Chapter 151

I woke up at 6 and did an hour of yoga. It felt amazing. I’m probably too pragmatic/cynical to appreciate all the spiritual practice within and pseudo-scientific stuff like “releasing toxins” but it does clear my mind and makes my body all supple.

I got to work and had three review classes in the morning, they went OK. During the long break I listened to an album by Excruciate666, a black metal band from France with a friend of mine behind the drumkit. I then put on a split by French grindcore bands Gummo and Insane Order. All three bands were good enough to keep my attention but none made me go “Holy shit, yes!” Out of all the music I listen to, some rises to the top, some sinks, and some just floats.

Not sure if it’s the pu-er tea I’d been drinking all morning, but I had a bad case of the shits. I had to rush to the toilet between two periods, and when I got home, I spent some time on the throne as well. I was not in a condition to exercise, so I postponed my calisthenics routine till the next day. Lunch was R n’ S, three boiled eggs and a juicy mango, that I ate watching videos about MMA and Clown World news. One piece caught my attention, about a university professor who told his students that a “filler word” (think “hummm” or “like” as in “you know, like, that guy, he, like, drank all the beer in the fridge!”) in Chinese is 那个, which sounds exactly like “nigga”. Merely for stating that most hilarious and awkward of facts, he got in trouble, the usual shitstorm of accusations of racism and of fostering an environment that is uncomfortable for BIPOCs.

I’m obviously aware of this comical particularity of the Chinese language and have been since literally day one, when I asked a kid on the college campus where the foreign language building is, and after a bit of hesitation and mild panic due to interacting with an overseas barbarian, he replied “Nigga... that way”. I was utterly confused and thought he had been watching too much MTV or whatever, until one colleague explained it to me. In fact I’m wondering how often it leads to utter awkwardness or even violent confrontations.

In the early afternoon I didn’t do much aside from browsing internet memes and listening to an album by Intonate, a Montreal technical death metal band that my friends just interviewed on their podcast. Tech death is a subgenre I find overall very uninteresting but I don’t hate it enough to want to turn it off when it plays in my speakers or headphones. Then I went to the chemistry lab, the practical exam was set to take place the next day and my Zimbabwean coworker and I prepped the rooms and discussed how we will do it. We have a lot of students, who do it in two sessions, so we have to make sure we can get everything ready quickly between the two sessions.

I went home and took a quick nap before heading to BJJ practice. There were four of us, so after warming up and doing a few drills from the De La Riva guard, we rolled for three rounds against one another, and a good time was had by all.

I rode back, opened a beer, showered, and cooked two steaks on the pan, that I ate with hash browns while watching a history documentary about Caesar’s civil war in Spain.

Chapter 150

I slept in, and had a very, very lazy day, eating leftovers, watching tons of TV. There’s a channel on YouTube about criminal psychology, the videos are very long and mostly consist of interrogation footage, but for some reason it’s very addictive and interesting and they all got millions of views. There was a new Dark Side Of The Ring out, about The Ultimate Warrior, I wasn’t around when he was big but I know a bit about his complicated legacy, it’s nice to hear it had somewhat of a happy ending, his early death aside.

The girlfriend and I also watched Love Death & Robots and The Office episodes, and at night I watched the movie Bad Santa, a dark comedy I had never heard of for some reason until it got mentioned in one of the criminal psychology videos as an example of an anti-hero. It was OK I guess, lots of raunchy humor and a scenario that intentionally doesn’t make much sense.

And that’s pretty much it. We didn’t cook, except to reheat leftovers. We only went outside for half an hour in the mid-afternoon, so that our dog could have a playdate with my friend’s dog, but we didn’t stay out very long, as it was hotter than balls. A truly lazy day, and there’s nothing wrong with having one of those occasionally.

Chapter 149

I was shacking in a hostel dorm and questioning my life choices. I clearly can afford a hotel room, but still pinched my pennies and went for this ghetto-ass option, on a shaky bunk bed with four Chinese roommates, one who snored, one whose morning breath filled the whole space, and one who slept through his alarm, to the point that I had to go shake him awake. “Sorry”, he muttered in English, all confused.

They all left early and I slept until 11. At least the room was well climatised (not too hot, not too cold), it cost me only 40 yuan, and when I book hostel beds, I know that they will let me in without fuss, unlike many of the budget hotels in China who enact racist policies and don’t let filthy overseas barbarians in.

I had ramen, fried chicken and a sparkling mango juice at a Japanese restaurant across the street, then drove across town to a jiu-jitsu gym. I thought I might as well maximize my time on this little trip, I contacted  their head coach a few days ago and he said I’m welcome to go to their Saturday afternoon class. I showed up an hour early, as they were having a kids’ class, so I sat there relaxing, stretching and watching 5-year-olds rolling around before the adults’ class started. We warmed up, did a few drills, and I rolled three six-minute rounds with some of the guys. I mostly got dominated, but at this point in my journey, the goal is not to be better than my opponent, but better than I was a few weeks ago. Everyone was welcoming and nice so I will return for sure, especially since the 100 yuan I paid is for two sessions.

I got back in the car, put the GPS on, and drove back home. I put on some albums I hadn’t listened to in a while and had forgotten how fucking good they are, first Dominion VIII by Grave, it doesn’t have the same cult classic aura as their first two (Into The Grave is my favorite death metal album) but it’s still an excellent piece of Stockholm death metal the way it’s meant to be played. When it finished I switched to Exodus’s Bonded By Blood, a masterpiece of 80s thrash, whose imperfections just make the whole thing more endearing and addictive. I made it to the apartment block just when the epic track Deliver Us To Evil was drawing to a close, and waited for the guitar solos to finish before turning the car off.

“What are we eating?” the girlfriend asked me, before I had even taken my shoes off. That’s a pretty important consideration, for the hedonistic gluttons that we are. She proposed we drive to Wuxi, an hour away, and eat at the Indian restaurant there.

“But I just drove 160 km this weekend!”

In the end, the appeal of all those fragrant curries was strong enough so I took a quick shower and we went back on the road, bringing the dog along. We have a car now, might as well use it. I put on the album Blood On The Tracks by Bob Dylan, which she calls perfect road trip music, and then some tracks by various Chinese-language artists. We talked about food, and all the stuff we’ll eat during our trip to western China during the summer. At some point she talked about Taiwan, and I said I thought the food in Taiwan was OK, but I much prefered Chinese food. She flicked me in the nuts.

“Ouch! What was that for?!”

“Taiwan IS in China!”

Oh yeah, right.

“One day we’ll go to Taiwan and eat boluofan, it will be haochi”

“You’ll have to bring your passport, and get a visa first”

“It’s not a visa, it’s a travel permit!”

“And everything will be in Taiwanese dollars, and your phone card won’t work, and you won’t be able to pay with WeChat”

“Cuba also has two types of money, remember?”

Sometimes I wonder if she’s trolling me. Same with nearly every Chinese person who talks to me about Taiwan. Soon we pulled in Wuxi’s downtown area, tried in vain to get a free parking spot, and eventually just went to an underground parking. Then we walked to the pedestrian zone with all the bars and restaurants, and I made a beeline for the beer fridge. The restaurant serves great Indian food but also doubles as a jazz bar with live music nights and has a fridge stocked with rare craft beers, I got a Belgian stout I’d never had before, which buzzed me quickly, clocking in at 9.5%, and then a NEIPA by Almanac in California, which was also quite strong. They were a bit expensive, but what the hell, I just received my juicy summer pay.

We sat outside and ordered various dishes. It was delicious and worth the long drive. Then we had a bit of a walk around the area and to the Buddhist temple across the river, before driving back. The girlfriend took the wheel, inebriated as I was, and an hour later we made it home.

