay, it wasn’t a straightforward “scan n’ pay” but rather some dogshit convoluted process that needed me to download 37 bloatware apps on shittily-designed and perma-crashing websites. Fucking shit. I wasted five minutes and felt retarded for even trying, so I just went to a normal line and dumped the already bagged groceries on the conveyor belt.

The podcast about d’Iberville finished, then I listened to Jocko Willink. He had a fellow SEAL officer on and they answered questions from the audience about motivation, leadership and the evils of islamist terrorism. I rode home, dropped the groceries, and brought the dog to a park. I had my Kindle with me so I soaked up the sun like Sheryl Crow and read for half an hour. Towards the end I was actually too hot, even just wearing a t-shirt. I started to be afraid I’d get sunburnt if I stayed exposed much longer.

I spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening browing a website called Caravanistan and reading about the logistics of traveling to Central Asia, even though we won’t go there for a good 18 months at the very least. I’m getting antsy, and now I opened a Pandora’s box of vicarious travel, with books and blogs. An old friend started updating his own blog after almost a decade of dormancy and posted the link on Facebook, I read all his old entries, about his time spent living in Indonesia and elsewhere. Not sure whether going back to work will calm down this wanderlust or make it worst.

The girlfriend came in, horribly tired and suffering from a stomachache. She still had work to do, preparing her classes for tomorrow and also teaching a private AP Art History lesson online. She works a lot, much more than I do, yet makes a fraction of the salary. Gotta love that white privilege!

I retreated to the bedroom while she taught her one-on-one lesson. The PlayStation is there (for some dumb reason it doesn’t work on the big TV in the living room) but I don’t really ever feel like playing videogames. I put on some music on a small speaker, first Morbid Visions, an early raw Sepultura album, and then A N D, by Japanese math rock band Tricot. I finished The Road Chose Me, Dan the enthusiastic Australian made it from Alaska to Argentina. I bought his second book about his circumnavigation of Africa, also in a Jeep.

Then I read a chapter from Roosh V’s new book. The doomy and brooding tone was night and day compared to Dan Grec’s upbeat and motivating vibe. Roosh has always been an odd character, and though I genuinely like his no-nonsense writing style and how some of his themes resonate with me and my expatriate life, I am also amused by his near-autistic and graphic descriptions of his interactions with the opposite sex that are at times the focus of his older books. Now that he went full-blown Jesus Freak, he spends a lot of time lamenting on the secularisation of the USA, and it gets a bit tiresome at times, especially when he says stuff like “geologists say that those rock formations were shaped by retreating glaciers, but no, it’s clearly God”. He does offer good commentary however, in this book about a road trip through the whole country, about the negative effects of consoomerism and how miserable and soul-sucking cities feel compared with smaller towns and nature. I agree with a lot of it (hence why I live in a smaller city and not Shanghai) but can’t say I’m bothered with gays as much as he is, as I said in the past I can’t think of any reason why I should dislike my queer brothers and sisters and non-binary siblings.

Speaking of which, I went to the kitchen, brought some LGBT (lettuce, grilled buns, burger patties and tomatoes) to the living room and we assembled burgers that we devoured watching The Office.

Back to work tomorrow... and it’s a packed day. Maybe these entries will become a bit shorter, or maybe not, we’ll see.