Chapter 56

Another day another dollar. The alarm rang at 5:48, I allow myself a 10-minute snooze spooning with the wife and the dog, then when it rings again it’s up on my feet before it’s 6:00:00. There’s a strong temptation to laze around in bed longer but once I’m out it’s not too bad, and in fact there’s something nice about having a morning that I can spend hanging out and slowly getting ready rather than rushing through my shit-shower-get dressed. Let’s make it a habit.

Jocko Willink and many others go through hard workouts first thing in the morning, but I always feel a bit too stiff for that. If I do lifting or calisthenics, I do it in mid-day, just before eating lunch and breaking my intermittent fasting. Morning is for yoga, taichi, taking a walk or stretching. Today I did a full body stretch and drank a bunch of water to reactivate my dormant joints and muscles.

Speaking of Jocko, I started one of his podcasts on the rainy and bleak bicycle commute to work. He talked about maneuver warfare versus attrition warfare and how we can apply those principles to other aspects of life. He also talked about his own teenage years as a hardcore punk and how having the mentality of an outsider benefited him in the military and in life in general. I could relate to a lot of what he said, how being a rebel just for the sake of being a rebel is counterproductive (and infantile) but marching to the beat of one’s own drum with the intent of “winning the game” (a game that, for a big part, you set the rules of) is one of the keys to fulfillment.

I had one class, it went well. Then I sat around the office preparing some exercises and put on an album from a German black metal project called Kanonenfieber. The lyrical themes, from the album description because they’re are all in German and inaudible black metal shrieks anyway, are about World War 1 and the album art is a giant skeleton wearing an officer’s uniform using a shovel to load tiny men into an artillery piece, an apt representation of that butchery.

I listened to one half of the Metal Minded podcast before I had to go to class. I didn’t listen to the albums being reviewed this week nor do I even know the bands, next time I should, that would be more engaging. There’s the album by The Amenta that piqued my curiosity, I took a mental note to listen to it in the afternoon.

Then I had a double class with the twelve-graders about NMR. I was wondering if I should just focus on its use as an analytical method in chemistry or go through the physics behind it, I chose the latter, because it ultimately helps understanding and making links with previously acquired knowledge. It’s a bit difficult to convey to people who don’t speak English well but I used examples and visuals and built it up slowly.

Some students spend a lot of time staring at their crotches. The school has a strict policy against phone use or even being in possession of one but either the homeroom teachers do a piss poor job or the students are dishonest, as a huge number of them are constantly staring mouth-breathingly at their little shitty time-wasting plastic rectangles resting on their laps. Honestly I’m not that bothered with the phone use itself, if they don’t want to listen it’s their damn prerogative, the only behavior that really pisses me off if chattering and disturbing others and myself. However I still have to enforce the rules to a certain point, especially when it’s blatant. Plus, it’s irritating and kind of disrespectful that they think it’s not the most goddamn obvious thing in the world.

I challenged one of the slackers in the back.

“Are you using your phone?”

He smiled widely. “No, teacher”

I asked his neighbor: “Was he using his phone just now?” I hoped he’d just say no.

“Now, no. But before, yes”

The whole class erupted in laughter.

“What do you mean, before? During the break?”

“No, during class”

The laughter started again, mixed with some taunting “WOOOOO!”s.

There’s a rhyming proverb about what happens to snitches... I’m not sure if I was more mad at the betrayal than the infraction. Either way I couldn’t not do anything at that point. I asked him to surrender his phone and he did, the homeroom teacher will keep it for a month. He seemed pretty unaffected, I wouldn’t be surprised his rich parents bought him several.

I got home, did some prep cooking by soaking pieces of chicken in a spiced yogurt marinade and making broth with pieces of carcass and old bones. I reheated some leftover pasta and watched a few small YouTube videos that popped on my feed. Cannibal Corpse just released a music video and I checked it out, the track was in the vein of their more recent albums like Kill and Evisceration Plague with the powerful and instantly recognizable vocals of George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher, with an insanely gory music video. I don’t like horror movies, especially not the torture porn genre, so I squirmed pretty hard but the music was good.

Then I felt in a rabbit hole: underground black metal has sub-scenes that are very right-wing or even full-blown neo-nazi, and I saw an article about a band with the rather dumb name Harakiri For The Sky that just cut ties with a female guest vocalist who was supposed to feature on one track of their upcoming album, due to her association with undesirable individuals with shaved heads. That led me to a subreddit called RABM (Red Anarchist Black Metal?) where far-left-wingers (AKA filthy commies) congregate and discuss which bands are “safe” for their sensitivities.

