Chapter 61

I had a weird dream, about driving a van in a weird country and suddenly being stuck at a roadblock with soldiers trying to extort money from us. Some of the soldiers were African, Latino, white and Asian, I guess stemming from a mish-mash of stories I’ve been reading in The Road Chose Me (Vol.1 Alaska to Argentina and Vol.2 Around Africa), stuff I’ve seen on the internet about Central Asia and Russia, and some of my own experiences.

This morning I didn’t do a structured yoga session or anything, I just stretched and did bridges. My bridges horrendously suck. I also spent more time looking at stupid memes on Reddit that I’m willing to admit.

I listened to the album Buried Death by Japanese band Coffins while walking the dog and on the way to work. I had a dumb smile plastered on my face because the music is so damn good, and I was slowly bobbing my head to the mid-tempo crushing riffs. Students and colleagues thought I was nodding at them as a morning greeting, and nodded or waved back. Who said death metal couldn’t foster a harmonious work environment?

In the morning I also listened to Présages, a promising death/black/doom outfit with a modern sound, and the album Alpenpässe by Minenwerfer. Great stuff. There’s more music thrown my way that I can handle, and everytime I open a portal to the underground, I get overwhelmed with a pile of awesome bands. You sometimes hear hipsters breathlessly lisp about how they wish they lived in the past because “tEh mUsiC wAs bEtTeR” but that’s nonsense, the present time is the best era to live in as a music lover.

I had a double class with twelfth-graders and it went well, then I went to the noodle shop and ordered my shrimp fried noodles, no mushrooms. I got home, opened the plastic container, and lo and behold, mushrooms. Ah well. There are worse fates that can afflict a man, I just picked the disgusting pieces of fungi and left them for the girlfriend, perhaps she’ll eat them.

I watched YouTube videos about Joe Biden, apparently plenty of democrat voters have serious buyer’s remorse, even that fat guy from The Young Turks lambasted him for... what? The military action in Syria? Constantly lying and posturing as progressive even though he’s the biggest puppet of the prison-industrial complex? His condescending talk about black people not knowing how to register for the vaccine, among many other seriously racist comments that mysteriously fly under the radar? Generally being senile and incompetent? Not sure. Some of my friends on my Facebook who are far from being Trump fans also noticed how they are constantly being gaslit by the media and how the treatment of both presidents is night and day.

Now the lie du jour is that the Trump admin didn’t have any plan for the pandemic, even though it can all be debunked in a few seconds. I think that’s the problem with a so-called democracy, especially one as bipartisan as this. When a new set of crooks take the reins from the previous bunch of crooks, they don’t want to give them any sort of credit, so they either scrap what the first bunch of crooks did or just minimize or deny their accomplishments. Chinese history is pretty much that shit, chapter after chapter, but at least it happens every three or four centuries as the dynasties get toppled, rather than every few years.

In the afternoon I supervised a lab. Now that’s one of the perks of being a chemistry teacher, of course it’s much more stimulating than being in the classroom for everyone involved. It was with the weakest grade-11 class, but they’re doing okay, just lots of small details to correct so I went around and helped them out, without just giving them the answers. At any rate they are way more stimulated being in the lab than sitting in the classroom for nine hours a day.

Now that I don’t have to talk that much to the group, I usually play music at low volume in the lab, to make it more interesting and to show them what real music is like. I put on The Roots’ Things Fall Apart, and then Blink-182’s Enema Of The State, an album I hadn’t listened to since forever. I think it’s the first album I ever bought with my money, when I was 14 or 15, so it obviously evokes my own carefree and youthful and immature high school years. But then I thought about it a bit further: my current students, doing titrations and calculating molar masses and measuring temperature changes of exothermic reactions around the room, were born in 2003, a good four years after Enema came out. For them, it must sound like what boomer music sounds like to me. Something I eventually learned to appreciate (listening to a 1969 Neil Young album as I write this line), but much later.