Chapter 148

Up at 6, green tea, 45 minutes of yoga, quick bike ride to work. I had three classes with eleventh-graders: one with the strong class, two with the weak class. Ten more days until absolute freedom.

I got back home and did my calisthenics workout. I was all stiff at first but after a superset of pullups and squats I was all loose again. Then I showered and ate the leftover pasta, it wasn’t enough so I also heated a bit of fried rice. I watched the news, it’s been a year since George Floyd died and various city halls in the USA or even in the UK are commemorating the event with banners and fireworks and shit. It’s so strange. He wasn’t a good person at all, and now he’s treated like a saint, a martyr for the cause of fighting a systemic racism that is way overblown. And if you say “But you’re missing the point! He shouldn’t have died for the petty crime of using counterfeit money”, well, this is true, but should he be sanctified for dying in police custody? Again, it’s all so bizarre, but then again it pales in comparison to all the other bizarre shit going on in this world.

I went back to school and wrote my diary, I got carried away I guess and wrote 1700 words for yesterday’s entry. I listened to Brutal Truth’s Need To Control, I knew only the band’s classic Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses (and I love it) but I’d never heard the other albums, so might as well plunge in the discography. It was pretty good, some furious grindcore with doomy elements, and then I listened to the 1996 album Kill Trend Suicide and I didn’t like it quite as much, it was very noisy and chaotic, borrowing bits of free jazz or whatever you call it.

I got home, changed my clothes, packed a bag and got in the car. From ages 18 to 23, I drove a lot, splitting my time between the cities of Ottawa and Québec, 500 km apart, but then I moved to Asia and for over a decade I didn’t drive at all. Now, driving was part of my life again, as if it never left. I was getting reacquainted with the nice aspects like blasting the music I want from the speakers, the relative freedom, the general fun of driving, but also the stale boredom of doing long stretches of highway, the annoyance of being stuck in traffic, and having to find parking spots in crowded cities.

I drove to the city of Suzhou, about an hour and a half away, with the Friday afternoon traffic. I had uploaded some of the radio stations from the GTA games on my mp3 player, a great selection of various genres with hilarious interludes, that fit the vibe pretty well. I listened to K-Rose and Radio Los Santos from San Andreas, and Flash FM from Vice City.

I was lucky to find a free parking spot by the hostel, dropped my bag, and got on my way. I took the subway, which meant I had to fish out a dusty fayssah mursk out of my cargo shorts pockets, and get in a packed train with fellow plebs. I remember coming to Suzhou eight or nine years ago to visit a friend, they just had opened their first short subway line, now they have a whole system covering the entirety of the urban area, like in most sizeable Chinese cities. A few stations down, I started getting filled by crippling dread. I left my passport and the car keys in a locker at the hostel, and thought about how disastrous it would be to have them stolen. The odds of someone breaking in the locker are so slim they might be zero, and so are the odds of getting mugged or pickpocketed. The chances of drunkenly losing them are a little higher but still negligible, but either way, maybe I’m OCD, but when I have my passport on my I constantly touch my pocket to make sure it’s still there, and now I was overthinking the fuck out of it to the point of ruining what was supposed to be a relaxing night. The subway stopped at a station, I thought about it for a second and just hopped off and backtracked to the hostel. Sometimes I look at how paranoid and neurotic I can be and shake my head.

The show I was going to was scheduled to start at 8, and now it was past 7:30. I saved time by taking a taxi, which I should have done in the first place, it was only 16 yuan for a 5-kilometer ride. The venue was in an upscale-looking bar and restaurant district by the lake, and was positively packed, I was afraid I wouldn’t get tickets for a second, especially since all the people in front of me had pre-booked or were on a guestlist. But no, they had space, so I paid, got stamped, and let in just in time, as the first band of the night introduced themselves and started their intro. Pynchanerve is a local band (well, local as in four white dudes who live in Suzhou) playing a mixture of Black Sabbath-style sludge and other variations of rock and metal, and their set was pretty cool.

Then four bands followed, I’d seen all of them live once and they’d been great. Dog Släyer (with the obligatory superfluous umlaut) is a five-piece from Hangzhou playing some 70s NWOBHM stuff with great enthusiasm and stage presence, it’s nice to see that the old style is kept alive, especially by such youngsters. They wear their Judas Priest influences on their sleeves, even playing a cover of that legendary band.

Never Before came down from Beijing to crush us all with their heavy sludge/stoner metal, alternating between crushing parts, fast riffs that got the pit spinning, and long melancholic interludes. One of the best bands on the Chinese scene these days.

Loudspeaker came next, they might be my absolute favorite Chinese band, or in the top three at least. The power trio assaulted the crowd with a tight set of take-no-prisoners crust/grind, and I have nothing to say aside from it was fucking insane and I’m eagerly looking forward to see those guys again.

All the bands played sets of around 40 minutes, but it didn’t feel like the evening was dragging on and on. Between sets, I went to the Family Mart to get snacks or cans of beer, and talked with old pals and randos I’d just met. The last band was Chimera Cult (see Chapter 113), a great way to close out the night. The four previous bands had set the bar high and the crowd was getting thin but their Pantera-worshipping metal got the remaining hardcore souls satisfied. I talked to the guys before and they were seriously drunk, after a boozy bus ride from Shanghai, and in fact their frontman was stumbling around on stage but delivered pretty well. God bless heavy metal and the bands who put their blood and sweat and tears into putting on great shows for us.

Chapter 147

I woke up at 7:20, took a nasty shit, washed my ass crack, brushed my teeth, got dressed and rode to work. I put on an album by hip-hop group Onyx, it was really hardcore and full of shouted choruses, reminding me of Gravediggaz. The lyrics were 100% about murdering people, and again one could point out the slight irony of having me, a honest mid-thirties schoolteacher wearing business casual clothing and riding a bicycle through a quaint neighborhood on my way to my day job, bobbing my head to music made by violent thugs talking about committing violent acts. It made me think about what I said two days ago regarding how I hate drill rap culture, and why I don’t feel that way about Onyx and other old-school rappers, whose lyrics are also mostly about crimes they commit. Is it because it’s from the 90s and not current? Because they’re from New York rather than Chicago? Hmmm after a bit of reflexion I think it’s just because I enjoy east coast boom-bap musically, while drill rap just sounds like garbage to me. The beats are lame, there are no punchlines or intricate wordplay, it doesn’t have the smooth yet gritty vibe of 90s rap, and all they talk about is beefing with other cliques to the point of being stale and repetitive.  

I had first period with a grade-eleven class, covering a few multiple choice questions. Then I had a free morning, and caught the live Metal Minded podcast, the boys reviewed four new releases. A Japanese band named Anatomia got a very negative review, well, negative in the sense that they both admitted they feel nothing for the death-doom subgenre in question. I happen to be a big fan of death-doom so I was intrigued, and checked it out, it was pretty cool, some disturbingly low-pitched, cavernous and slow death metal. I’ll relisten for sure.

I also checked out an album by Lectern, an Italian death metal band I read about in an underground metal zine. It was awesome, with a sick groove that got me dancing on my office chair. Another one that will enter the rotation! Throughout the rest of the day I also listened to another brutal thrash metal compilation, this one focusing on the years 1985-1990, so it was even more raw.