Here’s my take on this, as a long-time black metal fan: I have no love for nazis and white supremacists and their retarded backwards ideologies, and I never seeked to listen to any of the pure-and-true NSBM bands out there and never will. And the few times that I found out after the fact, it’s not as if I was disgusted and wished I hadn’t listened to it, but for sure my interest for the band all but vanished. But I can’t say I’m a fan of antifas and champagne socialists and anarchos either, though I’m not as opposed to having that kind of rhetoric in their lyrical themes and aesthetics as in the case of nazi or racist trash. I’m not gonna go full “middle ground fallacy” and pretend that a NSBM band talking about the Holocaust in every other track and recruiting kids to neo-nazi groups is the same as a crust punk band with extreme anarchist or communist lyrics, no matter how virulent (and cringeworthy) they are.

Browsing the subreddit, it seemed to me that, being commies, they despise the very concept of nationalism and any sort of sense of cultural belonging and roots and thus this can lead to a bunch of bands being falsely flagged as “fash” just for, I don’t know, being proud to be Norwegian. Also there was a lot of guilt by association in there, along the lines of “Well their former bassist who left the band 12 years ago was briefly in Satanikgördblut, a band that was fronted by Helljuggler, the guy who co-founded the Shrieking Tundra label, who signed a band with Viking themes called Häärdumsafäraa, the lyrics are all in Finnish and are complete mangled gibberish if we put them through Google Translate but there’s a passage about “blood and the land” which sounds pretty damn problematic to me. I’d say avoid them.”

I exaggerate slightly but it sure looks like they’re digging for dirt at times. But then again I might be completely wrong, after all one band they seem to approve of highly is Panopticon, which incorporates a lot of bluegrass and American folk elements and thus gives off a proud Appalachian vibe (one album is titled Kentucky, for fuck’s sake). I think nationalism in the sense of being proud of one’s roots and culture, without being exclusionary, is a good thing (sue me, globo-commies) and in the context of music, can bring some interesting elements like folk instruments, imagery, language and themes that can help some artists stand out.

The subreddit has a list of “essential albums” and I clicked on the first link, a very raw black metal album titled Socialismo Satánico, by Argentinean band Profecium. Other then the endless intro with dissonant guitars and some spoken word in Spanish, it was pretty damn good. Now I have too much music to check out.

I had no classes in the afternoon so I spent my time in the office doing prep work, writing and reading. The internet died at some point, and I didn’t have much music saved on my hard drive that I felt like listening to. I put on a Soilent Green album, and only then did I recognize the singer’s voice. Holy shit it’s the guy from Goatwhore! I hadn’t made the connection before. Both bands are from Louisiana so that makes sense I guess. I’ll go back an listen to the other Soilent Green releases to see if his voice is so instantly recognizable but I just didn’t hear it then.

I had a chat with a coworker, he helped me out with questions about the grade 12 curriculum (that I’m teaching for the first time) and then we chatted about teaching in China versus teaching “back home” versus teaching in proper international schools. The girlfriend and I aim to go work at one of those as a medium-term goal, after we take a sabbatical. One of the problems I foresee is having to manage teaching to different English levels, from native to high to pretty low, and also I heard that some of those embassy kids can be extremely spoiled and unpleasant. Something to research for our future endeavors.

I got home and hit the punching bag for a bit. I listened to The Amenta’s album, it was an avant-garde mix of ambient, industrial, black and death metal, with clean as well as harsh vocals. Can’t say I disliked it but I wasn’t crazy for it either. Then I put on the funky sounds of Earth, Wind & Fire, number 420 on the Top 500, followed by Cheshire Cat, Blink-182’s first album released in 1994. Blink is probably the first band I was ever properly a fan of and I still like their stuff nowadays (well everything until Take Off Your Pants) but I never listened to their lesser-known debut. It’s a bit rough around the edges as expected but still a sign of great things to come, on Dude Ranch and beyond.

I cooked rice in a spiced chicken broth then made a casserole by laying the pieces of chicken on top and baking the whole thing. It was delicious. We watched an episode of The Office, it was a tiny bit too absurd for my taste, I prefer the type of raw realistic situational humor that is so relatable to anyone who’s ever had a white-collar job and thus made the show so popular. Then the girlfriend helped me with my Chinese studying, we read the dialogues from the previous ChinesePod lessons out loud. This language is hella hard, if instead of China I had moved to... well, anywhere they don’t use little pictures instead of letters, I’d be native-like fluent right now.