Chapter 134

I got up at 6 and went through my slow morning routine, with a 15-minute yoga session and a stroll with the dog. Then I rode to work, listening to the album Terrorize, Brutalize, Sodomize by Vomitory, some elite-tier Swedish death metal. I remember being in a record store in Quebec City many many moons ago with a friend, he laughed at the album title and I got intrigued, I asked the shopkeeper if I can listen to it and within the first 10 seconds my wallet was out.

I had some review sessions prepared for the eleventh-graders, but as it turns out, the two classes I see on Friday take the chemistry lab exam only in June. I’ll review when we’re closer. So I gave them free time to study maths, while I sat there listening to Rorcal and reading an interview with Anton LaVey. He’s an intriguing character for sure, but I have a hard time taking seriously anyone over the age of 14 who is an unironic satanist.

I got home and did a calisthenics routine for about an hour, and then ate leftovers while watching the news. Hostilities between Palestine and Israel are ramping up, and there’s a fuel shortage in parts of the USA. I can’t help but feeling a certain apathy sometimes when I look at that shit happening thousands and thousands of kilometers from my placid little Chinese city.

The twelfth-graders are pretty much done with their final exams and by extension their prison sentence in the Chinese educational system, and about half of them were gone. I still had to babysit the remainder, I sat there with my laptop playing Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, a frustratingly difficult and addictive game from the late 90s. Not very professional maybe? Well it was Friday afternoon, and the students were themselves messing around on their computers, it’s not as if anything mattered.

I got home, ate a protein slurry, took a nap and got ready to go to the gym. There was an insane thunderstorm outside, so I waited for it to pass and rode there in the wet streets, there were enormous lakes due to the drainage systems not being up to the task and a lot of parked scooters or structures being knocked over by the wind. We had a nice training session, then I rode home.

I took a shower, seasoned a steak, threw it on the pan and wolfed it down quickly, as I was meeting friends at 9:30. There’s a bar that just opened, with an MMA cage in the middle, and tonight there are some kickboxing matches. So we sat there drinking beer and watching young Chinese dudes beating each other up. When I saw promo pictures circulating on social media I was wondering what the bar  would be about, if the cage is just for decoration or worse, if they have drunk bar patrons go in there with 20-ounce gloves (which is stupid at best and dangerous at worst and never entertaining for more than 5 seconds), but no, the fights were legit, with amateur kickboxers from different parts of China. Some of my friends went last week and said it was a mix between kickboxing and pro wrestling, I imagine in the future there might be some MMA and other disciplines as well. I approve wholeheartedly, especially since the bar is a stone’s throw away from where I live.