Chapter 334

Yet another day. One more month and 2021 will be in the rearview mirror, and finally I will be able to focus on other writing projects.

I had a practical session with the eleventh-graders, it was a bit of a boring one on their side, they just mix the chemicals and wait, stopwatch in hand, for the color to change and then do calculations on the rate of the reaction. Then I went home, had lunch, and had an interview with another school, located in Nanjing. I’m happy at my current position, but sometimes it’s good to test the waters elsewhere, get some interview practice, and keep options open. Also, the girlfriend is as unhappy as ever in her position, and that Nanjing school has an art program so we’re looking for a couple’s position. I talked to the principal, a guy I met in the past a few times in an informal manner, and whom I get along with. So it was relaxed, but he still asked me the usual questions. It went quite well I think, let’s see how it pans out.

I taught more classes in the afternoon. The guy who runs the black metal radio show in the Arctic sent me a link to the episode I helped him with, and I listened to it between classes. It was really great, he played all the Chinese black metal tracks I sent him, with lengthy and detailed introductions. I realized though that he didn’t use the notes I wrote, and only then did I go through the e-mails we had exchanged and saw that I didn’t in fact send him those notes. Oops. I did send the Word file with all the audio tracks, but since the folder was too big, I went back and sent all the songs one by one and just forgot to also send the notes. He did a tremendous job as always though, researching the info himself and presenting it with his passionate and erudite style.

I went home, dropped my bag and immediately went to the girlfriend’s school with the dog in tow. We were supposed to go pick up the construction materials, but the guy texted the girlfriend and said he can’t stay at his shop late because he has to go pick his child up at the school. Ah well, change of plan. Since we were already there though, we decided on the spot to go to the pizzeria, it’s been a while. So I drove in traffic for a bit and got to the street where it’s located.

I parallel-parked, and a skinny man with a wispy mustache ran to my window, knocked on it, and said I just scratched his car. I didn’t feel anything, and thought there was enough distance, but he was all mad and called the police. Fucking hell.

There was the tiniest of tiny scratches on the otherwise immaculately white bumper, and he pointed at a scratch on my own bumper that he thought was the smoking gun piece of evidence. I scrolled through my phone a bit and found a picture of the car from several days ago, with the front bumper already damaged. We argued a bit, and then the fine representatives of the constabulary force eventually arrived. They went through the process of listening to both parties argue like they likely do multiple times daily, and one of them pointed his flashlight at my bumper, saying “Yeah, this is an old scratch no doubt, but here’s one that’s fresh. Look at the tiny paint chips. If you dispute it, we will tow both cars to do tests, but the culprit or false accuser will have to pay the fees” Better just admit that I probably grazed the guy’s bumper, and get it over with. They got our insurance papers and printed some kind of receipt I had to sign.

So I was in a bit of a bad mood even though the pizza was amazing. I did some kind of mock job interview for the girlfriend, since she will also talk to the Nanjing principal soon. She was a bit nervous but I gave her pointers and good buzzwords to use in her answers.

We got home and I made a bit of music on FL Studio while she kept preparing for her interview, then we went to bed and watched an episode of Foundation.

Chapter 333

I started my day with some good fucking death metal, a Thai band called Oldskull. They delivered masterfully, when death metal is done right there isn’t better music on this planet.

I browsed Facebook a bit, a friend of mine who lives in Shanghai posted pictures of her sleeping on the floor of her office in a sleeping bag. She had to quarantine over the weekend, amidst the new variant scare and a possible case in her district. The funny thing is, she learned about that on Friday afternoon, and was allowed to go home to get her stuff first. How does that make any modicum of sense? I guess they want to minimize people’s movements and facilitate monitoring, not stop them completely from living, but still, it sounds silly as hell.

I then had a class with the twelfth-graders. I do a lot of review with them, going through past papers. At times I can get quite impatient, wondering if I should review or reteach everything, when I get blank stares or mouth droops after asking simple goddamn questions about things we’ve already seen 834 times. I have to avoid using “or” questions, because then I just get 50-50 blind guesses, and also I get very annoyed at how they can’t read new words. Yeah I get it, English is messed up and has a lot of illogical pronunciation, but most of the time you can still read a word out loud and not be too far off, can’t you? Well, that’s not how a Chinese brain operates, if the word is not memorized in their database, it’s a no-compute.

I went home for lunch, ate leftovers, and opened a box we just received in the mail. I ordered a bunch of food from a delivery company, and was all giddy when I saw it all. Bagels, pies, sausages, steaks, a block of goat cheese, and various other goodies. I just went there to order a Thanksgiving pumpkin pie but before I knew it I had put 750 yuan worth of stuff in my cart.

In the afternoon I had a double with the other twelfth-graders, and then went downstairs to the lab prep room and mixed the solutions for tomorrow’s practical. It took me about an hour and a half. At some point, I heard a loud, shrieking, machine-enhanced noise that startled me (in a country where loud, shrieking, machine-enhanced noises are pretty much the national sport). I investigated where it came from, it was from the open door of a second-floor classroom, a grade-10 teacher was teaching with one of those headset microphones that amplified and distorted her voice. I can’t imagine being one of those poor kids, holy hell that must be painful. I quickly fished for my mp3 player and drowned the noise.

I got back to the office and chilled for a bit. Some friends on Facebook were talking about the Messe des Morts black metal festival, which just took place in Montreal. Good to see the world is emerging from that long Covid-induced hangover, though who knows what it got in store for us. I listened to one album from a band that was featured on there, called Délétère. It was some decent melodic black metal but nothing that made me go all “woah”.

I went home, put meat in the slow cooker, watched BJJ instructionals then went to train. We drilled moves from top and bottom half guard and then had some solid rolls, a good time was had by all. Then I met the girlfriend and the dog at a park and we went home together. I ate a giant pile of meat and then went to bed early to read a few chapters before crashing.

Chapter 332

I dreamt that I was in Papua New Guinea, traveling by bicycle. The problem is that there were no roads, only narrow jungle paths and rivers full of coffee-colored water. I wasn’t having a good time.

I rose around 9, and enjoyed a lazy morning. I ate four eggs, three pieces of toast, and the last of my homemade salami while watching Gavin McInnes videos on YouTube, did a bit of writing and cleaning, and then headed to the gym to do my deadlifts, good mornings, leg raises and shrugs. I listened to the album Better Off Dead by Sodom, one of my least favorites from their extensive catalog of badassery. It’s leaning a bit too much in the mid-tempo heavy metal style, with covers from Tank and Thin Lizzy. Still, a mediocre Sodom album is a pretty damn good album, like everyone knows.

