Chapter 82

I didn’t do tai chi this morning like I was planning to, a good friend was online and we chatted on Facebook briefly before switching to Skype. The company he works for makes sulfur detectors and sells them to shipyards and other factories in China, and they need the expertise of an Old Asia Hand. We talked about it for a bit but then mostly just caught up and reminisced about random shit from our happy-go-lucky college days.

I had more stapling and folding to do, so I sat around doing just that. I listened to Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late album, its Rolling Stone Top 500 entry describes it as him moving away from sappy pop sounds and going “street” but it was still just a bunch of lazy trap beats like most of that newer hip-hop that doesn’t do much for me. The guy has bars though, and he drops N-bombs an awful lot for a white kid from Toronto. It was followed by an equally bland album by Aerosmith, then I listened to Clown World news. Some people in the UK and the USA lost their jobs and are even facing prison sentences for sharing dark humor about George Floyd or Greta on the internet. Sometimes I wonder who is living under an authoritarian dictatorship. Not that I’m willing to poke the bear though, and post spicy memes of Lei Feng or Xi Jinping. To my assigned CCP censor: the author of this journal abides by the rules and regulations of the People’s Republic of China. 富强、民主、文明、和谐，自由、平等、公正、法治，爱国、敬业、诚信、友善.

I had a double period with the twelfth-graders, and let them study while I wrote a travel story for my French-language blog, it is about a bicycle trip I took in rural Thailand twelve years ago. I ain’t getting younger. I brought my Beats headphones to the classroom as I knew there would be constant chattering, and listened to Blink-182’s Cheshire Cat and then the album 冷血动物 (Cold-Blooded Animal) by Xie Tianxiao. It’s an absolutely fantastic piece of Chinese rock n’ roll.

I rode home, and didn’t even put my coat on, as the midday weather was superb. The flowers in the trees are blossoming, making the scenery colorful and filling the air with fragrances.

Lunch was a grilled cheese sandwich (with hot sauces on the side), slices of salami, and a huge carrot chopped in sticks. I watched a video by The Amazing Atheist, he compared the left-wing and the right-wing view of freedom, elaborating on the many ways that the latter are in fact restricting individual freedom despite proclaiming to do the opposite. As a left-leaning person, I agreed with most of his points. The freedom that comes with having a smaller tax burden comes with a weaker or an absent social net. The freedom given to bosses are often at the detriment of the workers. Like he said, there’s no freedom, but rather there are freedoms. One part I didn’t agree with was about transgender athletes playing competitive sports as the gender they choose, it seems like such a no-brainer to me why this would lead and has already led to abuse. Also he used a pretty monodimensional political axis, ommitting to recognize authoritarian leftists (commies) and freedom-minded right-wingers (libertarians).

In the afternoon there was a practical exam, so I spent all of that time in the lab. It’s a lot of running around, because there’s always faulty apparatus, chemicals that run out, and also I had to go to an empty room and do the experiment myself in order to get data to compare with for the accuracy points. I didn’t see time go by, and hadn’t read the schedule carefully, so I was late for an invigilation period upstairs and the principal covered me. He was a bit mad and I apologized.

One of the people who run the main expat bar is Indonesian, and she posted in the bar’s WeChat group about ayam gorem (Indonesian chicken wings) being added to the menu. After getting home from work, the dog and I headed there. When I ride my longboard, he runs along and keeps his distance at the end of the leash, but sometimes he sees another dog and either runs towards or away from it, which can be a bit dangerous if I don’t see it coming. We were crusing in a small back alley when a stray dog came and aggressively barked, which got my little triangle-faced animal to throw himself in front of my board and I almost crashed.

We got to the deserted bar and the girlfriend was already there after driving directly from work, munching on her serving of poultry and rice. It was pretty good, and came with a sweet thick soy sauce and a fermented spicy paste. They were installing a Goose Island sign that they probably got for free in some kind of promotion, so I washed down my vittles with a cold Goose IPA.

I looked at my phone and a terrible surprise awaited me: there was an error in the goddamn driving school computer, and as it turns out I still need to clock 30 minutes in the system to complete my mandatory 38 hours. FUCK. I thought I was done with that dogshit. I pondered not replying or just telling them to fuck off, but it would only negatively affect myself and stall me in this inflexible bureaucratic system. So I rode my bike there, got driven to the boondocks, sat in the back of the car while another trainee clumsily drove around, and then went back to the city by taxi. I didn’t even touch the steering wheel, but the system must be fed. The taxi was at my expense of course, but it was only about 22 yuan, at least there’s that.

I was listening to the Chewjitsu podcast with Dean Lister on as a guest, the man is a grappling legend but his MMA career, although reaching the high levels, was middling, as he never really managed to get his striking together. It was an interesting conversation and he dropped a lot of wisdom. Then I listened to Shenjingcuoluan, the Chinese grindcore band. Their demo tracks are excellent, it’s a bit of a shame the sound quality isn’t top notch.

I detoured to a craft beer bar on the way home but they were closed, so I just went home. I opened one of my homemade spiced ales and tried to watch some YouTube videos, but the internet sucked donkey shit. I got pretty mad, and am not proud of it, it was very un-stoic of me. It’s not as if they were “important” videos, just some casual time-wasters about pro wrestling trivia. So I poured a glass of dark rum and went to watch The Office in bed with the significant other.