Chapter 243

Up at 6. I didn’t sleep well, every time I’d turn around I’d wake up due to the searing pain in my leg. How the hell did I practice muay thai for so many years?

I can still walk without limping, and don’t have joint pain or anything alarming, just that my muscle is bruised. I did 45 minutes of yoga, not sure if it helps or hinders in the long run, but for the time being it felt good. Then I took the dog out, took a crap, took a shower and got ready to go to work. I put on an album by Deviant Process, the band that was interviewed on the Metal Minded podcast yesterday (that I couldn’t listen to for more than a few minutes at a time because of the dogshit office internet). It was... really good. Progressive/technical death metal usually bores me but that Quebec City band crafts some seriously catchy and fun songs. It reminded me of Augury’s Concealed, an album they said they all adore.

All my stuff is ready for tomorrow, so I sat around, listening to the news, and had chats with coworkers. I don’t even remember anything worth mentioning about my morning. Then I went home, ate pasta and meatballs, and watched the UFC event from last weekend. As I rubbed my bruised leg with hot towels, I questioned my commitment to being a fan of a sport where the athletes constantly put themselves through much worse pain, and the first fight of the main card was truly an embodiment of how ridiculously tough they are. Middleweight Gerald Merschaert got battered on the feet by Makhmud Muradov and it looked like it was a matter of time until he got finished, but then he dug deep, took the Uzbek down and choked him. 99% of men, even if possessing equal technical skills, would have crumbled under Muradov’s attack.

I rode back to the office, and only once I was there did I see a message from the principal saying that we have the afternoon off. So I went home. I finished the UFC card, culminating in a victory by Georgian kicking machine Giga Chikadze over Brazilian kicking machine Edson Barboza.

I took a bath, listening to an album by French black metal band Neptrecus. It was pretty good and I could listen to it at a high volume, which is nice. I haven’t had neighbors knocking on my door asking me to turn it down in a long time now, I guess that’s a positive aspect of living in a place that has just so much ambient noise and people who had no choice but developing a resilience towards it.

The girlfriend came home, and we went to a restaurant across the street. I love Hunanese cuisine, they use a lot of those small yellow pickled hot peppers and create a spicy and sour flavor profile. We ordered bamboo shoots, cauliflower, potatoes, beef and brown fried rice, we ordered way too much and just packed it to go.

At night the girlfriend asked me to help her pay for a membership to a bank of resources for IB visual art teachers, as she doesn’t have a PayPal. In my mind of course it’s her school who should pay for it, but her school is a complete clown show and everyone I know who works there hates it. Of course those cunts don’t want to open their purse strings, and if it was my school who was too stingy to pay for materials or professional development, I’d tell them to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. So I told her to not bother, but she wants to do her very best as a teacher, which is quite noble. We started arguing and eventually I logged in and paid.

I then relaxed a bit and watched a few videos on YouTube by a young conservative commentator named John Doyle. He’s in his early twenties, but quite astute on many subjects and very eloquent, I’ll watch more for sure. I was in bed just after 9 and read a chapter from Musashi before crashing.

Chapter 242

Up a few minutes before 6, back to the grind. I called the dog to chuquwar and there was a dilemma on his triangle face, as much as he wanted to go out he also seemed happy to stay in bed with his mama. We walked around a bit, and there were old people doing tai chi in the square. I considered joining them for a second but the tai chi they do is pretty different than the one I learned so I went to another, more secluded place.

Then I had more time to chill a bit and drink green tea before getting on my bike and going to work. It was weird sitting in my cubicle for the first time in two and a half months. There’s been a few changes in the office, some of the previously empty desks are now occupied by math teachers, the one constant is that it’s deafeningly loud and my Beats headphones will get a lot of mileage.

We had a short assembly, basically just the principals welcoming us back, and then I sat down and did a bit of preparation, though most of my stuff was ready. We also had a short departmental meeting, alloting classes and which part of the curriculum will be taught by whom. Fairly uneventful stuff.

I went back home to eat lunch and play with the dog. I ate my leftover pasta while watching an old Breaking Bad episode, the one where Gus Fring is blown up. I remember watching it the first time and audibly yelling OH SHIT! but now that I knew it was coming I found the whole deception about him walking out of the room, adjusting his tie and then falling dead extremely cheesy. Walter White’s plan and execution was seriously twisted and unpredictable, though, gotta give them that.

In the afternoon there was a Zoom meeting with science teachers from the whole network. The internet kept crashing. I’ll have to make sure I have plenty of music saved on my hard drive and generally have a mindset where I don’t depend on the internet or other first-world modern amenities.

I got home, took a nap and went to the gym. We drilled a few attacks and defenses related to the De La Riva guard, then rolled three rounds. A good time was had by all. I had a bit of energy left, and saw that two of the Chinese kickboxers training in the other half of the gym had put on their shin guards and were touch-sparring. I changed into shorts, got my gloves and a pair of shin guards myself, then sat next to them. After a minute, one guy stepped out and the other one called me in. I said “Let’s go light, I don’t have my ball protector” and he nodded, but pretty much immediately started throwing full-power strikes. Why? Fuck if I know. I don’t think I crossed a line by asking (non-verbally and implicitly) to spar, I’m a fucken paying customer at the gym. And I don’t think he’s a douchebag bully, we boxed a while ago and it was controlled.

I got a few licks in, but I took some serious leg kicks that turned my thigh to marmalade. The next few days will suck shit, but can I really be mad? It’s not as if he snuck behind me and hit me. You get in the lion’s cage, expect to get hurt.

I went home, and though the thing I wanted to do the most was lie down, I took the dog out and did a circuit, sipping a beer. I ate sardines and crackers while sitting on the couch, icing my leg and my jaw, and put on the first episode of the second season of Bad Blood. The first season was produced by a Canadian channel and was inspired by the true story of the Risotto family, but the second season was picked up by Netflix and is entirely fictional. I made it to the 20-minute mark, there’s just so much painfully cliché dialogues and sassy female characters I can handle. Also while the first season was a classic case of French erasure in Montreal, the second season featured Italians from Italy speaking to one another exclusively in English, but doing the little hand gesture, which gave me cancer.

So I watched Hip-Hop Evolution, the episode about the death of Notorious BIG, and the rise of Puff Daddy and Jay-Z. Great series.  

Chapter 241

I woke up at 11:45, severely hungover and with sore legs. But I had to vacate the room and do something with my life. I went to the Family Mart next door and it sucks to see how little nutritious food those places have, it’s a bit dytopian if you think about it. The only source of protein I could get was yogurt and some initation crab, that I slowly munched on.

Then I went to the jiu-jitsu gym. I already went there a few months ago and they were very welcoming, and I contacted the coach a few days ago. I was there well ahead of time, while the kids’ class was on, so I changed and stretched and waited. The class was about the berimbolo, some rather fancy new-school BJJ move that is getting quite common, and when the coach demonstrated it it looked all cool but when I tried I felt like I have two left feet. Still, it was a nice class, then I rolled with an American blue belt and with the coach.

