Chapter 141

Wide awake before 5 AM, couldn’t drift back to sleep. So I just lied there enjoying the quietude and petting the dog and thinking about random things before starting my day. I walked outside, enjoying the small window of perfect weather we are blessed with for the time being before it starts getting damn hot and/or raining.

I listened to Rorcal’s crushing black/doom metal, Flatbush Zombies’ psychedelic-infused hip-hop and the Lotus Eaters podcast and their Clown World news while writing my diary. Some friends were having a little Zoom meeting and I joined, I thought I could be there for half an hour before having to babysit the eleventh-graders but then I went to their classroom and they were nowhere to be seen. So I kept shooting the shit with my friends, swapping stories of bodiy fluids.

I got home and did a calisthenics workout before eating a quick lunch of Italian cold cuts and a grilled cheese sandwich. I rode back to the office and looked for something to do, and ended up playing Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines for an hour before the game crashed. I went to supervise Attitude Class while they studied, but a math teacher offered to take those two periods so I went back to the office and did mostly nothing. What a productive day.

After a detour to the florist to buy the girlfriend a nice bouquet, I got home, changed my clothes, and rode the longboard with the dog to her workplace, arriving right as she was walking out. We got in the car, now equiped with a new sound system with an aux cord, so I could plug in my mp3 player and listen to Fonky Family’s Si Dieu Veut, a classic of old-school French hip-hop. We drove to the train station to pick up a friend who was coming to visit for the weekend. Along the way, I had to turn left at a green light and there were a bunch of cars coming from the opposite direction, so I put on my flasher and waited. Two cars lined up behind me and one of them just barreled through the intersection, almost clipping me and forcing the cars coming in to swerve around his piece-of-shit peasant van. I’m astonished at the level of entitlement, ineptitude and disregard for others that one must have to do something that fucking retarded.

We arrived just as my friend was walking out of the station, and drove back to town, catching up. We used to work in the same city, at different schools, and now he lives in Nanjing and works at a Canadian-run school that seemed like a nice place to work at on paper (I tried to get in at the same time he did but they asked for certifications I didn’t possess) but is a bit of a drama-filled nightmare these days, with lots of passive-aggressiveness and backstabbing. He has what he calls “golden handcuffs syndrome” and regrets signing up for another year, but with a young kid at home, sometimes you have to take the higher-paying option. He seemed happy to be going out of town and kick back a bit, his first vacation since 2019, after completing his master’s, having a kid, and also suffering a pretty gnarly accident playing soccer, fracturing bones in his face and requiring surgery.

We went to the Italian restaurant and had a great meal. I lined up the booze: a beer to quench my thirst, an amaro Montenegro as an aperitif, a glass of white wine with my spicy salami pizza, and limoncello for dessert. My dinner companions had the meat ravioli and a massive pork leg. Then we walked to the bar, stopping halfway at the hotel my homie had booked. He declined my offer to sleep on our couch, he felt like splurging so he looked up hotels with hot tubs so he could really relax.

This weekend is a big hash event, with 69 people signed up, some coming from faraway corners of China for what was initially supposed to be an eastern China regional hash, giving the whole thing a mini Nash Hash flavor. About a dozen of them were sitting outside, and more and more came through the evening. It was good fun and a “pre-lube” for tomorrow’s trail, the mis-management team had bought a lot of sex toys for drunken pranks and party games.

I left around 1 AM, stopping for KFC along the way. The retarded bloatware phone app they ask you to use for ordering was malfunctioning as it always fucking does, so I ordered my chicken wings and Portuguese egg tart at the counter, happy that the night manager was not a useless cunt and let me do it, sometimes they just say “Scan the QR code and use the app” even though they’re right there, giving us another proof that the purpose of technology is not to make our lives better.

I got home, showered, ate my chicken with a Belgian raspberry beer while watching a documentary about wars between early Romans and Celts on YouTube and fell asleep halfway, so I dragged myself to bed.