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.