I drove back, which took about an hour and a half, picked up the girlfriend from work, and went home. She asked me if I want to go eat out, and the truth is I’m a bit annoyed most of the times I go to a restaurant, with the peasants around me yelling and playing shitty Douyin videos on their phones, so even though I was pretty damn tired I felt like cooking. I made a new pasta sauce I saw on a YouTube video, with onions and bell peppers and cream, it was awesome. I also made meatballs to throw in there.

I was in bed by 9.

Chapter 240

I woke up fairly early and watched the Clown World news. A lot of Californians are very unhappy with the leadership of their governor Gavin Belson, and political analysts are looking at the potential candidates in the upcoming election. One of them is Larry Elder, a black conservative radio host, and now he’s being smeared by the media as a white supremacist, which is exactly as absurd as it sounds. I remember seeing a few videos he’s made in the wake of the George Floyd death, in which he talked about black fatherlessness and its effects, advocated for personal responsibility, and said that the nearly always present thread uniting those stories of use of lethal force by cops on African-Americans is resisting arrest and thus a lot of those cases could have been avoided. I imagine that pissed off a lot of people who see black people as devoid of any individuality and agency.  

In the early afternoon I got in the car and drove to Suzhou. I listened to a hilarious episode of the Boyscast and then an album by Buc Fifty, an underground rapper I’d seen mentioned in a list of recommendations. It was a bit inconsistent but a few tracks were really, really good, like the title track Badman. His voice had a certain unique pitch to it, and I’m pretty sure I’ve heard him featured here or there.

I had booked a hotel room but went to the wrong branch like a derp, so I got back in the car and drove the extra two kilometers. I put the car in the underground parking, quickly went through the check-in procedures, dropped my bag in the room and walked to the hash meeting point. After a summer hiatus of sorts, the Suzhou Hash House Harriers organized a trail, and I thought I might as well come and say hi. I hesitated whether I’d do the running trail or go with the flock of walkers, and ended up running. It was stupid hot, so only four of us did it, Downward Dogger (nicknamed that way due to her habit of bending over to catch her breath), Froggy Fiddler (being a German who got mistaken as French) and Find My iBush (a regular Suzhou hasher, I have no idea what her name means). We covered 9 km until the beer stop, on a superb trail laid in the old town of Suzhou, and I walked the remaining 5 km.

The circle beers and the follow-up party at 798 hit my battered body pretty hard, and though I paid for the two-hour free-flow and had access to all the microbrews on tap, I only drank two or three. I was rather inebriated and a good time was had by all. I took a taxi to the hotel and crashed hard.

Chapter 239

I woke up at 7:30 and took the dog out. Then I wanted to compile a bunch of songs in a video, but since I updated to Windows 10, I didn’t have Windows Movie Maker anymore. I had some other dogshit program, and a Windows-sponsored link to download a video editor that seemed pretty cool until it came time to press Save and they said I have to pay for the full version. Goddamnit. Why fix things that are nearly perfect? They did the same thing with MS Paint, nuking the old, user-friendly one to replace it with some piece of shit.

So I went on Google, and after a few unfruitful tries, quickly found a link to install the original Movie Maker. I compiled the tracks from the two EPs of a cult electronic music producer who goes by DJ JadPuntage and uploaded them on YouTube for the world to enjoy.

Then I listened to Arghoslent. Now that’s a band I’m very conflicted about, and hesitate to even mention their name, because of their seriously stinky political views and lyrical content. I’m not talking about “Hey that Trump guy’s got some good points uh?” but straight up talking about Jews and blacks in ways that make you raise your eyebrows. But... their music slays, and not only is it fucking good, it’s also unique and unlike anything I know. They play a mixture of melodic death metal and NWOBHM, with beats that make me want to air drum, galloping guitar leads, and a superb death growl that ties it together, when they don’t just make instrumental tracks. “Separating the art from the artist” is a common dilemma that usually applies to musicians who commit heinous acts, and while as far as I know the Arghoslent guys haven’t committed any crimes, I can’t say I’m really down with track titles like “Flogging The Cargo” or “Fodder For The Shoah”.

Then I clicked on a link to an album by Indonesian grindcore band Noxa, in a very Napalm Death vein. It was decent. The vocals were also very Napalmdeathesque, which is not always a good thing.

I did the calisthenics routine, ate kebab rolls, and watched two more episodes of the Hip-Hop Evolution documentary series. Chronologically, they were making their way from the 80s to the 90s, after covering the early days of the genre in NYC, then exploring the burgeoning of the Miami, Texas, Los Angeles and Bay Area scenes, and were now back in the Big Apple (god that sounds dumb and cliché to say that!) to document the second wave. That’s where and when hip-hop reached its highest point as far as I’m concerned, and became the best musical genre in history (alongside death metal and grindcore, of course). Gone are the old-school cheesy beats and monosyllabic rhymes, now DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Large Professor, RZA and their contemporaries laid a musical foundation that still sounds fresh nearly thirty years later, and rappers like Nas, the Wu-Tang Clan, A Tribe Called Quest, Mobb Deep and Biggie hit their stride and dropped some of the greatest albums of all time.

So I felt a bit hip-hop after that, and started an album by Kool G Rap before I had to go. He’s a great rapper from the latter part of the first wave, one that showed talent and innovation, but like is the case with Rakim and others, I can’t help but feel his music has aged poorly, hamstrung by the late 80s beats. Then I rode my longboard to the girlfriend’s workplace, with the dog happily trotting along.

At night I made falafel, and it was an epic fail. Either I didn’t drain the beans properly, or added too much lemon juice, because the mixture was way too wet and even after an hour in the freezer I couldn’t make balls that stuck together. I still pan-fried the gobs and it tasted OK. The oven-baked potatoes were a great success though, especially with a big dollop of the white garlic sauce.

We watched The Office, and then I rewatched a short series of documentaries from Internet Historian called The Triggering Of Shia. It’s about some kind of political virtue signaling masquerading as “modern art” put together by actor Shia Laboof or whatever, and the successful sabotage attempts by trolls from 4chan. Absolutely hilarious.

Chapter 238

I woke up reasonably early, took the dog out, did a bit of tai chi like the elderly Chinese man I am, and caught the beginning of the Metal Minded weekly review podcast. Halfway through, I had to get dressed and go to school, as we had our first meeting of the year. It felt weird to put on long trousers.

On the short bike ride there, I listened to the album Die Miserable by Fuck The Facts, one of their newest offerings moving away from pure grindcore sound while still being extremely abrasive. Despite the title of the album, I was quite cheerful, I can’t say I wasn’t looking to go back to work somewhat and that it hasn’t been a long vacation.

The principal, just released from 23 days of mandatory quarantine after coming back from his home country, went over a few points. Three guys were absent, one is still in quarantine and two are unfortunately stuck out of the country, for sure it’s a bit of a gamble to travel in and out of China these days. The meeting was over in less than an hour, and we were free to go until Monday. Cool.

