Chapter 344

I woke up surprisingly refreshed, despite the five and a half hours of sleep. Then I went to work and taught all my classes. There were a few funny highlights but nothing that I could really describe here without knowing all the quirks of the personalities of my students.

In the afternoon I had a bit of free time and decided I should check out Cynic’s discography. Cynic is a metal band that got started in the early 90s, pioneering some kind of progressive death metal, and after a long hiatus, they just released another album. I checked out their 1993 debut Focus and... it was extremely boring. I didn’t even finish the first track. Then I put on an album by Icelandic black metal band Misþyrming, titled Söngvar elds og óreiðu. They sure love their weird letters there.

I got home, got changed, and got to the gym. I did my leg day, listening to some good misanthropic black metal, and then got home with heavy concrete in the lower part of my body. It will be worse two days from now. I chopped a big block of beef in small pieces, seasoned it, and made taco meat. I also prepared a homemade salsa, with leftover hot peppers, tomatoes, onions, cilantro, spices and corn. The girlfriend and I ate our tacos while watching the new episodes of F is for Family, an adult cartoon we like quite a bit. It takes place in the 1970s and is a tragicomedy about a family in some Rust Belt town, dealing with all sorts of problems. Then, after she did the dishes, she said she wanted to watch travel videos, so we traveled vicariously to Guatemala, Congo and Palau through some vlogs made by random people on YouTube. Soon, soon, we could travel the world like we used to, let’s hope.

Then I watched the UFC Embedded episodes for the upcoming UFC 269 pay-per-view, and then a whole card of King Of The Streets. It’s weirdly fascinating, and as a combat sports purist, it doesn’t get much realer than that. I cringe in fear a bit watching it, I can get behind the whole “bare-knuckle, KO only, no rules” format and the zero-frills presentation, but the concrete floor is just a matter of time until one guy gets a serious injury or worse. Still, the sad truth, like when we talk about more “sanitized” combat sports or other dangerous endeavors like stunts or football, is that some madmen are gonna do it regardless, whether there’s a camera or not.