Chapter 74

Up at 6, yoga, and cold water (both on the inside and the outside of my body). I took the dog out for a little loop and then rode to work.

One grade-11 student wore a t-shirt with an enormous, colorful marijuana leaf. Coming closer, I saw he also had a matching one on his sweat pants. I squinted, cocked my head and asked what it is. His friends laughed.

“Weed!”, one of them piped.

“He’s drug dealer!”, said another.

Cannabis really isn’t widespread in China. There used to be some expatriates in some circles who would consume quite openly stuff of various quality they bought from ethnic minorities (the kind with small cylindrical hats who don’t eat pork) but a lot of those supply chains dried up and the demand plummeted in early 2019 in the wake of the Trumpland-China tariff war, which caused the Powers-That-Be to tighten the screw on its foreign residents and conduct drug testing. Anyway in all my years teaching high school in China, I’d be very surprised if any students partook.

I made myself some pu-er tea with the balls I bought on Saturday. The blackened tea leaves are packed inside a dried up lime, and the resulting opaque black liquid has hints of citrus (duh!), pepper, as well as the typical earthy aromas of pu-er. The peppery part especially threw me off at first but I learned to like it as I was sipping it through the day.

I had a block of four classes and it went quite well. I went home for lunch and had a reheated KFC burger the girlfriend brought home from an office party (what is a Chinese office party without KFC?) and a tomato sandwich. I thought about doing calisthenics first but my whole upper body is on fire after the dips and pike push-ups from yesterday. Especially the dips, it’s been a while.

I watched fights from the latest UFC event. All three of them ended in some form of fuckery. In the main event, one of the gnarliest eye pokes ever had Belal Muhammad writhe on the floor, crying from pain and also the panic in the face of potentially losing his eyesight. Browsing MMA news sites, it seems like his eye won’t suffer permanent damage, thank Allah. The fight ended in an anticlimactic no contest. MMA uses fingerless gloves and there has been calls forever about changing the design to make it harder or impossible to extend the fingers in front the opponent’s face, but of course the scumbags in charge don’t act on it, too busy they are making shady advertizing deals that undercut the athletes. It’s not as if it’s impossible, PrideFC back in the glory days of Japanese MMA used a curved glove that still allowed grappling, and one renowned MMA coach came up with a design of his own. Eye pokes are endemic and disgusting to see, one day there will be a particularly bad one that will bury the UFC under a mountain of bad press if they don’t do something about it.

In another main card fight, middleweight Eryk Anders was on a roll, bludgeoning his opponent Darren Stewart on route to a seemingly inevitable TKO victory until he had a huge derp moment and threw a knee to Stewart’s face. The problem is, Stewart had a knee on the ground, which made the strike illegal. Two weeks in a row this shit has happened. In the following fight, flyweights Manel Kape and Matheus Nicolau fought to a decision, and I couldn’t believe when the scorecards were read. Nicolau won by split decision, though he clearly lost rounds 2 and 3. Both fighters looked surprised, Nicolau didn’t even really celebrate, he just walked to Kape and gave him an apologetic shrug. I hopped on Reddit and saw that 22 out of 22 media members scored the fight 29-28 in favor of Kape! Can we reform the judging for fucking once?!?!?! What’s the point of having three elderly retards who oftentimes are old crusty relics from boxing and couldn’t tell half guard from side control sit cageside where they can’t see shit? Are we at a boxing match in a state fair and is the year 1885? Why not have five or seven or any odd number of judges watch the fight in a room on multiple monitors without commentary, and give their score electronically? The bigger the number, the fewer chances inept, corrupted or racist (like that fuckface who has a serious deoubtedly coincidental bias towards Hispanic fighters) fuck up the whole thing. And while we’re at it, why stick to that dumb-ass round-by-round 10-point system, another relic of boxing? Judge the fight in its entirety like they do in Japan.

Fuck. I’m riled up. I’m quite passionate about that sport, the most beautiful, the purest form of competition with the highest stakes (well aside from flat-out war), the most exciting, yet it’s still plagued with so many goddamn problems that I (or any educated fan) could fix immediately if I became president of the world.

Anyway. I rode back to work, listening to Jocko Willink’s podcast. His guest was a fellow SEAL, and absolute hard cunt. They were telling stories of their time in Iraq and how not only they weren’t afraid of firefights, but loved it and couldn’t wait to go back. One question from the audience was whether they were scared to die, and both of them said an unequivocal no. I was in the army for a bit when I was young and I have to admit I’m not cut from the same cloth as those guys and some of the other hard cunts I met while in there. Maybe it’s my atheism, my ego and my materialism (in the philosophical sense) speaking, but I value my life above nearly everything else, after all, if I’m dead, I’m nothing. In fact that’s what kept me going even in the times I was depressed and my life felt like a giant shit-sandwich, I never even remotely thought about suicide, I just wished my life sucked less and moved slowly towards that goal. Don’t get me wrong: I signed the dotted line as a skinny angsty 18-year-old and would have abided by my oath if I were sent to kill and die, because I gave my word and am not a filthy oathbreaker. Or at least I like to think so, looking back. Who the fuck knows what I would have been like with real bullets flying around and bombs exploding all over the place. I have to say I’m glad I never got to find out.

There was a slice of cake on my desk, with a note saying it’s for a student’s birthday. I was assaulted by a bunch of contradictory feelings about it: I want to have a clean(ish) diet, but also hate waste. I don’t really like cake, especially the sickly sweet whipped cream heavy birthday cake kind, but was also touched that they thought about me. I ate it, thinking fuck it, I’ll exercise later anyway.

I went through organic chemistry review questions with Attitude Class then went home and took a short nap before heading out in the ass weather. I rode my bicycle for 4.5 km to a gym where a total of five of us had a good jiu-jitsu session. It’s a small commercial gym with fancy-looking equipment, and they put a rather small mat in the middle. One of the guys is a member there and suggested we go, most of them seem a bit uncomfortable at the idea of going to the kickboxing gym for free. I’m a bit displeased, I think the kickboxing gym is much better and also a 5-minute ride from my home, but I’m craving BJJ so much I’ll just go with what the consensus ends up being. I don’t really want to pay for a likely expensive gym membership though. We’ll see.

For the time being we practiced guard opening drills, that the Italian blue belt showed us, and had a few nice rolls. The place was suffocatingly humid, and I was sweating buckets, but went through anyway. During one roll I was on defensive mode pretty much the whole time, gutsing through submission attempts, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror as my friend was choking me with a bow-and-arrow and I was cherry red, but I held on and reversed the position. But then later the Italian got me with the same choke and I foolishly didn’t tap, so I passed out for a few seconds at least. The lights felt much brighter when I came to, and I was weirdly euphoric. I always tap early to joint locks but will sometimes try to survive chokes and pain submissions if they’re applied by white belts, but when they’re done by blue belts there’s no way out. Lesson learned.

It is always very unpleasant to put on clothes that are already wet. I rode home, opened a can of German beer, put my clothes in the washing machine, took a cold shower, and fixed myself a steak and broccoli dinner. A little bit of random YouTube browsing later, I crashed. If you’re reading this, I hope you’re doing well and you also had a nice day.