So I went home, opened an 11 AM beer, and ate sesame noodles while watching Clown World news. Some schools have been in session for a few days now, and there are teachers getting a bit of attention from the internet for posting bizarre videos or Twitter rants. Most were innocuous enough if a bit out of place, like the young teachers showing how the first thing they did in their classroom was to plaster it with rainbow and BlackLivesMatter flags or discussing alternative transgender pronouns with five-year-olds, but some definitely crossed the line for any sane person, like the transgender talking about teaching pre-kindergarden children about gender identity and sex education and “kink”, and the high school teacher who got filmed yelling about how much she hates Trump. How’s that relevant to anything? “This is a chemistry class!”, one student is heard saying in the background as she screeches. I seriously can’t recall knowing anything about my teachers’ political position on any issue when I was in high school. The latter two got fired.

I love the contrast of the faces of the Lotus Eaters show hosts as they react to this. Carl's face shows he's been around the block for many years now, ever since he was doing the This Week In Stupid series, trying not to laugh and overall not being very surprised at anything. His sidekick Caleb's frowning with his head cocked, even throwing a few facepalms in.

I'm teaching in a British school program in China. The education about "racial harmony" to these ethnically homogeneous kids starts and stops at "Your physics teacher is Srilankan, your chemistry teacher is French Canadian, your math teacher is Ugandan, your economics teacher is South African and your English teacher is a black American, and they're all specialists of their subjects with your academic excellence and growth at heart" and it's more than enough. And as far as the LGBT stuff goes, I don't think it's relevant to anything in my syllabus and goes further than disciplining bullies who mess with the gay kid if it ever comes to my attention (it never happened in all my years here)

In the afternoon there were professional development presentations done by the corporate office. Normally we have a three-day conference with all the teachers from the satellite schools all over China, but due to the pandemic they run it on Zoom. Attendance was optional for returning teachers, but I went anyway. I sometimes get ideas and though some of it can be circlejerky at times, I enjoy talking about pedagogy with other classroom foot soldiers (though I severely, severly dislike discussions about pedagogy by academics who just throw jargon and acronyms around).

Then I listened to some new metal releases that the Metal Minded homies talked about. Tombstoner with a Cannibal Corpse-esque death metal, and Wolves In The Throne Room with some masterful atmospheric black metal, a band that I don’t listen to that often but is close to my heart for being one of the first to expose me to that subgenre way, way back in the day.

I have a bunch of vacuum-packed kebab meat in the fridge and looked up how to make Lebanese garlic sauce. Turns out it’s dead easy, and only involves three ingredients. So I whipped it up, chilled it in the fridge, and went to buy vegetables at the stinky market. I put the kebab meat in heated tortillas (an acceptable substitute for any sort of flatbread, don’t sue me) with a heaping spoon of the garlicky goodness and hummus, tomatoes, lettuce and some kind of Chinese pickles I found in the fridge. It was delicious, and gave me nostalgia of my old life in Ottawa. The only thing missing was some of that thick mango juice you could only find in those shawarma shops, and a guy named Faroosh or Nasseem saying “Ça va être tout, chief?”

I watched the season finale of Bad Blood and a few other odd videos on YouTube and then played Mount & Blade for a bit, campaigning against the Khergit nomadic scum. Their castles were fairly easy to take but the pitched battles were frustrating, now I understand why the Mongols took over half the world, not necessarily because their mounted archers are that strong, but because they’d piss off everyone until they ragequit.

Chapter 237

I woke up at 7:30 when the girlfriend left to go to work, and should have just gone for a walk with the dog, but rolled back to sleep instead. So he peed and pooped in the corner. I can only be mad at myself for being such a failure at life.

I read the news, and watched a YouTube video about the cultural impact of Slipknot. For sure, having been in high school at the turn of the millenia, Slipknot was a band I and millions of other angry teenagers were into and brought me towards extreme metal. I agreed completely with the thesis in the video, regarding Slipknot being more of a mix of death metal with post-grunge radio rock than a full-on nü-metal band like they were and are still labeled as. Aside from a few scratchy-scratches on the self-titled album, in fact, there isn’t much nü-metal in Slipknot’s earlier work, and very little that sounds like Korn or Limp Bizkit. The Punk Rock MBA also highlighted how their commitment to image and lore brought them to the next level, and you can’t disagree with that, seeing Slipknot live is an experience unlike any other. It made me want to listen to some tracks from their first album, and though I’ve moved on, I can still appreciate the hell out of songs like (Sic) and Surfacing.

Then I clicked on a link to the music of a duet called Duma, from Kenya. It was labeled as grindcore with electronic elements, and after listening to their album I’d say it was more the opposite, it sounded like high-aggression looping beats made on FL Studio, with screaming vocals on top of it. It wasn’t bad, but not the stuff I’d listen to every day.

I started getting antsy staying in, and since the temperature dropped a bit, I went on a bike ride with no particular destination in mind. I exited the city and went through farmlands and industrial areas and neighboring small towns, for about four hours. A nice afternoon. On the way back, I stopped in Nongville to get portions of sesame noodles, and ate some when I got back. I didn’t eat until I was full though, as I was going to play soccer in the evening. In fact I only had about half an hour to shower and eat a few bites and get my stuff, then I got in the car. I stopped by Metro to buy a few bottles of gin, since we ran out and the girlfriend can’t make her gin-tonics, which brings her into a state of panic.

We played soccer for two hours, rotating three teams, 20 minutes on, 10 minutes off. A great time was had by all. Then I drove two pals home, and one of them, the Polish guy who makes his own limoncello, gave me a bottle to thank me. Pretty cool. He suggested to let it age for another week, I can’t wait to drink it.

Back home, I took a quick shower, drank a homebrew, relaxed on the couch petting the dog and then went to bed where I read a chapter of Musashi with a glass of rum. It was past midnight, when school starts I don’t think I’ll go play soccer often.

Chapter 236

I woke up at 10 and cleaned the puddle of urine and the little pile of turds left on the bathroom floor by the dog. He’s fully trained now and we don’t even put those diaper pads on the ground, but he’s used to go for a walk early, something his dad is too lazy to wake up for, on his last few days of vacation. I took him out anyway, and we walked around the apartment complex.

I made English muffins and eggs and watched the Manny Pacquiao retirement fight. First there were two Mexican veterans going at it, and then Pacman against a Cuban guy named Yordenis Ugas. It was... pretty boring, dare I say. I love boxing as a discipline and the whole pageantry around it and its long history and culture, but high level matches like these tend to just be very linear, with little momentum changes and the guys are so tough and good at defense that they just exchange combos without anything really affecting their output. Despite 95% of the build-up being about the Filipino legend, Ugas won fairly comfortably and retained his welterweight title, well, one of the several welterweight titles.