I went back home and ate Sichuan food leftovers, and soon after the girlfriend came back from getting her nails painted and we headed out. First, we dropped the cat litter and a bag of cat food to the Eccentric Ukrainian, who just rescued a feline, then we went to a massive outdoors market to buy rods to build a frame in our future mini-RV. The Chinese are probably the least concise people in the world, and the shopkeeper and the girlfriend talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked forever, in what could be summarized as “Here’s what we need, it’s on this piece of paper” “OK, it’s getting a bit late now, but I’ll cut them tomorrow morning and you can come pick them up any time. Please pay a 50-yuan deposit” “Thank you, bye bye”

We got home, and she made a chicken soup in the new clay pot her mom sent us. I watched a few videos by 7 jours sur Terre, one was about the demographic disaster happening in Africa and overflowing into Europe, and the other one was about North Korea, and why the USA and China are both willing to maintain the status quo. Short answer: it gives an excuse to the former to station over 100 000 troops at the edge of the Pacific Rim, and the latter has a strong buffer that prevents a land invasion through the most viable route.

We ate the chicken soup and some thick noodles while watching The Office, then I did the dishes and soon was in bed, reading with a small glass of whiskey.

Chapter 331

I woke up at 11, ate a bowl of scrambled eggs and a slice of my homemade salami, and put the final touches to a travel story for my French blog before publishing it. It’s about one of last legs of last summer’s road trip, when we all went to the Tibetan village of Zhagana.

In the afternoon I went to clean up the inside of the car, and make measurements with my tape for the eventual frame we’ll put our bed on, if we want to turn it into a cool micro-RV. That will take a bit of creativity and ingenuity but it’s quite exciting.

There’s a new South Park that dropped on Thanksgiving, a one-hour special. Seems like they won’t really do seasons anymore, just irregular specials like that one and the few they made last year. It was set in the future, with the kids being now middle-aged, the adults becoming elderly, and the state of the world a bleak, dystopian mess. I loved it, and am looking forward to the next one, it’s a pretty damn interesting arc and a way to keep such a long-running show from going stale.

Then I went to the gym. The Italian blue belt sometimes teaches kids but now he’s out for the weekend, and asked me to step in. It was a one-on-one with a boy of about 5, and he was great, it was a lot of fun. Then I rode my bike to the kickboxing gym, and practiced grappling with the Eccentric Ukrainian. His judo and wrestling and aikido background make him do a bunch of moves I’m not used to, and I’m slowly trying to implement them in my game, especially stuff about shoulder movement to avoid and break collar grips. A good time was had by all.

We went to the tiny microbrewery, where the girlfriend and the dog were waiting. The place smelled great, they were in the middle of a wort boil and the humid aroma of cereals filled the whole room. My first sip of IPA felt heavenly, and my companions had the cherry beer and a coffee stout. I ordered food from the Sichuan restaurant next door and it hit the spot.

I briefly considered going to another bar but I nahed. I’d rather go home and chill there. A small group chat on Facebook was active, two of my boys were talking about reggaeton and other current Latin music. One of them lives in Suriname and works with Mexicans, so he’s really into that stuff. I also generally like Mexican music, though a lot of it can be a bit repetitive, it’s high energy and catchy. He sent us links to videos of a new hybrid style called corridos tumbados, which is a bit of a mix between folky banda music and hip-hop, and I sat there listening to all that and shooting the breeze with them.

I watched a bit of political analysis and history videos then read in bed a bit, I finished Apocalypse Bébé and just now started a novel called Tout est Ori, taking place in a fishing village in eastern Quebec. 

Chapter 330

Another day, another dollar. I walked the dog, shit-showered-shaved, went to school, taught my classes. Not much else to say.

During the twelfth-graders’ PE class, I went to play badminton with them. Some of them play OK, but overall it’s not much of a challenge.

In the afternoon, two students came to the office to ask questions about the stuff I’d been teaching recently. And then one said “We saw a video of you in some kind of judo match! It’s on Bilibili (some kind of buggy Chinese video-sharing platform)”

“How did you find it?!”

“We searched for your name on Baidu!”

I did just that, and yes, the first (and only relevant) link was John Guotong vs Some Chinese Guy at my first BJJ tournament, last year. I didn’t even know it had been filmed and uploaded.

That reminds me of a story that happened several years ago, at another school. Some students with a VPN searched for all of our names on Google. Some teachers had names that were way too common to yield anything, mine had only a link to my Facebook page and an antiquated site with my teenage cross-country skiing racing results, but the physics teacher was somewhat of a public figure. He had ran for public office in his American city, and calling him a “libertarian conspiracy-minded kookoo” would be an understatement, if anything. I was already aware of his rather radical political views and general eccentricity, though I liked him as he was generally quite nice, and didn’t constantly talk about racial hierarchies and how we should ditch the dollar and use only silver and gold and how Barack Obama tried to poison him because he knows the truth about global warming. But now, our more advanced senior students had stumbled upon a video taken from an ABC news report in which they talked about death threats he made to doctors going to vaccinate children in schools, and told me and another teacher about their worries.

(That was years and years before Covid, and refering to the meningitis vaccine if I recall. I’d be hella curious to hear that guy rant about Covid, I haven’t kept in touch since he left that school)

I had a bit of time chilling in the office and doing class prepping, I listened to Clown World news and an album by Skeletal Augury, a Chinese raw black metal band. Then I went home, and shortly after that headed to the gym. I did my workout, got back home, walked the dog, refueled, and spent a relaxing evening reading and watching stuff on YouTube. I also indulged in a few cups of sake, and went to bed a bit later than I dare to admit.

Chapter 329

I had another weird-ass dream, I was in some kind of gritty warehouse covered with graffiti and Spill Your Guts were playing on stage. I stood on the sidelines, watching the band play and the hardcore kids mosh, when some policemen said it was too violent and ended the show. A big metal garage door slowly descended and blocked the view from the stage, and then we all had to exit through the creepy pastel-colored staircase from Squid Game. Weird.

I sent a picture of my grandfather, circa 1940, to the group chat I share with the girlfriend and her parents. Mama-in-law said he looks like me (something she says about nearly every Caucasian person) and asked if he’s the one who emigrated from France. I said no, he was the 10^th or 11^th generation, my first ancestor having arrived to North America around 1645. “Woah! That was during the Ming Dynasty!” And... yeah, a lot has happened in China since. I once wrote a short story, some kind of “historical what-if” in which I speculated what the world would be like if the Ming Emperor didn’t burn the imperial exploration fleet in a fit of autistic rage and instead encouraged the mighty admiral Zheng He and others to keep exploring, leading to their eventual arrival to America before the Spaniards and other Europeans. My fictional scenario led to a world roughly split three-way by the Ottomans, the Bengals and the Chinese, with medieval Europe being various vassal states of these empires, and eventually Chinese hegemony on the whole world. We’d be all speaking Chinese nowadays, and aside from a few improvements in the military or navel sectors, we’d still be living with 15^th-century technology, due to the Chinese cultural inability to innovate and their racist refusal to adopt inventions made by peoples deemed inferior to the GYR (Great Yellow Race). *

*If you think it’s racist to point out how racist the ancient Chinese were, I suggest you go take a look at primary sources from the Ming and Qing Dynasties. They were cartoonishly racist, and in fact that’s what led to their extremely isolationist policies and their near-downfall.

