Chapter 62

I woke up at 6 and read the news while drinking tea and stretching my sore muscles to a Brahms soundtrack. Then, when the girlfriend left and the field was clear, I put on some death metal to put my day in third gear. A friend of mine sent me a link to Ripped To Shreds, maybe because they have Chinese album titles, though the band is American. Next up was Afterbirth, that I saw in the belatedly released top of 2020 list by Teufel’s Tomb, a guy who really, really knows his metal. I ripped it and uploaded it to my mp3 player for a skateboard ride with the dog. They play some progressive/technical death metal that failed to really tickle my scrotum, as I’m not a tech death fan at all.

First two periods were a lab, I put on some Mendelssohn, a lesser known German classical music composer, and then the 2020 The Kingdom album by British grunge band Bush. It’s got a few songs I like, notably the first two, but it’s overall a bit too limp-wristed for my general tastes. Still, it was there on my laptop’s hard drive, and playing some extreme metal to my students would be a bridge too far, I have to train their ears first.

I did some prep work in the office, listening to the next entry on the Top 500, called Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era. Excuse me, what the fuck?! I was already puzzled by the decision to include best ofs in there, but now we have a compilation of many artists?! Why can’t the CDs I was burning for my friends in the early 2000s be nominated, then? Anyway I don’t take that list very seriously, it’s just a window in the mind of some boomer music journalists and a way to explore the classics, and it turned out to be an enjoyable listen for the most part. Some bands were poor Beatles clones, but some played fun garage rock.

I had one more class, then went home and cooked some pasta. I made a sauce with sausages, onions, garlic, canned tomatoes, chili peppers, leftover wonton filling and black olives and then mixed it with the al dente penne and shredded cheese. Cooking is fun. While I was in the kitchen I was listening to the Lotus Eaters podcast, Coca-Cola mandated that their employees take seminars about “racial equity” that teach them to “be less white”. It’s nice to know that multinational sugary water corporations are so woke to the current societal problems, while they contribute to immense health problems and employ third-world indentured slave labor. I wonder if Chinese companies condescendingly lecture their workforce and ask them to be less yellow. Oh wait they don’t, because China is not suffering from terminal Clown World syndrome.

I listened to two new metal releases: Insect Inside from Chyelabinsk, Russia, who sounds like every slam/brutal death metal in existence (satisfying and greasy but nothing that memorable, like a gas station meat pie) and Plague Weaver from Mississauga, Canada, with a modern doomy black metal sound and vocals I couldn’t really get behind, it sounded like the Zerg from Starcraft to me.

In the early afternoon, I didn’t go back to school, I rode to the hospital to get my second shot of the ‘Rona vaccine. I made sure I had a SLUGF (Stupid Little Useless Glass Fogger) in my coat pocket, grabbed my passport and my appointment sheet, and off I went. In my earbuds was Otoboke Beaver, an all-girl Japanese band playing chaotic punk rock with the deviant eccentric wackiness that is so common in the music coming out of the Land Of The Rising Sun, and then Cianide, a super underground American death metal band with a superb old-school sound that reminds one of Unleashed’s first albums. That mostly drowned the ambient noise that came with having to wait in line with Chinese people yell-chatting.

The place is called a “Traditional Chinese medicine” hospital, but instead of having an illiterate nonagenarian make me drink a potion of boiled twigs and rub licorice on the back of my hands, they used real pharmaceuticals, developed by scientists, not the result of oral tradition from generations of farmers and the cultural refusal to challenge what senile elders say. I asked the nurse whether I’m allowed to drink alcohol, she said no, for the next three days. Hmmm, Saturday afternoon will be when I’ll have my victory beer.

I went to the waiting room adjacent to where people were lining up to get in, and some of my coworkers were there. My Ghanaian homie saw I was adjusting my belt and asked “Did they make you take off your trousah?!” I joked that this shot was not on the upper arm like the first one but in an ass cheek, but no, I was just tucking my shirt in my pants.

I went back to work for one more class, about proton NMR, then went home, buying strawberries and jackfruit on the way. I munched on the fruit while watching the latest BKFC event. MMA is my favorite sport to watch, but I like all combat sports, whether it’s boxing, kickboxing, muay thai, lethwei, grappling, and now bare-knuckle boxing. The raw and brutal nature of it, even by combat sports standards, make it appealing to purists like me, and all the fights were fun. The fighters battle in two-minute rounds, start in the middle of the ring and are allowed active clinch, which means the pace is always explosive. BKFC is a fairly new organisation, which means it’s both exciting and mysterious in the same way that early UFCs were, but it also means there are also some serious rough edges and can feel a bit silly at times. And by this I mean “I feel a bit dirty watching that hillbilly circus”. Their main sponsors are kratom, a CBD company and a shady offshore gambling site, for F’s sake!

Their main problem is that the talent pool is very shallow, with low-level journeymen and has-beens. Since their inception, they have relied on bringing in aging or even retired MMA fighters with name recognition, which works to some extent (that’s why I started watching after all) but can’t be sustainable.

The best example of this is how their biggest fight ever, their PPV headliner, was Paige Vanzant’s bare-knuckle debut. Vanzant had a middling MMA career and was fast-tracked to the forefront of the sport due to how marketable she is, and had been mostly inactive for the past few years, making more money as an Instagram model than her already inflated UFC payouts. I didn’t care too much about the main event and will watch it later, but I really wanted to see legendary brawler Chris Leben’s retirement fight and the 135-pound championship between Johnny Bedford and Dat Nguyen. Dat Nguyen was a high-level boxer until he transitioned to no-gloves and had been impressive in his first two BKFC fights, way ahead of some of the brawling rednecks and inner city gang members that seem to make up most of the roster, but he’s 38 now. The only way BKFC would take it to the next level is if they have enough promising or accomplished fighters who make the switch earlier, rather than at the tail-end of their careers.

I listened to a bit more music from the Top 500, while I was writing or reading. First Anita Barker and her soulful R&B, then Ghostface Killah’s sophomore Supreme Clientele. It’s been a while since I listened to it, and holy shit is it frustrating. Some parts are excellent and a perfect display of what east coast 90s hip-hop is about, but there’s so much filler on there and some beats just suck ass, like the one on Stroke Of Death, which almost gave me epilepsy strokes. I know it’s seen as blasphemous in some hip-hop circles, but I feel that the Wu-Tang Clan is very overrated. Just my opinion.

My Spanish garlic and bread soup from yesterday tasted even better reheated, and I had a late dinner after eating all those fruits at 5 o’clock. I watched a Ryan Long skit about a feminist homeschooling single mom, it was hilarious. Then I went to bed and read a few pages from the Norman history book before collapsing.