Chapter 69

And I passed! Third time’s the charm. I showed up at the testing center at 7:10, which was an excellent idea as only 10 minutes later the line-up was 50 meters long. I was in the first wave to go in, drove though the circuit without triggering their hyper-sensitive “You stepped over the line, you retard!” computer. A huge weight off my shoulders, there’s another practical test coming up but this one should be much easier.

Key word “should”... A guy from the driving school sent me a message on WeChat about the content of that third test, an enormous wall of text in Chinese. I can read Chinese characters, but rather slowly and with mental effort that makes my brain hurt. The part I read thus far is about when to use regular headlights and when to use high beams, I wonder if every Chinese person has really passed that test, at night half the cars on the road blind everyone with their brights and half don’t even bother turning on their headlights.

I made it to the school by 9 and went to the lab. My students were finishing up today’s experiment, and the teacher I asked to cover me wasn’t there. “Where’s she?”, I asked, and got shrugs in return. Half an hour later I saw her in the office, she thought the lab was later in the morning. I guess we’re both lucky nobody got hurt, in that chemistry lab with 88 different things that can injure you, and also that the students did the lab and answered all the questions on their own, without being prompted to do so.

During the break I stumbled upon an article being shared on Facebook about teachers in Quebec being physically attacked by students. The comment section was filled with anecdotes of being spat on, called racist slurs, stabbed with pencils, thrown shit at, having their cars vandalized, threatened, and other joyful things like that. Meanwhile, I teach high schoolers who, when left unsupervised in a chemistry lab for an hour, not only don’t destroy anything, but they take the initiative to complete their lab assignments. And people still wonder why I’m still in China and not really interested in teaching “back home”.

My grade-11 class went well, then I rode home. The dog looked at me with “I fucked up” eyes, he had chewed the girlfriend’s earbuds, so I put him in prison. He escaped, crafty little bastard that he is, and I gave hime the silent treatment. The girlfriend has been reading about dog psychology, she suggested we try a new approach when he does something stupid, instead of punishing him we just show him the thing he destroyed, make disappointed sounds and then pretend to ignore his existence.

There was a leftover salad in the fridge, that the girlfriend brought from work. I added shredded cheese, bacon and a hard-boiled egg to make it a meal. Later in the afternoon I got the shits, not sure if it’s the salad, or maybe I undercooked the bacon (unlikely, it was burned black, the way Tyrion Lannister likes it), or maybe it was the tea I’d been drinking. Unpleasant.

I took the dog out for a walk before heading back to work. There was a group of elderly ladies sitting outside gossipping as they always do, the dog went to sniff one of them. She gave a big toothless smile and said something to me in a language that is not Mandarin. It’s weird, the push to get the whole country to speak a common language is quite recent and still a work in progress the further south you go, and you have old people here who don’t really speak Mando or not at all. They couldn’t communicate if they went elsewhere in China, and even in the city they have trouble, yet it’s not as if they’re immigrants, they were born here and the language just changed around them.

One of the old people in our apartment building has a pretty cool bird, and sometimes brings him out and hangs the cage on a tree branch. I went to look at the bird, and felt a bit sad for the poor thing stuck in that tiny cage. “Ni hao!”, he chirped. Awww that’s nice.

That reminded me of that time I went to a tourist site by a mountain in central China, one of the knick-knack shops had a parrot outside. I went and started saying Chinese swear words hoping he’d repeat them, and the shopkeeper just pointed at a sign that said “Don’t say obscenities to the bird”. I laughed so hard, I guess I wasn’t the first to do that. She didn’t even look mad or annoyed, just stoically pointing at the hand-written sign as if it happens all the time.

I went back to the office, did some class prep and looked at memes online. Some people coined the term “super-straight” to talk about those who are not interested in dating transgenders, and the SJWs flipped a switch, calling it bigoted and transphobic. It seems to me that the idea that trans people are entitled to have sex with every straight person of the opposite gender they identify as is a bit rapey and against the concept of informed consent that feminists have been pushing (rightfully so), I mean, yeah, even if you don’t want to invalidate trans-men or trans-women’s identity, they are pretty damn different than people born with that gender.

