Chapter 80

Sunday, day of the Lord. I woke up at 8:30 and checked my e-mail, my dad approves of my opinion regarding that fuckface immigration consultancy and its Quebec-bashing. He’s a proud Quebecer and always has been, and I have adopted this trait from him. Nowadays it seems like in the gangrenous western world nationalism and patriotism are seen as dirty words, but what’s wrong with having respect for one’s community and culture? It ain’t about being exclusionary or hateful, you can be cool towards people of every creed and ethnicity and culture but at the same time being proud of where you come from.

(I did originally write “proud of your own” but amended it because I don’t give a flying fuck about my ethnicity, I have very little tribal affiliation with white people, but I do care about being part of a vibrant albeit imperfect community of North American French-speakers)

Maybe “proud” isn’t the best word, in the sense we usually give it, since it’s not as if it’s something you accomplished, but all this talk of “white guilt” and ethnomasochism you see nowadays makes me cringe. I’ve traveled the world, and it would be a pretty bland place if there wasn’t a sense of nationalism and pride in the distinctive culture of a place.

I put on the next Top 500 entry, the first post-Beatles solo album by George Harrison. It was pretty nice. I cooked myself a big brunch with the leftovers from the Sichuan food the girlfriend ordered yesterday, that I scrambled with eggs and rolled into a hybrid breakfast burrito. I also ate shrimp dim sum and strawberries, and washed it all down with a gin tonic.

The UFC was on, I caught it as the main card started. Hulking Australian Tai Tuivasa threw some of that Pacific Islander power at a last-minute journeyman newcomer, flattening him in 49 seconds. Two Mexican bantamweight newcomers had a high-level scrap until the better striker of the two, Adrien Yanez, got a picturesque walk-away KO after a lightning quick right counter in the third round. Truly a guy to follow, it seems like he could make waves in that aready exciting weight class.

Next up was a very bizarre fight in the women’s strawweight division, seven-times Mexican wrestling champion and heavily-tattooed gangster-lookalike Montserrat Ruiz repeatedly took down her opponent Chayenne Buys and pinned her in a scarf hold, causing minimum damage but a lot of frustration. When the 15 minutes were over, Buys was restrained by the ref as she still tried to swing at her and yelled “I’ll follow you home, bitch!” So you can get pinned down on her kitchen floor? You already had three rounds where you were literally allowed and even encouraged to fight, so you can’t save face now by throwing threats around like that. The replay alleged that Ruiz spat at her with a few seconds remaining, but turns out it was an illusion, and what she did was calling her a puta, a not very sportswomanlike action but less illegal. I didn’t care for those trashy antics, but I unironically liked the fight overall, sure it was a very one-trick-pony affair but there’s no denying she was dominating. The fights I dislike are those in which nothing happens or there’s some fuckery in the officiating.

Chinese welterweight Song Kenan got murdered by Max Griffin in the co-main, which makes Chinese fighters named Song 0-2 in 2021 and saddens me. I always root for my fellow Chinese no matter what, they had a pretty good run in the past two or three years culminating with Zhang Motherfucking Weili capturing the strawweight title and defending it in 2020’s Fight Of The Year, as well as Yan “Kicking Rainy” Xiaonan going 6-0 in the same division and likely being one fight away from contention, but now it seems like most of them have a ceiling around the middle of their weight classes. At least The Leech is still delivering unorthodox violent bangers, and our eyes are all on skinny Tibetan striker Alatangheili in the 125-pound division.

The main event was also a bizarre one. Kevin “Trailblazer” Holland endeared himself to the fans and the UFC brass with his active schedule, being one of the rare fighters to win five fights in a year, as well as his highlight-reel KOs and especially his wacky personality. He is known for constantly, and I mean constantly, talking during fights, no matter if he’s the hammer or the nail or if it’s between exchanges. Now he was fighting the ultimate middleweight gatekeeper Derek Brunson. Brunson dominated the first few rounds, spamming takedowns, getting the better of most of the striking except once when the fast and technical Holland put him on his ass with a flurry, and keeping a game face at all those weird out-of-place attempts at humor by the Trailblazer. Recently retired lightweight champion and smasher of worlds Khabib Nurmagomedov was sitting ringside, not as a cornerman but merely as a spectator, and Holland would be talking to him as he was in the bottom position, asking him what he should do now. The more the fight went, the wackier Holland became, which led to a lot of people criticizing him for not taking the fight seriously. Yeah sure, maybe he’d have done better and possibly even won if he was more focused, but the way I saw it (sitting on my couch rubbing my beer belly) is that he just realized he was overmatched by the underrated and always game Brunson, and he wouldn’t let it get in the way of him having fun in there like the obviously fun-loving guy he is. Browsing Reddit, it seems like a lot of people hated his antics and the overall slightly underwhelming match, but being a glass-half-full guy I liked it quite a lot, I must have watched tens of thousands of fights across all combat sports by this point, and I like when it stands out in one way or another.