I then wanted to listen to music while I read Musashi. Taake is a well-known underground Norwegian black metal band and aside from their solid catalog, the band got a bit of internet fame (in the obscure corners of the internet that I lurk) for a picture of the frontman performing live and his penis coming out of a hole in his pants. “Rock out with your cock out” was the caption. So even though it’s good Trve Norwegian black metal I can’t help to smile when I hear that band. Then I listened to At The Gates’s The Red In The Sky Is Ours, after browsing metal news and seeing that the legendary Swedish band is releasing an album and that I had only listened to their über-classic Slaughter Of The Soul, a monumental album that laid the foundations for melodic death metal and unfortunately outshines the hell out of the rest of their discography. The Red In The Sky Is Ours, their debut album, was in a similar vein but much more chaotic and with strange violin interludes, I enjoyed it. Then I played the new Sodom EP, with one re-recording of their old classic track Bombenhagel with plenty of seemingly improvised solos, and two new tracks. Sodom slays, nothing more to say about it, and I’m always happy when they drop a few tracks.

I had a Wechat conversation with an old friend, the guy I ate oat noodles with in Beijing. We often argue about politics, and after reading the entry from two days ago he disagreed with my premise that some cultures are better than others. We went at length debating mostly about the semantics and relevance of such a statement, and it was a fun discussion. I won’t rehash the arguments brought forth by both sides, because it would probably have a bias on my part, but it was a fun talk. I like having smart friends.

At night, I made hummus and pan-fried chunks of pork. We ate while watching The Office and then I played Mount & Blade for a bit, there’s one faction in the game who are kind of like the Mongols, and most of their offense is made up of horse archers. They’re very frustrating to fight, because they just buzz around like bees and the battles take forever to conclude.

Chapter 235

I woke up late and relaxed in the crib during the daytime hours, to escape the heat. Looking for stuff to watch on YouTube, I stumbled upon a channel called Analysis Of Evil, based on the antagonist or anti-hero of popular movies. It’s really great, and I watched a few of them, about the bad guy in Training Day, No Country For Old Men, Taxi Driver and Breaking Bad. The latter was particularly long and in-depth, going at length about what makes Walter White such an interesting character. It made me want to revisit the show in the intended format, so I watched a full episode, one from Season 4 that was particularly acclaimed. There are aspects of the show that grate me a bit (the absolutely retarded storyline with the twin bald Mexican hitmen, and the whole arc with the plane crash) but there’s no denying it’s one of the best TV series of all time. The acting, the cinematography, the pacing, the build-up and denouement, it’s so on point. I’ll do a full rewatch one day, for sure.

I sat down writing my diary, and looked for music. I put on EPs and tracks by Agalloch, some kind of atmospheric post-metal, beautiful music that your grandma would find cool if you removed the harsh vocals. Then in the evening I went to the gym, the BJJ guys were resting but the big Kazakh and the eccentric Ukrainian came and we practiced wrestling together. They were speaking in their weird communist language, and I was a bit surprised, I could understand more than I thought I would. I should get back to studying Russian, I have books at home and went over the basics (that I polished during my travels to Soviet countries) but when you start clawing your way towards a lower intermediate level, you get a serious kick in the nuts, their grammar rules seem to have been written by Satan himself.

I sprained my thumb during a grappling exchange, being a useless noob who doesn’t have the muscle memory and reflexes of sticking all the fingers together like a big claw. At first I thought I could just shake it off and work around it, but the more we went, the more painful it got. Ah well. What’s a boy to do?

I rode to a small park to meet the girlfriend and the dog and we went home. Dinner was a bunch of leftovers while we watched The Office, and then I watched two episodes of Bad Blood. I’m torn, it’s a really good mafia story with unexpected twists but the fact that it’s set in Montreal and everybody just speaks English seriously fucken grates me. Isn’t Narcos super popular, and nearly all in Spanish with subtitles? I’m sure the average moron could handle having actual Quebecers on screen. It’s particularly infuriating since the chucklefuck producer, in an interview, said that the series (inspired by the true story of the Risotto family) had to “be developed in Canada by Canadians”. Which means completely erasing French speakers, I guess. Doubly ironic in the age of “inclusivity” and “representation” and “shoving gay black characters in every possible slot because it’s 2021”.

Chapter 234

I dreamt that I lived in Japan. I had an office job and was riding cramped public transportation for long periods of time. It was one of those very immersive dreams that felt real.

I did 45 minutes of yoga, then watched the UFC main card. It was pretty good, culminating in a close middleweight fight between Jared Cannonier and Kelvin Gastelum. I ate the last piece of the khachapuri and watched Clown World news. In the wake of the Afghanistan fiasco, a Ukrainian adviser mentioned that the USA failed to export its political model as well as the idea of forcing “diversity” in cultures that are not receptive to all that LGBT imagery, feminism and black characters shoved in Netflix shows. So instead of working around Afghanistan’s culture and political landscape (I use the term “Afghanistan” loosely here; the very fact that it’s treated like a nation-state in the Westphalian sense rather than a collection of tribal lands is in fact one of the roots of the problem) they tried to just make them become like the USA, and of course it was doomed to failure.

That got me thinking about cultural solipsism, and how indeed there are many things that might work well in Culture A but don’t work in Culture B, and vice versa. China would be one clear example, very relevant to current events and also one I obviously have a perspective of, having had my feet on the ground and my eyes and ears open for close to twelve years now. A lot of the macro- and micro- cultural aspects of China seem totally incompatible with the western liberal framework, and get labeled as “authoritarian” and “inflexible”. A limp-wristed democracy here would lead to absolute chaos and the collapse of the country, and people hold some kind of collectivist views that initially struck me as a bit weird, coming from an individualistic, atomized culture. And yeah, of course, it’s nuanced and complex, when taking into account generational changes, technology, inevitable globalism, regional variations, outcasts who don’t fit in the stereotypes of their country’s culture, and paradoxes arising, like how a so-called collectivist society like China can still lead to some of the most fucken blatant displays of selfishness. But overall, yeah, one of the great failures of foreign policy is to just see the whole world as a USA 2.0 just because Canada and Australia and parts of Western Europe fit the bill, and that the only differences are that some of them foreigners wear funny hats or dress according to their climates or eat with sticks instead of forks.

The one trap we have to be wary of falling in, though, is the one of cultural relativism. Some cultures are better than others, and if you reject the idea, you haven’t traveled. Some behaviors and cultural norms are objectively despicable, and that’s why I don’t feel bad for calling out cunts for littering, and shit on the idea that “it’s just their culture” rather than what an uncivilized fucknugget does. So telling Afghans to stop raping boys is fine, imperative even, while trying to push the idea of gender equality and 50% representation in government is maybe a bit too much. And there are zillions of examples obviously, some between cultures that are overall not that different but have points that are not compatible, like the wokels who try to import and force-feed American critical race theory into Quebec and look at the nation through an American black-vs-white lens rather than the struggle of French Canadians against their anglo overlords.

Anyway, I’m just some guy rambling, but this stuff is on my mind quite a bit, seeing how some of the destructive Clown World ideas peddled by the western media and academia don’t apply to the rest of the world and that attempts at forcing them down the throats of reticent cultures either fails epically or leads to backlash.