After that we had a meeting. I had to pay attention and couldn’t just day-dream, since it was my turn to write down the minutes. Tomorrow we all have to go for our second dose of the vaccine, at different times of the day.

I had one more class, with Attitude Class, but nobody gave me any attitude. I appreciate that.

I got home, sat around a bit, then went to the gym. Now that the jiu-jitsu gym closed, I’ve been trying to get some of my old training partners together for an open mat of some sort, and the boss of the Chinese kickboxing gym lets us use the premises. When I showed up the door was wide open, but it was completely empty and pitch black, I had to fumble around looking for the electric switchboard. My two friends showed up soon after: an Italian guy and a Chinese girl, both of them blue belts. We warmed up a bit in the unheated gym, then grappled each other for a few 5-minute rounds. I couldn’t wipe that grin off my face, I really had been missing it. I hope we can make it a regular thing. Sure, it’s not as good as a structured class with a coach who shows us drills and corrects our errors, but it’s much better than nothing.

I rolled with the girl, for the first time. At the original gym she’d only practice with other blue belts, or girls. She told me to go light, and yeah it would be stupid to go all brute force on her. We fought for position, but she is so small I would just buck her off and she wouldn’t manage to keep me down, and when I attacked with my noob white belt moves, she did everything correctly like the four-stripe blue belt she is, tucking her elbows in, but I’d just manage to effortlessly pry her arms open anyway. People say BJJ is all about technique but the weight factor is clearly crucial. I’m almost twice her weight and though I’m very average, I have man strength. I wonder how good a girl would have to be to beat me.

So in that case what we have to do is “flow-roll”, kind of like the Italian dude is doing with me, letting me practice my offense and defense instead of just crushing me like a bug. I was left on my hunger a bit at the end, flow-rolling is cool and all, but I was craving some whitebelt-on-whitebelt action, where we’re roughly evenly matched and we can go hard and try to outspaz one another.

I made it home and made a sopa de ajo with ham, sausage, paprika, stale bread and of course lots of garlic. Another comfort food recipe I got from Chef John on YouTube. I poached an egg towards the end of the cooking process, to add some runny goodness in there.

I plopped on the couch and looked for something quick to watch on YouTube while I ate and waited for the laundry to finish. I randomly clicked on a video about “Top 10 overrated cities”, and the list was Paris, Rome, Sydney, London, NYC, Shanghai, Rio, Barcelona, Athens and Amsterdam. I’ve been to every entry except Sydney (though I did go to Australia) and disagree with the pompous own-fart-smeller, they’re all worth visiting. I guess they’re only “overrated”, by definition, if you have overly high expectations, but I knew before even getting on the plane that all of them (except Shanghai) would be giant rat-infested shitholes with tons of bland development beside the iconic architecture, a certain sense of modern uniformisation, overpricing, and legions of people of lower socioeconomic status (to be polite) whose delinquency I’d have to be wary of. But I also knew that they are major centers of culture, economics and politics. I mean, what are you gonna do, be an überhipster and skip them altogether if you go to that country?! As much as I like traveling to smaller towns, the countryside, and untouched nature, cities are also an integral part of the whole travel experience. Some of the points he brought up were tired clichés, like the good ol’“Parisians are meeeeaaaaan”, well to me they weren’t, because I speak their fucken language, I’d like to imagine you if your city had been overflooded with clueless tourists 12 months out of the year for the past two centuries. Maybe the first time some mouthbreathing American or German with a camera around his neck asks “ex-koo-zay-mwah, woo ay la Tower Eye Full” you’d feel helpful, but on the 384^th occurrence you’d just zoom past as the busy working ant you are, on your way to the job that allows you (but barely) to dwell in such an overpriced and joyless dystopian metropolis. And he also talked about Shanghai not being the best place to experience real China, another humongous cliché, I won’t even fucken start with that one.

My dose of Top 500 music was the aforementioned Neil Young, who’s rightfully seen as a legend, and then a turd of an album called 69 Love Songs by Magnetic Fields. I got to the third track of the sappiest shit ever before tapping out.