I got home and ate reheated pasta, watching a documentary about Chicago’s crime epidemic that I had been queuing ever since I started reading about drill rap earlier this week. Black teenagers form small cliques and fight one another, a fixture of a lot of poor neighborhoods around the world, except that the stakes have been risen so high that they now just shoot their “opps” instead of fistfighting. One would be killed, then immediately his friends will look for retaliation, more often than not quickly get it after a day or two of stalking, and the cycle continues, constantly getting fed as increasingly younger kids join in. One older guy (well, he looks around 30, which in that crime-ridden shithole is the equivalent of being 115 years old in normal society) talked about how he can’t leave the area and feels trapped there, yet it’s so unsafe with all the stray bullets that when he goes on a date with a girl from the ‘hood, he goes “wheah’ why’ folks at” but he doesn’t feel comfortable there either because he gets judged by how he looks. Oh really? People don’t trust gang members who spent most of their life in jail for murder? Must be racism. I’m sure suburban middle-class white people feel totally comfortable around big drunk long-haired men wearing jackets with HELL’S ANGELS on them, as long as they’re white.

The British journalist overdubbed the conversation and said that “Kool-Aid” can’t go live elsewhere because of racism, even though Kool-Aid never implied so. So what is it now, black people are confined there like Palestinians in Gaza, and if they try to leave the perimeter they will be thrown back in?! And while I’m sure it’s more complicated and just getting the hell out of that area with a murder rate higher than pretty much everywhere that is not an actual war zone is not an easy option for many, well, why can’t that Kool-Aid guy take whatever meagre savings he’s got, move to a small city in Illinois with cheap rent, and get a job in a hardware store or a supermarket or whatever? Not as glorious as sligning crack on the corner, but it’s a living, and at least the risk of getting shot would be minimal. Maybe I just don’t understand. If he doesn’t want to leave, at least perhaps he should do something positive or downright noble, like that other older ex-gang member who works as a “violence interrupter”.

I then watched a short video by political commentator Styxhexenhammer666. I think he’s quite astute on many topics, but I disagree with many of his hard-line libertarian opinions, and also he really, really hates China. I like China, so that’s another thing that puts me at odds with some of his positions, especially since I’ve been living here forever and he’s a Tim Budong who thinks Hubei rhymes with Dubai and calls the Chinese president “Zheen-Pahng” as if it was his surname. Now he was saying that “Taiwan is a real country, but China isn’t” based on the fact that the Chinese Republican government still claims the mainland that they lost as fair and square as you can, over 70 years ago. What an idiotic take. You can criticize China and the CCP if you want, but that is just sore loser bullshit.

I went back to work early, to invigilate an exam. It was a physics lab exam, so the students were playing around with springs and weights and meter-long wooden rulers. One of the Chinese teachers looked at a ruler one student was using, laughed, and switched it to another one. Curious, I looked at the ruler to see why it had been ruled defective, and saw that the back was covered with vulgar graffiti. I couldn’t understand all the small handwritten Chinese characters and bizarre teenager slang, but one said “to watch videos of [one boy from Attitude Class] showering, go to the WeChat account [number]” and there were even more obscene things too. I shook my head in disapproval to hide the fact that I was in fact mildly amused.

I had a whole afternoon of fuckall, so I listened to a lot of music, read the news and browsed the internet reading about various topics of interest of mine like camping and minimalist/frugal lifestyle. I also wrote recommendation letters for students, probably the part of my job I dislike the most, but someone gotta do it and might as well do it now while I have a very light schedule.

I rode home, relaxed with a bowl of fried rice and a beer and bare-knuckle boxing fights on the TV. There is a new organization called BYB which for some reason holds its fights in a triangular ring, and of course it’s based in Florida. I like bare-knuckle and feel like it’s a legit, purist form of combat, but it’s still got a long way to go and many of the promotions feel gimmicky and money-grabbing, which is understandable to some extent, it’s a business after all, and not one where it’s easy to break even let alone make a profit.

The girlfriend was going to be off work at 20:30 and I looked for something to do in the meantime. The weather was nice, so I got my inflatable kayak and lugged it on my bicycle. My city is all criss-crossed by canals, the water is all brown and foul-smelling but I go paddle in there anyway, it’s relaxing and the views are seriously beautiful, with the parks, willow trees and downtown buildings. There are also a lot of large fishing birds nesting under the bridges, and when I’d slowly paddle by they’d be sneering at me or flying away angrily.

I got to a place with stairs that descend to a pier of some sort, where I inflated my raft and put it in the water. I paddled about a kilometer through a narrow canal that then widened near the big central shopping mall, and reached another pier, that is near a bar I sometimes go to. I disembarked, walked to the bar with the kayak on my shoulders, had a nice IPA, and then made my way back. There were loads of people enjoying the nice early evening weather, mostly old people in small groups, and I must have been quite a sight to them, some  waved at me or said hello. I couldn’t hear them, engrossed in the country music compilation I had just uploaded on my mp3 player, something I felt would fit the vibe of this little aquatic trip. On the way back, it was dark, the bridges and the walls of the canals were all lit in different colors. I didn’t take pictures, as I left my phone at home.

I got home, took a shower, making sure to thoroughly soap my whole body after getting splashed with all that sewage water. Then I rode the longboard with the dog to the girlfriend’s workplace. There was brief talk about going to get dinner somewhere but we just went home after a small detour to the convenience store. I made dark n’ stormy cocktails (ginger beer, lemon juice and dark rum) and we curled up on the couch, watching some episodes of Love Death And Robots and YouTube cooking shows. Binging With Babish showed how to make corndogs and it made me crave that most delicious of snacks, I’ll give it a try soon.

Chapter 146

Up at 6, bright eyed and bushy tailed. Big pot of green tea, 45 minutes of yoga, all that hippie shit. Then I made my way to the school, under light rain. Recently, the weather alternates between nice sunny days and pissy rain, on a day-to-day basis.

I sat around the office reading stuff on the internet and writing my diary. I checked out one of the bands I read about in the magazine yesterday, a very underground black metal outfit called Unholy War. Evil and uncompromising. Then I listened to the Lotus Eaters podcast, they talked about a British black supremacist getting shot (as a target or collateral casualty), the plans for a black supremacist nazbol commune in the mountains of Colorado falling apart, and internet censorship raising an interesting international issue, as you can end up with California-based tech companies interfering in politics in Poland, for instance. I didn’t know black supremacists were really relevant, all sorts of racial supremacists are pretty damn pathetic to me.

I rode home and did the recommended calisthenics routine. I listened to a compilation of early 90s death-thrash and brutal thrash metal that a friend shared on Facebook, some forgotten bands or bands who never really entered the collective memory of anyone but their local beer-guzzling friends with bare chests under their leather coats. Too bad, because that’s a really awesome sound. I finished my workout, took a cold shower, and ate a tomato sandwich, three hard-boiled eggs with hot sauce, and one mango.

I took the dog out, in the now heavy rain. I put on my raincoat but the water just trickled down to my lower legs, it really fucking sucked. After dropping off the animal and drying him a bit with a towel, I packed a dry pair of pants in a plastic bag and rode back to work. I listened to Suffocation’s live album, Suffocation is my favorite band of all time, they wrote the blueprint for catchy brutal death metal but nobody managed to write masterpieces of the genre of an equal level as Catatonia, Thrones Of Blood and Liege Of Inveracity, among many others. Those songs are just perfect.

I changed into my dry trousers and sat in the office for a bit. I had classes in the afternoon with eleventh-graders, reviewing some material for their final exams. It was weird to “work” after two weeks of doing very little but it was also quite enjoyable.

I went back home (in the pissing rain again), ate a protein pudding, took a nap, went to BJJ practice, sweated about three gallons, rode back. I drank a 1.5-liter plastic bottle of Russian beer to rehydrate, and made a giant pot of linguine with pesto, olives, hot peppers, mozzarella cheese, chopped up cold cuts and parsley. I ate while watching a history video about the battle of Agincourt in the Hundred Years War, goddamn the French are a frustrating country to root for!