I wrote a whole bunch of essays and short stories, but they still sit on a hard drive, unpublished. I’ll see if one day I wanna put them out there.

I browsed the news, a high-profile tennis player named Peng Shuai accused some big honcho from the Communist Party of sexual harrassment, and now her social media accounts are scrubbed and her whereabouts are unknown. What the fuck?! This is cartoon-villain shit right there. I said it many times in many ways, but I like China. China has been good to me, and yes, I’m talking about both the people and the government. I admire how they went from third-world shithole to superpower in a span of time that’s barely believable. I think a lot of the criticism they get are unfounded, exaggerated, dated, or based on pure bullshit. I like the fact that a lot of problems that are just seen as “part and parcel of living in a Western country” are virtually absent here. I like and respect the Chinese patriotism and commitment to build their country even further, compared with the gangrenous western ethnomasochism. I see people who criticize China for taking an ever-increasing place on the world stage as huge fucking hypocrites, especially if they’re Western Europeans, doubly so if they’re Americans.

And I do see a lot of merit to the Chinese political system. But stories like that make me want to vomit. Even with all the above in mind, I could never fully get behind such a system, in which there’s damn nearly zero accountability. Yes, dictatorships can accomplish great things and bypass the grotesque inefficiency of democratic systems, but it can also very easily devolve in tyrannical abuse. Hell, I even feel weird putting this opinion online, and I’m under no illusion whatsoever that doing it anonymously protects me in any way. Fuck.

Aside from that, I went through my day like a good worker bee, teaching Catatonic Class and Crazy Class. They were a bit more attentive than usual, as I went through the answers of the post-lab reports. In the afternoon I had Strong Class, but when I walked in, they were all gone except one guy still hastily gathering his stuff. He said they have some activity and the last two periods are canceled.

“What activity?”

“A science fair”

Nonplussed, I went back to the office. My coworker also walked back with his stuff. He seemed a bit more peeved than I was about the lack of communication, and the quasi-insult that is not inviting us, science teachers, to a school-wide science fair.

So I chilled in the office. At some point, I clicked on a link to a ten-second video that got me laughing out loud, which is always a bit embarassing in an office. It was of a haggard-looking Joe Biden saying “Time is money. As one computer said, if you’re on the train and they say Portal Bridge you know you better make other plans.” I played it a second, and then a third time, and still have no fucking idea what any of that means.

I went home. It was a rest day, and the girlfriend wasn’t there. I looked for something to do, and ended up watching documentaries about pro wrestling. I also unwrapped the sausage I made and cut a slice, it was good, but a bit bland. I salted and peppered the outside, brushed it with liquid smoke and let it air-dry on a rack. I also made chicken broth with leftover bits of carcass, onions, celery, carrots and garlic, and after two hours simmering, I drank a bowl. And another one.

I rode the longboard with the dog to go meet the girlfriend at her workplace, and she drove us back. She was all alarmed, apparently there’s been like three Covid cases reported in Shanghai and now she thinks our lives are all gonna be flipped upside down. My fate is in the hands of Jesus Christ and Xi Jinping, and I submit to Their will.

We walked the dog to the mailboxes, got the package of wine, gin and whiskey I had ordered, and then watched an episode of Foundation together. It’s entertaining but also a little stupid, and the Israel Adesanya-lookalike main character gets on my nerves. I heavily dislike the cliché trope of the young but misunderstood character placed in a position of power and who is communicating exclusively in sassy, sarcastic and brusque one-liners. I was ready to go to bed when it finished, with the help of a tasty glass of whiskey, but I had a Skype call scheduled with my dad. We discussed new possible or confirmed developments in our respective lives, it will soon be two years since we met in person and will likely extend into much longer, with the grinding halt on easy international travel and what not. Still, he is very supportive of my endeavors and I appreciate that a lot.

We also talked about current events, he’s slowly waking up to the shenanigans orchestrated by malicious actors pulling the strings and causing all the western ethnomasochism, notably in that cringeworthy circus act of “apologizing for being on unceded Native American land”. But he doesn’t seem to understand how this extends to the racist terrorist attack that happened in Wisconsin two days after the Rittenhouse verdict (coincidence?), in which a militant black nationalist plowed through a crowd with a truck, and the media pretty much covered it up, obfuscating the rather undeniable motive and thus ending up protecting a black man. Perhaps in 1965 that would be an absurd idea, but given how hell-bent they are now at pushing the narrative that “white supremacy” is the most dangerous thing in the USA now, it makes a lot of sense. (See also: Timothy Simpkins)

Chapter 328

I started my day normally, and browsing Facebook, I saw someone posted a link to the Tales From The Hood soundtrack. No idea if it’s from a movie or whatever, but it was a nice compilation of hip-hop from different sub-genres and scenes, including a real banger by a hitherto unknown Bay Area rapper named Spice 1. I looked him up, and he’s got a huge discography, I shall investigate. It was unfortunately followed by an Ol’ Dirty Bastard track. I do not like Ol’ Dirty Bastard.

I taught grade-12 classes in the morning. I use the same materials I prepared last year, and the dates on the PowerPoint presentations I’m currently using are in the mid-December range. That means I’m way ahead compared to last year, since I have more classes per week and also because Cambridge removed big chunks of the curriculum. Conversely, for the grade-11 classes, I’m lagging behind compared to last year, because I only teach them twice a week, the curriculum has been beefed up, and well, I already talked about the academic abilities of two of the three groups I teach. I asked my former Hells Angels coworker if he’s on track to finish in time and he said “No fucking way”, we might have to cut some lab sessions and give them more practice to do at home.

The problem is that many of these students don’t have autonomous study habits to say the least, and that’s something I adressed in the short parents’ meetings we had on Monday. They’re not little kids anymore, they need to be a little responsible.

There was another parents’ meeting scheduled for the second half of the lunch break, which is a bit unpleasant but you gotta do what you gotta do. I didn’t go home, I rode my bicycle downtown to buy a huge bag of dog food, we ran out yesterday. Then I ate a quick plate of Muslim noodles, dropped the bag of dog chow at home, and went to meet the parents and give some tough love to the members of Crazy Class.

I had two classes in the afternoon, then did some class prepping in the office. I checked out some Clown World news, and saw what is likely the clowniest shit I’ve seen in a long time: a bunch of universities in the USA offer therapy sessions for students who get anxiety after hearing that Kyle Rittenhouse got acquitted. No shit. That’s the state of young western adults now. Should we laugh or cry?

I went home, renewed all the stuff in my mp3 player and headed to the gym. It was leg day. Leg day sucks, but there’s no way around it. Then I went home, walked the dog, and ate some leftovers while watching a documentary about the early years of Pride FC. The Japanese organisation was huge, at a time the UFC was in its dark ages stateside, and like a lot of old MMA fans, I remember it fondly.

