Chapter 354

Another day in paradise. I can’t believe I wrote an entry every single day, no exception, since January 1^st.

I took the dog out and headed to work. I had two classes in the morning, and in my free time, I wrote and printed a practice sheet, and listened to music. There’s a big metal show in Shanghai next weekend I plan on attending, and I researched the bands I don’t already know. One of them is a hardcore band from Chengdu called Gaiwar, I watched a live show they played in a McDonald’s. Another band has a name in Chinese which translates as Execution, and looking the name up, the first result on YouTube was of an actual public execution that took place in 1995. I waited until I got home and watched it out of morbid curiosity, it was astonishing. It was filmed by a handheld camera, probably illegally, and we could see four people (one woman and three men) being paraded in a flatbed truck in a village with a large sign around their neck. The video quality was too grainy to make up what was written on those public shaming signs, but reading the comments, it seems like they were drug dealers. They were marched to the middle of a field, and the video cuts to their inanimate bodies being checked by a doctor. One of them must have shown signs of life, because a policeman came and shot the man in the head. Then the bodies are being carted away in body bags. Throughout the whole thing, there’s a big crowd of onlookers, and you even hear children chirping in their sing-song voices. I knew China applies the death penalty, but I had no idea it happens publicly. Twelve years here, I missed out.

I ate a baloney sandwich in a baguette bread and rode back to school. I taught a twelfth-grade class, and they were all dead asleep, their brains embedded in thick Jell-O. Also the computer kept malfunctioning, freezing, restarting for no reason. It sucked and I was wondering what the hell I was doing there, but then I reminded myself it’s only an hour and a half and then I can do fuckall for the rest of the afternoon afterwards. I’m Catholic by culture, I work to live, I don’t live to work.

I got home and watched the main event of last Saturday’s UFC. Derrick Lewis blasted his opponent and then obtained the record of most KOs in the history of the UFC. I ate a bowl of yogurt with nuts and dried fruit before going to the gym for jiu-jitsu practice, and that proved to be my demise. My stomach was grumbling throughout the training session, and after the second round of sparring, I felt like I was going to vomit. I went home and had very little appetite, in fact I kept dry-heaving and vomiting little strings of bile. To make things worse, a neck pain started to settle and become increasingly searing, as the adrenaline wore off. I took a steaming hot bath, forced myself to eat something, and went to bed.