And I guess we could look at this from the opposite direction, with “vaccine passports” being the talk of the town. Obviously Quebecers and Americans generally oppose the idea, citing individual freedom and privacy, while the Chinese just go along. I have this tracking app on my phone that gives me either a green, yellow or red code based on regions I’d been to in the past 14 days, in case one of them has an eclosion of covid cases. And... I’m fine with that. I don’t really care if Xi Jinping can track my movements to the nearest ± 10 meters, what I do care about is the microbrewery and the grocery store and the BJJ gym staying open. So yeah, in short, I care more about convenience than privacy, and you have the right to disagree, but don’t call me names, I can also play that game, and probably more virulently than you do.

But net positive results to all that tracking has to be part of the equation. I was talking about that with an Australian friend who also used to be a long time resident of China and now holds nuanced schizophrenic political views like I do, mixing libertarianism with a rational realization that some of the collectivist measures in place in a country like China actually work. He said that as a result of that tracking and surveilance of its citizens, China has low crime and efficiency, in the way that you wouldn’t have it even if Australia implemented such measures. That’s why I’m so opposed to partial, conditional lockdowns, they just bring the worst of both worlds.

When darkness fell, the girlfriend, the dog and I took a long walk, first stopping at a florist shop and then at the Italian restaurant. A lot of booze and food was consumed. A good time was had by all.

Chapter 233

There was a funeral just outside my window, with the old-timers marching band playing dissonant music while a woman cried her heart out on the microphone. Then at around 9 AM they blew up a bunch of bombs. As long as they don’t do it at 6, better than a kick in the nuts.

I browsed Facebook for a bit. There are a few people I know who get mad when there are instances of Quebec-bashing in the squarehead Canadian media, and one guy pointed to some dumbass housewives daytime show in Toronto. They had a panel discussing the future of the French language in Canada, and unlike most roundtable discussions that (quite sensibly) include black people for black issues, gays for gay issues, etc., only four anglo women were present, and they just spouted some shitty ignorant takes. I was surprised that the vermin called Jan fucken Wong was present, I thought she had been canceled to oblivion before getting canceled was cool. She penned an editorial many years ago in which she blamed school shootings in Montreal on laws put in place to protect the use of the French language, and even her racist anti-peasoup overlords thought it was too much.

It’s weird to hear or read what foreigners think of Quebec. On one hand I understand that we’re just 8 million rednecks in a lost frostbitten corner of North America, but aside from squareheads (anglo-Canadians) and Murkins who live in the northeast and maybe a handful of French people, most seem to think we’re a relic of the past, like those small towns in Texas where some German dialects are kept on life support. My coworker was astonished when I told him Quebec City is a metro area of one million where 100% is done in French, he thought people did everything in English and French was far in the background, like in Louisiana. But I also meet people who think every Canadian is bilingual.

On a semi-related note, I started watching a TV series called Bad Blood, on a friend’s recommendation. It’s set in Montreal and is based on a true story about the mafia and biker gangs fighting, something that runs deep in the cultural psyche of that city and is the premise for a lot of good movies and series. I’m two episodes deep and it’s pretty good, but I can’t help but being annoyed at how they shit on the immersion factor by having everything done in English. We’ve already seen Mexican gangsters speaking to one another in Spanish-accented English, Russian mobsters speaking English with Russian accents, and now it’s the turn of Quebec bikers. It’s so fucking dumb. But then again don’t they have black actors portraying medieval European characters nowadays? Suspension of disbelief be fucken damned.

I also played a fair bit of Mount & Blade: Warband, and at night I trained BJJ. A good time was had by all, I was truly drained afterwards. Then I went home, ate the dinner the girlfriend prepared, and watched the Oakland episode of Hip-Hop Evolution.

Chapter 232

I woke up late, enjoying the ACed room like the lazy walrus I am. I checked my e-mail, we’re starting to get news from the school about work soon resuming. It’s been a long vacation, it will feel a bit weird to get back in the groove.

I went to buy frozen chicken breasts, that I left in the sink to thaw, and other food items we need. I kneaded dough to make a khachapuri, a god-tier underrated cheese-filled bread from Georgia, and while it was rising I got on a weekly Zoom group discussion between fans of metal and craft beer. I was home alone, so after it was over I heeded recommendations for some good growly music and listened to albums by Primitive Man, Galvanizer and Flesh Hoarder. All three were magnificient juicy slabs of metal.

I rolled the mix of mozzarella, feta and cream cheese in my dough, baked it, and ate way too big of a piece while watching Clown World and MMA news. Then I went to the bank to pay my rent for the year. It took only 10 minutes, despite the fact that it’s a Chinese bank, and also they are undergoing renovations so the whole operation is temporarily cramped in a back room. Long gone are the days where I’d spend all day at the bank just to do the most simple of shit, I cherish the fact that my current bank is staffed by competent clerks and not fucktards. Also they didn’t ask me to wear a fayssah mursk, which is always a plus in my book. I can’t wait for that dumbest of trends to go to the garbage can of history where it belongs, and that we only see those things at the dentist.

Back home, I did the calisthenics routine, getting nice and sweaty and pumped up. I cut the chicken breasts and simmered them until they fell apart, then made “sloppy chicken” sandwiches using hamburger buns. It was delicious. The mix of onions, ketchup, Dijon and hot sauce gave the whole thing a nice flavor profile. We started watching The Office again, Michael is on the verge of getting fired for his immaturity and incompetence so he’s starting his own paper company.

We took the dog out for a bit, cleaned up and had a relaxing night in. Life is good.

Chapter 231

I woke up fairly early, because I was to be a guest reviewer on the Metal Minded podcast. Usually it’s another guy doing it, but he can’t this week, so my old friend running the show invited me on. We talked about four new underground releases: Killer Souls and Graveslave were rather generic and unimpressive in their thrash and modern death metal slots respectively, Dimman really annoyed me with their limp and uncohesive and uninspired mix of melodic death metal and female opera voice parts, and the only album I thoroughly enjoyed was by Fawn Limbs, a three-piece from Pennsylvania transcending genres, expertly mixing up chaotic and incredibly violent mathcore and technical extreme metal parts with a creepy ambiance and a narration using spoken word. My boy Yolin and I dissected the albums for the small but loyal audience over a bit less than two hours, and they responded well to my performance, it was nice to hear. And despite the early hour due to the time difference between China and Quebec, I indulged in some good beer as per Metal Minded tradition. I had a white beer from a Xinjiang brewery and a Contender pale ale from Boxing Cat, an extremely pintable brew from one of the country’s premier micros.

The remainder of the day was spent resting, after a busy Wednesday that saw me run in the morning and grapple in the afternoon. I ate English muffins for lunch, I hadn’t had English muffins in years and they used to be my favorite breakfast items. When I saw a targeted ad circulating on WeChat from a supplier of British food I jumped on it and made an order. Then I played a bunch of Mount & Blade: Warband, building a badass mercenary army with mamelukes and crossbowmen and hired infantrymen, and getting into battles and sieges.