I cleaned up and folded the laundry and felt like listening to some good hip-hop, so I put on videos by Cypress Hill, AOTP, Apathy & Celph-Titled and Inglorious Bastardz. Then I got to bed and read a bit, I’m on the third novel by J-P Baril-Guérard, about a tech start-up.

Chapter 145

I got up at 7:30. My disciplined habit of being up at 6 on weekdays is falling apart, I felt like I needed extra sleep after a double workout and also I don’t really need to slowly start my day when I’m doing a whole load of fuckall all morning anyway.

I had a nice surprise waiting for me in the office, the metal zines I had ordered were there. It took over two months for the snail mail to bring them over from France but I was glad they finally arrived. I’ll have some nice reading to do over the next months.

No classes, the twelfth-graders are gone. I listened to some good ol’ black metal in the office, an Icelandic band called Misþyrming and a French band called Regarde Les Hommes Tomber, before switching to the complex deathgrind of Yautja, a band I had never heard of before today. Then I watched a documentary about inbreeding in the British-Pakistani community, which made me furious. Those people are extremely overrepresented in the rare genetic diseases statistics despite their small percentage of the total population, due to a bunch of them marrying their cousins. Some would say that such a documentary is white supremacy fodder because right-wingers might cite those stats in their anti-mass-immigration rhetoric but the main journalist in there is Pakistani-British herself, the doctors present the facts with their common near-autistic detachment, and plenty of young Pakistani-British are interviewed and say how much they oppose the idea of marrying one’s cousin and how it’s backwards and forced. I’d say it’s pretty damn objectively disgusting. Some of the suffering that their children experience is truly sickening, and even more sickening is the mother blaming (in Urdu with subtitles though she’s been in Britain forever) hospitals and doctors rather than her own gross negligence and adherence to the most backwards of customs. Three of her children are blind and do nothing all day but moan in pain, this shit is the very definition of child abuse.

I then found myself on Reddit on a page called “Chiraqology”, chronicling and glorifying the insane gang violence taking place in Chicago. I clicked on links I maybe shouldn’t have, seeing videos of young men gunning one another. What a fucked up culture. It doesn’t even seem to have the “it’s only business” underlying theme of organized crime, it’s just black kids making shitty rap tracks and murdering “opps” for no reason than the thrill of killing, which leads to a neverending cycle of violence.

Midway through the morning there was an awards ceremony for a science poster contest. Two women came from the corporate office and handed out trophies and certificates to the students, one by one, and then they called all of them and the teachers for a group photo. None of the students stood up, they looked around with puzzled expressions on their faces, before the head teacher repeated in their language. I sometimes find myself thinking it’s condescending to repeat basic instructions in Chinese but no, a bunch of our students (especially in grade 10) can barely understand three words of English, and the Chinese staff will try their best-ah to ensure it remains that way, god forbid they get a functional command of the language before going to their American or British university.

I went home and made myself a tomato sandwich and boiled some eggs to get some of dat good protein to feed my huge bulging muscles. I watched a video titled 25 Most Stupid Moments In Game Of Thrones, and boy oh boy were there some gems of extraordinary retardation in the steaming piles of shit that are the latter seasons. Those two writers truly are absolute derps. I also saw that Dexter is going to have a reboot and I have to say I’m somewhat looking forward to it, I didn’t hate the latter seasons and the ending nearly as much as many fans did, and it was (by design or by accident) left open for a sequel at some point down the road. The one article I read talks about a true crime podcaster finding out he’s still alive and out there, I foresee something similar to Season 2, in which Dexter is the hunted more than the hunter.

I had a pretty bad headache, not sure why, maybe from staring at a computer screen for too long. I took the dog out and he ran after a striped cat, but the cat didn’t flee, he stood his ground and clawed aggressively. Our dog yelled “E!” and ran away. He was unscathed, or at least he didn’t bleed, hopefully he’ll learn.

I rode back to school, listening to the Jocko Willink podcast. He had one of his SEAL buddies on and they were reminiscing killing people in Iraq the same way I swap old party stories with my buddies. I saw that the line-up for the second edition of the Global Grindcore Alliance online fest is out, and Gride will be there, a Czech punk/grind band with an extensive catalog of short, fast, angry songs. I listened to one of their compilations and it was nice ear candy.

We had a meeting, the principal had updates about the holiday and Covid policies. The Powers-That-Be published a list of 14 blacklisted countries, if you go there your Chinese visa and residence permit will be immediately cancelled. Among them are South Africa, the UK and Canada. “Big lad countries!” my British coworker cheered. That’s weird, I thought they were in the process of deconfining. Also the mandatory quarantine just got upped to three weeks. Sounds like pure hell, I’ll stay in China, thanks. We also got told not to merely let the eleventh-graders self-study but to teach them review classes, which is something I was planning on doing anyway, starting tomorrow, as their last exams loom over the horizon.

Half of Attitude Class is not taking further maths so they went home already, I watched the remainder study for 45 minutes before going home. I ate fried chicken and drank a Duvel IPA while watching a Dark Side Of The Ring documentary about Collision In Korea, that one time in the mid-90s when WCW and Japanese wrestlers went to Pyongyang. I went to North Korea a few years ago and it was awesome, it truly felt like traveling back in time.

I had errands to run and the dog wanted to run around, so I went to the park with a camping chair, a beer and my Kindle. There was a young boy and his grandpa playing with a kite, and soon he started running after the dog too, who was a very receptive playmate. The kid was very curious and friendly and asked me a bunch of silly questions, a good time was had by all. The sun was slowly going down and a lot of people were outside enjoying the nice weather, families, senior citizens, dogs, and though I can’t really say I feel a sense of community (I’m atomized as fuck and don’t know the names of any of my neighbors except Qiuqiu, Pengpeng, Niuniu and all the other dogs) I at least feel like it’s a nice place to live, especially compared to murderous southside Chicago or inbred Birmingham, England or dystopian Pyongyang. My morning reading depressed me a lot, there is some ugliness in this world, but now after relaxing in the park and playing with that happy little kid and watching the people hanging out, I felt better. I bought laundry soap, peanuts and beer and walked home.

I still had a headache and felt a bit under the weather though, so I went to bed around 9, read a metal magazine and then fell asleep.

Chapter 144

I woke up at 6, and was still dead tired from all this sleeping. I drank a lot of water and put on a mixtape by The Roots, the great hip-hop band from Philadelphia, and then did a quick yoga routine to get the blood flowing.

I got to school, gave some assignments to the students, and sat at the front desk writing my diary and listening to music. The only albums worth listening I had on my hard drive were by Rorcal and Eyehategod, two bands I got into quite heavily in the last week or two. I also listened to the Lotus Eaters podcast, covering recent news, a lot of it was about a border crisis in Spain, with migrants rushing over the fence to enter the enclave of Ceuta, located on the African continent. Like the story of Francis Ngannou showed, it’s a very strange situation, because while illegally crossing into European Union territory is a crime, illegally being in the EU doesn’t seem to be treated as such. So border guards are constantly blocking those migrants from entering or even just throwing them back in the water, but as soon as they have a foot in they can claim asylum. It’s very weird to me, can you imagine any other crime being legislated like that? Stealing a hamburger from the buffet being subject to punishment, but sitting there holding and eating a very obviously stolen hamburger being fine?! And the whole issue raises questions about national sovereignty and the right to be on a foreign territory, as almost none of those migrants come from war-torn areas and can be called refugees, they’re nearly all men in their twenties looking for better economic opportunities, which is something we can empathize with but to what extent? For sure, the west is a pretty damn benevolent place, I’m not sure I want to know what happens to Burmese or Tadjikistan nationals who get caught crossing illegally into China, or Bolivians or Paraguayans staying without a visa in Brazil.

