Chapter 132

I woke up at 7. My alarm rang at 5:48 but I was too damn tired and decided that some sleep was a better use of my time than the mindless web browsing I usually do before yoga or tai chi, while the tea is brewing. Also I do my share of mindless web browsing throughout the day, so it’s not like when I’m actually teaching a lot of classes and want a slow relaxing start to my day.

I still had enough time to go on a leisurely stroll with the dog and do tai chi in the square. He was sitting by my side, but now he has a bad habit of running towards strangers. He doesn’t lash at them or even bark, he just wants to play, but while this amuses the grey-haired laoyeyes who giggle and shoo him away, it traumatizes small children. I have to keep an eye on him.

I rode to school and went straight to the cafeteria, where the students had a math exam. They were hanging out in front of the building, I got the seating plan and called them so they’d line up in order. Some students from classes I don’t teach were laughing at my prononciation of their names, hey assholes, I don’t laugh at you when you can’t put more than three mangled Chinglish words in a row even though you’ve been learning English since kindergarden. I didn’t feel like calling them out on this beautiful morning though so I let it slide.

We had to wait a few minutes before starting the exam, because the kitchen staff were having a meeting. About thirty cooks and dishwashers were lined up in two ranks, all dressed up in blue scrubs, hairnets and rubber boots, and the manager was giving them instructions for today’s work. I worked in a cafeteria on a military base back when I was a youngster, so this triggered some memories, mostly positive ones, that shit was fun, the work was hard and thankless but the camaraderie in the kitchen was nice, with tons of extremely vulgar jokes constantly thrown around. I wonder if they also use that kind of no-nonsense crude language, like “Hey Xiao Wang, I know you’re a migrant worker from Chongqing so you probably got huajiao in your ears, but didn’t you hear the runner just now? If you don’t bring that tray of banmian to counter 6, the sous-chef will stuck that broomstick up your ass faster than you can say Xi Jinping wan sui, and he’ll turn you into a shabichuanr” “Give me a second, you Zhejiang lisping faggot, if you brought that sliced garlic earlier instead of dafeijiing at your prep station, I’d be done by now”

I don’t know how much they’re paid exactly, but I’d estimate about twelve times less than I am, for long shifts of constant manual work in a steamy, high-pressure environment, while I’m doing mostly fuckall these days. I can’t say I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and didn’t put on some work to get where I am, but for sure there is some kind of privilege involved, being born middle-class in Quebec and being born working-class in China isn’t the same deck of cards.

I went to the office and worked on some review materials for a bit, listening to music. The internet was intermittent and I had to play that heinous game of “VPN musical chair”, constantly changing servers and hoping to stay connected for more than a few minutes. When it sucked too hard, I put on the Rorcal & Earthflesh album I had downloaded for the fifth time in as many days, and then I checked out two other albums from Rorcal. Világvége and Muladona were in in a similar crushing doom metal vein, without the noise and with more black metal elements, excellent shit, this Swiss band will enter my regular rotation and stay there for a while.

I got home, played with the dog, reheated the cabbage stir fry and fish slab and watched random YouTube videos from my feed. There was one by Internet Comment Etiquette, one of the funniest channels out there, recommended if you like absurdist vulgar humor and internet culture.

In the afternoon I brought my external hard drive and cord to connect my mp3 player to the computer. I flushed all the music, it was getting a bit stale, and I uploaded some new albums and podcasts in, bit by bit, throughout the afternoon. In my death metal folder, I stumbled upon an album by Defeated Sanity, a German brutal death metal band, and it was candy for my ears, a lot of bands in this genre sound generic as hell but Defeated Sanity is among the elite. I browsed online for more music like the insatiable beast I am, after reading my negative comments of the Dillinger Escape Plan album I listened to an older one titled Calculating Infinity, on some friends’ recommendations. It was much better, and there were no whiny emo vocals. I rounded it up with a spin of the new Abominable Putridity album.

I babysat a group of twelfth-graders for a while. They were bunched up in front of a laptop computer, one boy was sitting on a classmate’s lap, their arms interlaced, and the guy sitting on the adjacent chair had his legs on top of theirs. I’ve been in China since forever and am still puzzled by how they don’t see anything gay about that.

I got home, ate a protein slurry, slept for one hour and headed to the gym. I made sure to buy a sports drink and even added two pinches of salt in it, to avoid crashing in hyposodium shock like I did Monday, though it wasn’t nearly as hot. I had much more energy, as we drilled sweeps and rolled five-minute rounds. One guy was there for the first time in months but didn’t take much of a step back, he really has a knack for the game and is strong as a horse so despite my improvements, he still wiped the floor with me. His cardio went to hell though, and he was wheezing heavily.

After four rounds of BJJ, I went to the boxing ring with my headgear and gloves and sparred a bit. The whole group was all like “Ho-hooo, what is going on there?!”, stopped what they were doing and all huddled around, like it often happens when I step in a ring. I don’t think it’s a case of nationalistic pride hoping the yellowman beats the filthy barbarian, more of a novelty factor. I boxed three successive guys of increasing skill, the last one was throwing lightning-fast combos and bobbing and weaving a lot, but I got some good licks in. We all went pretty light as agreed upon but I still had a misaligned jaw afterwards. Good times. Boxing makes you feel alive.

I was drained as hell when I made it home, threw my sweat-saturated rags in the machine, but forgot to add laundry soap like a derp. Ah well, it still gave my gi and undergarments a needed rinse. I put on a playlist of old-school British dubstep, drank a liter of homebrew and made spaghetti with two boxes of sardines, onions, celery, raisins, peanuts, fennel, bread crumbs and parmesan cheese, that I devoured in front of the TV. I also ate a roast quail I bought from a street vendor, it is just like a chicken but the size of a baseball, so it was hard to get some of the bits of meat. I gave parts to the dog, he loved it. I watched the UFC, Donald Cerrone is getting up there in age and mileage, and got blasted in the first round by an under-the-radar welterweight named Alex Morono. The main event had been received with mixed reviews online, because a large portion of the MMA viewership is made up of sexist inbred morons. If it was two men instead of Marina Rodriguez and Michelle Waterson slugging it out with grit and skill for 25 minutes, they would have had a different opinion. Rodriguez won the decision with her higher output and varied muay thai attack, but Waterson had her moments too with her grappling and karate kicks that took the stoic Brazilian by surprise and gave her a Jean Chrétien-style grotesquely swollen jaw.

Though I was tired and in need of restorative slumber, I couldn’t fall asleep, maybe it was the nap I’d taken at 5 o’clock. I started a book by a young Quebec author named Jean-François Baril-Guérard and read in bed. Perhaps I should write novels instead of this navel-gazing diary.