Chapter 159

Woke up at 7:30, after falling asleep late and waking up through the night. Insomnia sucks shit. I only had time to brush my teeth and get dressed.

First thing was a short one-on-one meeting with the principal, to debrief and discuss how the academic year had been. I’d say it was a good one overall, I’m mostly satisfied with all levels of the pyramid: students, coworkers, support staff/facilities, administration, and corporate over in Shanghai.

Then I sat in the office for a bit, browsing the internet and writing. I listened to an excellent grindcore album by Finnish band Feastem, and then a friend sent me a link to a 6-hour video of a virtual grindcore festival. I listened to three quarters of it through the day, some of the bands were so-so but most were on point. The only one I’d seen live before was Final Exit, a duet from Japan playing some extremely weird noise grind, they’d start a little jazzy or old rock n’ roll beat and then immediately switch to blast beats and cacophonic distortion for a few seconds. Just before them was an American band named Fed Ash who was using noise samples in a much different way, to emphasize the bleakness and post-industrial apocalpytic nature of their music, complete with visuals of rust belt factories and a heavy VHS filter. Other bands had a much more straightforward grindcore or powerviolence approach, with no gimmick, no dress code and no fucking around, letting their music do the talking.

At lunch I had a bagel with cream cheese, bacon, and I ate out of a half watermelon with a spoon. I watched Clown World news, a Yale professor of Indian descent went on a weird, psychotic and extremely racist rant, talking about how she can’t interact with white people without wanting to shoot them, which she sees as what would be a service to society. There were so many quotables in there that made you go “Calm down there, Pol Pot!” and it wasn’t out of a drunken conversation recorded without her knowledge, it was in a university speech. She also said that no white person is redeemable, and that people of color are gaslit into believing they are crazy for getting angry at the constant barrage of racism they face. I’d say it’s more the opposite happening, anyone taking offense to dogshit like that shit she spews (and moreover seeing it promoted at high levels of academia) is told they are expressing “white fragility”. As if you’d have to be white, or have any sort of racial allegiance to think it’s horrible. I say fuck that cunt. If she said anything like that against blacks or Asians or Latinos or Indians or whomthefuckever I'd find it just as reprehensible. At least the one part of the story that shows that perhaps we’re not in Full Clown World yet is Yale University reprimanding her for being such a psychotic bigot. It’s mostly a slap on the wrist, but hey.

After an uneventful afternoon, I got home and made chicken broth. We keep all our bones and leftover bits of carcass in a bag in the freezer, and once in a while I throw it all in a pot with onions, carrots, celery, garlic and whatever other aromatics I have around. I opened a German beer and watched the Logan Paul vs Floyd Mayweather boxing match. It was very stupid. The announcers and commentators were the usual A-team for Showtime Pay-Per-Views and they were discussing it as if it was a legit main event, I wonder how much of it they believed themselves.

The eight rounds ended without as much as a knockdown, and being an exhibition, no winner was announced. Mayweather obviously outboxed his foe but Paul had likely an even bigger claim to the moral victory, having survived eight rounds as a 0-1 amateur against an undefeated boxing legend, albeit one who was 50 pounds lighter and coming out of retirement in his mid-forties. I checked what people on Reddit had to say, of course they were mad at the shitshow, but I disagree with the idea that Mayweather took it easy, he seemed to be going pretty hard especially in the latter rounds but the YouTube vlogger was tough, much bigger, and likely better than anyone anticipated. I also don’t really agree with those who say “it’s an insult to boxing”, it’s not as if exhibition matches against NFL players or actors or wrestlers or whatever haven’t been a staple of the sport since the 1800s. Either way both men made millions of dollars and are currently laughing on their way to the bank.

I cleansed my palate with the last UFC card. The fights on the beginning of the main card were pretty good, then Santiago Ponzinibbio and Michael Baeza stole the show with a blood n’ guts brawl. For dinner I marinated chicken cubes, cooked them in the pan, and rolled them in a tortilla with cheese, nacho crumbs, lettuce, sour cream and salsa. I made the salsa by adding diced onions, lemon juice, cilantro and hot peppers to the blended tomato, garlic and basil mix I made for the bruschetta a few days ago, and the basil taste was overpowering. Not that it was bad, it was delicious and got me rubbing my beer belly with satisfaction, just that it was a bit strange and outside the realm of normal Tex-Mex flavors.

I went to bed early and read the intro to Andy Ngo’s book about antifa before crashing. Four more days before freedom.