Chapter 154

I got up at 6 on the dot and slowly started my day. There’s a British dubstep playlist that’s been on a browser tab for a few days now, that I put on when I’m at home and don’t want to put on some gargling blasting metal to anger the girlfriend. I did yoga for half an hour, washed my face, brushed my teeth and went to work.

I only had one class in the morning and it must have been going well, as I don’t remember a single thing about it aside from a very vague recollection of having been there and seeing what I wrote in my teaching log. Well, I say “teaching log”, it’s more of a loose sheet of paper where I record what I did in class so I know where to pick up next.

The live Metal Minded podcast was about to start, they were reviewing an album by Inhumate and I checked out a few tracks, it’s some truly superb deathgrind straight outta France. This seventh album is their last, I’ll have to check them all out, no idea how they flew under my radar like that. Another album they reviewed was by Impaled Nazarene, a well-known Finnish black metal band with a punky attitude, I had listened to it a few days ago and found it enjoyable but unmemorable, like all their other releases. Their highest recommended album of the week was by Stormruler, so after the podcast ended I checked it out, I couldn’t find the album for free online but there was a well-recorded 30-minute live set and it was indeed some excellent Swedish-style black metal.

I got shrimp noodles at a local eatery and went home for lunch. I watched Clown World news, it’s now Gay Pride Month and plenty of corporations are virtue-signaling by telling us how down they are with the LGBT folks and all that shit, though they are ruthless and exploitative money-making organizations who don’t see any issue with employing third-world indentured slave labor, interfering with politics and making business deals with backwards countries where gays are thrown off rooftops. Classic shit. I also saw in my recommendations a short animated documentary about the Battle Of Mogadishu, that happened in 1993 and inspired the movie Black Hawk Down. It made me realize I’d never seen the movie, so I told myself I’d watch it at night.

I took the dog out for a walk and rode back to the office. I spent the afternoon browsing random corners of the internet, I was so bored out of my mind that I downloaded the IBJJF (International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation) rule book and read it from cover to cover, a 50-page PDF. Then I drew a comic, scanned it, edited it, and put it online at https://laowaicomics.tumblr.com/. I had a decent following during the two- or three-year period I was publishing this webcomic, getting quite a bit of fan mail and offers of syndication on China-related blogs (as well as a few haters, of course) but it’s been dormant for a while, I’m mostly retired as a cartoonist but will draw one a year when I have an idea I can’t just let go. This one points the rather confusing paradox of Chinese people being scared of small dogs but stepping out of the footpath in national parks to go photograph large herbivorous but potentially dangerous animals. The internet is chock full of videos of idiotic Chinese tourists in Yellowstone or whatever disregarding instructions and common sense to go take a selfie with a moose or elk. Sadly, few of them involve serious bodily harm.

I listened to a bit more music, including the album Inhumane Minimalism by Greek black metal band Human Serpent. Man, even in a week filled with great underground music, this one rose even higher than others, and I listened to it twice. I then checked out a Russian band called Lethality, two years ago some Russian metalhead in Shanghai just gave me their t-shirt and for the longest time I didn’t even know which band it was, with their illegible logo. They only have released one short EP before disbanding, and as expected it is some ridiculously brutal death metal.

On my way out, I saw there were tables set up for some kind of university recruitment fair. Various American, British and Canadian colleges had a little kiosk, with monolingual Chinese brochures, hustling hard to get a prime spot to suckle on the golden cash cow. Rumors (and a good guesstimate) say that the whole market of rich Chinese exchange students will eventually dry up, as their rich Chinese daddies start wondering if it really comes with a high enough ROI and also as Covid is scaring people from going abroad, in which case, my job would be doomed. Ah well, what can I do but ride it until the wheels fall off? 

I went home, drank pre-workout and did my calisthenics routine. My legs were afflicted with a crippling case of DOMS after Tuesday’s pistol squats and a three-year-old kid punching me on the thigh would have made me cry like a little bitch, so I took it easy on the legs and just did some normal bodyweight squats as opposed to holding a big kettlebell like usual. After showering, I wanted to kick back, eat and watch Black Hawk Down, but the torrent file I had downloaded was an .exe and likely a dangerous virus, so I had to download another one. In the meantime I watched a documentary on Broadmoor, a psychiatric prison in England. Some of the inmates seemed nice enough when on their meds but they are one tiny chemical imbalance away from murdering you with a hammer, and then the craziest ones couldn’t even appear on camera as they are too dangerous and too kookoo to give informed consent.

Then I watched Black Hawk Down. It was cool as shit, the kind of war movie where it’s a shootout from beginning to end. I am very, very, very nitpicky and critical of a lot of movies and all the tired clichés and unrealistic shit they throw in but this one was pretty well done for the most part and didn’t peeve the fuck out of me like a lot of war movies do. I noticed though that all the “Somalis” didn’t look like Somalis at all, I didn’t go to Somalia but I went to Kenya years ago, home to a large Somali population, and they have a very distinct look that I’d describe as halfway between sub-Saharan African and Arabic, while the actors and extras in the movie were not like that. Wikipedia told me there weren’t any Somalis employed for the movie, not sure why, perhaps because they’re not really portrayed in the best light. There was also a bit of controversy coming from Malaysia and Pakistan, both countries with a UN peacekeeping force on the ground who actively took part in the battle and felt they were underrepresented in the movie.

The girlfriend was at her Chinese chess class and I was getting ready to go ride the longboard with the dog to go meet her as it ends, but it was raining so I stayed in and waited for her. Thus ended my day.