Chapter 327

I had all sorts of weird-ass dreams, in one of them I was a passenger in Kim Kardashian’s Mercedes and she was crashing into other people’s cars on purpose to get revenge on her boyfriend who dumped her. The thing is, I don’t even know what Kim Kardashian looks like, so in my dream she was just a generic dark-haired attractive woman. And why was I even there? Then I was walking in a dark parking lot of some shithole third-world country, and some sketchy guy tried to sell me something. He only spoke Spanish, and though I speak I guess what would be called lower-intermediate Spanish, he was speaking fast and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. So there’s a subconscious part of my brain that can recreate Spanish better than my conscious brain can?! I often wondered about that, when I make dreams involving foreign languages. The sketchy guy tried to grab me, and I saw he had something in his hand, maybe a syringe. I ran to a bus stop and some pot-bellied cop shooed the scumfuck away, before saying something about kidnapping and slavery. I then woke up, and thought about it for a while, the world can be a bad place, full of bad people.

I took the dog out, and then rode to work listening to Traumaturges, a hip-hop crew from Montreal that dropped a gritty as fuck album in 2000. The first two tracks are some serious boom-bap bangers reminiscent of the NYC golden age and talk about developing a distinct Quebec sound rather than imitating French rappers, but there are also a few tracks that are lazy both in production and lyrical content. I appreciate and even love hip-hop even though the political orientation of a lot of “socially conscious” rappers is much more to the left than I am, but in one verse talking about racism, one MC of Haitian descent says something like “my parents should have never moved here”. Oh really?! You’d rather be in Haiti? Well, what can I reply to that other than the painfully obvious?

I got to the office, and listened to a few country music tracks a friend suggested on Facebook. We discussed country a bit, and that reminded me I’d been meaning to check out Superjoint Ritual, the Phil Anselmo-fronted hardcore/metal band in which Hank Williams III played the bass. I listened to an album called A Dose of American Hatred and it was pretty much exactly as expected, some dirty Louisiana metal that makes you want to get in a beer bottle fight with a bunch of bikers.

I had a few classes that went well, and then ate a quick tuna sandwich lunch at my desk before heading out to the sports field. There’s a soccer tournament, last year myself and a few other teachers played in teams of students but this year I was asked to be a coach. So I stood by the sidelines yelling nonsense, and aside from that and being in a group picture, my role was quite limited. The game was quite hilarious, aside from a few kids, most players were clumsy and there was even a sequence in which no less than five throw-ins in a row were made, all of them illegal due to the player jumping or not throwing the ball over their heads. My team won 2-0.

In the afternoon we had a professional development session, conducted over Zoom since the big wigs from the corporate office are not allowed to leave Shanghai due to Covid. So they could come off the clock, lick every door handle in the whole city, and get back on the train with nobody stopping them, but they are stopped from coming in a professional capacity by the Education Bureau. Weird. It was a good session nonetheless, centered on “reflective teaching”, with discussions and strategies to implement. They opened it with a quote from some academic journal, which I paraphrase here as:

“Teachers should reflect on their teaching practice (Grumble and McPumpernickel, 2003). That helps them improve and optimize the outcome of their lessons (Ingleburtonberting and Facedesinge, 1981)”

That got me thinking, do we really need to refer to so-called experts for statements that are, well, pretty goddamn obvious? It’s as if we wrote:

“In winter time, it’s a good idea to wear a coat (Bubblegut and Plunknugget, 1993). A thick coat can help you maintain your body heat in cold temperatures (Van Den Schlafenbing, 2004)”

The whole thing reminded me of my post-graduate teaching certification and all the pseudo-intellectual drivel I had to write in my essays, supported by quotes and sources and a beefy bibliography. I’m a teacher, not a crusty academic. So as much as I do enjoy professional development sessions, it’s mostly for the discussions with fellow teachers and the ideas I can get to improve my craft. One strategy that was mentioned was “writing a diary or blog”, hey, it means I’m a reflective teacher!

Then I taught the twelfth-graders. The topic was chromatography, and the concept of “retardation factor” came up, which led to a student pointing at his neighbor and say “Hahaha, you’re a retardation factor!” I was impressed by his vocabulary.

I stopped by the stinky market and bought the whole tray of Harbin sausages. Yeah, baby. Then I got home, ate one, with a mango-flavored beer. I started drinking during the week again, but only on days I don’t exercise. And moderately. I browsed YouTube, watching whatever caught my eye, and when the girlfriend walked in two hours later I was pretty damn deep down the rabbit hole, and I was watching dambe matches, some kind of boxing done in Nigeria in a sand pit, with one bare hand and one hand wrapped in rope.

“Help me put the meat my mother sent us in the freezer”

“Wait, wait, I want to see who’s gonna win, Dogon or Buhari!”

We ate fried rice and meatballs for dinner, and then watched an episode of Foundation. The trope about the three clones of the same guy, but conceived at different times, ruling as a triumvirate is quite disturbing and original I’d say.

Chapter 326

Today was a bitterly cold day, especially in contrast with the sunny Saturday we had. Be grateful for having nice weekend days (shitty rainy Sunday notwithstanding) rather than sun through the work week and then shit weather on rest days.

I had one class with the eleventh-graders, and then during the half-hour break, talked to parents from Crazy Class. I had to excuse myself at 10 because I had to go teach Catatonic Class, but when I went to the classroom, the students were nowhere to be seen. On Mondays, the whole school assembles for a flag-raising ceremony, and oftentimes there’s a big wig making a speech and the students come back late. That could prove to be a compounding problem, as I only teach eleventh-graders twice a week, and now it could very well become 1.7 times a week with all the time lost.

I went home for lunch, stopping to get fried rice and duck legs at an eatery. It was absolutely delicious. Then I went back to school, dreading having to wake the twelfth-graders up. The bell rings 5 minutes before lunch time ends, and they’re supposed to get up and walk around but they just stay hunched over their desks, in deep slumber, until the teacher has to wake them up as if he was their goddamn mom. I talked about it before, it’s fucking retarded, everyone who disagrees is a fucking retard, and it’s one of my biggest peeves about this school and how it operates. But when I walked in the lobby, I saw that the drum kit had been taken out of the music room for whatever reason. It gave me an idea, and I was giggling to myself as I walked in the dark classroom holding the snare drum in one hand and a stick in the other. You know what happened next, and it was glorious.

Naturally, they gave me a bit of attitude, but it would have happened anyway and I can handle it, been there done that. I went over an exam question and finished the chapter on polymers. During the break, one student had a big plastic tub full of bubble gum, and she gave me one, which was nice of her. One girl asked her friend “Do foreigners know bubble gum?” Uh, I’m pretty sure it’s a stereotypical piece of Americana, and like pretty much everything that exists, it was invented outside China. Their ignorance is quite endearing, they don’t know much about the world beyond the borders of their country.

In the second half of the afternoon, I did some class prepping, and listened to some clips from Gavin McInnes. He must be one of the funniest men alive, he’s cancelled to hell now but his political views are not even that extreme, he’s just a classic Gen-Xer ex-punk who likes to stir the pot and be contrarian, from what I’ve seen.

