Chapter 308

I woke up at 6:30 and put on the 2021 album by Slaine, a Boston-based rapper who has had a pretty prolific career in the underground. I didn’t like it, too many sappy choruses, I like my hip-hop a bit more raw and old-school.

I rode to work, relaxed, I didn’t have to teach today. I invigilated a math exam for 45 minutes then went to the office and spent the rest of the afternoon browsing the internet and stapling, folding and counting the chemistry papers. I could do that while listening to the Metal Minded podcast, the boys reviewed four recent releases from the Quebec scene and they were all positive. In the afternoon I did listen the albums or tracks from them and they were okay, but nothing that made me go “Woah!!!” First Fragment was a richly layered tech death album with surprising flamenco and neoclassical bits, Outre-Tombe was some solid Stockholm-style death metal but not as good as their previous album, Épiphanie was quite interesting in its proggy, post-metallic way, and Hak-Ed Damm was some violent and intense black metal similar to Anaal Nathrakh but it didn’t tickle me, not my prefered type of black metal.

I went home, got changed and headed to the gym. I did my deadlifts and my accessory exercises, going home with a gigantic pump in my biceps. I downed a protein shake and then rode the longboard with the dog to go meet the girlfriend at the end of her evening study supervision duties.

We had a chat in the car, she was asking me to reconsider my plans for the weekend. I wanted to go on a road trip to the coastal city of Ningbo, to visit friends, attend a death metal show and train a bit of BJJ at the academy there, but now she was saying that if there’s an eclosion of Covid there, it could seriously come and bite us in the ass. There has been a handful of new cases in the past weeks, in various cities, and people who might have been in contact with them have to quarantine or do tons of testing. I believe that my job would protect me if this unlucky fate fell upon me, but her, being Chinese and thus subjected to the bullying whim of her cuntfucian bosses, could lose her job even if she stays home, for merely living with me. So yeah, how bullshitty is that, that even one (1) unconfirmed case in a city of 10 million where I’d happen to be within two weeks, of a disease with a 99.99996% survival rate, for which I’m vaccinated, could cause such an uproar? Still, I accepted the compromise, after all she went to great lengths to accommodate me and my wanderlust recently, and I had been gone out of the city three weekends in a row already. Notably, she didn’t give me shit for staying in Nanjing on the way back from Hefei, even if it implied that she’d have to drive three hours by herself. So as much as it sucks, I’ll just cancel the trip to stay safe.

We got home, and I ate a giant bowl of R. n’ S. composed of white rice, Sichuan food leftovers, spicy peanuts and eggs. It was glorious. I watched a few videos on YouTube then I went to bed and started a novel titled Mukbang, by Fanie Desmeules. It’s about a young internet addict who starts her YouTube channel, first talking about make-up and vegan diet and yoga and other basic white girl shit, but then she sees how popular “mukbangs” are, an abomination coming from Korea in which people eat disgusting amounts of food live in front of a camera. I only had vaguely heard of it, and it’s revolting.