I had one class, teaching nucleophilic substitution and elimination reactions with halogenoalkanes (whoopdeedoo) and then another small block of free time. I watched one video by Soph, the teenage girl who made huge waves last year with her incredibly astute commentary on society, and who got banned from YouTube due to her opinions not being kosher. It’s been a while, now I have to catch up on her content, it’s really great. This video was about pornography addiction and metastrophilia, a word I heard for the first time ever and refers to the attraction to things that disgust.

I had another class then went home and took a quick nap, then headed to the gym and had a little jiu-jitsu open mat. This time five people showed up, and we could have some nice rotations. All of them were blue belts, so they were better than me, but I could hold my own for the most part, defend against some attacks and positions (though I was utterly useless when it came to other positions, notably side control) and even threw some attacks of my own, including a cool arm triangle. I suspect he gifted it to me to some extent but it’s about practicing, improving and helping others improve.

There were other people in there, training kickboxing. When I walked in, some old stocky guy parked his food delivery scooter and walked in, I thought maybe someone in the gym ordered takeout, but no, he changed out of his Meituan delivery driver uniform, put on a pair of shorts and gloves, and went hard on the bag. Waimai guy by day, fighter by night, all day.

On the way home I stopped at a corner store to get milk and toothpaste. Now I’m really not the type of guy to get attached to brands, but there’s one toothpaste brand I always buy. Not that it’s of a higher quality or anything, but because it’s hilarious: heiren yagao, or “black man toothpaste”, with a smiling African guy in a tuxedo and top hat as their logo. They used to go by “Darkie” as their English name, with a much more, say, unflattering drawing of a black guy, but changed it to “Darlie” in the 90s.

I went home, famished and hungry and sore. I opened a liter bottle of homebrewed IPA and made falafel, using a mixture of chick peas, onions, garlic, cilantro, flour and spices that I ground up in the food processor, shaped into balls and deep fried. It was OK but not a great success, I used the oil from the fried chicken I made two days ago and it was darkened with burnt bits, which made the falafel taste a bit carbonized. I still devoured them, in a tortilla with onions, tomatoes, lettuce and a sauce I made by mixing yogurt, hot sauce and garlic.

While I was busy in the kitchen, I put on an album by Clipping, which is made up of a black dude rapping and two skinny white hipsters making dark electronic beats. They stylize their name as clipping. (no capitalization, and with the full stop) which is a bit dumb, but the music is pretty cool, reminding me of Death Grips but way less abrasive. Then I watched more of the UFC prelims, it was a great card, with a high level of talent even in the undercard, and exciting KOs and submissions. In one of them, colorfully eccentric and usually goofy flyweight Tim Elliott turned it up and brutalized his opponent Jordan Espinosa, calling him a woman beater after a story emerged on Facebook in which one of his friends alleged he choked her after she refused to have sex with him. It was caught by the cageside cameraman, and Espinosa, all bloodied up and trying to stop Elliott’s forearm from grinding his face and neck, replied “You don’t know the whole story”. It’s a brutal sport where things can get personal, and now that they hold fights in empty arenas, not only do you hear the strikes much more clearly and the fighters can hear their coaches and even the commentary team, you can also catch such moments in which the fighters talk to each other.

I felt like listening to hip-hop, so I put on a mixtape from Termanology. His duet album with Slaine, Anti-Hero, is my favorite rap album released in the past 10 years so I wanted to hear what the Boston lyricist’s solo stuff sounded like. He’s got solid bars but I have to say Slaine steals the show and is the one who makes the album such a great listen.

