Chapter 125

I pressed snooze and was up at 6:20. I put on some classical music, made tea, and did yoga. My mood was great, looking forward to a day of doing mostly fuckall, well, nothing unpleasant or that I don’t want to do, at least.

I spent the whole morning writing my diary, until I caught up to the present day. I was initially toying with the idea of bringing my laptop on the trip but I much prefer to travel light, not deal with the possibility of having it stolen or damaged, and also I knew I’d be busy throughout the whole weekend and even on the plane, I’d rather be reading or sleeping. While I wrote, I listened to more of that Decibel livestream, it was good, but I cared mostly for the live performances, not the endless parade of ads and speeches.

I went home and did a calisthenics workout, which took me about 50 minutes. I listened to a podcast called Whispers From The Void, hosted by two friends. Well, I say friends, though I’ve never met them in real life and in fact they haven’t met each other yet, one living in Quebec and the other one in Massachusets, we all know each other virtually through a craft beer and metal online group. They had another friend on, discussing craft beer and metal and various projects, a lot of people start podcasts these days it seems. The video had like 15 views on it, who knows if one day they’ll get a bigger audience, but either way they’ve been regularly making one a week and having fun, worse comes to worse it’s just a nice conversation between friends. The same way I feel about my own writing projects, even if I don’t become famous, it is a worthwhile hobby.

After a quick cold shower, I ate R n S and watched Clown World news. Katelyn Jenner is thinking about running for governor of California, and some wokels are angry at her comments about transgender athletes having a massive advantage over biological girls, something I’d imagine she knows well, having been a male Olympic athlete in “a previous life”. There’s a lot of “no true Scotsman” comments whenever a person identified as a minority group goes against the far-left-wing narratives or doesn’t adhere to the stereotypes assigned to that minority group. Identity politics are very weird to me, and seemingly antithetical to he idea of “equal treatment for everyone” that I support and feel like is the way to go for a prosperous and happy society. But hey what do I know, I’m jUsT a ciSgEnDeR wHiTe mALe.

In the afternoon I listened to the album Monkey Barz by Sean Price, one of the all-time great hip-hop pieces, and then when I was in a classroom too far from the Wi-Fi router, I listened to some random hip-hop tracks I had saved on my hard drive. Then I saw a link posted by a friend with excellent musical taste to a new release by Body Void, an American doom metal band. It was crushingly superb.

I met the girlfriend and the dog at the park and we walked home. I took a nap for about an hour then went to the gym. All my BJJ buddies were busy but I didn’t feel like idling, it was either badminton or boxing, and I went for the latter, it had been a long time. I warmed up, hit the pads with a trainer, then sparred a bit in the ring. First I was against a coach, a long lanky guy with precise and quick punches that connected to my headgear quite a lot, and with his sanda background, he was using a lot of lateral movement more reminiscent of karate than boxing. Then a 50-year-old stocky delivery driver stepped in and we had a few nice exchanges, we agreed to go light and mostly stayed on that course, stepping back and even apologizing when a connection was made, and having good fun. Some gyms I went to in the past sparred really hard, and yeah it’s an integral part of boxing and can be quite exhilarating, but I have a day job and it’s not fun to go to work with a misaligned jaw, fucked up hands or even headaches.

I was in a great mood when I got home. I opened a triple IPA from Sierra Nevada, heated a pork pie that I ate with cold noodles, took a shower then watched a Dark Side Of The Ring episode. I love this documentary series about the tragic stories and characters of the pro wrestling industry, and now they just started the third season. This one was about Brian Pillman, a 90s wrestler I’d never heard of, he had a “loose cannon” personality, playing the WCW against the WWF during their ratings war and exposing industry secrets at a time where kayfabe was still mostly unbroken. The first episode ended abruptly, with a car accident, I’m very much looking forward to the next one, to see what happened.