Chapter 300

I woke up at 6:30 and started my day. I stumbled upon a discussion on Facebook about “war metal”, a loosely-defined subgenre of extreme metal that is basically black metal with death metal elements, very aggressive and chaotic as opposed to a lot of black metal which is cold and melancholic. So I spent most of my free time in the first half of the day listening to a bunch of suggested bands, some of whom only released a self-recorded lofi cassette recording that someone put on YouTube. One that stood out was Damaar, a band from Lebanon with a 19-minute demo of pure raw harsh violence, that I listened to twice.

I went home for lunch, and on the way back, I was dreading having to go teach Catatonic Class. The twelfth-grade classes go by like a breeze, but I don’t have much motivation to teach the weak eleventh-graders. The class went OK, though. Then I had Crazy Class later in the afternoon, and it fucking sucked. Why am I here? Why are they here? Not only are they unable to do much, they don’t even try, and now they’re becoming disruptive and even disrespectful. They know I can speak Chinese, so they almost all gave up on replying in English to my questions, and can you blame them, with the anti-immersive environment brought forth by the Chinese staff?

About twenty minutes in, a faint alarm sound came from the hallway. I wondered what it was about, and when I went to check it out, there were also a bunch of bewildered teachers and students outside the classrooms, wondering if we have to evacuate the building or not. Turns out we had to go back to work, and now they were completely unattentive. Ah well. What’s a boy to do?

I went home, cooked a burger and hard-boiled eggs, and took a nap. There was no BJJ practice, so I got ready to go play soccer, it’s been a while. The new pitch where the boys go is on the edge of the city, 7 km away. Doable by bicycle, but hey I’m a motorist now. After getting the approval from the girlfriend, I went to her school to retrieve the car, riding my longboard and bringing the leashed dog along so he’d get his exercise. Then I went home to drop him off and feed him, got my bag and drove west. The complex of basketball courts and soccer fields is under a highway bridge, covered from potential rain but at the same temperature as the outdoors, which is a win-win in my book. The pitch by the shopping mall is exposed to rain or sleet, and the indoors one has thin corrugated iron walls which makes it weirdly colder than outside on bitter winter days and hotter than a furnace in the summer.

There were sixteen of us, some of the usual pals from various countries, and a few Chinese guys. We played seven on seven with subs, a great time was had by all. I suck at soccer but aside from a few certified derp moments, I did OK I guess.

I drove home, dropping a Polish and a British pal home on the way. I had a protein shake and then took a shower, a warm one, the first one in months and months. I usually take cold showers, but now I wanted to mellow out and fall asleep easily. Well it wasn’t sufficient, I was still pumped from the two hours of soccer, and even after a nice glass of rum and half an hour reading in bed next to the sleeping girlfriend, I was wide awake.