Chapter 77

I did my tai chi this morning, and this time, the guy demonstrating it on YouTube wasn’t an old man but a younger athletic guy, and it was a much more physical form of tai chi, with squatting horse stances that left me with burning thighs. I saw in the related videos that the guy lives in a yurt that he built in the woods, and that he made a long video about it. Looks interesting, I should watch it with the girlfriend this weekend.

Still in a deep hip-hop phase, I listened to Dirty Boyz, a duet from Alabama. I normally don’t listen to a lot of southern rap but their album The Pimp And The Gangsta is fantastic. A friend once introduced them to me with the video for Hit Da Floe, which is hilariously “country”.

I had one class with the eleventh-graders, doing review for the upcoming exam, and it went well. Then I got back to the office and caught the second half of the Metal Minded podcast, the guys gave dithyrambic reviews to the new albums by Stortregn and The Crown, so I made a mental note to listen to them later that day. I had a lot of fun bantering and telling dumb jokes in the live chat with the other regular listeners.

I gave a past paper for the twelfth-graders to do at the beginning of the week, and went over it in class today. Most of them just copied the answers from the marking scheme, which is not as if it was a genius move, those are available on the Cambridge website a quick search away, and obviously defeats the fucking purpose of formative assessment. When the question required a worded answer, it would be verbatim from the marking scheme, when it was a numerical answer I’d get the final answer but none of the calculations, and when the marking scheme would just give guidelines on what to look for in the answer, it would be left blank, as they’re too lazy to read it and develop an answer from that whole mumbo-jumbo.

I rode home for lunch, and whipped up together a pasta dish with whatever caught my eye in the fridge or on the shelf: onions, dried chilis, bacon, a can of tuna, a can of sardines, fennel, oregano, sweet peanuts, raisins, and shredded cheese. It was roughly inspired from Sicilian sardine pasta, and I topped it with bread croutons. So damn good. I watched more UFC prelims, Cortney Casey lost a close decision (name a better duo) and Nasrat Haqparast won an exciting decision over a tough Mexican newcomer.

Back at the office, I listened to the new album by The Crown, a Swedish band with a lot of underground cred for its furious mix of death and thrash metal. I like their 90s releases Possessed 13 and Deathrace King, but find their style a bit repetitive and uninteresting, and am afraid I got the same vibes from the recently released Royal Destroyer. The Stortregn melodic black/death metal album also left me limp, yes it’s very technically proficient and nothing in there was unpleasant or irritating, but I’m scared of how little I get excited about newer metal music.

I’m much more enthusiastic about hip-hop, so I put on Vice Et Vertu 2, a mixtape by prolific French rapper Swift Guad. He has a rather incredible lyrical prowess and a gritty style, but some of the tracks in there abused the fuck out of autotune, which is a deal breaker for me. I then put on a compilation by Blaq Poet, a Queens rapper. Excellent stuff.

Most of my afternoon, aside from listening to music, was devoted to putting the mock exams together for grade 12. I dug through the database of past papers and spliced a bunch of questions together, making sure the topics are varied and the total number of points is 100. Tedious but also relaxing, I was in my bubble, with my big headphones on, drinking strong black tea.

I got home and played with the dog a bit. I poured myself a virgin Pina Colada, I thought about adding a glug of rum in there but as much as the driving course is a shit sandwich, I’ll play along and abstain from drinking before going. I left soon after to go wait around in front of their office, I was told to be there at 6 but nobody came to pick me up until 6:30, so I went to a park right across the street and did a quick street workout with five sets of dips and five sets of hanging levers with my legs tucked in.

I eventually got brought to the remote-ass practice circuit and did what I had to do. The whole time I was driving, I was repeating “This is so fucking retarded, this is so fucking retarded” in my head, and trying to keep a calm, stoic exterior. Ever the optimist, I have to say that the cool thing about this section of the exam, aside from the endless dark kafkaesque comedy, is the fact that it can be done at night throughout the week, and thus I can accumulate hours more quickly and get it the fuck over with sooner. The closed-circuit part could only be done during the day, which limited me to weekends.

Though I clocked in two hours, I wasted a total of almost four hours out of my evening, with the commuting there and back and the sitting around. While another lady drove, I sat in the back, with my Kindle in my lap and my headphones in, listening to the most violent music I have on my mp3 player in order to keep myself calm. Dödsrit, Daughters, Cryptopsy, yes I was in that area of the alphabetical list of artists.

The book I’m currently reading is called Camp Of The Saints, and if nowadays they put disclaimers on old cartoons saying that the cultural values within don’t correspond to today’s climate, I wonder what kind of disclaimer you’d see at the beginning of such a controversial novel. It was written in 1972 and is about a horde of a million Indians following some kind of prophet talking about paradise at the other end of the world, embarking on old rusty ships and navigating their way around Africa until they reach French shores. They are themselves peaceful but their impending arrival cause an enormous turmoil in France, with politicians, soldiers and common citizens wondering what to do. The societal debate pits against one another white supremacists, communists, anarchists, normal people with no enmity towards the third-worlders but wondering if it’s a good idea to let so many of them coming all at once, catholics, grifter fake left-wing journalists, let’s just say that the debate over mass immigration is not new, and not over, with the reported 100 000 migrants crossing the Mexico-US border only last month. The book has sparked controversy because, well, there’s some racism in it, with rather archaic words that are not very PC nowadays, but the questions it raises are interesting, if you’re not a racist fuckhead yourself and can distance yourself from the old French politicians who keep harping on about the white race. Notably, the part where the navy is sent to intercept the ships and the officers and sailors can’t bring themselves to open fire on an unarmed and peaceful crowd (albeit one that is unwanted and illegally entering a territory), and the anarchists rushing to the coast to interfere with the police and army stopping to break free their “comrades” at a penitentiary who, surprise surprise, don’t give a shit about their commie “we are all human” cause and end up just going back to their rapey and murdering ways.

Anyway, I’m just two thirds in, who knows what the author has in mind for an ending. I’ll finish it tomorrow or the day after.

I made it home, famished, reheated some of the pasta, made a huge pina colada (with rum this time, praise the Lord) and slowly wound down.