Chapter 57

I did yoga for 15 minutes and slowly started my day listening to Brahms. The girlfriend doesn’t like loud music in the morning but classical is fine. I love classical music and have a pretty extensive collection saved on my external hard drive.

You know what I like besides classical music? Retardedly over-testosteroned modern thrash metal. Terror 2000 is one of my favorite purveyors of that genre, a Swedish band fronted by Bjorn Strid of Soilwork fame, with a speedy thrash assault, infectious hooks and a caustic sense of humor. I love their album Terror For Sale to death and listened to it for the 18 563^rd time this morning while getting ready (after the girlfriend had left of course) and on my bike ride.

I also listened to Zatrata, a Polish band expertly mixing death metal and crust punk, and an incredibly good black/crust metal album by Iskra, recommended by those commies on Reddit I talked about yesterday. Perhaps I shouldn’t judge them that harshly, and forgive them for wanting to impose a dystopia that would lead to famine and abject penury, if their musical taste is that good. Later during the day I kept going down that list, with Trespasser and Dawn Ray’d, and they were also very enjoyable.

I had two hours before my first lesson, as I switched a class period with a colleague, me taking her Wednesday class and her taking my Friday morning class. I fell into another rabbit hole on Reddit, on a sub called Crippling Alcoholism. The tone there is downright weird and unsettling, people use a distorted and dark sense of humor to talk about their addiction to alcohol and how it messes up their lives, but it’s also dead serious and without any detour or apologies, some threads on the front page were even about suicide. Yet there’s a palpable sense of support for one another, as I imagine most alcoholics don’t want to hear pseudo-self-help condescending bullcrap from normies. I read a few stories about rock bottom, some of them involving drinking one’s vomit because it might contain traces of alcohol (!!!), losing everything, ending up in prison, and all sorts of jolly stuff along those lines.

Alcoholism puzzles me. I’m now on my ninth day without a drop, after getting the covid vaccine and being advised not to imbibe during the incubation period. Ever since I became an adult, the number of days when I didn’t have at least one drink is probably in the low one-digit percent, yet I don’t think I ever felt addicted, rather “habituated”. Case in point, I can’t say I feel very different these days, other than thinking a beer would be nice with my dinner but forgetting about it ten minutes later. Yet some people get to the point where withdrawals are so intense that they need to constantly up the dose and god fucken knows how unhealthy that can be at every level.

I had a double class with the lower level eleventh-graders. Many of them struggle a lot even with basic concepts and their motivation can be low, however, they are nice and have a good sense of humor, and they try.

I went back home, in the rain. I forgot to put the child lock on the snack drawer, and the dog managed to open it and eat our tortilla chips and peanuts. Apparently peanuts are toxic for dogs, but our little triangle-faced simpleton has a stomach lined with steel from the first few months of his life spent on the tough streets of our apartment complex. He even ate a chocolate bar the other day and aside from a sugar rush that made him nearly insane with rage and with a full-body itch that got him to rub his body violently against the couch, he was unscathed.

Reheated pasta was my lunch, and I watched videos from a channel I saw in my recommendations for whatever reason, called Infinite Elgintensity. He has a series called “Exercises In Futility” (like the Mgla album) where he roasts internet fitness snake-oil salesmen and especially crossfitters. His dubbed-over commentary on crossfit competitions is hilarious. Crossfit gets a lot of hate in some circles and personally I don’t care that much, anything that gets people to exercise can’t be that bad, and there are benefits to circuit training and keeping it varied, but for sure there are a lot of crossfitters with shitty form or doing downright dangerous maneuvers in some of the videos I’ve seen over the years. Also it does feel like a weird cult at times.

I took the dog out for a quick walk and then went back to school, wearing a pair of sports pants over my dress pants to shield them at least a bit from the rain as I was pedaling under a now heavier rain. Bleh. The Haunted played in my speakers, their album Revolver has a good modern thrash sound and a cool little hardcore edge coming from the singer, I saw them live a few times in Montreal back in the day, and also when I drove to Massachusetts to attend the Ozzfest.

I had a double period with Attitude Class, it went pretty well. Just like that, the week was over. One down... Not sure how many to go. It’s a much shorter semester than the autumn one, either way, most of it being made up of review and exams, with increasingly nice weather and a corresponding increase in morale. And then, before you know it, boom, two months vacation! It’s just a matter of hanging in there till then and enjoying the ride.

A package was waiting for me in the little cabin by the gate where mail comes in. There’s a record label in Quebec that closed its doors in December and did a clearance sale, I got 25 CDs from various underground metal bands for $60. I was all giddy as I opened it after arriving home. The problem is, I don’t have anything to play CDs, except my PlayStation I guess... and the car. That I still can’t drive. I’m supposed to go to driving practice this weekend.

I watched No Country For Old Men. It was slow but worth sitting through, and the absence of music added to the suspense. I think it’s only the second movie I watched since the beginning of 2021.

The girlfriend is also reading about travel these days, a book written by a Chinese author about a trip through Latin America and also the Lonely Planet magazine. She’s always asking me “Can we go there? Can we go there?” and moaning about how we are stuck here working instead of out on the road. We watched a few videos about travel in Central Asia, then she sat at the computer and researched second-hand vehicles. The dream is alive, if Plan A materializes itself, we’ll set off in July of 2022.

One of the video montages had a soundtrack of cool folk music from what I assume is that part of the world, and it made me want to listen to Lao San, a folk musician from the Qiang ethnic minority group in western China. I saw his show in Jinan several years ago and was blown away, I immediately bought his album and listen to it quite regularly. I did a quick YouTube search, it’s not there, so I saved it as a video file and uploaded it so non-Chinese people can hear it. It’s now here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13QL8TerEfo. Go give it a listen if you like esoteric world music, it’s really good.

After the album finished playing, in the same “Folk and world music” folder on my hard drive I saw Tinariwen, the Tuareg band, and put on their album Amassakoul. Great stuff. I went to bed early enough to not fuck up my sleep schedule.