Chapter 148

Up at 6, green tea, 45 minutes of yoga, quick bike ride to work. I had three classes with eleventh-graders: one with the strong class, two with the weak class. Ten more days until absolute freedom.

I got back home and did my calisthenics workout. I was all stiff at first but after a superset of pullups and squats I was all loose again. Then I showered and ate the leftover pasta, it wasn’t enough so I also heated a bit of fried rice. I watched the news, it’s been a year since George Floyd died and various city halls in the USA or even in the UK are commemorating the event with banners and fireworks and shit. It’s so strange. He wasn’t a good person at all, and now he’s treated like a saint, a martyr for the cause of fighting a systemic racism that is way overblown. And if you say “But you’re missing the point! He shouldn’t have died for the petty crime of using counterfeit money”, well, this is true, but should he be sanctified for dying in police custody? Again, it’s all so bizarre, but then again it pales in comparison to all the other bizarre shit going on in this world.

I went back to school and wrote my diary, I got carried away I guess and wrote 1700 words for yesterday’s entry. I listened to Brutal Truth’s Need To Control, I knew only the band’s classic Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses (and I love it) but I’d never heard the other albums, so might as well plunge in the discography. It was pretty good, some furious grindcore with doomy elements, and then I listened to the 1996 album Kill Trend Suicide and I didn’t like it quite as much, it was very noisy and chaotic, borrowing bits of free jazz or whatever you call it.

I got home, changed my clothes, packed a bag and got in the car. From ages 18 to 23, I drove a lot, splitting my time between the cities of Ottawa and Québec, 500 km apart, but then I moved to Asia and for over a decade I didn’t drive at all. Now, driving was part of my life again, as if it never left. I was getting reacquainted with the nice aspects like blasting the music I want from the speakers, the relative freedom, the general fun of driving, but also the stale boredom of doing long stretches of highway, the annoyance of being stuck in traffic, and having to find parking spots in crowded cities.

I drove to the city of Suzhou, about an hour and a half away, with the Friday afternoon traffic. I had uploaded some of the radio stations from the GTA games on my mp3 player, a great selection of various genres with hilarious interludes, that fit the vibe pretty well. I listened to K-Rose and Radio Los Santos from San Andreas, and Flash FM from Vice City.

I was lucky to find a free parking spot by the hostel, dropped my bag, and got on my way. I took the subway, which meant I had to fish out a dusty fayssah mursk out of my cargo shorts pockets, and get in a packed train with fellow plebs. I remember coming to Suzhou eight or nine years ago to visit a friend, they just had opened their first short subway line, now they have a whole system covering the entirety of the urban area, like in most sizeable Chinese cities. A few stations down, I started getting filled by crippling dread. I left my passport and the car keys in a locker at the hostel, and thought about how disastrous it would be to have them stolen. The odds of someone breaking in the locker are so slim they might be zero, and so are the odds of getting mugged or pickpocketed. The chances of drunkenly losing them are a little higher but still negligible, but either way, maybe I’m OCD, but when I have my passport on my I constantly touch my pocket to make sure it’s still there, and now I was overthinking the fuck out of it to the point of ruining what was supposed to be a relaxing night. The subway stopped at a station, I thought about it for a second and just hopped off and backtracked to the hostel. Sometimes I look at how paranoid and neurotic I can be and shake my head.

The show I was going to was scheduled to start at 8, and now it was past 7:30. I saved time by taking a taxi, which I should have done in the first place, it was only 16 yuan for a 5-kilometer ride. The venue was in an upscale-looking bar and restaurant district by the lake, and was positively packed, I was afraid I wouldn’t get tickets for a second, especially since all the people in front of me had pre-booked or were on a guestlist. But no, they had space, so I paid, got stamped, and let in just in time, as the first band of the night introduced themselves and started their intro. Pynchanerve is a local band (well, local as in four white dudes who live in Suzhou) playing a mixture of Black Sabbath-style sludge and other variations of rock and metal, and their set was pretty cool.

Then four bands followed, I’d seen all of them live once and they’d been great. Dog Släyer (with the obligatory superfluous umlaut) is a five-piece from Hangzhou playing some 70s NWOBHM stuff with great enthusiasm and stage presence, it’s nice to see that the old style is kept alive, especially by such youngsters. They wear their Judas Priest influences on their sleeves, even playing a cover of that legendary band.

Never Before came down from Beijing to crush us all with their heavy sludge/stoner metal, alternating between crushing parts, fast riffs that got the pit spinning, and long melancholic interludes. One of the best bands on the Chinese scene these days.

Loudspeaker came next, they might be my absolute favorite Chinese band, or in the top three at least. The power trio assaulted the crowd with a tight set of take-no-prisoners crust/grind, and I have nothing to say aside from it was fucking insane and I’m eagerly looking forward to see those guys again.

All the bands played sets of around 40 minutes, but it didn’t feel like the evening was dragging on and on. Between sets, I went to the Family Mart to get snacks or cans of beer, and talked with old pals and randos I’d just met. The last band was Chimera Cult (see Chapter 113), a great way to close out the night. The four previous bands had set the bar high and the crowd was getting thin but their Pantera-worshipping metal got the remaining hardcore souls satisfied. I talked to the guys before and they were seriously drunk, after a boozy bus ride from Shanghai, and in fact their frontman was stumbling around on stage but delivered pretty well. God bless heavy metal and the bands who put their blood and sweat and tears into putting on great shows for us.