I got home and did a calisthenics workout. I was still a bit hazy and bloated and sore from the weekend but I gotta do what I gotta do, I want to get three good workouts in every week, plus BJJ and other accessory exercises. I was sweating profusely, and my sweat smelled like stale beer. Then I ate a giant bowl of R n’ S, with some of the fried chicken and other leftovers chopped up and mixed with rice, and took the dog out for a quick walk, as I didn’t do it in the morning.

I had no classes in the afternoon but had to be at work anyway. Sometimes I question my life as a salaried drone and tell myself how cool it would be to be a self-employed entrepreneur and not have to do useless things such as “being there because the boss said I have to” but I can’t say life sucks that hard, being fully paid to do very little could be much worse. A few years I tried my hand at freelance entrepreneurship and it was only a mixed success at best.

I looked at things to do, my last few review periods are prepared and I can’t write recommendation letters until I get the form from the students, so I just sat around and did some reading and writing. I played Commandos for a bit but then told myself it’s a bit much and could get in trouble if one fellow teacher snitches on me. I like to think I have a good relationship with my coworkers in my office but who knows if one or more of them is a two-faced snake who hates me?

Some twelfth-graders came to the office with a camera and asked me to say a few words for their graduation video. I briefly considered doing it in Chinese but swept that dumb idea aside, as it wouldn’t do anything but elicit racist chuckles. “Wa, it can speak our language!!!” So I just gave a quick generic speech in English, congratulating them for the hard work and wishing them well.

I got home, ate a protein slurry and slept for an hour before going to jiu-jitsu practice. There were five of us, plus a teenager (well, I say a teenager, but who knows, he could be 31 years old) who joined us. There was also a kickboxer who knew one of the blue belts, and he learned a few basic moves. I proposed we roll for a round and he said “Slow and light” but went all out like an absolute spaz anyway, like every newcomer on the mat (including me a few months ago, and I’m only a little removed from newcomer level). He was quite strong and looked to be in good shape but after 45 seconds of trying the most ineffective attacks and ending up in bottom side control with my fat torso pinning him down, he panicked and gave up. Both of them inquired about where to buy gis, hopefully they can come regularly, we’re in need of new bodies to roll with. I did two more rounds with blue belts, and would like to think I did well, I escaped and positioned myself in ways I couldn’t not long ago.

Tired as a motherfuck, I got home, showered, drank a Goose Island IPA and ate a steak with asparagus. I put on a mixtape I randomly clicked among all the hip-hop that YouTube sends my way, by a guy named Black Thought. Some great lyrical hip-hop, I can listen to that shit all day. The girlfriend came home from walking the dog with one of her friends who also has a little pooch, we went to bed and tried to watch an episode of Love Death And Robots but the sound was all crappy, so we watched The Office instead.

Chapter 143

I felt surprisingly good when I got up at 7, with less than five hours of sleep and a torrent of alcohol consumed the previous day. I stuck to beer and I paced myself (and by that I mean I drank from 10 AM to 2 AM but at a constant rate) and like I learned at Nash Hash, when I go on a multi-day binge I have more energy on the third day than on the second, as my body is turning into a hashing machine.

I was supposed to go mark the trail for the hangover run but it was raining buckets. I exchanged messages with my co-hare, already on the way. I was seriously considering canceling the whole thing and would have if it was an ordinary hash, but we had visitors and also people were slowly pouring in the WeChat group to confirm their attendance, rain or shine. So fuck it, I grabbed my balls, put on a raincoat and rode my bicycle to the meeting point.

Guitärded Spitler was there, his disgusting German bare feet in walking sandals, sitting under a tarp by a small convenience store. I cracked open a morning beer and we discussed logistics. We changed our original game plan, as the chalk marks were becoming all smudgy quickly and then disappearing in the rain, so it will have to be a live trail, walkers only. He’d stay with the group, and I’d set off a few minutes earlier, marking as I go.

He went to park his car at the end point and I went to the park to hide the supplies for the first beer stop. At 10:30, people started coming in, a surprisingly high turn-up of twenty or so. Some hashers from other cities had already left but the hardcores remained. A little after 11, I got on my way, leaving chalk marks leading to the first beer stop. My homebrewed Shitty Trail Amber Ale was served, alongside Snow lager chasers, and there were games of baijiu roulette: six shooters are lined up, five containing water, and one with foul cheap Chinese rotgut. I could have played a more cruel version (5x baijiu, 1x water) but I felt like this was enough.

I kept marking the trail, riding my bicycle ahead of the pack. It’s more fun to mark it ahead of time and do the trail at the same time as the hashers but sometimes you gotta adapt and overcome. It was a city hash, but I got them to walk along canals and through parks, pleasant places. I got told it was a bit too long, it would have been fine for a standalone hash but as a hangover hash following a big Saturday trail, maybe too much. I had to down a few cups as punishment once we made it to the comfy dry confines of the hash bar.

I planned the second beer stop to be under a bridge in a cute city park, so I went to buy beer at the only store nearby. It’s one of those shit-fucking Baixin convenience stores that look modern but are managed by imbeciles, and though there was plenty of space in the bottom shelf of their fridge, only a few cans of beer were cold, and they were those fancy-looking cans of Qingdao that cost four times the normal price but don’t taste that much better. So it was either pop our budget, or drink only disgusting piss-warm beer, and even if I do take those few cold cans it’s not enough. I didn’t even know how overpriced they were until I got to the counter and the lady charged me an absurd price, so I just walked out. I sincerely hope the cunts go out of business and get replaced by a Lawsons. So I changed the plan and had the BS2 a bit further, in a rather third-worldy neighborhood with only mom-n-pop stores but manned by people smart enough to stock their fridges with beer.

After that it was a beeline to the hash bar, where we had the final circle, ate pizza and played a few more drunken pranks on one another. I went to pee without closing the door, heard running footsteps behind me, and WHAM got hit with a whip. Crotch Cricket swung it upwards between my legs, and one of the leather straps hit me right on the tip. Fair enough, should have closed the door.

I said goodbye to everyone, went home, and took a hot bath. I sat in front of the TV but now the sleep deprivation, exercise and colossal beer consumption caught up with me, and I went to bed at 5 o’clock. I woke up at 10, the girlfriend was reading a book and eating fried chicken, she asked me if I want some. “No”, I replied, before drifting back to sleep.

Chapter 142

I put on my alarm for 8:10, but in my hungover stupor, I pressed Off instead of Snooze For Another Ten Minutes Pleez. When I opened my eyes again, it was 8:46, and I told my dad I’d be online at 8:30 for our Skype call. Oopsy. I apologized for my tardiness and we had a nice chat about life and finances and whatever.

The girlfriend, the dog and I walked the half-hour distance to the bar, which was packed with hashers in colorful breathable t-shirts. Most had a beer or bloody mary in hand, in many cases not their first one, though it was barely past 10 AM. We ordered cocktails and English breakfast and got ready for the beautiful day ahead.

The buses couldn’t come directly in front of the bar, located on a narrow one-way street, so we had to carry the dozens and dozens of beer crates around the corner. They couldn’t all fit in the luggage compartment, so we put some in the aisles, which could be a safety hazard but also means we have enough beer on hand for the one-hour ride to the trailhead. It passed by like a breeze, everyone had hilarious stories to share.

The trail was 18 km for runners and 8 km for walkers and started right at the Yangtze River before going into steep forested hills. One elderly uniformed shurgwaydinger tried to stop the dog from going on one of the paths but I gaijinsmashed my way through, like God intends us to do when a pesky shurgwaydinger tries to enforce such a nonsensical rule. The dog was having a jolly good time running around, we leashed him when we went through sections with a lot of people and carried him in our arms when a shurgwaydinger would be posted there sneering at us and looking to flex the little speck of authority he has.

