Chapter 55

I wanted to work out in the morning but my elbow was all sore, probably from sleeping on the plank of wood we call a mattress. I fired up some YouTube videos with taichi routines, on mute, and performed them in front of the TV. I used to do taichi regularly, during my first year in China (my Tim year) but I forgot all of it since.

I got to the office and had to navigate through a labyrinth of boxes containing photocopied past exams. That’s a pretty useful tool for review, I grabbed mine in case they forget to give me some. I then gave classes to the eleventh-graders about electrophilic substitution, they don’t seem to think it’s as cool as I do.

During the break I listen to Beck’s Odelay, I immediately recognized his weird lo-fi mixture of styles and his characteristic voice as the guy who sings “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me”. The album was great and I’ll check out more Beck in the future.

On the way home for lunch I listened to Chadhel, a no-frills grindcore band from Saguenay, Québec. Their LP Controversial Echoes Of Nihilism is excellent, clocking at just under 30 minutes, and their guitar player is one of the funniest guys in the universe, if he ever starts a YouTube channel in which he just rants and comments on stuff he’ll become a superstar in no time.

I did my home workout, took a shower, and ate baloney and cheese sandwiches in the leftover hamburger buns. I wrapped them in foil and threw them in the oven, then slattered them with mayonaise. I ate them and drank grapefruit juice while watching videos about internet lore. This one was about the leprechaun sighting in Mobile, Alabama, one of the all-time funniest viral videos. The guy who introduced it to me many years ago, an American stoner named Joe who taught at a sister school in a neighboring Chinese city, had his girlfriend at the time calling him racist for laughing at a video that paints black people in such a poor light. Well it’s a black neighborhood, what to expect, of course everyone in the video is African-American, just like all those hilarious Quebec viral videos I’m a huge connaisseur of feature white French-Canadian rednecks.

(No, I’m not gonna spell it connoisseur, because that’s retorded)

And as the guy who researched the history and context of that video found out, many of the residents were in on the joke, trolling the reporters. Notably the guy who held a piece of scaffolding and pretended it was a flute that his Irish great-great-grandfather used to summon leprechauns. My stomach sank, thinking I’ll soon be revealed that it’s a piece of pure fiction, a hoax like the “Fuck her right in the pussy!” video, but no, it’s a real news report from a local Alabama station. Two guys working at a Dallas radio station went to investigate years later and did pretty good detective work, tracing back a guy going by “Midget Sean” who climbed a tree wearing green clothing a few days before St-Patrick’s Day (presumably under the influence of lean and marijuana) and sparked the whole thing.

I took the dog out for a walk and a shit. The neighbors’ door was open, and I could see inside their living room. It was packed with flattened cardboard boxes. Their storage area in the basement is also packed to the brim with cardboard and styrofoam and plastic bottles and other recyclables, that they collect with a rusty tricycle. I never asked them (and when we make small talk it’s laborious, with my laowai accent and their deep countryside dialect) but I assume they were farmers who got compensated with an apartment when the city’s undending horizontal development swallowed their village. Collecting scrap to sell to recycling plants, in lieu of doing other unskilled labor of which there’s plenty around town for any able-bodied ex-cabbage planter, construction and landscaping and street cleaning and the like, can’t pay well but they work on their schedule and there’s always tons of food sitting on the derelict table right in front of the door so they must be doing okay.

Our landlord was also living in the countryside but got expropriated when a road was built, and he got four apartments as compensation. That’s a pretty sweet deal.

Between classes, a bunch of students were hanging out in the hallway, one was in a wheelchair with a bandaged foot. He could still stand, so his pals were taking turns sitting and being pushed around. I asked if I can try and they moved aside to let me. As it happens, I can do a wheelie and hold it in place and even move around on two wheels, a skill I acquired when a friend of mine was wheelchair-bound after breaking her leg but could still walk on crutches for periods of time, so I had a lot of time to practice. The students gasped and hooted and hollered. Some of them tried to do it, I told them “I’m not responsible if you get hurt!” and ran away to my class. A good teacher leads by example.

On the way out I made small talk with coworkers. There are a bunch of flagpoles in front of our building, with various national flags representing the foreign staff. The Croatian physics teacher pointed at the one that used to fly the cool checkered red, white and blue and now had the Hong Kong flower.

“What’s this?! This is discrimination!” he joked.

“Do we even have a teacher from Hong Kong?”

We used to, but he left after a tumultuous relationship with the then principal. And now we have one who is of Hong Kongese descent but was born and raised in England if I’m not mistaken.

“I guess it’s because so many of our students end up going to Hong Kong University”

I stopped at the little market on the way home to get groceries. When I came out, there was a little commotion, an elderly woman was sitting down on the asphalt holding her leg and one guy was trying to hoist her up. I did my good action of the day, I ran over and helped, and once she was back on her feet holding on to the other guys shoulders I went and got a dusty chair that was there against the wall. A scooter delivery guy was there, all agitated after hitting her. Those guys drive like absolute madmen, on sidewalks, down narrow alleys, against traffic, and you constantly have to watch out for their erratic driving. But then again old Chinese people are also a serious danger to traffic, as they tend to just wander across the road without ever looking left and right. So who knows who’s at fault, probably a bit of both. The old lady seemed OK, she survived the Taiping Rebellion, the fall of the Qing Dynsaty, the civil war and the dark days under Mao, you have to be strong for that.

I got home and made creamy, cheesy pasta with shrimp, calamari and broccoli. I ate it watching an episode of Bojack Horseman, that has got to be my favorite TV series of all time. I can’t even think of anything about it that is not absolutely stellar, let alone remotely negative. I watched every episode three times but will sometimes go revisit one.

I started a Ryan Long podcast, he was talking to James Altucher. I had never heard of the guy, he seems like quite the overachiever. He wrote like 20 books about personal development, ran hedge funds, started websites that sold for a large amount of money, is a world-ranked chess master, and then later in life he started doing stand-up comedy. There was a bar in Hefei, a central Chinese city I lived in for two years, that would do comedy open mic nights and I did a set. It was fun but this shit is much harder than what it seems, it’s not just about being (hopefully) funny and cracking jokes, there’s a whole sense of timing and a million other little aspects that separate the greats from the good and the passable and the forgettable. The two guys were talking about the craft of comedy, I didn’t like Ryan Long’s other podcasts with guests and thought he’s much better as a solo ranter but this conversation was quite interesting. I’m now tempted to go check out Altucher’s catalog of books.

I took the dog out and we went to the girlfriend’s workplace as she was clocking out. On the way I listened to the album Everything Sucks by Descendents, a band I wasn’t even aware existed before they came to Shanghai and guys in the WeChat group about local heavy music shows were talking about it. When I was in school, Blink-182, Green Day and The Offspring were insanely popular and likely owing Descendents one for coming up with the blueprint for pop punk, but these Californians weren’t well known at all in my circles by the time the late 90s rolled around. The band was founded in 1977 and I caught them live more than four decades later, the four grey-haired boomers gave a damn fun show.