Chapter 68

This time I did yoga instead of tai chi, other than that, it was a normal morning. I always feel like staying in bed a bit longer but have to say it’s nice to have a good hour and a half for myself to enjoy and then go to work relaxed rather than just roll out of bed and rush. Let’s keep this habit up.

I listened to Jocko Willink’s podcast, he said that contrary to popular belief, there are such things as stupid questions. As a leadership consultant, he advocates humility, open communication and what he calls “extreme ownership” (accountability and owning one’s mistakes) but also says you should do your homework beforehand and not have to ask about things you should already know. He’s 100% right, I’ve always disliked that cliché.

I got to the school, dropped my stuff in the office, and went to the hot water dispenser to make tea. A Chinese physics teacher was doing the same, we talked tea for a bit and I proposed we make a trade, so I went to my office, put a few loose leaves of Huang Shan tea in an empty container to trade for his bag of white tea. It then dawned on me that I don’t even know his name, though we’ve been working in the same school for two and a half years now. It’s a weird thing about my life in China, I don’t know the names of my coworkers except those in my office, I don’t know my neighbors’ names, I don’t know the names of any of the girlfriend’s relatives except her parents and her two cousins. In many cases I’d be surprised if they even know mine.

In the morning I prepared lessons while listening to a vaporwave compilation and then a live set from Put, the Russian black metal band. I call them Put because that’s the transliteration of their name in Cyrillic (путь) but the video description translated it as Pathways, which sounds better, so I’ll use that from now on. I will keep calling their album Песни смерти “Skeleton Playing Accordion In The Snow” though. The one-hour set was pretty good, and I have to appreciate that not only they use a real accordion, it’s also well recorded, unlike a lot of folkloric instruments who unfortunately get buried by the drums and electric guitars oftentimes.

I had a double class with twelfth-graders and it went well. Some got sleepy, what can I say, nuclear magnetic resonance is not a fascinating subject at all.

I didn’t go home for lunch. I headed to the outskirts on my bicycle, where I did one practice run on the driving exam circuit. The instructor knew my time was a bit tight so he let me go first, while two other trainees sat in the car. It went well and I hope I just pass this test and get done with it.

On the way there and back I finished a Ryan Long podcast, his 23^rd episode. It was absolutely excellent, as I keep repeating he’s both hilarious and on point in his criticism of woke culture. It was titled “No Fun, Only Activism” and the main topic was people saying you shouldn’t celebrate the Fourth Of July because the USA is a flawed country and there are problems in the world. He also talked about the Blacklivesmatter activists pushing people to virtue-signal about their cause and implying that if you post other shit on your Instagram or Facebook (like pictures of your dog or a hike or the food you cook or whatever) that’s an example of privilege and white supremacy. I vaguely remember that. The thing is we live in such a Clown World, you tend to forget about some of the hundreds and hundreds of weird instances of pure narcissism like that.

I hauled ass on the way back, and made it to the city with enough time to eat Muslim noodles at an eatery before going back to work. I had a lab period and played Creedence Clearwater Revival on my little speaker, some students were gently bobbing their heads to their classic rock. CCR are pretty damn special, not only do they have tons of great songs, they also manage to have a distinctive recognizable sound AND not having every song sound the same.

We had a meeting in the mid-afternoon. The principal talked about the upcoming final exams, and how we need to be on our toes to prevent cheating. Another topic that was brought up is how apathetic some of the twelfth-graders are, the most capable ones having already been offered a place in a good university and the weakest ones just not giving a fuck. Some of them even gave up on the idea of studying abroad, or more likely their tiger moms decided they wouldn’t go. I still have a great time teaching the seniors, even Attitude Class, the key is having proper expectations and choosing battles.

Speaking of Attitude Class, I taught them one period after the meeting, going through an exam paper from 2016. They paid attention, noting all the different nitpicks that the British people who’ll grade the exams can hold against them.