In the early afternoon I got my racquets and went to play badminton with the city’s club. I didn’t play that well, and got repeatedly clowned by my opponents, some of whom were middle-aged chubby women. I’m at a weird place, being too good to play against normies without finding it very underwhelming while not being good enough when pitted against those lean mean badminton machines. I had a few moments, notably a Hail Mary dive to get a seemingly hopeless sneaky drop shot that got everyone hooting, but all I can do now is keep playing and get my hours on the court, like they all undoubtedly have a fuckton of.

I didn’t go home, as I was scheduled for more of that driving practice nonsense dogshit and the driving school was near the municipal gym. I had about 20 minutes to spare so I went to the cute park by the canal and did sets of dips and hanging levers. I was scheduled for four hours, which means I’ll be done tomorrow but I was bracing myself for a serious dose of unpleasantness, then the car arrived, with shitty techno blaring and shaking its windows. The car we used on other days didn’t have a stereo, but now there was an aux cord, and the instructor has seriously terrible taste in music, like about 99% of Chinese people. Boy, it’s gonna be a long day and a test of my stoicism, I told myself, channeling the zen buddhist in me.

I was pretty damn familiar with the circuit at that point, but would still commit errors that are apparently immediate failure, like stopping before turning right at a red light, failing to pump my brakes like a spastic retard when passing a bus stop with absolutely no one in sight, or have my foot hovering over the clutch pedal even if I’m not pressing it. That mannerless cunt of an instructor would bark at me when that happened, and at some point I asked “Who does that? Who pumps the brakes at a green light?”

He looked extremely confused, and I repeated my question. “Those are the exam stipulations”, he replied matter-of-factly.

“Yeah but nobody does that in normal traffic”, I gestured at the cars wildly swerving around, operated by goldfish-attention-span drivers with one eye on the road and one eye on their phones. I wanted to use the word “unrealistic” but didn’t know how to say it in Chinese.

“Those are the exam stipulations”, he repeated. Because like I said before, the course and the test has very little to do with preparing people for actual driving. He’s right though; don’t hate the playa, hate the game, and hate the game as much as you want (it’s a dumb fucking nonsensical game and I feel stupid for playing it), at the end of the day my goal is to pass and get it over with. So if I have to forgo any notions of safe driving or common motherfucking sense just to get my pawn move a bit further forward in some rigid bureaucratic system, I will.

I sat on the back seat most of the time, reading. I finished Camp Of The Saints, and started a series of horror short stories, to fit my own horrific predicament being stuck there on what could be a nice Sunday early evening going to the park with the girlfriend and dog and enjoying a sushi dinner. The coach was watching Douyin videos on his phone, 10-second bursts of mind-numb superimposed with the most annoying music tracks. I fished out my mp3 player and switched from the Chewjitsu podcast I was listening to to some loud metal that would drown out the noise. I hadn’t listened to Bosse De Nage in a while, one of those newer black metal bands with a lot of shoegaze and post-rock influences. Then I put on Coffins, I love me some Coffins, and the mid-tempo crushing doom-death metal went well with the stories of demons and serial killers I was reading.

8 o’clock rolled around, I asked if I can go and was given my freedom, at least there’s that, the whole thing lasted exactly four hours, not a minute more. Here’s a funny thing: my mp3 player is embedded with a speaker that can play at low volume if the headphones aren’t plugged in, and when I took out my earbuds, I saw that the jack wasn’t completely in, which meant that while the music went through the earbuds, it also came out of the shitty tinny little speaker. I wonder how long all the other passengers had to put up with my death metal. Yet nobody said anything or even looked at me weird. China has a culture of non-confrontation, which gets people used to deal with all the uncouth antisocial shit around them, but also in a way enables it or even exacerbates it, by putting them into some kind of revenge mode (I know I feel that way often). Call me an old-fashioned imperialist westerner if you want, but I kinda prefer a more open approach in which you get called out for your shit and therefore tend to lead by example and act the way you’d like your fellow humans to act. But hey, when in Beijing.

I took a taxi back home, with the Didi app (Chinese Uber). This is pretty fantastic and far superior to ordinary taxis, plus, there would be absolutely no way I’d be able to flag a taxi on that remote road. Didi drivers are required to drive a car of pretty high standard, oftentimes a brand new car with comfy leather seats, and drive safely. In contrast, a lot of chain taxis are old rickety pieces of shit and their drivers swerve around as if the world is made out of sponge. Yeah, I guess there’s a phone number you can call and report unsafe driving, but it’s unlikely to do anything aside from getting lost in a bureaucratic pile somewhere, unlike the star rating from Didi that can end a driver’s account if he gets just a few shit ratings.

I got home, and there was a truck parked in front of our complex, selling potted plants. I bought as much as I could carry on my bike. The girlfriend was in her fluffy pyjamas, doing embroidery. She was an art major, and is always drawing, painting, sculpting, or doing other artsy things. I love her so much.

Four of the eggs I had just bought got cracked on the ride in the bike’s basket, so I made scrambled eggs for dinner that I ate with a few slices of Spanish salami and a cold hefeweizen. We took the dog out and let him run around on the patch of grass behind the postboxes, and he ate a dog turd he found. I brushed his teeth when we got home. I fixed myself a double negroni and we watched The Office in bed before sleeping early to start the week right.