I stopped at the stinky market to get a big bag of freshly ground meat and other ingredients. Something caught my eye above the meat trays, is it... is it Harbin sausage?!?! The northernmost provincial in China, where I lived over ten years ago, has a local specialty that is quite similar to a Polish kielbasa, and I used to eat it all the time. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find outside the deep north-east, and after a few very, very disappointing attempts that led me to inferior, vacuum-wrapped imitations, I gave up on the idea of finding those sublime pork cylinders. Those looked like the real thing though, so I bought one. And it was excellent! They only had the lean version, back in the day I always got the extra fatty ones with 1 cm³ blobs of white lard throughout, that I’d squeeze out in my mouth and then fill the cavities with Tabasco. Still, great success, hadn’t had a proper Harbin sausage in years, and the girlfriend loved it too.

Then I went home, cleaned the apartment, and headed to the gym. We did some no-gi jiu-jitsu, which is weird, being used to all the grips allowed by the thick pyjama. Also I had to be mindful of my ass injury, I had banged it pretty hard when I slid on the steps leading to the lake and it was quite painful when I’d sit directly on my tailbone. Still, a good time was had by all. I listened to tracks from an old Quebec hip-hop group called Cavaliers Noirs on the way, but I didn’t like it that much, DJ Horg makes some solid beats but the rapping was monodimensional and saccadic. I put on a Manu Militari album while we trained, and it was much better.

On the way home, and while walking the dog, I listened to Saccage, their black/death/crust is great and not many things sound like that. Then I put on a Scorpions album while I cooked dinner, it’s okay, but a teeny bit sappy for my tastes, like a lot of 80s rock. I made meatballs and steamed broccoli, and after eating my meal I started making a homemade sausage and brined pickles. I forgot to buy more white vinegar, so I mixed what was left with Chinese dark vinegar and leftover brine from olives and pickles. The resulting black sludge wasn’t too appetizing but it should turn out okay.

With all that cooking, I went to bed at 23:30, a bit past my usual bedtime. Ah well. Worth it.

Chapter 325

Woke up at 7, a bit sore from the night in a sleeping bag on a thin camping mattress, but overall we slept well, it started raining gently but our tent didn’t let a single drop in.

The girlfriend prepared a big breakfast spread of oranges, hard-boiled eggs, cooked chicken breasts and tea, while I put everything away. Then we got in the car and when I put it in reverse, BANG! I bumped into a brick pedestal surrounding a tree, putting a big dent in our bumper and chipping the paint. I had to then promise I’d spend 48 hours not making fun of the Chinese for being bad drivers, and the girlfriend rose it to a full week, which is fair enough, that was quite the blunder.

We slowly made our way home, choosing the scenic route by the lake before we got on the highway. When we arrived near our city, we took a detour to a ghetto industrial suburb to stop for sesame noodles, and then got home. We unpacked the car, we had brought an awful lot of stuff just for one night, the joys of having a vehicle and not having to lug all our shit around.

I drove the car to the repair place, to ask them to remove the back seat. We’d been brainstorming and toying with the idea of turning our car into a tiny RV, and the first step would be to gut the back, before building a frame and a bed of sorts. I thought it would complicated, but the guy just got a ratchet wrench and showed me how to do it. So then I drove to a hardware store, the size of a cupboard, and the grumpy lady there didn’t have the 14-mm socket I needed. I drove to a bigger store, and got it.

I removed the back seat and seat belts, and put it all in storage. Then I prepared a chicken by gutting it, stuffing the cavity with onions and butter, seasoning it, and putting it in the oven. I headed to the gym and did a chest workout, which is always the most pleasant to do. I listened to Suffocation’s new live album, and it was bittersweet. On one hand, I’m a die-hard Suffoc’ fan with a tattoo to prove it, their live shows are superb and I could listen to their early material endlessly, but I’m also wondering what’s the point. Almost all the songs are from 25+ years ago and have been a mainstay of their live sets ever since they came out, and yeah, the sound quality is spotless, but I much prefer the energy and chemistry of the Live in Quebec City album from 2005.

I got home, made a salad to go with the roast chicken, and the meal was fantastic. We ate while watching Foundation, the first episode was quite good but then they went way, way off-script from the Isaac Asimov novels. Let’s see how it pans out, whether it retains a bit of depth or becomes a cliché-fest. Then I read the news before bed, Kyle Rittenhouse got cleared of all charges and of course plenty of wokels and leftoids are seething. Ah well. I'd say overall it was pretty clear that Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense and that the legitimacy (or complete lack thereof) of the BLM and commie rioters is irrelevant there, but it's just weird as hell how a minor was there with a gun in the first place, if I may state my opinion on the whole thing. When I was 17, I was sneaking out to drink beer in the park, not to go to a fiery but mostly peaceful riot with a rifle.

A friend went on Facebook and angrily typed that it’s proof that the jury has been brainwashed by Fox News. But if you wanna talk about brainwashing, biases and horrible fallacies, that shit comes from both sides. He was labeled as a white supremacist (a pretty juicy accusation with zero basis to it), and I particularly liked how he was called antisemitic (because one of the guys he shot was a jew, something he of course couldn't have known beforehand) yet it was constantly stated by left-wing memes and journalists that the fact that all three guys he shot turned out to be convicted criminal scumbags should be ignored, because he had no way to know. I love a good ol' contradiction.

Anyway, plenty has been said about the topic, by people smarter and having more free time than me so I’ll leave it at that. #ClownWorld.

Chapter 324

I woke up around 9, the girlfriend was already up and just came back from walking the dog. It was really sunny and quite warm, she proposed we go camping. Hmmm, why not, we’d been talking about that for a while. We packed our bags and plastic crates, stuffed it all in the car, and headed out. I drove about an hour on the highway, then we got to the shores of Tai Lake, a huge body of water a bit inland, west of Shanghai.

We slowly cruised, the road was usually too close to the lake to allow for some good camping spots, and most of the shores were either swampy or occupied by touristy parks. So we kept going, on the lookout for something suitable. I saw stairs going down towards the water and it led to a decent enough spot, but with too much of a tree cover, which would be nice in summer but now we’re looking for sun exposure. We shortlisted it, marking it on the GPS.

The girlfriend proposed a spot, but it seemed to me that the police or rent-a-cops would come and tell us to fuck off at nightfall. I was more interested by a quiet area up a hill in the clearing of a tea field, but it was a bit cramped. We talked to a couple eating their homemade hotpot lunch by their RV with their three dogs, and they suggested we go back to the spot the girlfriend initially came up with, as there are sometimes people camping in tents there and don’t get bothered. Sold.

We set up the tent, and sat down enjoying the view. I cracked open a beer, a pretty tasty white from a Chinese brewery called Bairenbahe, and then went to a pier nearby where an old man was fishing, inflated my boat, and put it in the water. I went down the stone stairs and slid badly on the last step, which was covered with slimy algae, and fell hard on my ass. It could have been much worse though, I was mostly mad about getting wet and getting the dog wet. I paddled a bit, the dog curiously staring at the horizon, and alighted at another pier from which I walked back to our camp.

