Chapter 355

I slept terribly, with my upset stomach, resulting dehydration, and my neck and left shoulder preventing me from snoozing peacefully. I also made all sorts of weird-ass dreams.

I still dragged my carcass to work. The flatscreen TV at the entrance of the school had a picture of Stalin (or, as they call him, Sidalin) with “Happy 143^rd birthday!” The mustachioed Georgian was born in 1879, and the Chinese always add one year to ages. Oh, and though they adhere to an authright state capitalist model bordering on enlightened fascism, they also revere old commie figures from the past.

I had a lab period with the strong eleventh-grade class, and though the antiquated alcohol burner/timebomb kept malfunctioning, it went well. Then I got home and saw that the dog had managed to open the drawer and eat my dried pineapple chunks. He got swiftly thrown in jail. In the afternoon I had more classes, with the eleventh-graders I need to crunch the syllabus in order to save time, and that sucks, I much prefer to teach at a pace that makes sense, using logical links to build on previously acquired skills, rather than just cram. Not that Chinese students aren’t responsive to pure rote memorization and cramming, far from that.

During a break, I played a few online games of chess. I suck ass, and lost most of them, only winning a few. Some of my fellow 600-ranked n00bs try some dumb moves like wayward queen attacks that I now see from a mile away, but I also commit stupid mistakes or am vulnerable to other textbook gambits.

I was very sluggish, I think the weakened state of my body welcomed some shitty germs in. After my last class, I went home, dressed in warm long underwear, and played a few more chess games. Speaking of germs, I put on a Jocko Willink podcast, and he was talking about Unit 731, the absolutely evil group of research on bacteriological warfare from the Japanese Imperial Army that did research on human guinea pigs during the 1930s and 1940s. It’s about the most horrific thing you’ll ever hear about in your life, I did visit the Unit 731 museum near Harbin a few years ago and for hours afterwards, I was walking in some kind of zombified state and if I had crossed paths with a Japanese person, I’d have punched him straight in the face and stomped his body until he’d turn into hamburger. And to make things even worse, most of the culprits never really got punished, due to the Americans not wanting the (admittedly scientifically valuable) results of those experiments to be given to the Soviets, and not wanting to jeopardize Japanese collaboration.

Though I felt like boiled shit, my appetite was back in force, so I cooked a meal of steak, asparagus and baguette bread with cream cheese and watched a few more UFC fights. I was in bed by 8, book in hand and mug of rum, hot water, honey and lemon on the nightstand. I crashed at 8:30.