There was a beer stop halfway, we reached into basins of icy water to retrieve cold bottles of Qingdao beer and enjoyed a break. There were also games involving riddles or bananas, to fit the “Kink-Oh De Mayo” theme.

The trail got us deeper in the woods, and we stumbled upon artillery pieces from WW2 and concrete tunnels leading to bunkers. The area is still a military zone and some hashers got told by soldiers to take a different path, but the people I was walking with didn’t experience that. At some point I got separated from the group, as the dog tried to make a detour to avoid going through a tunnel, and later I thought I got lost, unable to find any of the chalk marks. I thought I’d arrive at the ON IN late, but in fact got there a bit ahead of the pack and helped people unload the beer from the buses. Maybe I took an inadvertent shortcut.

The post-trail debriefing was done in a circle, and people who committed crimes (arriving late, wasting beer, marking a shitty trail) were punished by having to sit on blocks of ice or getting their asses whipped or both. Two hashers got baptized and were showered with beer. Then we got on the buses and went back to the city, where we had dinner in the restaurant we had booked. The food was generic eastern Chinese, not my favorite of all the Chinese cuisines but some dishes were excellent, and I gorged myself. Apparently some people bitched but I didn’t hear them not would have cared, sucks to be them, if they are picky eaters they should bring a packed lunch or shut their pie holes. At any rate it was pretty much the only restaurant that fit our criteria. Then we went to the bar for more drinking and games, but the enthusiasm and energy wasn’t quite as the night before, a lot of people were pretty tired from their day-drinking and hiking.

Some guys were going to the fight bar and I tagged along, as it was halfway home. We watched a few fights, the first one ended quickly, the guys were not wearing shin guards and one stocky muscular guy from Anhui province threw a combo ending with a vicious leg kick that floored his overmatched opponent. Ten minutes later he came out the back in his street clothes with his backpack, an easy paycheck. The next fight had a local guy in it and an American girl I know was rooting for him, as he is her personal trainer. He lost pretty badly but showed toughness, getting pieced up all the way to a third-round TKO in a rather sloppy affair. A guy with a guitar played a few songs to kill time and then there was another kickboxing fight of pretty high level, followed by a pro wrestling match. The “bad guy” was an Irish bloke and he came to high-five us at our table, getting some heat as the evil foreigner. The guys threw each other around, spilling out in the crowd and scaring some of the bar patrons under cheers from our table. The evil foreigner got the pin and asked for a chair, I gave him one over the cage wall and he stomped his downed opponent for a bit. It had been ages since I saw live pro wrestling and it was awesome.

Chapter 141

Wide awake before 5 AM, couldn’t drift back to sleep. So I just lied there enjoying the quietude and petting the dog and thinking about random things before starting my day. I walked outside, enjoying the small window of perfect weather we are blessed with for the time being before it starts getting damn hot and/or raining.

I listened to Rorcal’s crushing black/doom metal, Flatbush Zombies’ psychedelic-infused hip-hop and the Lotus Eaters podcast and their Clown World news while writing my diary. Some friends were having a little Zoom meeting and I joined, I thought I could be there for half an hour before having to babysit the eleventh-graders but then I went to their classroom and they were nowhere to be seen. So I kept shooting the shit with my friends, swapping stories of bodiy fluids.

I got home and did a calisthenics workout before eating a quick lunch of Italian cold cuts and a grilled cheese sandwich. I rode back to the office and looked for something to do, and ended up playing Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines for an hour before the game crashed. I went to supervise Attitude Class while they studied, but a math teacher offered to take those two periods so I went back to the office and did mostly nothing. What a productive day.

After a detour to the florist to buy the girlfriend a nice bouquet, I got home, changed my clothes, and rode the longboard with the dog to her workplace, arriving right as she was walking out. We got in the car, now equiped with a new sound system with an aux cord, so I could plug in my mp3 player and listen to Fonky Family’s Si Dieu Veut, a classic of old-school French hip-hop. We drove to the train station to pick up a friend who was coming to visit for the weekend. Along the way, I had to turn left at a green light and there were a bunch of cars coming from the opposite direction, so I put on my flasher and waited. Two cars lined up behind me and one of them just barreled through the intersection, almost clipping me and forcing the cars coming in to swerve around his piece-of-shit peasant van. I’m astonished at the level of entitlement, ineptitude and disregard for others that one must have to do something that fucking retarded.

We arrived just as my friend was walking out of the station, and drove back to town, catching up. We used to work in the same city, at different schools, and now he lives in Nanjing and works at a Canadian-run school that seemed like a nice place to work at on paper (I tried to get in at the same time he did but they asked for certifications I didn’t possess) but is a bit of a drama-filled nightmare these days, with lots of passive-aggressiveness and backstabbing. He has what he calls “golden handcuffs syndrome” and regrets signing up for another year, but with a young kid at home, sometimes you have to take the higher-paying option. He seemed happy to be going out of town and kick back a bit, his first vacation since 2019, after completing his master’s, having a kid, and also suffering a pretty gnarly accident playing soccer, fracturing bones in his face and requiring surgery.

We went to the Italian restaurant and had a great meal. I lined up the booze: a beer to quench my thirst, an amaro Montenegro as an aperitif, a glass of white wine with my spicy salami pizza, and limoncello for dessert. My dinner companions had the meat ravioli and a massive pork leg. Then we walked to the bar, stopping halfway at the hotel my homie had booked. He declined my offer to sleep on our couch, he felt like splurging so he looked up hotels with hot tubs so he could really relax.

This weekend is a big hash event, with 69 people signed up, some coming from faraway corners of China for what was initially supposed to be an eastern China regional hash, giving the whole thing a mini Nash Hash flavor. About a dozen of them were sitting outside, and more and more came through the evening. It was good fun and a “pre-lube” for tomorrow’s trail, the mis-management team had bought a lot of sex toys for drunken pranks and party games.

I left around 1 AM, stopping for KFC along the way. The retarded bloatware phone app they ask you to use for ordering was malfunctioning as it always fucking does, so I ordered my chicken wings and Portuguese egg tart at the counter, happy that the night manager was not a useless cunt and let me do it, sometimes they just say “Scan the QR code and use the app” even though they’re right there, giving us another proof that the purpose of technology is not to make our lives better.

I got home, showered, ate my chicken with a Belgian raspberry beer while watching a documentary about wars between early Romans and Celts on YouTube and fell asleep halfway, so I dragged myself to bed.

Chapter 140

I woke up at 7 and walked the dog. Then I rode to work, listening to Jocko Willink’s podcast. He had a guest on named Colonel Bill Reeder, a helicopter pilot from the Vietnam War who got shot down and held in captivity. Pretty humbling and scary stuff.

I got to the office and sat at my computer. A friend sent me a link to a side-to-side comparison of military recruitment videos: the Russian one was a gritty clip of a hard-looking young man waking up at the crack of dawn in his bunk and putting his uniform on, the Chinese one was a montage of huge numbers of soldiers on parade, explosions, fighter jets and Xi Jinping shaking hands with officers on a battlecruiser, and then the American one was a colorful cute cartoon narrated by a girl saying she has two lesbian parents and then it cuts to a real-life version of her in uniform. I won’t read too much into it, but let’s admit that the contrast is quite hilarious.

I listened to the Metal Minded podcast, shitposting in the chat with the other guys listening live. I listened to two of the albums they were reviewing and they were OK, but not more than that. Halfway through, I had to go take a shit. Like everyone, I dislike having to shit at work, especially since the toilets here are just holes in the ground and it takes a bit of muscular effort to hold the squat position, as opposed to a relaxing shit on my own toilet at home. Still, when it comes to public washrooms, I’d rather have the hole in the ground than a seat where others had been sitting before.

