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.