Chapter 100

And we’re heading in the three figures! I knew it would be possible and perhaps even easy to not skip a single day and publish a journal entry every day, but when I self-imposed this exercise, I didn’t set a word minimum and now I’m pretty happy to see that nearly all of the chapters have exceeded 1000 words. There is a lot going on in my mind and in my at-times very mundane life, it seems.

I woke up at 8:30, and for some reason I craved khachapuri, the Georgian cheese-filled bread. I’ve made it at home a few times and it’s always a great success, so I prepared the dough, shredded and crumbled the cheese, flattened and rolled the whole thing together, and baked it. It’s a bit of work, and as much as I love cooking I’m not the biggest fan of kneading dough and having sticky hands, but the result was fantastic. I scrambled eggs with leftover tudousi potatoes, got slices of salami from the fridge, made giant gin-tonics, and we ate our brunch while watching The Office. The show (the American version) can feel like a pretty normal sitcom about the mundanity of white collar work and the awkward and at-times unpleasant relations among coworkers forced to interact though they have very little in common, but sometimes it goes pretty deep, and shows Michael as a character much more multi-layered that the goof he is initially portrayed as.

Today is also a brewing day: first I crushed the grains with an old-school cast iron mill, the kind with a hand-held crank. The apparatus is loud as hell, which annoyed the girlfriend trying to get some work done on her computer, but more importantly it meant I couldn’t put on anything on the TV that required attentive listening. I watched the boxing match from 1990 between Mike Tyson and Buster Douglas, Iron Mike’s first loss and one of the biggest upsets in the history of boxing.

I checked my e-mails, I got one from United Airlines. I’m a member of their points program so once in a blue moon I receive a newsletter. This one was about their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Ah. I’m glad I got this clarified, before today I thought they were focused on homogeneity, injustice and exclusion.

A lot of music got played in the abode throughout the afternoon, as I went through the process of brewing my beer. I went through six entries of the Top 500, and there was quite a bit of overlap, with two almost consecutive Bob Dylan albums and one by Roxy Music as well as a solo album by Brian Eno, a member of Roxy Music. The excellent Abraxas by Santana and a Bill Withers LP rounded up this succession of albums from the 70s (give or take a few years each side) before I felt like listening to metal, and had the green light now that the girlfriend left for the hairdresser. I browsed Facebook for recommendations, which led me to a great new release by a New Zealand death metal/d-beat band called Bridge Burner, and then Shora, a French band which started with chaotic hardcore and then drastically moved on to play ambient instrumental post-metal. I had to Google the name to confirm that it was indeed the same band.

One of the girlfriend’s former students, now a freshman in university, came to visit. She just finished her first year in university in London, and gave us both pocket watches. Very nice of her. She used to come over quite a bit last year, along with other students, to work on their final projects or just hang out. I can’t even begin to imagine inviting some of my own students to my home or even to socialize with them outside of a school organized activity, not that I dislike them, but I feel like some professional distance is pretty important. The girlfriend has a much closer relationship with her pupils, it seems.

After boiling the wort and adding hops, I took the pot to the sink and cooled it. I’m not very well-equiped for doing this, I have to constantly change the sink water as it warms, stir the wort, and use a handheld fan to blow the steam off the surface. Some nanobrewers have a badass setup with a coiled copper pipe they can run cold water through, in fact I have one of those but it does not fit my kitchen pipe, so I have to do it by hand. Then I siphoned it all to the disinfected fermentor and fit the airlock on top. Two weeks till bottling, and then another ten days before I can drink the fruit of my labor.

At night I went to BJJ practice, a good time was had by all. I rode back home, made some rice in the rice cooker, ate leftovers, drank a tasty black weizen, put my dirty rags in the washing machine, and had a Skype call with one of my good friends. He’s in Berlin now, stuck in his apartment, as most of Germany is under an endless lockdown. We discussed that, and then various aspects of the Clown World we live in, throwing handfuls of black pills at one another. That lasted about two hours, then I put my laudry to dry and crawled into bed.