Chapter 87

Up at 8:30, all stiff and sore, my left biceps was particularly killing me after a grappling transition yesterday when I defended an armbar and it got turned into a compression sub that made me tap. Good times.

I turned on the UFC, in time for a prelim fight featuring Khabib Nurmagomedov’s cousin. He dominated his opponent.The Nurmagomedovs have several UFC fighters now even after Khabib’s retirement, what a clan, imagine one of their family gatherings. Alonzo Menifield quickly won with a quick OSP choke, Australian Jamie Mullarkey boganned out his opponent with a fast KO, Miranda Maverick (yes that’s her real name) won a back-and-forth flyweight fight, and then it was time for the big three. Sean O’Malley has a grating personality and lots of haters but there’s no denying the talent, as he pieced up Thomas Almeida with his sublime striking on route to a late KO. Almeida was once a highly regarded prospect but now this is his fourth loss in a row. Now we’ll get O’Malley douching it out for the next six months after beating another unranked fighter on the downwards slope.

Tyron Woodley also lost his fourth fight in a row, he who was seen as a dominant champion and possibly even surpassing GSP as the greatest welterweight ever. What a ruthless sport. Vicente Luque is a tough customer for sure, and after withstanding the early aggressive assault from Woodley, he outboxed the former champ and choked him out.

Then it was time for the heavyweight championship! The challenger: an ancient African god of war, unearthed and trained by an army of scientists and specialists in the same way the Russian guy was trained in Rocky 4. The incumbent: your friend's dad, who likes goofy jokes and baseball, has a bench press in his garage, and makes a mean barbecue. I’m a huge fan of both men, so it was a bit hard to know that one of them has to lose, but such is the nature of competition. Ngannou made proper adjustments since their first encounters, defending the takedowns and adopting a patient approach until he knocked the hell out of the Croatian-American fireman. What a scary man! With him at the top of the heavyweight heap, I don’t see a lot of people lining up to fight for the belt.

Two of the guys we play soccer with are coaching a middle school team, and we got invited to play with them. Since I wake up early during the week and our Wednesday games finish at 11 PM, I haven’t been going since the end of the holiday, so I was pretty happy with the invitation, seems like a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon. The school is pretty far in a satellite district of the city, 13 km away, I toyed with the idea of riding my bicycle there but ended up just sharing a taxi. We played all afternoon, two games against the middle schoolers and one game against a bunch of Korean engineers. The kids were really good, and kicked our asses in the first game but we managed to play to a 0-0 tie in the second one. The weather was superb, maybe a bit too hot even, it’s weird, not even that long ago we were playing on the indoor pitch and freezing our fingers off.

I made it back home, grabbed a beer from the fridge and took the dog out. We went on some kind of plaza in the middle of the apartment complex, where old people and families congregate, and I let the animal run around. He seemed to take a liking to a four-year-old girl who was carrying bananas, and chased her around a bit. She was giggling and leading him on, running in circles. Some Chinese adults are dead scared of him, even when he’s leashed, but some tiny children just say “gogo!” (dog!) and want to play. I give him some slack now that I know he doesn’t play aggressively with people and (most) other dogs, but still, I always keep an eye on him. I sat on a bench and drank my beer, a hibiscus and prickly pear ale called Guns n’ Rosé from Austin brewery Oskar Blues. Fancy. After all this running around in the sun, it got me a bit buzzed, and I sat there enjoying the serene environment, with the blossoming flower trees and the families taking a stroll before dinner.

I reheated the Japanese leftovers and opened a jumbo bottle of homebrew. I ate my victuals while watching a funny video about post-punk from PageFire, and then put on a few nostalgic music clips I randomly felt like watching. Spineshank, Exterio, Les Anticipateurs... I might or might not have been a little drunk at that point, and dancing in my living room.

With all that, it was a bit difficult to bring myself to grade the pile of grade 11 papers that have been watching me from the dinner table. Well I have to do it eventually, might as well do it now, I told myself. I put on the self-titled album by After Forever, a Dutch metal band fronted by a female singer with an operatic style, normally a metal subgenre I don’t give a shit for, but for whatever reason I really like that album. I followed it up with Tengger Cavalry, a Mongolian-themed metal band with a lot of folk instruments. I finished grading the sixty or so papers pretty much exactly as the album ended. Then I washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen with the next Top 500 entry, a 70s rock band called Big Star, who failed to make much of an impression one way or another. Then the girlfriend arrived home from her long day at work and we watched The Office before sleeping.