I changed into comfy warm clothes, read a few chapters, then started making dinner. I lit our little propane stove, dumped a cooked chicken breast, a tuna can and a green peas can in a pot, and we ate that tasty mixture with a tortilla filled with cream cheese. I also had a Delirium Tremens beer, and its 8.5% alcohol content knocked me hard, I don’t drink much these days and get inebriated much quicker. Cost efficiency.

The girlfriend was cold so she went in the tent, I stayed up reading a bit and then joined her. We brought the parchési table and played a game, which I won by a tiny margin. Then I went to sleep, though it was barely 8 PM.

Chapter 323

Sleeping nearly ten hours felt pretty good. My day went by normally, I had a double with the twelfth-graders, and then it was their PE class and one girl from another class, with whom I partnered last year for the badminton tournament, invited me to go play and practice for this year’s tourney. The other students were either sitting around doing nothing, or lining up for an exam of sorts, where they had to jump rope for a minute straight and then hit a volleyball as many times as possible without dropping it. Weird.

I had lunch at home, some zucchini spaghetti that hit the spot, one of my favorite pasta recipes to make now. I went outside with the dog, and then went through my afternoon. In the last period, I headed to the library, where a mini-parents’ meeting was about to take place. Five eleventh-graders from Crazy Class were there with their mothers, and they rotated from one table to another to talk with the various subject teachers. Some of the students had fucked up hard on the mid-term exam and their mamas weren’t pleased at all. I made them talk rather than just spit a bunch of platitudes myself, like by asking “Well what do you think about your performance? And how can you improve?”

So with that happening, I was home a bit later than usual, but I felt like it was fairly productive. I sat on the couch and looked for something to do, I watched a few YouTube videos about Clown World and politics and then put on an episode of High Maintenance, a TV series about a marijuana dealer in Brooklyn. I stumbled upon that show when it was a tiny, low-budget webseries, since then it’s been picked up by HBO but kept its underground spirit. I like the unpredictability, originality, cinematography and anthology format, but I feel uncomfortable at times with how it glorifies pretty damn sad and degenerate urban lifestyles. Characters are nearly always unhealthy, living in tiny pods, childless, working in all sorts of useless artsy or corporate jobs, and self-medicating with weed with various results. That episode was centered around a particularly shitty woman: she’s working at a radio station, she tries to use a very personal story involving her parents’ divorce, they refuse, and then she records an argument she has with her boyfriend against his will and plays it to all her coworkers. The argument itself is fucked up, she regurgitates a bunch of half-chewed feminist talking points about how her mom was basically a slave to her dad, but she can focus on her “career” because the boyfriend has such little ambition that he doesn’t get in her way. Naturally, no matter how much of a pussy-whipped nü-male he is, he takes umbrage at that, but somehow he’s the one who apologizes at the end. Toxic.

I considered going out to the bar but ended up just going to bed early, playing a bit of GTA and reading Apocalypse Bébé. I like things to be quiet. 

Chapter 322

Another Thursday. I like Thursdays, because I have two lab sessions and only one class, and it’s with the strong eleventh-graders.

I could go in details and talk about what supervising lab sessions entail, but I feel like I’ve done it already in previous entries. I can barely think of anything to write about, other than “my day went well and nobody really pissed me off”. I caught the Metal Minded live podcast, the boys reviewed positively four albums in vastly different subgenres of metal, three of them being sung in French. They noted something I had noticed as well, it seems like more and more metal bands nowadays embrace making music in their native language, and it’s a good thing. I had already listened to the disturbingly bleak sludgy, grindy punk from Fuck Toute (what a name!) and was blown away, now at their recommendation I checked out a black metal release by Montreal-based band Malebranche, and it was pretty good. The kind of atmospheric black metal to play while sitting in a hot bath in the dark with a glass of wine.

Towards the end of the afternoon, I started getting a headache, not sure if it’s due to this lingering cold I’d been nursing on and off, or because I’d been staring at a computer screen. I was also a bit sluggish, and had to drag myself to the gym. I did my deadlifts and accessory exercises, forcing myself through. I was listening to a Jocko Willink podcast, which is always pure concentrated motivation in an audio format, and in this particular one, he was talking to a Marine Corps combat engineer who had his legs blown off but is now running marathons, having completed 31 in 31 days.

So yeah, with that in mind, I guess I can plough through some minor discomfort and finish my workout. I got home, ate some kebab meat and then truly felt drained. I was in bed by 20:30.

Chapter 321

Another day. I have to say I still enjoy sitting down and penning this navel-gazing diary but at times it’s hard to think about what to write, my life isn’t boring but not every damn day is worth writing about.

I had grade-12 classes in the morning, going over the mid-term exam. Then I went home and had lunch. I reheated some leftover curry I had forgotten about, in the back of the fridge. I was hoping I wouldn’t die. [UPDATE: I didn’t die] I added hard-boiled eggs, and ate it with tortilla bread, wiping the brown spicy goodness from my bowl. I watched an episode of Dave, and it was quite trippy: the semi-autobiographical Lil Dicky goes to Rick Rubin’s house, gets in a floatation tank, and has a bunch of dreams and visions about where he should go as an artist.

I uploaded a bunch of classic and underground Quebec hip-hop to my mp3 player, and listened to it all afternoon when I wasn’t teaching. 2Faces, Yvon Krevé, Traumaturges, stuff like that. Some of it can be a tiny bit corny, but there are some great tracks in there.

I had a bunch of free time in the middle of the afternoon, but the internet was down. Yesterday it was malfunctioning, and some guy came with a ladder to fiddle with the router, conveniently nailed to the ceiling. So I did some writing, since the cheapos in charge don’t want to provide me with the proper tools to do my job.

I saw a bunch of messages in various WeChat shitposting groups, apparently there’s been an earthquake just off the coast, and people in Shanghai and even in my inland city felt it. They even evacuated the girlfriend’s school campus. As for myself, I didn’t feel a thing.

At night, my BJJ partners were busy, so there was no practice. That’s the problem with having such a small group. I wanted to train anyway, so I went to the kickboxing gym, stretched and warmed up, and then did mitts with the waimai delivery guy. The Eccentric Ukrainian came soon after, and we practiced together, doing some kind of flow grappling, fighting for grips and takedown setups. He was a bit injured so he took a break, and I did some boxing sparring with two of the regulars there. Good times.

I went home and the three of us went on a walk, the lot where there used to be a building is now all cleared out and covered with grass. The dog enjoyed running around there. Then we went home, and I cooked dinner: beef cubes and broccoli, cream cheese bagels, and leftover seafood chowder. Bliss. The girlfriend wanted to watch Foundation, a TV series inspired by Isaac Asimov’s novels. I read the first few, and weird, I don’t remember the main character being a woman. I can overlook all this netflixisation and shoving of “minorities” in every story when it’s fictional or set in the future, I have a bit of a hard time when it’s a historical series, like what they’re doing with Vikings apparently. Anyway, we watched 10 minutes, but the dogshit Chinese website she was using to stream it was (surprise, surprise) malfunctioning and the audio was way out of synch. I told her I’ll download it and we can watch it another day.

