Chapter 75

Up at 6, green tea, and tai chi. It seems like most tai chi channels on YouTube are featuring old white men, but I feel like an old white man myself when I drag my sore carcass out of bed the morning after jiu-jitsu.

I rode to work, and had about two hours to chill in the office. I listened to more music from the Top 500. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea was a barely listenable album, shattering the line between “quirky and eclectic” and “is this a joke? Who the fuck would willingly listen to this shit?”, then it was Green Day’s Dookie, an album I’ve already listened to a bunch of times. I didn’t care for Green Day as much as many of my pals in high school did, I was more into The Offspring and Blink as far as pop-punk went. Still, undoubtedly a great album. Then it was a blues album from the 1930s, as expected it sounded like it’s been recorded with a potato. OK, maybe it was influential and all that shit, but come on now, you’re really saying that only 373 albums have ever been recorded since that are objectively or subjectively better? Then Chef from South Park (Isaac Hayes) had his moments, with a great soulful delivery and a deep voice, but there was also a supremely boring 18-minute filler track right at the beginning of the album. Not a great day of music thus far.

I taught a double class to the twelfth-graders, reviewing an old exam paper. One student lied to me, he promised a while ago he wouldn’t use his phone in class and I let him fly with a warning. Again today he was staring at his crotch, and after a humorous warning “Hey, put your phone down and answer this question on the board” he was still typing away a few minutes later. I confiscated it and told him he has two choices, either I turn it over to the head teacher, which means she’ll keep it for a month and call his parents, or he writes a 1000-word essay on the topic of integrity, after he lied to me blatantly like that. He obviously chose the second option.

I rode home, and started a Chewjitsu podcast. It’s really good and I’ll listen to more of it. He barely talked about jiu-jitsu, most of it was about setting and reaching goals, and how crippling digital addiction can be.

I made a BLT sandwich for lunch, and watched UFC fights from last weekend. All three ended in quick and violent KOs. While at the office, I started reading a long article about retired UFC fighter Spencer Fisher and how he deals with terrible brain damage nowadays. Headaches, nausea, memory loss, dizziness, shifting behavior, drug addiction, all that. It’s a pretty ruthless sport, especially since the athletes are paid so little unless they make it to the top 0.1%. At times I question myself, as a fan, but always come to the conclusion that there are always people who will want to do it, no matter the risk and payout.

I went back to the school and alternated between classes and time sitting around. I fucked around on the internet a bit as I always do, but also wrote a list of guidelines and advice for the upcoming lab exam. I put on old-school east coast hip-hop playlists, damn there’s some great stuff that came out in the NYC underground in the 1990s. This might be my favorite genre of music now, more than death metal and grindcore. If you’d told me 10 years ago that I’d be like that, I’d have smashed you on the head with a beer bottle.

At night I went to driving practice. I hate it. I really hate it. The instructor is a rude jerk, the other trainees are mouth-breathing peasants, the exam stipulations are absolutely retarded and unrealistic, and the whole process of having to sit around 80% of the time is clownishly inefficient. And to top it off, I’m paying quite a lot of money for the privilege. Still, I have to do it. No matter how much you try to streamline your life and reduce friction, there’s always some unexpected or chronic shit you’ll have to put up with.

I took a taxi from the boonies to the city and then rode my bike home. The girlfriend was teaching art history online, I made her a pina colada. I opened a Revenant IPA by Lost Coast Brewery, made tacos with the beef I put in the slow cooker all afternoon, and sat on the couch watching more UFC fights with the sound off while she was talking about romanticism to her online student. She finished at 21:30 and emitted a huge sigh of exhaustion. She’s working a lot these days, I’ll have to keep an eye on that, burnout is a serious issue and one that is unfortunately trivialized or even celebrated in our work-obsessed cultures. She was singing “Why can’t I just be a NEET?” and talking about how much she’s looking forward to our planned sabbatical trip. That got us to discuss about the dog, there’s obviously no way we can abandon that little affectionate triangle-faced animal. Her parents said they’d take care of him, but they are semi-retired and also like to travel. We’ll see.