In the afternoon I went out with the dog to buy groceries, I wanted to try a chicken recipe but the small stores I went to didn’t have chicken that wasn’t frozen. I pondered going to a bigger supermarket, but it was further away, and just bought a whole chicken that I tried to debone myself. Bad move. It was way too fat and didn’t have enough lean meat on it, so my stew didn’t have the expected consistency. Nonplussed, I just put it aside to use all the rendered fatty goodness the next day, and baked some chicken wings instead. I also made a potato salad, quesadillas and steamed asparagus. The girlfriend had one of her grade-12 students over for some kind of school project, and I gave her a plate. Hopefully she won’t get addicted to my cooking and come every month like some of the girlfriend’s previous students.

Chapter 230

I knew I wouldn’t beat that video game addiction out of me, but I could also force myself to do other shit. So I was on my feet before 6 AM and ran to the lake and back, a good 8 km. It felt great. I even got the nod and thumbs up from a sinewy old man who looks like he’s been running marathons since 1952.

I took the dog out for a bit, took a shower and then we went to the Marriott hotel for the breakfast buffet. A British pal goes there once a week so we joined him, gorging ourselves on eggs, bacon, noodles, fruit juice and various Chinese and western staples. A good time was had by all. We talked about various topics, one being the recent news about the government imposing rules on education, banning (or seriously impeding) after-hours cram schools from operating. Chinese students are squeezed like sponges from age 3 onwards, staying in school from the crack of dawn until 10 or 11 PM, and getting dubious tutoring on the weekends and holidays, anything to get a slight competitive edge for the cut-throat university entry exams. Well, no more, Big Brother says. Apparently this comes in the wake of the slacking of the one-child policy and other population control measures; in fact, now the government wants people to make more children, and the main objection was “How are we gonna afford all those cram schools then?!” So they do have the interests of the middle class at heart, sometimes. And maybe also they considered how goddamn unhealthy the whole system is.

Now, of course, this will greatly affect a significant portion of the foreign population, many of whom are employed as English teachers in training centers that operate exactly in the type of after-hours slots that are targeted by that new regulation. And on top of that, the big wall of text that’s been shared on social media (a confusing and clumy translation in English, and the original Chinese that uses too much legalese and complicated terminology for me to want to squint and decipher) talked about restricting teaching jobs held by foreign nationals and to prioritize the Chinese. Ah well. We’ll see what will happen with that. I think my job is safe for the time being but there’s been rumors about those types of “international” high schools that have been mushrooming in China over the past decade also being red taped to death. What can a boy do?

I went back home, played Warband all afternoon and then took a nap before going to the gym. We had a great jiu-jitsu session, and I did some light boxing sparring too. Afterwards we all went to eat Xinjiang barbecue. I don’t like the place that much, it’s always crowded and deafeningly loud, the service is of adequate speed considering how busy they are but the Uyghur waiters are always a bit surly, but they have an ideal location downtown so people often want to go there when it comes time to consume grilled mutton skewers. I much prefer the other Xinjiang restaurant, but hey, a great time was had by all.

Chapter 229

It’s been a few days in a row where my favorite people on Earth came out and blew up bombs by my window, and every time it’s been at 8 AM on the dot. It used to be at 6, perhaps there’s a new rule in place. Baby steps, I guess. Every time I just rolled over and went back to sleep.

Coincidentally, a friend of mine in a shitposting WeChat group posted an article entitled noise pollution rules, and being my usual snarky self, I replied “They mean it as a verb, right? Noise pollution, it totally rules!” The article talked about dancing grannies who roll out a big speaker on public square at dusk, put on some bangin’ music, and do a choreography, apparently their days are counted and now the Powers That Be want to crack down on that. I for one think it’s a pretty cool aspect of Chinese culture, seniors get to exercise a bit and socialize, and yeah they can be loud and the music is more often than not godawful (sometimes it’s some dissonant dubstep though, which is hilarious) but if they want to alleviate noise pollution in the undending campaign to make the peasants more 文明, I’d say explosions in the morning, speakers playing advertisements on loop in front of stores and cunts with their cell phone videos in public should be a higher priorities than the dancing grannies.

I read the news, the story of the hour was about the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The whole thing was an absolute farce from the beginning, a little sprinkle of neocon interventionist put-your-fingers-in-others'-pies to impede China from dealing with Iran, lost in a trillion-dollar scam engineered by cartoon villains and their "reconstruction companies". There was zero chance of ever "stabilizing" the country, and even calling it a country in the Westphalian sense is inaccurate and Eurosolipsistic.

Some of the comments I've seen have a bit of sunk cost fallacy in them, in the sense that even people who agree it was a fiasco (ie: anyone except bumbling retards) say the transition/removal of troops should have been done better and that "American/Canadian/Afghan lives have been lost for nothing". Perhaps. But we could have stayed there until 2025, 2050 or 9000 and it would still be the same shit.

That's why I don't think Trump, or even Senile Joe, deserve that much blame. For the former, "bringing the troops back home" and stopping all this nonsense world police shit is in line with his isolationist/nationalist/America First platform. And for the latter, he doesn't know what he had for breakfast so let's cut him some slack. I dislike the whole blame game the way it's knee-jerkedly played, in this bipartisan arena, so as much as I hate the metric tons of undeserved shit Trump got thrown his way, just as infantile and unintellectual it is to just go "Biden bad" like some libertarian/conservative/right-wing commentators are doing since he got in.

Hell, I considered going on a tour in Afghanistan when I was still enlisted. Would have been a nice 50 000$ in my pockets for 6 months, plus all the reg force pay in the build-up. But getting potential PTSD or getting shot at for that cause I didn't believe in for a second after a bit of reading on the topic, nah. (Some guys in my unit went and were on base the whole time, barely hearing a shot fired and the hardest thing they did was drink an unrefrigerated Coke, but some saw pieces of human hamburger fall on their windshields after unsuccessful suicide bomber attacks) So I came to China instead.

At least the memes are spicy, like that person who pointed out that the Taliban will strictly enforce mask wearing and social distancing for 51% of the population.

I spent most of the day playing Warband, as a mercenary navigating some kind of fictional medieval world. You gather a band of warriors and go on missions given by lords and random people, making friends and enemies along the way, which can impede your movements through the map. You can also do trade and diplomacy rather than brute force attacks, and there are layers to the game I haven’t seen yet. It’s really fun, and very addictive. I had semi-plans for the day but none of them materialized, engrossed as I was in the game. After dark, the girlfriend peeled me from my screen to go take a walk, we went downtown with the dog and bought some odds and ends at a cheap goods store, before stopping at the wine bar like the urban hedonists we are. We shared a bottle of Riesling, a sweet white wine from Germany, chatting with the owners. It was a bit expensive but hey, are we urban hedonists looking for a quick endorphin rush or are we not?

We went back home, ate a late dinner of creamy pasta and a scrumptious salad while watching an episode of Close Enough. Then I played Warband until way too late.

Chapter 228

I woke up late, not really hungover, but with the kind of bloated and hazy feel that follows a night of heavy beer consumption. Bleh.

I did mostly fuckall for a few hours, then went out on my skateboard to go pick up the car at the garage as mandated by the girlfriend. The clutch has been acting weird and the car does a little herky-jerky at low speed, but it’s expected, it’s an old machine now. On the way, I went to investigate saunas and bathhouses, the Kazakh asked me about it. Most are closed because of anti-covid measures, but I found one that’s mysteriously open.