She did the dishes, and I watched Dark Side Of The Ring, the episode about the steroid trials in the 1990s, that threatened to tank the WWF. I stopped halfway, I was dead tired, and went to bed.

Chapter 320

I woke up when the triangle-faced animal poked me in the face with his underbite, then started my day the way I usually do. In the morning I had a lab session with the strong eleventh-graders, they’re good but they tend to overthink everything.

I went home at midday, and the retarded dog immediately hid under the dinner table, he had been chewing some of the girlfriend’s art supplies and her poster of James Bond. I was thankful he didn’t puncture the acrylic paint tubes, which would have caused a huge mess, but still he was thrown in jail unceremoniously.

Lunch was a reheated seafood chowder with a whole box of crackers, then I rode back to school. I had a few classes, and we also had a staff meeting, in which the problems of Crazy Class were adressed. The mid-term parents’ meeting got canceled due to Covid, one of those weird remnants of restrictions imposed by the champions up there in the Department of Education, who mostly seem to be spinning wheels of fortune to make their decisions and justify their positions. This is bittersweet, on one hand the parents’ meetings are exhausting and off-hours and feel very unproductive at times, but it’s also good to establish a rapport with the students’ guardians, praise those who are doing well and urge them to keep it up, and light a fire under the ass of the lazy or failing ones. One teacher talked about organizing his own little parents’ meeting, on a one-on-one basis, perhaps that could be useful.

I went home, and the girlfriend came soon after. We drove across town, and since I was halfway through a Jocko Willink podcast on my mp3 player (he was talking to a former Marine named Dakota Meyer), I let her choose the music. I’m brave like that sometimes. The pizza restaurant we wanted to try out was mysteriously closed, so we went to another place, a quiet pub popular with the expats who live in the western half of the city. We had a spicy sausage pizza and chicken wings, and I had a draft beer, saving 5 yuan by ordering it one minute before Happy Hour was about to end.

The girlfriend perused the new and improved cocktail menu. “Fuck it, I’ll have a margarita. I’ll call one of those guys who can drive your car home.”

China has got a pretty cool service, you can have a guy come on a foldable electric scooter, he puts his scooter in your trunk and then drives your drunk ass home. Kinda like Opération Nez Rouge but year-round.

We discussed future plans. She wants to do a master’s in either art education or art therapy, which implies moving to London for one year or two. I don’t particularly want to go to London. But I’m a supportive husband, and if that’s what she wants to do, we’ll make it work. Maybe I can stay in Quebec and go visit every few months. It’s just one idea though, who the hell knows what the future has in store.

She left, two of my pals came, and we played chess. I went 1-2, I can play chess okay but I’m super rusty. Then I rode my longboard all the way home, with the dog running along. He covered the 5-km distance effortlessly like the predator of the great plains that he is, and drank water for two minutes straight when we arrived home.

I browsed the internet a bit before bed, a minor piece of regional news from the old country was about a guy cursed for asking to be served in French in a café... in Gatineau, Quebec. Weird. Sometimes I wonder what kind of Quebec I’ll eventually go back to.

Chapter 319

Woke up well rested at 6:30 and started my day. I had a bit of free time between classes, that I used to grade the remaining exam papers and listen to Clown World news. There’s so much gneetardation happening I don’t even know what to comment upon, or if further comment is needed. The main story that keeps coming up is the climate change conference in Scotland, attended by heads of state lecturing us plebs about our carbon footprint, while those cunts ride around in private jets and eat gold-leaf-covered steak and live lives of opulence.

I went home for lunch. The bird by my apartment building entrance chirped “Ni hao!” at me. I feel bad for him, stuck in his cage like that, but then even if I broke him free, not only that would sadden the elderly man who takes care of him, but he would probably die.

In the afternoon I had a double with the twelfth-graders, and then did a bit of writing, class-prepping and music-listening. I tested my limits with music at the very edge of listenability, even for an extreme metal die-hard like me: Diphenylchloroarsine with overly distorted and ridiculously low-pitched slam/brutal death, and Plebeian Grandstand, in a chaotic noisy post-hardcore vein. Both were somewhat enjoyable, after 5 minutes I felt saturated but kept going and eventually got in some kind of groove, until I got tired of it after 20-30 minutes.

I got home, relaxed, put music in my mp3 player and headed to the gym. I listened to half a song from Hanoi Rocks and decided it’s not for me, so I listened to Sodom. My favorite band has never released a bad album in its 40 years of existence, and their 2013 offering Epitome of Torture showed us all that the power trio still has lead in the pencil. Great violent music to get pumped.

I took the dog out for a spin, and then cooked a pimped out seafood soup and steamed broccoli. I watched some UFC fights, Max Holloway is an absolute legend though he’s only 29, and when it was announced that he’d be fighting Mexican kicking machine Yaír Rodriguez, boners all over the MMA fan world sprouted. The fight delivered masterfully, a display of magnificient violence, in which the Hawaiian took some serious hits but won with his patented ridiculous forward pressure. He’s now the clear number 2 in the featherweight division, way above everyone else but having lost twice to the champ, a scenario that’s being observed in other marquee weight classes (Covington at WW, Zhang at SW). The other fights on the card were also great, notably my fellow Chinese Song Yadong hunting for a knockout and getting it.

I then played a bit of Mount & Blade. Gone are the six-hour sessions, half an hour is enough, I gather my band of mercenaries, go kill some filthy Sassanids and Khergits, and set up camp. I used to be completely addicted to that game but now I barely even think about it.

Chapter 318

I was up at 11, downed a protein shake, and rode to the BJJ gym again. There was a gi class taught by a purple belt, about sweeps from spider guard. Then we had a few rolls, a good time was had by all. They talked about going to eat bagels after training, and I tagged along, my train wasn’t leaving until 15:46. I got cream cheese and smoked salmon bagels and a Gweilo pale ale, and also got some bagels to go.

I rode a rent-a-bike to the train station, that has got to be my favorite way to travel around. Shanghai is huge and intimidating and has lots of traffic, but it’s easy to navigate on two wheels, and those rent-a-bikes cost almost nothing. I got on the train, and after a short hop at 200+ km/h, I arrived, found my car in the parking lot, and got home.

The girlfriend was out having dinner with a student, so I took a bath, did laundry, and kicked back watching UFC fights from last week. They all ended in violent knockouts. I love combat sports, I must be some sort of barbarian.

Thus ended my weekend. I was in bed at 9.

