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.