I got home and fed the dog, he had skipped lunch, poor thing. I rewatched an old UFC fight, Amanda Nunes has now won her last twelve fights, most of them by murder, cementing her place as baddest woman in the history of combat sports, but she does have losses on her record. So I watched her fight against Cat Zingano in 2014, in which Nunes started strong and beat several layers of shit out of Alpha Cat before the tables turned. Cat Zingano was one hell of a scary woman back in the day, truly one of MMA’s biggest “what if”s, due to injuries and psychological issues due to the death of her husband. The fight was seriously sick and included two extremely violent takedowns that looked like the DDT move used in pro wrasslin’, something we don’t see in MMA often, if ever.

I wrote this entry while listening to the album Morning Star by Entombed. Vocalist LG Petrov died at age 49 yesterday, which prompted a lot of my metal friends to post a little tribute on their Facebook, so I clicked on that album link. Their debut Left Hand Path is legendary (the title track!!!!) and I like the death n’ roll approach on Clandestine, but I had never heard Morning Star, their seventh studio effort. Parts sounded like the Entombed of old but big swaths of the album were either boring or plain bad. After that I listened to an aggressive thrash metal album by a band named Incinerate, a release from three days ago, and it was good stuff.

At 8 or so I rode my longboard with the dog to the girlfriend’s workplace, and we came back home. I mixed myself a negroni, read a bit, and went to sleep. Just another day in paradise.

Chapter 67

I got up at 6 on the dot, brewed some green tea, did my tai chi, had a cold shower, put on a button down shirt and got back in teacher mode.

I took the dog out for a walk, listening to Jocko Willink’s podcast. The man is hilariously intense, he was talking about “going on patrol with his kids last week-end... well, civilians call it hiking” and how they “set up a lay up point, or like they say, camping”. Pretty much any time he appears on the internet now, he spawns memes like “Once Jocko was pulled over, and he let the officer go with a warning”, “Jocko's blood type is testosterone” and “Jocko’s microwave automatically stops at 1 second to not annoy him”, among many others.

I made it to the office half an hour early to get my stuff in order and then did four classes in a row. The students have to learn organic chemistry mechanisms, and many of them don’t do the practice I tell them to do, which means they’re unable to answer my review questions. It’s always the dilemma, do I stop and reteach everything, or do I leave them behind in the dirt?! I have a rather tight schedule to follow, and the sad truth is that even if I redo it from scratch, they still won’t practice and the next class will be the same ordeal. Also that’s unfair for those who actually do the work.

In my third class, about half of the twelfth-graders didn’t do the very small homework I gave them. I expelled them and told them to only come back when it’s done. Gotta put my foot down sometimes.

Lunch was leftover sesame noodles and braised beef, browsing funny memes and politics videos on YouTube. Nothing very interesting. I took the dog out once more, we usually go for two short daily walks and one longer one.

I got back to the office, did a bit of writing and class prep while listening to an album by Glacier, an American instrumental post-metal band. It was good but when there are no vocals I feel like there’s something missing. Then I blindly clicked on an album by a Swiss band with the slightly silly name of Endark The Brightness and didn’t like their keyboard-laden black metal, after one song I switched to Put, the Russian atmospheric black metal band with a really cool album cover of a skeleton playing the accordion in the snow. Then I had a double with Attitude Class, and thus ended my work day.

I got home with about 40 minutes to spare before I had to head out again. I put on the prelims from the last UFC card, and they were all quick finishes so I had time to watch three of them. One guy particularly impressed, a skinny balding lightweight from Serbia who somehow now lives in Alaska, and who bulldozed through his opponent.

Then I went to meet my Mexican-American friend, and we took a taxi to the climbing gym. I hadn’t seen him in a month, as he spent the holidays in Shanghai, so it was good to catch up and exchange stupid jokes and anecdotes on the way. I climbed for about an hour, I still can’t complete route 3.5 but I beat my previous record by going a few pegs higher than before, I had a rush of endorphins when that happened. I tried again, with my friend coaching me, but the last holds are tiny and require some serious finger strength which I do not possess.

