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.