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.