Chapter 317

I woke up a bit before 8, finished packing my bag, kissed the sleeping girlfriend and dog on their foreheads, and drove to the train station, blasting some tunes by Non-Phixion. Their album The Future is Now is an underground classic, some real goddamn hip-hop. I parked underground and was on the Shanghai-bound train a few minutes later, with very little nonsense aside from having to wear a fayssah mursk that I took off as soon as I was in my seat. I ate my breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, raisins and nuts on the train, and we pulled in the metropolis an hour later. I rode a rent-a-bike to the hostel where I had a bed booked, dropped my backpack and got a little drawstring bag with the stuff I needed, before riding another rent-a-bike to the jiu-jitsu gym.

I got there with half an hour to spare and had a thorough stretch while the kids’ class was in session, my legs were sore as hell from the leg workout two days prior. Then class started, we drilled a north-south escape and then the men and women were separated and we did a lot of position sparring. It was great. I don’t do nogi as often so sometimes I was wondering where I should put my hands but I did okay, getting better positions against more inexperienced guys and holding my own against higher belts.

Then I rode back to the hostel, stopping for slices of pizza and a beer, that I ate on the outdoor patio, on this beautiful day. I had a Hawaiian and one with Italian sausage and hot peppers. It was delicious and it helped me fall asleep, I napped for about two hours and then woke up feeling as if my muscles were replaced by concrete and acid. I stretched it out and then rode a few kilometers to Specters bar. I’d never been there before and couldn’t find it but then I heard the loud music coming out of the window and walked in as the hardcore band Rat King was doing its soundcheck. They were one of the three bands about to play, alongside my pals from Spill Your Guts. I said hi to their Russian frontman and my fellow Quebecer handling the bass for the mighty expat hardcore quintet, and took in my surroundings, Specters is a pretty cool looking dive bar, with the walls covered in the usual rock n’ roll and punk paraphernalia. The bartender handed me a free beer, I graciously accepted it but it tasted way off, very metallic, maybe it was expired. I also got warned by more than one person to stay the fuck away from their draft beer. Noted. I’ll bring my own later.

When Rat King were done with their soundcheck we all walked out to have dinner at a Thai restaurant in the neighborhood. I don’t want to be that guy, but living in Thailand for a year has almost ruined Thai food outside of Thailand for me, so my expectations were low. Nonetheless, I didn’t say anything, and was ready to just smile and reply “delicious!” if asked how it is, even if it is bland slop and an insult to the Thai nation and its culinary culture, like it’s unfortunately too common. Well, the meal was great, and spicy enough.

The show wasn’t due to start until 10, so the bassist and I walked to Stone Brewing where we joined their Danish rhythm guitarist and had some expensive but spectacular microbrews, talking about all sort of stuff. Then we went back to the venue, now mobbed by dozens of people eagerly waiting for the show to begin. I ran into some old pals, and the beer helping, I was having a jolly good time shooting the breeze with them, catching up and discussing underground music. There are shows every week in Shanghai, the scene is alive and kicking.

Round Eye took the stage, they’re veterans from the local rock scene but weirdly enough it was my first time seeing them live. They were great, some catchy, dirty punk rock with a degenerate energy to it. Then Rat King got on, and their violent hardcore immediately started a huge life-threatening pit, with limbs flailing in all directions. The jiu-jitsu coach who taught the nogi class is a hardcore fan, and he was there up front, shirt off, spinning and throwing capoeira kicks. I was standing on a speaker by the stage, taking it all in, trying to not slip and fall.

To complete the theme of Shanghai-based bands exclusively composed of expats, Spill Your Guts arrived under cheers from the crowd, ready to play their farewell show. They started with the opening track of their long-overdue LP, a sick slab of hardcore with black metal and At The Gates-esque elements, and it was pure headbanging and moshing for the next half hour. A Russian pal, long-time fan of the band, took the microphone for the short and intense classic Full Blast! which got everyone going nuts. SYG will be missed but hey, that’s the nature of the business, and of expat life. People come and go.

It was now pretty late, I stuck around a bit chatting with people but left soon after to get somewhat of a full night’s sleep.

Chapter 316

I rode to work and had a double with the twelfth-graders in the forst two periods. As the lesson was nearing its end, I got a bad case of the shits so I rushed to the handicapped toilet stall, hidden in a corner somewhere on the first floor. I chose that one because it has a seat instead of just a hole in the floor, but the light didn’t work so I was engulfed in complete darkness. Also the door doesn’t have a latch to lock it, great, fucking great. I was praying that nobody will come, but I must have prayed to the wrong god because two boys opened the door and yelled in surprise when they saw me inside. I leaned forward and slammed the door shut. What a way to start the day.

The rest of the day went by normally, I had classes and graded exam papers. Then I got home and took a little nap, I was exhausted and a bit ill, still feeling traces of a cold and some uneasiness in my stomach. Not the best start to the weekend, especially since it’s our five-year anniversary, and we’d been talking about going to have dinner and watch a movie. I texted the girlfriend and told her I’d better not eat out, and would rather cook something easily digestible at home, we’ll postpone our romantic dinner. The movie was still on, she had bought the tickets already and my nap has recharged me enough. So after a plate of bacon and toast, we rode our bicycles to the shopping mall and watched Dune, a movie getting quite a bit of hype and positive reviews these days. I didn’t like it that much, I thought it was fairly predictable, the characters were monodimensional (especially the villains), and it’s a bit weird to have people fight with machetes and swords in the year 10 000. It wasn’t bad or anything, just that I expected better, I guess.

Chapter 315

Rememberance Day/Armistice Day. Let’s take a moment to commemorate the victims of all the senseless wars, uniformed or otherwise.

I supervised two lab sessions, Catatonic Class and Crazy Class did quite well overall, though some students are clumsy as hell and broke glassware. In between, I graded exam papers. Whoopdeedoopdeedoo. Good thing I had the Metal Minded podcast to keep me company, in a semi-interactive manner, I’d drop comments in the live chat box and sometimes the guys would engage with the stuff I said. Then we had a bit of an offline Zoom chat, talking about recently dropped metal albums, and that stampede at a rap concert in Houston that killed 8 people. I’ve been in huge crowds before, and it can be scary, the right combination of panic, stupidity and incompetence from organizers could cause some serious damage.

Lunch was instant couscous, I fried the grains in butter and chicken fat, added chicken broth, seasoned it with spices, raisins, peanuts, eggs and fried chicken. It was delicious. Then I went back to work, and my afternoon went by smoothly.

I got home and made some music. I especially like cutting hilarious obscure samples. Too bad I have zero musical talent. I contacted an American goregrind band looking for collaborators for a split, maybe we’ll dump a steaming pile of shit together.

Then I went to the gym. I started a 5/3/1 program, as developed by powerlifting coach Jim Wendler, and today was leg day. I did squats and accessory exercises, then I rode home, had a protein shake, and rode to the bar with the dog running along. The kitchen was closed, so I ordered food from the Japanese place next door, a seafood fried rice and chunks of fried chicken, that I washed down with a Singha beer. There was a pub quiz, and my team dominated nearly every round, with the combined supreme power of our three nerd brains. Feels good. We had celebratory shots of some coffee liqueur, but I didn’t want to get too drunk, so I rode back home and was in bed a bit before midnight.