He showed me exercises one can do to improve climbing strength, mostly dead hangs and pull-ups. I couldn’t do any of them. I can do a lot of normal pull-ups, I’m probably in a very high percentile compared to the population (not that I’m that strong, just that the majority of people are fat tubs or weaklings) but the lower part of my forearms and my fingers aren’t as developed.

He stuck around for longer, climbing junkie that he is, and also wanted to modify the routes with the approval of the boss. He took a big Allen key and removed some pegs, replacing them or moving them around. I had to go home and cook dinner, plus my forearms were marmalade at that point so I bade farewell.

I almost never use taxis around town, but I have the Didi app on my phone and it works like a charm, within two minutes a luxury sedan with leather seats picked me up. The fare for that 4-kilometer ride? Barely above 2 USD. You can’t beat that with a stick. That’s the magic of China.

Back home, I opened a Pêche Mel’Bush, a delicious blend of Bush (not to be mixed with horrible pisswater Busch; we’re talking about the strong Belgian ale here) and Pécheresse Lambic. At 8.2% ABV, it clocks much higher than most fruit beers. 

I put on the new album by Abominable Putridity, a Russian brutal death/slam band. It’s far from my favorite style but that band and a handful of others manage to really reach me, and made me bob my head. Then I switched completely and put on a Mariah Carey album, at number 389 in the Top 500. It was OK, as far as pop music goes.

I took the chicken wings that had been marinating since lunchtime and made fried chicken. I used the flour-egg-crumbs breading station with the wet hand-dry hand technique, but towards the end all my fingertips were coated in batter. I fried the pieces in batches and finished just as the girlfriend came in, we devoured the poultry while watching The Office and drinking gin tonics.

While she did the dishes, I looked for something quick to watch on YouTube before bed and clicked on an analysis of the movie Martyrs. Though I’m really not a horror fan, I watched it last year and it’s the type of movie that makes your butthole pucker all the way to your belly button. Then I watched a wrestling match from 1994 pitting Terry Funk against Onita Atsushi, with twisted stipulations that could only come out of a deviant Japanese mind: the ropes were replaced with barb wire (and judging by how the guys would bleed after getting thrown in there, real barb wire) and would trigger explosions upon contact. Then, at the end, a timer went off, and five minutes later the whole ring exploded with the two wrestlers inside. I thought the “explosion” would just be noise and smoke, but no, they used pretty powerful pyrotechnics and it didn’t look very safe. I felt my IQ drop a few points.

Looking at the comment section, seems like the video surfaced because AEW did a similar match last week and it was nowhere near as good. I will probably check it out anyway, as bizarre extreme wrestling is one of my guilty pleasures, or I’ll ask some wrasslin’-obsessed friends about it first to see if it’s worth it.

Chapter 66

I woke up at 9 and rode my bike through a light rain to the driving school, I brought a bottle of my homebrewed IPA to give to the instructor, who’s been so patiently dealing with my shit. He sat on the passenger seat and let me drive the 20 minutes or so separating the city office to the practice field. At some point, I was going 80 km/h on a brand new country road and saw a bunch of debris falling from the truck in front of us, some curved filter sheets or whatever it was. I had to swerve to avoid them.

“Wo cao! Look at that truck, the tail gate is open, and shit is falling!”

“Yeah, don’t stay in the same lane as trucks”, the instructor laconically replied.

Sometimes I have people tell me that the idea that you should just accept the hazardous or anti-social behavior inherent to life in China and find ways around it rather than through it is racist, and... I agree, to a pretty big extent. It reeks of bigotry of low expectations. But at the same time, this type of stoic resilience didn’t appear in a vacuum, and I learned it from interacting with Chinese people who have had to put up with shit like that for much longer and oftentimes to a much worse extent. And as a soon-to-be newly minted Chinese driver as well as a “bike-and-destroy” cyclist, sharing the road with inept and dangerous motorists is something I have to contend with.

