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.