Back home, I fired up the PC game Warband: Mount & Blade, that I installed a few months ago but didn’t get into it. Well, now I’m truly addicted, and roamed the medieval open world with my mercenary character for the remainder of the afternoon. I had to peel myself away from the computer to go to BJJ practice.

It was raining but fuck it, I’d rather have that than 38-degree days. Six of us were on the mats, and I had some hard rolls. I tried an armbar escape I saw on YouTube and it worked, I was all giddy, until I realized I wasn’t out of the woods yet and still had a strong blue belt trying to fold me like laundry.

The Kazakh and I went to the sauna place. It felt good but I was already completely drained and in need of food and beer, next time we’ll go in the afternoon and enjoy the facilities, the place has rest areas, board games, a buffet, and plenty of unisex and mixed-gender areas for pampering oneself.

I dragged my exhausted carcass home and made pasta with some leftover stew we found in the freezer. I watched a bit of comedy and clown world news videos and then played Mount & Blade for a bit, and by for a bit I mean until 3 AM.

Chapter 227

During the road trip, especially the segment with the in-laws where we had to cover long distances every day, we often had to get up early and I was longing for a lazy morning where I could sleep in a bit. Well I got it, and then some, I’ve been abusing a bit in the past few days.

I reheated and ate the Thai soup, and like a lot of flavorful soups or stews, it tasted even better the next day. Then I mostly sat around, doing a bit of writing, a bit of reading, a bit of YouTube watching, a bit of music listening. The girlfriend was at her desk, making dumplings by scooping a little mound of ground meat in a thin layer of dough and folding it. I’d have volunteered my help but I suck ass at folding dumplings.

In the early evening, we went out with our bicycles to the roasted fish restaurant. It was packed and festive as always, but we didn’t have to wait, we got a table right away and the fish was on our table within three minutes of us ordering. Efficient operation. I forgot to bring a small container of dog chow, so the dog was begging for bits of fish under the table.

Then the girlfriend went to retrieve a package she got delivered at her workplace, and I went to the bar. A bunch of my British pals were there, with an ever-expanding collection of empty beer and cider bottles. Their goal was to fill up a whole rectangle on the table, I got some Chang beers from the fridge and helped them out like the altruist I am. We played poker games, with sips instead of money, and I drank way more than I initially planned.

Chapter 226

I woke up late, with a smile on my face. I ate the leftover fried rice, with a tall glass of grapefruit juice, and did random stuff on the internet. Browsing Facebook, something caught my eye. My cousin is a hardcore endurance athlete, having completed several Ironman triathlons. She must be somewhat insane, like all the people who put themselves through such a grueling ordeal. Well her boyfriend (or at least I think it’s her boyfriend) is doing a 100-mile run, and she posted pictures of him at the starting line. Fucken hell, 100 miles?! 160 km?!?! I looked down at my beer belly, put on my running shoes and headed out. It was overcast and a bit chilly, perfect temperature. I did a loop around a lake, mostly on cute pedestrian/bicycle paths, it must have been around 8 km according to my estimation on Baidu Maps and it was enough for me.

Back home, I rehydrated and took the dog out for a bit, until it started raining. In the afternoon I watched a movie called High Life, about a bunch of death row prisoners sent on a spaceship to work on extracting energy from a black hole or some shit. It was slow, and quite creepy, with an unsettling scene of aging starlet Juliette Binoche getting her post-wall flabby body naked and masturbating with some kind of big mounted dildo. I didn’t like the movie that much, in a similar genre I much prefered Moon, and at least that movie has a denouement, it doesn’t just “end”.

I took a nap, then went to the gym and wrestled with the big Kazakh. It was grueling as all hell, freestyle wrestlers are another breed of humans, like ultramarathon runners. It’s already hard enough to try to move a body the same weight as yours around, but when he’s also trying to move you around and with better technique and the kind of gritty spirit of a nomad of the great steppes who’s been doing it all his life, well, you’re in for a smeshing. Interestingly enough, some of the words he used were directly from French, a testament of the francophilia of the Russian world and also because apparently modern wrestling has been brought to Kazakhstan by some tough French bastards at the turn of the 19^th century. For instance, the drill where you start on all fours and must resist takedown attempts from your opponent is called par terre.

I got home, dropped my sweaty clothes in the laundry, and made some a Thai soup. I browned onions and garlic and scallions, added ginger and various hot peppers, chicken broth, coconut milk, tofu, shrimp, bean sprouts, and a seasoning package I got in Bangkok last year. It hit the spot. We ate while watching a new adult cartoon called Close Enough, about a couple of millenial parents and their young daughter getting into all sorts of weird shenanigans. Then I watched another episode of the hip hop doco series, about 2 Live Crew and the Geto Boys putting southern hip hop on the map in very different ways.

Chapter 225

I had a strange dream: I was sitting in the office of an English teaching mill, surrounded by gossiping, sneering coworkers. I was new there, and when I’d ask a question, they’d be crabby and unhelpful. The photocopy machine didn’t work, or rather it was an old piece-of-shit model that made barely legible copies at an extremely slow speed. I tried to fix it, but ended up making it worst. Then, Joe Biden himself shuffled into the office and summoned me to the photocopier. In his senile, muffled drawl, he condescendingly pointed at the faulty pieces and showed me how to put them back together, but it still didn’t work. Throughout the whole ordeal, there were no classes, the classrooms were empty and there were only vague rumors about when the students would arrive. One of the rumors emanating from the gossip machine was that the students were pretty bad and disruptive.

So yeah, I guess it was a big mish-mash of things I’ve seen and read and thought about recently, put together in a semi-coherent narrative by my bored subconscious mind. Then I woke up around 11, and spent another glorious day doing very little. I cooked fried rice and dropped some torn clothes to be sewn at one of those small dry cleaning and mending shops in the ghetto part of town. It was only a five-minute bicycle ride but it counts as an errand anyway.

I watched several YouTube videos about clown world news. It was depressing but also entertaining in a Schadenfreude way. Some people made a big deal about Obama celebrating his birthday in a lavish party where none of the jet-set cunts attending wore fayssah mursks. I say good for him, fayssah mursks are retarded. Yeah, maybe there’s some hypocrisy at play, but what should we expect? And then there’s the whole thing about vaccines, there’s still a small segment of the population who categorically refuses to get the shot for various reasons, and now the propaganda outlets are working double time to incentivise them to get it, by all means necessary. There’s coercion, bribing, fear, and one campaign that amuses me quite a bit, in which some extremely gay young TikTokers make videos with the airheaded White House press secretary and interview Dr. Fauci on their shitty platforms normally used for junktertainment for primary school kids, with the goal of making the vaccine look “hip” and “cool”. So the last bastions of unvaccinated, the urban blacks, the rural whites, and the Latinos, are going to be convinced by that? Fat fucken chance.

