Chapter 63

Up at 6 again for my morning tai chi and my walk with the dog. The music was Haydn first, then a powerviolence band called Afterpill, from Saguenay Quebec, blasting 20-second tracks in the vein of Spazz and Charles Bronson and all that good stuff.

Two students forgot their lab books, so I had to send them to the office and ask a teacher to print today’s experiment for them. Today’s music was Ravel and Muddy Waters. After that I had a double with the twelfth-graders, I went over an exam problem from 2016 and gave them the rest of the period to work on another past paper. About half of them chose to put their head on the desk and sleep instead, but I ain’t mad at all, after all when they do that they are silent. I dislike noise. With grades 10 and 11 I’m a little bit more proactive when it comes time to make them do stuff, but with the seniors, I can’t be bothered too much, next year they will be in college and nobody will take them by the hand, so if they don’t have a bit of self-discipline at this point, it’s too late I’m afraid.

I rode home, enjoying this sunny day. I started a new Jocko Willink podcast, he’s discussing with a British photojournalist who’s been covering war zones.

The dog was happy to see me, and I gave him “candy” since he didn’t chew or displace anything he wasn’t supposed to. When I played with him on the couch, he rolled on his back and I noticed a huge lump. “What the fuck is that?!” His penis was twisted at a 180-degree angle, inside the sheath of skin, it sure didn’t look natural but he didn’t seem to be in pain. I wondered for a second if I should just go straight to the vet, but first I held his face with one hand in case he’d lunge and bite me, and readjusted it with the other. He squirmed a bit but was fine afterwards, thank fuck. I know it’s the second time I talk about my dog’s dick and that’s two times too many, but his micropenis does seem to cause him inconvenience and potentially serious problems down the road so I’ll have to monitor it in the future.

I reheated some of yesterday’s pasta and sat in front of the TV, I couldn’t use YouTube due to the VPN not working so I watched a Rick And Morty episode from my external hard drive. I fired up my backup VPN, which needed updating as their engineers are constantly working on new patches to circumvent the restrictions imposed by fascist governments, and it worked like a dream. That surprised me, but I’ll take it.

There were pieces of beef thawing in the fridge since the day prior, I cut them in big chunks and dry rubbed them with a mix of spices. That will be our dinner.

I got back to the office and sat around for a big part of the afternoon, planning my lessons for the upcoming week and listening to podcasts. British comedian and social commentator Andrew Doyle has been making a lot of waves with his alter ego Titania McGrath on Twitter, a so-called “intersectional poet”, one of the best pieces of satire ever made about the current state of the world. As much as I enjoy the parodic content he creates, he’s even better when out of character, very articulately and accurately discussing the “wokeism” religion taking over the West.

One of the most recent incarnations of that gangrenous decadence is how some school boards in the USA are dismantling their honors programs because they’re mostly attended by white and Asian students. Talk about leveling down. And I’ve seen screenshots from some kind of bizarre campaigns to “decolonize mathematics”, saying that the objective, dry nature of the discipline is an enactment of white supremacy. What a crock of shit! All three math teachers at my schools are African, have master’s degrees, and do complicated calculus that I can’t do. I wonder how they’d feel if they were told by pink-haired intersectional academics that black people are not supposed to be good at math.

I also listened to the Metal Minded podcast, the guys reviewed four albums. The Plague Weaver album that annoyed me a bit with the Zerg vocals was well received, I should go revisit it. Then, finishing off the first hundred entries of the Top 500, I finished the Fela Kuti I started earlier and started Blondie’s self-titled album. After I finished my lesson planning, I designed a label for my latest batch of homebrew, using a hand-drawn picture I photographed with my phone, MS Paint, and my piss-poor editing skills. It’s a spiced ale, with cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, and all sorts of stuff I randomly picked up from our spice rack.

I had one class at the tail end of the school day, resulting from the schedule change after a physics teacher covered a class of mine yesterday so I could go get the vaccine. The students were confused when I walked in, and joked that I killed the physics teacher.

I got home and had a lazy evening, just me and the dog, as the girlfriend has to stay at work until much later. I’m not supposed to exercise strenuously while the vaccine is incubating so I sat around reading and watching stuff on YouTube. I watched bits of a documentary about pro wrestling, and the UFC Embedded episodes. The upcoming event is a monster, with three title fights and a stacked undercard.

I cooked some curry, but I couldn’t find the fucking can opener so I had to get creative with the coconut milk can, and by creative I mean “smashing it with a hammer”. And then while the sauce was delicious, the chunks of beef had the consistency of a rubber shoe, so I chopped them into smaller pieces and simmered them for longer. Not my day. I’m still grateful to be alive.