Chapter 277

I woke up reasonably early, and checked on the cat. Skip the next paragraph if you don’t want to read about a prolapsed anus and other joyful things.

He’d been eating with appetite, which is a good sign, but the lower part of his body was a carnage of blood and peanutbuttery shit. I put on one of those plastic gloves you’re handed when you buy fried chicken or other finger food and gave him a delicate wash. I saw what looked like a pale pink blister, his intestines were prolapsing by half a centimeter. Rather alarming. I took a picture and sent it to the vet via WeChat, she told me to push it back in and hold. Which I did. The cat was meowing but it seemed to be more mild discomfort than pain, at any rate I was thankful he’s the size of a lemon and his thrashing was of no factor.

He spent most of the day sleeping, and ate his pellets drowned in dilute powdered milk, like a weird cereal bowl. Sometimes he’d walk around the apartment, bow-legged like a cowboy. At least the dog is the perfect picture of health and youthful vigor.

I distractedly watched the UFC from yesterday. Most of the fights were a bit boring, and in the case of Kyle Daukus vs Kevin Holland, anti-climactic, ending in a clash of heads that incapacitated the wacky African-American and a subsequent no contest. The main event between Thiago Santos and Johnny Walker was rumored to be one of the most uneventful fights in recent memory, so I skipped it altogether. Can’t win ‘em all.

I had pieces of leftover fried chicken for lunch, and in the afternoon I rode the longboard with the dog to a wooded area a bit north of where we live, to meet up a South African pal. We’ve been shanghaiied into haring the next hash trail so we wanted to do a bit of a recon and exchange ideas. That took a part of my afternoon and it was nice, though the heat was pretty damn oppressive and the dog’s seemingly infinite energy reserves were getting depleted towards the end of the home stretch.

On the way there and back, I was listening to a lot of black metal, like I’ve been doing in the past days. I’ve been playing old albums and discovering new ones by Maeskyyrn, Obtained Enslavement, Be Persecuted, Put’, Forteresse among others, and when I’m home I listen to episodes of Hurlements sur la Toundra, a Nunavut-based radio show hosted by a passionate and very eccentric guy.

I ate a bit, and the girlfriend emerged from the bedroom where she’d been lying immobile since the beginning of the day, and suggested we watch more Squid Game. We binged two episodes, then I went to the gym. None of my training partners were there, so I skipped rope, did some core exercises and stretched. Then I rode home, made some spaghetti with pesto and Italian sausages, and we finished Squid Game. Nine one-hour episodes in barely 24 hours... not the best idea to do it too often.

Then I watched Dark Side Of The Ring, I was giddy and looking forward to that episode about FMW, an extreme wrestling promotion from Japan that put up some absolutely astonishing displays of gory and brutal retardation in the 1990s. They put barbed wire matches on the map, and when even that seemed too tame and redundant, they started adding stipulations such as electrified cables, rings in the middle of swimming pools, bombs and other things that made wrestling fans from 25 years ago chase those rare tapes coming from a very, very deviant and wacky country on the other side of the planet.