Chapter 161

I woke up around 6:30 and slowly started my day listening to some good hip-hop from the Boot Camp Clik, a collective of rappers from NYC. Then I rode to work. Jocko Willink received a pilot of his podcast, he was a member of Top Gun, I thought this was just the cool name for the slightly homoerotic movie from the 80s but no, there’s really an elite Navy flight school called Top Gun. The US military is crazy, even their navy has a bigger air fleet than most countries’ air force. I sometimes wonder what the hell I’d be doing if I wasn’t institutionalized in this expat life, if I had stayed in Quebec I probably would have gone for a military career. Not as a pilot though; I’m a useless colorblind derp.

The Metal Minded podcast was scheduled to start at 9, with four album reviews. I listened to one track from each album, and none of them tickled my ballsack. Yolin and Taï also weren’t overly impressed by neither. Another guy on the Facebook group gave a good review of a Canadian band named Goreworm and I gave it a spin (or, well, a YouTube click), it’s tech death, and you know how I feel about tech death. That one was a bit more enjoyable than your average riff salad though, with plenty of melodic death metal elements that made it catchier.

I went home and made spaghetti carbonara with added sausages cut in slices. I watched Clown World news, StyxHexenHammer666 had a short commentary video titled “Corporations Are Right to Exploit Idiots with Wokeness Campaigns”, and he’s 100% right. That whole shit about changing your logo for something with a gay pride rainbow has fuckall to do with anything other than virtue-signaling for a cheap cash grab. Few things are funnier and more telling than seeing all those multinational companies changing their logos for the US, European, Canadian, Australian, etc. market but not a single word about LGBT month on their Middle Eastern or Chinese social media pages.

Speaking of the rainbow flag, the Lotus Eaters had a segment about all the add-ons some activists are making, like adding light blue and light pink for transgender people, and a black and a brown stripe for ethnic minorities. I thought the whole point of the rainbow flag was to symbolize the whole spectrum, not that each of the six colored stripes were explicitly about a certain group of people! Now it’s just becoming an endless race of “my flag is more inclusive than yours” and it’s a bit stupid.

I have a small gay flag at home, that I strung along the other flags I’ve collected from my travels. I got it at a previous school I taught at, when one class of students paraded with them at the opening ceremony of sports’ day to celebrate their openly gay homeroom teacher. I thought it was cool in that context, but all the zillions of pride flags you see now in the west just make me cringe, because there’s no substance to it. Rainbow flags in China represent progress, rainbow flags in European or North American countries represent, well, nothing at this point.

Of course I’ve never walked in a gay man’s shoes but from what I’ve observed, China is not super homophobic, at least not compared to Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East and other hotbeds of tolerance. But it’s also clearly not accepting of homosexuality the same way that western countries are, and it stems more from a traditional family oriented “Oh no, my son is gay?! Goddamnit he’s my only child, who’s gonna give me grandchildren then?!?!” point of view than some religious or hateful position. As time goes on, the erosion of those Cuntfucian rigid family values and the embrace of modernity does come with negative aspects, but it will also make life a bit easier for my gay and lesbian friends.

I walked the dog, and when I released him in the park, he ran around for a bit and then ate a dog turd. I scolded him, brushed his teeth when we got home, and locked him in prison for the afternoon. I got back to the office and applied myself at the tedious task of writing recom letters. I had ten to do and wanted to finish the whole thing. Of course there’s a bit of copy-pasting and template using involved, but still it has to be adapted to each student. Some are highly achieving and it’s easy to give them praise, and for the less highly achieving ones, I talked about improvement and effort n’ shit.

I was fueled with pu-er tea and music I blindly clicked on a grindcore Facebook group. Some was good, some was unlistenable shit recorded with a potato. The short and fast nature of the genre made me rifle through a lot of albums and EPs, I can’t remember every single one of them, but one that stood out was Swedish crust punk band Ursut, that sounded exactly like every Swedish crust punk band ever, and that’s a sound I can enjoy once in a while.

I got home, released the dog from his cell, and he was all excited and looked at his leash with his tail wagging. As we were heading out, two things happened simultaneously: it started raining, and the girlfriend came back from work. So we retreated indoors. She took a nap before going to her Chinese chess class, I watched videos about military history and the upcoming UFC event. Later I made soup with chicken broth, bacon, sausages, sliced garlic, tons of paprika, and cubed bread. A Spanish recipe, I think, I saw it online somewhere. I also pan-seared a steak. A lazy night with a few nice beers.