Chapter 85

We had stayed awake past our usual bedtime the night before, so it was a bit harder to get out of bed. I thought about sleeping in a bit, but then remembered Jocko’s podcast about the Cheyenne dude, how he wrapped it up by talking about how those Native American rugged warrior cultures didn’t get eradicated in a single battle, but rather eroded over time, as the Indians became “soft” and succumbed to the allure of an easy life on the reservation. He equated it to one’s life, how you slowly start to slip away and forgo disciplined, healthy habits. Truly wise. His sidekick added that when you learn history in school, you can end up wondering what’s the point, until you figure out it’s not about names and dates, but about lessons that can be applied to real life, most of those lessons are collective but many are applicable to individuals too.

So I got up. The girlfriend soon followed, shuffling around, looking like she hadn’t slept for centuries.

“Have some of that black tea”, I told her.

“I don’t want tea. I want a vacation”

“We have a three-day weekend soon. But we’re going hiking! We’ll have to rest before and after that”

I did my tai chi session and went out with the dog. He ran after a cat. He’s about the same size as a normal adult cat, which means some of those felines don’t flee, they just round their back like a crossfitter attempting a deadlift and hiss, which prompts him to stop his frontal attack and attempt flankings until the cat just darts away. I wonder who would win if they actually fought.

I rode to work, listening to an episode of the Boyscast. The guest was Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert comics. I much prefer when Ryan Long does a solo podcast, but Adams was a very interesting conversationalist and dropped a lot of wisdom. The office was particularly noisy, so after fixing myself some pu-er tea, I listened to an album by Spirit Of Rebellion, a solid Quebec death metal band, while I counted piles of data booklets for the chemistry exam.

Aside from a half-hour block where I went to invigilate an econ exam, I did some grading while watching news videos on YouTube. One particularly harrowing one was a boots-on-the-ground report by Project Veritas at an overcrowded “migrant temporary detention center” in Texas. Apparently 100 000 people (!) crossed or attempted to cross the border illegally in only a month, emboldened by the soft rhetoric of President Biden, and huge numbers of them are piled up in those glass enclosures. Truly a tragedy, no matter how you feel about the whole thing politically (the Project Veritas video didn’t really take a position one way or another, just showed images). The one question that deserves to be asked though, how come the mainstream media doesn’t attack Biden on the issue like they did with Trumpy?

I went home and had lunch: pieces of cold chicken, a mango, a banana, and a handful of strawberries. Some people advise to not eat too much fruit, but I feel that’s a bit extreme. Refined sugars make me all twitchy and queasy, but if I don’t have a bit of carbohydrates in my diet I just feel empty all the time. My body responds well to real foods, which include a lot of fruit and vegetables and grain products. I ate while watching UFC promos for the upcoming massive event. My boner is at full mast for the heavyweight championship rematch between Stipe Miocic and Francis Ngannou. The only thing that sucks is that both of these men are extremely likeable, and one of them has to lose on Saturday. I also gave the dog a shower, he was starting to get all stinky. Let’s just say he’s not a big fan of bathing.

I got back to the office, put the finishing touches to my travel story and published it at https://quesstuvascrisserla.com/2021/03/26/issan1/. It talks about the time I had a flat tire during a bicycle trip in rural Thailand and the locals went out of their way to help me out of this bad predicament. I have about five millions stories of generosity, hospitality and friendy encounters during my travels around the world.

I was dreading the next entry in the Top 500 but told myself I’d have to listen to every album for at least a few tracks. When I was in high school, my friends and I were heavily into the punk rock and the nü metal that was popular among angsty teenagers at the turn of the millenium (it was either that, or bling era rap, with very little crossover except maybe Eminem, who was somehow loved by both camps). Later I branched into increasingly more extreme metal, but a lot of guys went the emo route and I didn’t care for that sound and aesthetic at all and still don’t. So I wasn’t looking forward the The Chemical Romance’s Black Parade. Well... it was pretty good. It sounded more mature than all the stuff that was playing in my friends’ cars in 2003, and the Queens-like opera track is definitely interesting even if it’s not something I want to listen all the time. But then I got some ear cleanser in the form of a band called Black Mass Pervertor, a friend sent me a link to their newer album and said “Hey do you remember the Finnish guy we met at a death metal show in Bangkok in 2010? Well that’s his band” It was really fucking good, some first-wave black metal with a thick punk layer, I had to check out their other stuff, starting with their 2020 release Lux Sodomiticum, and I liked it even more. Really evil! I’ll check the rest of their catalog and try to find the dude online so I can say hi.

I went home, took a nap, then rode my bicycle to the municipal gym, with Nasum blaring in my earbuds. I uploaded their discography in my mp3 player, but the little piece of shit has the tendency to play some albums not in the order intended, like it would play 1, 10, 11, 12...19, 2, 20, 21 and so forth. Very unpleasant. Human 2.0 was like that, but Inhale Exhale wasn’t, so that’s the one I played. Nasum is the greatest grindcore band ever in my book, every single thing they’ve ever done is stellar. I went to play badminton. What a beautiful sport! I played for an hour and a half with various partners, then I saw that in the badminton group chat one guy and his wife were at the craft beer place not far from my home. I joined them. That brewpub is very nice, all in (fake) brick and metal, with a small stage for live music, a mezzanine with a pool table, their homebrews on tap, and a selection of rare microbrews from all over China and the world. However, it’s always dead empty. The manager told me they’re closing soon, we can’t have nice things.

I opened a Gose Gone Wild, a sour from Stillwater Artisanal in Baltimore, and it was superb. The price tag was a bit hefty, but I don’t have this label in my now pretty extensive collection. I have over 1800 beer labels now and am constantly on the lookout for new ones, which can be a bit of an expensive hobby but a man gotta indulge.

My new pal is a lawyer, and told me a few years ago he was doing immigration paperwork for Chinese people emigrating to Canada. They pay absurd amounts of money. Makes me wonder about all the recently arrived Chinese who operate corner stores, they can’t have millions of yuan sitting around... I imagine there are a few different avenues, some take longer than others, and when you have embezzled a lot of public funds made a lot of money through illegal business ventures, you can throw cash around to get those “investor visas”.

I then had a pineapple IPA from some British brewery, and finished with a Vedett. They left, and I sat there nursing my white beer and a plate of fried chicken nibbles. I got a few beers to go, and when I went to pay, I saw that the lawyer dude had already paid for my first three beers. Awww.

I made it home, and was hungry, so I looked in the fridge and got an aluminium pack of Pakistani food. The label said “aloo matar”, but in Chinese it was a more direct “potato and chick pea curry”. I added a few chopped up peppers to the pan while it heated, and I munched on it with tortilla bread and a German beer while watching some UFC promos and history videos at low volume to not disturb the sleeping girlfriend. I also rewatched an episode of Love Death & Robots, the one with the farming colony getting invaded by insectoid aliens. That anthology series was pretty awesome, I should rewatch the whole thing eventually.