The West is falling to smithereens under our eyes, there’s no question about it. That said, when I’m actually there, I mostly see normal shit, normal people doing normal things, and men and women, whites and ethnic minorities getting along just fine, and all the ethnomasochism and destructive commie currents are barely an afterthought, encountered only on the rare and unpleasant occasions when I interact with an overweight person with unnatural hair color and facial piercings born close to the year 2000. Same thing with my life in China, which is (as the daily autistically obsessive chronicling done on this very blog shows) pretty damn far from the dystopian vision that a lot of foreign media outlets depict.

I spent most of my day doing stuff on my computer, like upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10, and moving my stash of cryptocurrency from one platform to another. Whoopdeedoo.

I briefly, very briefly considered going to the pub, as it was Friday night. Staying in with the girlfriend and watching cartoons, hip-hop documentaries and wrestling matches was a much more judicious use of my time.

Chapter 224

Yet another day of doing a big bag of fuckall. Should I feel bad about it though? We constantly hear about productivity n’ shit but I don’t have anything on my to-do list, I do make money for every minute spent sitting on my ass (I’m on paid vacation), and I don’t do anything too destructive like drugs or eating colossal amounts of junk food or spending money uselessly. I did do the calisthenics routine early in the day, giving me a nice pump and a boost of endorphins, so it’s still a net positive.

I listened to three albums by Chinese black metal bands: Vitriolic Sage, Acherozu and Vengeful Spectre. They all kicked ass, there’s some seriously high level black metal in the Yellow Country. I read chapters from Musashi. I browned pieces of meat and put them in the slow cooker.

I started watching a Japanese anime called Aggretsuko, set in a world with anthropomorphic animals, the main protagonist being a raccoon working a soul-sucking accounting job and blowing off steam by singing death metal songs at a karaoké bar by herself at night. I also watched a movie called Jusqu’au Déclin, about a bunch of survivalists in Quebec going to a training seminar in the woods. At first, everything goes well, but then something fucked up happens and their bottled up paranoia and the stash of weapons around exacerbates the problem. Pretty good movie, check it out, it’s on Netflix under the name The Decline.

A friend also recommended me a documentary series called Hip-Hop Evolution, I watched the first two episodes, about the genesis of the genre in The Bronx in the 1970s. Pretty good stuff, and they had lengthy interviews with everyone involved, from Kool Herc to Africa Bambata to Grandmaster Flash among many others. I was a teeny bit surprised the word “Jamaica” wasn’t mentioned once in the whole episode, after all Kool Herc was an immigrant from Kingston and there’s a clear connection between proto-hip-hop and dancehall. Still, it was pretty thorough and interesting, looking forward to the rest of the series.

Chapter 223

Again, a fairly lazy uneventful day in the crib. I watched a documentary on boxing called Counterpunch, it’s only available on Netflix so I got a membership, in the next month I’ll try to watch more interesting stuff on there. I am so picky when it comes to movies and TV series though and don’t want to take the plunge blindly, there’s way too much crap to plough through. I’ll ask friends who have good taste for recommendations.

I watched tons of BJJ tutorials on YouTube, then I went to BJJ practice. We did a few drills to activate muscle memory, and then rolled some rounds. There’s a blue belt I did pretty good against, even catching an armbar after a side control reversal and the ensuing scramble. I outweigh the guy by 50% though, it definitely played a factor. Still, my positional awareness is improving and that feels good.

Then I went to the new microbrewery, they used to operate out of a tent by a stinky tofu cart but now they opened their own small brewpub, with a minimalist decor of wood and aluminium. I had the saison and the gose, two styles I haven’t had in a while. I foresee myself spending quite a bit of my easy-earned cash at that brewery.

Chapter 222

Sometimes this diary spins its wheels in the mud. What did I do on this sunny August 10^th? Not much. I read chapters from Musashi, I listened to music, I watched documentaries. I walked the dog in the early afternoon, and I walked him again. I rested my sore muscles.

We got an e-mail from the principal, he’s in a quarantine hotel for three weeks. Three weeks!!! With that, and the heightened price of airfare to get out of China, and the uncertainty, you’d have to really, really want to go on vacation elsewhere. But like I said before, for many of my coworkers, it wasn’t even a dilemma, they had to go see their families whom they had not seen for over a year. Forgive me for waiting a bit.

Chapter 221

I woke up at 8, just in time for the Metal Minded podcast to start. The boys were talking to two musicians from the melodic death metal band Aeternam, which is based in Quebec City and has had a rather long and fruitful career. I never heard their material, so before the podcast started I gave one track a listen and it wasn’t my cup of tea, a bit too much on the prog side of things, with the Moroccan vocalist doing things that are definitely original but failed to tickle me. Still, the interview/conversation was a fun one, and afterwards I joined the offline after-party and bullshitted (bullshat?) with them for a bit before they all went to bed.

Lunch was a big slice of that savoury cheesecake, while watching an episode of 7 Jours Sur Terre. The main topic was the contentious relationship between Australia and China, in the grand scheme of the rise of my adoptive country as a superpower, and I liked the analysis, I didn’t feel a knee-jerk “China baaaaahd” bias like you often see. Still, the fate of that insignificant kangaroo- and bogan-infested remote large island is a bit of a sad one, being more or less forced to play ball with China like that. I’ve seen some anonymous report from an alleged real estate investor who said that China plans to assimilate Australia completely by 2060, it’s probably a hoax but it was quite interesting to read how the plan was laid out.

I put on an album by Polish black metal band Czort, which I saw recommended more than once, and started reading the behemoth of a novel called Musashi. After a few chapters I was already confused by all the characters’ names, Otsu, Osugi, Omi, Oma, Omu, Otsa, damn it to hell, every time I read something Japanese I get the same problem (except when I read Haruki Murakami, in which the problem isn’t the high number of homonymic characters but just the fact that fuckall happens). Still, it’s not enough to stop me from powering through.

I was all sore and stiff from accumulated stress on my old muscles and joints in the past few days so I had a thorough stretch and took a nap. I slept for most of the afternoon, then went to the gym a bit early, to get a nice stretch and warm-up. The big Kazakh came, and we trained together. He’s built like a boulder, and has been wrestling since a young age, in rough-necked Soviet/Central Asian programs, so I felt like an absolute useless weakling in comparison. I have some okay jiu-jitsu chops at this point but he would put too much pressure for me to apply sweeps or create enough space for attacks, and even when he made the egregious mistake of underhooking my thigh to pass my guard, I couldn’t finish my triangle choke over his big shoulders. Still, a good time was had by all, and it emphasized the importance of physicality in grappling.

I was completely drained, so I rode the short distance to the bar, in the pleasant evening coolness and along the tree-lined streets. It was empty aside from the boss and a Chinese couple in the corner, I wolfed down a cheeseburger with a bottle of Goose IPA then went home. The dog was all excited and wanted to chuquwar, so I leashed him and just as we were going out we ran into the girlfriend who was coming back from hanging out with her colleagues. We went to a grassy pitch to watch the little spaz run around in circles then went back home and had pink cocktails. I watched a bit of YouTube then went to bed early and read more Musashi. A pretty uneventful day but I can’t say it wasn’t a nice one.