I have to get my license first, so I meticulously practiced. I put an earbud in one ear, and listened to the album The Head That Controls Both Right And Left Sides Eats Meats And Slobbers Even Today by Bleach, and then a Ryan Long podcast. He had Roger Stone on as a guest, I never heard of the guy before, apparently he was a Trump campaign strategist who got accused of collusion with the Russians. They had a great discussion about censorship, corrupt judges, and the Clintons.

On the way home I made a detour to Nongville, the quasi-slum sandwiched between luxury apartments and office towers, and bought sesame noodles. The friendly lady was happy to see me as always, and said it’s been a while. True, we should patronize that shop more often, those Wuhan-style reganmian are bomb. I got one serving extra-spicy, with extra mustardy pickles and cilantro, and one medium-spicy without cilantro, for the girlfriend.

I made it home in time to catch the end of the big UFC card, and the three championship fights. Piotr Yan was dominating Aljamain Sterling with his merciless and crisp boxing attack, but then had one of the derpiest moments in the history of the sport when he spiked the downed Jamaican-American in the forehead with a super illegal knee strike, losing by disqualification. I think it’s the first time a UFC title changes hands by DQ.

Amanda Nunes slaughtered her overmatched opponent in less than two minutes to the surprise of no one, and then it was the main event, a middleweight champ versus light heavyweight champ superfight. A very compelling one, as nobbody could really tell if the speed and unreal striking technique of Adesanya would prevail over the brutish size and legendary Polish power of Blachowicz, or the opposite. Well... turned out it was pretty evenly matched, the Nigerian New Zealander having his moments but never hurting the hulking Pole, who used a lot of jabs, turned it up in the latter rounds and wrestlefucked to victory. As far as personalities go, I was happy for Jan Blachowicz, he really endeared himself to the fans (me included) with his humble, natural and humorous demeanor, while Adesanya just feels like pure cringe at times with his forced swag and the uncharismatic clichés he spouts. He’s still a G though, and I see him stay champ at 185 pounds for a long time.

I was a bit buzzed by the time mid-afternoon rolled around, after imbibing a giant gin tonic, a tasty amber ale by Australian brewery 4 Pines, and a dark and stormy (rum and ginger beer). That seventeen-day period without a drop of alcohol (aside from a sip of the girlfriend’s gin tonic, that I mistaked for water) is in the rearview mirror now.

The girlfriend asked me for help, she wanted to move her desk where the dining room table is, and put the dinner table by the window. I initially disagreed, thinking it would obstruct the way to the kitchen, and joked that that’s the problem when you let a woman live with you, they always want to fix things that aren’t broken and move furniture around, because they get bored so easily. “That’s racist!” she retorted, a bit nonsensically. I still went with her plan, and it turned out to be a good idea, I like the new configuration.

Today’s music was an OK album by Ike And Tina Turner followed with one of my favorites thus far on that Top 500, Kaleidoscope by Kelis. I had never even heard of the name, a quick Wikipedia search told me she’s the chick singing the catchy and a bit overplayed “My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard”, and her debut album was a great piece of R&B. The single Caught Out There had a surprisingly angry yelled chorus and was fucking awesome, I played it for a second time when the album was over. Then it was Pixies, with a good alt-rock record that clearly influenced a lot of big 90s bands.

We walked with the dog to the Italian restaurant and had a great meal. She had the meat ravioli (which she cutely calls “Italian jiaozi”) and I had the ham pizza, with a Ramazzotti aperitif, a glass of white wine and a limoncello digestif.

On the walk home, we spoke only in French. She wants to learn and I feel the best way would be through some kind of immersion for 15-20 minutes a day at least.

