Chapter 129

I woke up around 8:30. The girlfriend was leaving, she was going to Suzhou to sit a Chinese language exam. Obviously it’s her native language but so many people in China speak Mandarin with atrocious accents that to get a teacher’s certification or a lot of jobs related to public speaking, they need to pass those tests. Also, as my hellish driving course and my knowledge of the local education system shows, retarded and meaningless and convoluted exams are part and parcel of Chinese culture, and have been for millenia. Confucius himself had to pass extremely difficult tests to be a bean counter for some local chieftain up there in Shandong 2500 years ago, and from what I understand of the Taiping Rebellion, the guy failed the Qind Dynasty public servant exam so many times that he was driven to insanity, thought he was the brother of Jesus, and boom, 50 million peasants massacred each other.

So even though she speaks Chinese with an accent that is quite neutral to my ears, she was nervous. I wished her good luck.

On the front page of YouTube was a clip from Kamala Harris talking to the Mexican president, it had a 12:1 dislike-to-like ratio, quite the feat, even Justin Bieber videos don’t get anything that bad. She opened by greeting him with a painfully condescending “Hello! How... are... you?” the way you’d talk to a toddler or a senile elderly person (hmmm perhaps she’s getting used to it these days), throwing a few of her trademark cackles around, and then going on a tirade about how they must work together in this migrant crisis, Mexico being the USA’s closest neighbor. Hmmm, I’m not sure what Canada has to say about that. It seems like every Biden or Harris speech on YouTube gets downvoted to oblivion, sure, it might just mean that a bunch of angry conservatives or edgy teens brigade all the videos, but it’s not as if they’re not always on the front page of YouTube and that normies could “reestablish the balance” if they thought that the current presidential administration was doing a good job. Yet, the media is still trying to force-feed us the idea that they are the most popular administration ever.

I did yoga, walked the dog, wrote in my diary, did a good calisthenics workout, and ate a light but hopefully proteinated enough lunch of sausages and black cherries. I listened to hip-hop mixtapes, one by a trio called Little Brother I’d never heard of and was quite good, and one by Brother Ali, a talented rapper from Minnesota. I also put on an episode of the Chewjitsu podcast, their guest was a former soldier and cop, he had really interesting points of view, and finished listening to a Jocko Willink podcast, he read a letter written by a WW2 Australian soldier to his daughter and asked a difficult question: since war brings the absolute worst but also, perversely, some of the best out of mankind, can we access all this goodness without the traumatic and destructive pressure of war?

At around 2 I put on a suit and tie and rode to school for the graduation picture session. We had to wait an extra half hour for the photographers to be done with the junior students, and then got those pictures taken. It felt very disorganised, with a fat guy with leathery skin yelling instructions in a bullhorn at a deafening volume. Sitting in the front row with my fellow educators, his fucking bullhorn was often inches from my face as he yelled in it. With the 45-degree heat, there were about five million places I’d rather be at.

It lasted about an hour, then I went back home and kicked back. I opened a bottle of my homebrew, and it tasted OK, not more. My first three batches were legit delicious, but my fourth one was a bit of a failure, and this one is also not up to standard. Perhaps I’ve been cutting too many corners and chaboodwoing some steps I shouldn’t have, after all it does seem like an exact science, based on the discussions I see online by nanobrewers who meticulously catalog everything they do with near-autistic attention to details.

The girlfriend came back, she won’t know the results of her test until later. She proposed we go eat sushi, something we’d been postponing for a few days now. We walked there, letting the dog run around Commie Square, the plaza built by and for the local branch of the CCP. It’s easy to forget that China is a communist country, or rather easy to wonder what the hell it’s even supposed to mean, given that whole downtown areas look like giant shopping malls and that consoomerism is the religion devoutly followed by the average Zhou. But for sure there is centralization and collectivism and red banners with hammers and sickles out there reminding us of the Powers-That-Be.

We had a great meal with our usual favorites, washed down with Kirin beer, plum liqueur and sake. Then we met up with YRD Hash mis-management team members (an American-Belgian couple), visited two of the short-listed restaurants and decided on one of them, paying a deposit to book six tables. The four of us then went to the microbrewery trailer and ordered a mojito, a Long Island iced tea and two double-hopped IPAs and sat down, chatting about random stuff.

The girlfriend was a bit drunk on the way home, telling me anecdotes from her job that were a bit nonsensical to begin with and nearly unintelligible when she started laughing uncontrollably mid-sentence. Good fun.

I watched the last Wrestlemania match, a triple threat with Roman Reigns, Daniel Bryan and Edge. It was violent and fun.