I listened to the Finnish death metal album by Convulse again, then felt like listening to Natural Born Killaz by Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, after learning about the death of extreme wrestler New Jack. I kept listening to more hip-hop after that, the next recommended link on YouTube was East Coast (Remix) by A$ap Ferg, that starts with one of my all-time favorite verses by Busta Rhymes. The man has got an inconsistent discography and plenty of bland tracks, but when he’s on, his flow is unparalleled. Then I put on some Flatbush Zombies, a trio of eccentric rappers from New York, one of my favorite modern hip-hop artists.

I got home, ate R n’ S and watched some stupid videos on YouTube but had to cut my lunch break short, as I had to go invigilate an exam. 170 eleventh-graders were bunched up outside, waiting to be let in. The principal told me to go in the room and make sure the students don’t talk, but this is like trying to stop a waterfall with a shovel. It’s in their nature, birds fly, trees grow towards their light source, and Chinese people make noise. The exam was held in the dining hall again, and though the tables had been wiped, they all had a thin film of greasy water on them. Students called me over.

“Tissue”, one said.

“Can you make sentences?”

I know it’s not necessary and borderline infantilizing, but c’mon now. That’s the whole point, she’s almost an adult, that’s not how you communicate, especially not with a person in a position of authority. At the price of a seemingly extreme effort, she did produce a complete question, though she seemed to have forgotten the word “table” for a second. Yet she’s about to sit a physics exam in English, in a curriculum that only advanced British students undertake (and she’ll probably do well). My life is so weird sometimes. I went to get a box of tissues and walked through the aisles so they could all get one and wipe their greasy-ass tables.

I had no classes in the afternoon, and barely anything to do. I browsed the internet a bit, and feeling drowsy, I took a nap in an empty room that has couches in it. I woke up a bit later, no idea how long I was out, my phone was on the charger. Two coworkers, a Croatian and an Australian, were chatting in the hallway, I joined them and had a chat about various topics to pass the time. So yeah, not a very hard day, can’t complain.

The big hash weekend is just around the corner so I went to the print shop to get beer labels and do some reconnaissance for the Sunday trail. I spent about two hours doing that, marking with chalk, though I’ll have to do it again on Sunday morning. When I ran out of chalk, I went home. Only when I was settled on the couch with a beer and my bowl of R n’ S did I realize I forgot to go to the florist. The girlfriend had been sending me pictures of the flowers her friends got from their husbands, as today is May 5^th, which reads as wu er ling in Chinese, and because it vaguely, vaguely sounds like wo ai ni (I love you), it’s a Valentine’s Day of sorts, one of the several they have every year. I’ll try to remember to go buy a bouquet tomorrow.

Chapter 139

I woke up at 6 on the dot and put some classical music on. Mahler I think, I usually just open a huge folder I downloaded and choose a compositer at random. I started my day slowly, made some tea, did a quick 15-minute yoga session and went to work.

I don’t remember doing anything. The students were gone to an exam so I sat in the office and listened to some good ol’ death metal. Connaisseurs of the genre (no, I’m not going to fucken spell it connoisseur, I’m not retorded) know about the signature sounds from the early 90s, back when regional bands influenced one another much more than nowadays and there was much slower spreading of ideas: the Stockholm sound, the Long Island sound, the Florida sound, to name the most important and influential. But there was also a Finnish scene, with a very distinctive vibe and aesthetics, including a lot of doom elements into their molasses-heavy death metal, and for some reason these great bands made a much smaller splash and are underappreciated nowadays. A friend posted a link to one album from that era, World Without God by Convulse, and it was superb. I then blind-clicked on an album by Purtenance, who also turned out to be a Finnish band from the 90s, and it was a much more chaotic and lofi affair but very enjoyable, it’s DEATH metal we’re talking about here. I rounded up a great session of dissonant aggressive music with an EP and a LP by Cruciamentum, British band that plays some old-school shit despite being formed in 2007.

I had a 40-minute invigilation shift, in the middle of a two-hour math exam. I walked around, peeking at the problems the students were working on. It might as well have been ancient Armenian. I did all that shit 15 or 20 years ago, trigonometry, calculus, statistics, and managed decently enough, now the only math I can do is simple algebra.

I got home, reheated some R n’ S, topped it with two fried eggs, and ate while watching the second part of the documentary about Mike Perry, the rather unstable UFC fighter. As a fan of combat sports, you have to contend with the ethical dilemma of admiring athletes who can be deep down violent thugs and not very good people, and also, while the disciplined and brutally humbling nature of the sport can be a great way for them to release their violent impulses in a productive (or at least, not destructive) way, there’s also the not-yet-fully-understood issue of brain damage and how it can make it worst. At times it feels it’s not a question of if, but when, a Chris Benoit incident would plunge the UFC into a PR nightmare.

I hadn’t taken the dog out in the morning, so I took him for a stroll before going back to work. Again, I sat around reading and writing and listening to music, there were two new black metal releases by Wormlight and Seth that were OK but nothing terribly memorable. I read the 90s underground magazine Answer Me!, there were interviews with people from all over the spectrum of the seedy underbelly of society and culture: a KKK member turned politician (the name, David Duke, vaguely rang a bell, I looked him up, he’s still active today), a porn magazine editorialist, the Geto Boys, a completely off-the-rails metal musician named El Duce, frontman of The Mentors. I looked up their music, it got a cult status apparently but I’d never heard of them. I found it to be OK, some sleazy 80s rock with lyrics that must have been shocking then but I heard way worse since.

I was so bored I looked desperately for ways to busy myself, and ended up cleaning my USB key and the folders on my hard drive where I keep my teaching materials. Once in a while it’s a good idea to do this, and to make back-ups.

I got home, took a quick nap and went to practice BJJ. I’m about evenly matched with the British white belt, or at least once in a while I manage to capitalize on one of his mistakes. In a weird spazzy clumsy white belt scramble, I sank a d’arce choke, not sure if it was technically sound but it did the trick and he tapped. Between two 5-minute rounds, one of the kickboxing coaches summoned me to the boss’s office, it felt ominous, like being called to see the principal as a school kid. He invited me to sit across from his beautifully carved tea table, offered me a cigarette, and asked if I have time in the evenings to teach English to his friend’s child. A pretty common thing to be asked as a resident laowai, plenty have little side hustles like that and it can get pretty lucrative, but I’m not that interested, money is plentiful these days and I like my free time. Plus, it’s illegal, which is the reason I gave him for politely declining. In the past it felt like it was way more of a “don’t ask don’t tell” situation, but recently there has been crackdowns on out-of-contract employment and I know more than a few guys who spent a few days in jail as a result.

When I went back on the mat, the guys (and girls) were done, sitting around eating pineapple and honeydew melon slices. I had one or two more rounds left in me but that’s fine, it was a good session.

I rode home in shitty heavy rain, thankfully it was only a 10-minute ride. I cracked open a beer, showered, threw my rags in the laundry and ate a big dinner while watching a documentary on the 30 Years War, that was a particularly brutal one and I’m still slowly wrapping my mind around that complicated conflict.

Chapter 138

I had a weird dream last night. I was at the XXL magazine’s Freshman Cypher, a yearly event that showcases emerging rappers, in a circle with black guys sipping cough syrup from styrofoam cups and taking turns freestyling on the microphone. Then when it was my turn I just tried to rap a few crappy rhymes and throw ad libs, but failed miserably as I’m, well, not a rapper. My recollection of the dream is patchy, I don’t remember the crowd’s reaction but it cut at some point to music critic Anthony Fantano disdainfully reviewing my performance. I struggle with inadequacy complex and impostor syndrome at times, I feel like that was the underlying theme of that dream.

