Chapter 193

My favorite travel writer, or dare I say the only travel writer I like, who goes by the pseudonym English Teacher X, has a quote that goes as such:

Considering it, my traveling had never been an expression of an adventurous spirit but rather a deliberate denial of the large part of myself that just wanted to sit around and watch TV and read comic books all day.

I often feel that way as well, wondering why I’m not at home, with my routine, comfort and not having to spend money on gas, highway tolls, traffic violations and other piling travel expenses. But one thing I learned through my years of vagabonding is that I can alleviate this by keeping it balanced and having the occasional lazy day. I was originally planning to go camping somewhere but the endless rain on the forecast made it a perfect excuse to take advantage of Dancing Davey’s apartment.

So I woke up around 9 and did yoga to stretch my sore joints while listening to Clown World news. Having successfully culturally enriched the big cities of England, the globalists are now aiming for the countryside, penning newspaper articles about how “problematic” it is that those places are mostly inhabitated by, well, English people. Shocking, I know. When I’m in the Chinese hinterlands like I am now, I’m also expecting Ghanaians and Fijians and Austrians, so weird to see so many Chinese people here. There was also a video that made waves, the gay choir of San Francisco performing a song called “We’re coming for your children”, which is an ironic quip about how they are in fact aiming to make young people tolerant and open-minded. I still have the damn song stuck in my head, those guys are as good at singing as they are bad at self-awareness and optics, and even a lot of left-wingers commented on how clumsy and of bad taste the whole thing was, and now the video has been taken down.

I wrote my diary, listening to the Metal Minded podcast, with my boys Yolin and Simon interviewing two guys from a Quebec City deathcore band called Observants. Then Dancing Davey came for his lunch break, we walked to his company’s workers’ canteen and I got shrimp, pork in a sweet sauce (very reminiscent of the weird Chinese food we get in the West), a chicken leg and a duck head. He said I’m the first laowai he’s ever seen who likes duck heads, and yeah, there are a few strange Chinese snacks I like unironically. We walked back, he took a nap and I ate my vittles while watching a movie. It is titled Threads, and it was made in the mid-1980s with the theme of nuclear annihilation. It starts slowly, with the normal daily life of various people in Sheffield, who are mostly indifferent about the escalating conflict between the USA and USSR in Iran, as it’s so far from where they are. But then, the superpowers start exchanging nukes, first on military targets and then on industrial areas on home soil and quickly on big population centers. This led to near-total destruction, with the few survivors dealing with radioactive fallout, nuclear winter, outbreak of rat-borne diseases, famin and seizure by the government of whatever small stockpiles are still intact. It was really harrowing, the movie does a great job at showing how a nuclear war would basically mean the end of mankind as we know it and even if you’re far away from the strikes, you wouldn’t be safe.

I watched two documentaries in the afternoon: one about Qanon, and one about the controversial coach of the New England Patriots. Then Dancing Davey came home, we hopped in his car and went downtown. He had to go get a haircut so I walked the dog and did pull-ups in a neighboring park, which was quite nice but had sections that got flooded after the day’s heavy rains. As I got out of the park, two pretty girls caught the corner of my eye, like the red-blooded hetero man I am. One was wearing very short jean shorts, the other had a small top that exposed her midriff, and their long black hair was falling on their thin shoulders. The problem is both of them had fayssah mursks on, one of the negative aspects of the pandemic seldom talked about. They were pulling heavy suitcases and one said audibly that she was tired, I offered to help, since I was walking in that direction, and she thanked me. I replied to their curious small talk questions but didn’t do any creepy shit, I didn’t even say “Oh cool, my ex-girlfriend was also a nurse” when they told me about their line of work. I remember one of my elderly colleagues constantly being an old creep around unprovoking young women and making them feel like they’d rather be several miles away, and told myself I don’t want to be that guy.

It started raining heavily just as we got in the car. We went to a typical local restaurant and he treated me to an amazing meal. Getting a Chinese friend to accept me paying for the meal or even just half would be easier than getting him to put on a shirt that says TAIWAN IS AN INDEPENDENT COUNTRY, they’re quite hospitable. He had a few phone calls to make back home so I finished the Qanon documentary and read a bit before bed.