Chapter 127

I did my yoga, walked the dog, and went to work. I had a bit of pain in my right hip, one of the yoga positions put some stress on it and I wasn’t careful, not respecting my “edge”.

At the red light, there was a convoy of old people on bicycles, with tarps and other supplies in their baskets. I asked where they’re coming from, they said they’re going from Shanghai to Nanjing round-trip. That’s over 300 km one way, pretty impressive. I used to be, and still am on occasion a long-distance cyclist, I explored the region and other parts of China quite a lot back in my day. There’s something pretty awesome about setting off for a few days, shutting the world off and doing nothing but pedal forward, eat, sleep, and do it again the next day.

My old friend who went on the Whispers From The Void podcast mentioned that he doesn’t drive, which raised my eyebrow. Not having a driver’s license is pretty rare in the sprawling suburban city we’re from, with the long distances, shitty public transportation and an obnoxious car-heavy culture. I asked him why in a Facebook conversation, he said it’s because he has a crippling phobia of driving, something called amaxophobia. That got me thinking, why isn’t this more frequent? It’s a pretty damn rational phobia to have, with the 900-kilogram piles of metal moving at high speed and more often than not operated by morons. Yet, the majority of people just get behind the wheel and don’t think for more than a few seconds about how goddamn dangerous the road is.

I listened to a lot of music today. First, a crushing noisy slab of doom metal by Rorcal & Earthflesh that was so good I listened to it twice, then the album Ire Works by The Dillinger Escape Plan. For now I gave up on listening to every single album from The Rolling Stone’s Top 500, too many duds and overrated boomer dogshit made the experience more of a chore than an exercise in exploration, so I’ll go back to checking out newer releases and classics in genres I like. The Dillinger Escape Plan is a well-regarded band, seen as the pioneers of “mathcore”, a very chaotic and technical form of hardcore, some of the tracks on this album were very interesting but midway in the tracklist there was some sappy clean emo singing and I noped out of there. I then listened to Friction by Breach, a post-hardcore band that some of my friends adore but it just lacks a teeny bit of punch for me.

Another new release I clicked on was a self-titled EP by dissonant grindcore outfit Resin Tomb, which got my head bobbing. When I ran out of internet I played what I had saved on my hard drive: Cold-Blooded Animal by XTX, the self-titled Bleach album, and Dude Ranch by Blink-182. Now that’s an album I hadn’t heard and forever, and it’s some sweeeeet punk rock.

While all that music played, I was reading. I went through a whole 100-page PDF titled EasyPeasy, about porn addiction. I feel like that’s one of the biggest unaddressed problems that afflicts young people (well, young people in the first world) nowadays, but few talk about it, because nobody wants to admit being a compulsive wanker. I’m a bit ashamed to even talk about it and wouldn’t know where to start, I don’t think I was as negatively affected as some of the people who put on depressive stories online but for sure I was wondering what the fuck I was doing. I didn’t particularly like pornography, thought it was creepy and bizarre and exploitative and clearly harmful, wondered whether the mainstream push was organic or had some sinister intentions by very manipulative people behind it, and would go weeks without even thinking much about it. Yet, once in a while, I’d just feel compelled to fire up those weird tube sites and nearly immediately asked myself “Why the fuck am I here?!”

Even just willpower or distractions (this daily blog might or might not be a self-improvement measure to fight that insidious addiction) aren’t always enough, that shit rewires your brain in weird ways, as was stated in the e-book. In the last chapters, it suggests to look at it as a positive rather than a negative, like saying “I am a non-user” rather than “I am fighting the urge to use it”, if I understood well.

I also read an article my dad sent me, about the disastrous war in Afghanistan and how it was, by design, an endless one. US-led forces (and their allies, like all my fellow Canadian soldiers I knew back in the day who went there) would build a road, the road would get blown up by local tribesmen, then they would pay exorbitant costs to construction companies to rebuild it, which included mafia-style protection money to the local tribesmen, and that protection money would be used to buy more bombs and weapons. Rinse and repeat, and of course through the whole process tens of thousands of NATO soldiers die. It’s so fucking cartoonish, like a factory that spews pollution in the air but doesn’t produce anything and just fills the pockets of the cigar-smoking fat pigs who oversee the whole clown show. My dad also sent me a related parody article, titled “Taliban wonders who will inadvertently fund operations after US leaves”, which is lethally funny and accurate. It reminds me of another parody article from The Babylon Bee I saw a few days ago, “ Chinese Government Lays Off Entire Propaganda Team As American Media Doing Their Job For Them”

I went home at lunch, did a calisthenics workout, ate boiled chicken and went back to school to resume my reading. A few students came to ask questions and I was more than happy to help, but most of the time I was in my world.

I took a nap upon going home, then went to the gym. The Italian blue belt showed me a few sweeps from the bottom and then we rolled a few rounds. It had been almost 10 days without jiu-jitsu now and I was getting restless, now that is one thing worth getting addicted to! He asked me if I want to go have a beer after, I went home first to shower and change, stopping halfway at a Sichuan restaurant to order some spicy chicken. I paid and told the lady I’d be back half an hour later, which I did, on my skateboard with the dog running along. I went to the bar and had a few beers with my homies, devouring my pile of chicken.