I walked the dog and did a bit of tai chi in the square. I still felt a bit under the weather, recovering from that nasty cold, but was getting much better. Then I rode to work.

To make up for the classes I lost on my sick day, I asked the teachers who were scheduled for the first two periods if I could have their classes and do a review for the lab exam that was to take place in the afternoon. I walked in there, and 80% of the students were dead asleep. If it were just a few, I’d have shaken them awake and started my lesson, but that many?! I don’t want to have to deal with their little grumpy faces as they sneer at me for daring to disturb them, so I sat at the front desk and answered questions from those who had any.

I had a bit of free time in the office, and read the news. Quebec City, like most horizontally built American cities, is clogged with traffic and there has been talks about building a new highway linking its southern suburb across the river to the main part of the city. Of course a lot of people are mad at the plan proposed by provincial and municipal politicians, which lines up to be a financial disaster that would just increase the amounts of traffic, while the city’s public transit links are pitiful. While I perused angry comments on the internet, I listened to an album by Eyehategod, a New Orleans sludge metal band with a sound I can only describe as dirty, and in an awesome way.

One student from a grade 11 class I don’t teach came to talk to me. He is selling his PS4, and heard from a coworker that I might want it. I’m semi-thinking about it, but I don’t like video games that much nor do I feel it would be a good idea to push myself to play more of them, there’s so many more productive things I could rather be doing. The only game I’m really interested in is Red Dead Redemption 2.

I didn’t have a lunch break to speak of; the chemistry lab exam took all afternoon, in two batches of two hours with a break in the middle for the lab technician to refill the chemicals. I had to check the apparatus with the students, replace broken or missing bits, ensure the environment was safe, and also I had to go to another room and do the experiment myself to have quantitative data to send Cambridge. It was a bit of a stressful shit-show, but we managed. In the break between the two I managed to go home and get some food to bring back to the school, that I quickly ate. Blueberries, litchis, and a protein bar.

I got home later than usual, and did a calisthenics workout. I considered resting, as I was a bit weak from the cold, but knew I could push through it and it would make me feel better. The girlfriend and I then went to a restaurant in the neighborhood that serves Hunanese cuisine, one of my favorites. They use a lot of pickled hot peppers, giving it a suanla (sour n’ spicy) profile. We had pig feet, beef covered with cilantro twigs and three kinds of peppers, green beans and shredded potatoes, and they had German wheat beer in the fridge for some cool reason.

We got home and I talked to my cousin on Zoom. He and his girlfriend bought a van and built it into a home, all with wooden panelling, a wooden stove and a self-sufficient electric system with solar panels. A few months ago the whole van was gutted, it’s the first time I was seeing the finished product. They did some absolutely awesome work!

I went to bed and read a few chapters from another novel by J-P Baril-Guérard, called Sports Et Divertissement. Just like the law student in Royal, the young actress who acts as the protagonist and narrator is sheltered and uppity, and you never quite know if you should envy her status and hedonistic lifestyle or pity her as the heartrendingly pathetic mess that she is. Great stuff. Saying I don’t have my finger on the pulse of modern Quebec literature would be the understatement of the century but I’m glad I stumbled upon this young author.

Chapter 137

Even after 9 hours of sleep, I still felt like chewed dogshit. I called in sick, something I don’t often do, I spent a few of my working years not calling in sick even once but sometimes you have to do what you have to do. I drank hot water, took some medicine and drifted back to sleep.

I got up mid-morning, drank a lot of hot green tea, and did 75 minutes of yoga. My energy levels are too low to do anything taxing physically, but I thought yoga would make me feel better and it did. Then I watched the UFC prelims and ate leftover R n’ S. I read a bit, wrote a bit, lied down on the bed with the dog, and listened to some good new death metal releases by Chasmdweller, Apraxic and Replicant. In the late afternoon I walked to the park with a camping chair slung on my back and my Kindle in my pocket, to get a bit of fresh air and sunshine and to let the dog run around a bit.

I went to bed early, before the girlfriend came back from her extended work day. Not the most eventful day ever but hey.

Chapter 136

I got up around 9, with a nasty cold. The 180% humidity level and constant switch between maple syrupy thick hot air and air conditioned spaces does that to me. Godfuckingdamnit.

I popped some Chinese medicine, drank hot water with lemon, picked up the wadded tissues by the bed, and dragged myself to the living room. I turned on the UFC just as the main card started. Edson Barboza and Shane Burgos had a banger of a fight that ended in a strange delayed reaction KO to open up the festivities, Katelyn Chookagian narrowly beat Viviane Araújo in a fight that doesn’t mean much since the champ of the women’s flyweight division is basically invincible, then two flyweight men got at it in a fast but slightly underwhelming fight, and just like that it was time for the co-main. Not even that long ago Tony Ferguson was one of the most feared men in the sport, with an unorthodox and relentless attack that got him 12 wins in a row, but now he’s been thoroughly dominated in his last three, sure it was against top-level competition but he had absolutely nothing for them except his extreme toughness, and even that turned out to be a negative, as he refused to tap to two deep submissions that damaged his joints perhaps irreparably. His weird personality is less endearing now that he’s losing, and he seems more like an unstable schizophrenic maniac than an eccentric wacko. He’s also 37 years old now, let’s just hope that his decline won’t be as steep as some of the other greats who fell off a cliff after they couldn’t compete with the top guys.

It was a hash day, and though I felt much better after drinking tea and eating cereal and stretching a bit, I considered staying home to nurse my cold. In the end I said fuck it, a bit of exercise will feel good, so I put on my windbreaker jacket and off I went. The start point was close to my house, so the dog and I walked there, it started drizzling and then raining at a decent rate. Stupid weather forecast said it would be cloudy and dreary, but no rain until the evening. It stopped not long after, and we did the trail, in the city’s parks and small streets. At the end one of the hares got baptized with a beer shower. Good times.

I made it home, took a shower and gave one to the dog who was half mud, half animal at that point, and watched the UFC main event. If you told me a few years ago that Charles Oliveira would become the lightweight champion, I would have told you to get the hell outta there. He was a win some, lose some featherweight journeyman with a dangerous submission game but lots of weaknesses, and wasn’t especially popular due to several weight misses and just being another random Brazilian who doesn’t speak English. Now he rounded up his game, amassed a serious win streak (in the most dangerous division in the UFC) and KOed Michael Chandler in the second round to claim the title. Good for him! Let’s see how long he can keep it, with the line-up of killers in front of him.

I made a roast chicken, shoving the... ahem, cavity with carrots, garlic and lemongrass, rubbing salt and pepper all over, and putting little nuggets of butter between the skin and meat. It was decadent and delicious, and paired really well with the leftover Thai soup. We watched an episode of Love Death And Robots, an anthology animated series that just released its second season. It was about a utopian futuristic world in which robots take care of all mundane tasks, but of course the vacuum cleaner robot went haywire and tried to kill an old lady and her poodle.

I went to bed at 8:30, and was asleep by 9. I finished the book Royal, by J-P Baril-Guérard. It really reminded of Bret Easton Ellis with his portrayal of an insufferable twatty daddy’s boy with an enormous superiority complex, navigating the ultra-competitive world that is law school. His high intelligence and sheltered rich upbringing didn’t prepare him for failure, and he falls deep into depression when he didn’t get the grades he expected, spiraling out of control but eventually emerging on top. The novel is written in modern Quebec French slang and uses the second person for narration, which makes it quite unlike a lot of novels I read recently. I’ll check out the other novels from this young author.