Back home, I watched a live set by Rodzeng, a rapper from Gabon. He used to study engineering in a Chinese university and I met him a few times, he opened for Quebec City rapper Webster when he came to tour China, financed the French Alliance. I’ve been following Rodzeng on social media, and he’s a sick lyricist. Then I saw a 40-minute YouTube video analyzing the Simpsons episode with the highest rating in history, the one with Frank Grimes. The analysis was quite deep and multi-layered, it made me appreciate golden era Simpsons even more and made me want to watch an episode. I have Season 6 saved on a hard drive and randomly chose the one where Homer is accused of sexual harrassment, I must have seen it five times back in the day but it’s so good, and more than 25 years later, the themes of media-driven smearing campaigns, fake news and defamation are more relevant than ever.

Chapter 65

I woke up at 6:30, felt good to be sleeping in. Though it was Saturday, I had stuff to do, notably going for more goddamn driving practice. I rode to the driving school’s city office, listening to a Jocko Willink podcast. He was talking to a Vietnam War veteran, and the audio file kept cutting, as they edited out the names of soldiers and officers in post-production.

Sitting on the passenger seat on the way to the practice lot, I kept reading the book about overlanding in Africa, Dan Grec had reached Angola by now. One chapter was about the big Chinese presence there and elsewhere in Africa and I went "Boy, here we go again" but ended up very happy and dare I say surprised at the way he put it, given how much pure wet dogshit there is in most coverage of modern China by western media. As a long-time expat here with my eyes and ears open and boots on the ground I have of course a different perspective than many of those so-called journalists who don't even seem like they've even set foot in China let alone talked to a Chinese person, and I'm saddened and angered at how the issues related to China, including the presence in Africa, are portrayed. So props to him for being nuanced and rational in his short exposé in there, showing how the legacy of colonialism and especially the debts imposed on newly independent African nations in the 1960s have pretty much ruined the continent, and how politics aside, the roads and infrastructure built by the Chinese do have a net positive impact on the average African’s quality of life.

Not that I'm a China shill or unwilling to acknowledge the serious problems that come with the Chinese government, far from that. Saying that my relationship with my adopted homeland (and some of its people) is one of love-hate at times would be the understatement of the year! And in fact from what I've read and what I've heard first-hand and what I've seen when I went to Africa myself, it's a bit of a messed up situation, how some countries get embroiled in raw deals that puts them in serious debt when they can't repay the infrastructure. But for sure as he pointed out, the European powers have been and are still doing that (especially France, which still has a huge military presence there and pretty much controls the CFA currency), hence the hypocrisy of those expats in Africa who talk openly about "The fucking chinks and their neo-colonialism" (their words, not mine) as if it hasn't been done for 150 years already.

I did my practice, and then I drove the car back to the city. The car had a messed up gearbox and a flasher that would stay on even after bringing the stick back to the neutral position, but I managed.

On the way home, I stopped at a photocopy shop and had them do a high quality print of my homebrew labels. It cost me less than a dollar. When I came out and was ready to hop on my bicycle, a bus stopped beside me to queue at the red light. I knew what would happen then. Chinese people are fascinated with foreigners, but children and very rural people aside, they tend to keep a poker face in public and not stare or point, I am not sure if it’s done out of politeness or just being scared that the hairy barbarian will notice and fly into some kind of barbarian rage. Either way, when they’re behind a protective surface, like the window of a bus, this does not apply, and when I looked up, every passenger’s eyes were fixated on me. A gaggle of bespectacled teenage girls (“rainies” in Caucasian-Chinese slang) were pointing, and one was even fumbling for her phone to take a picture. I pointed back and made faces, and they all erupted in laughter.

I made it home before the time I would have been waking up on a normal Saturday, so I felt a sense of accomplishment having already done my day’s task. So I spent a lot of time sitting around, playing with the dog, listening to music, writing, and watching YouTube videos. For some reason, I felt like listening to Los Divididos, an Argentinean rock band I discovered when I visited that country a year and a half ago. I put on their album Amapola Del 66, and then a live set by post-metal band Amenra. In the middle of the set, their vocalist took his shirt off and had a bunch of bodyfication freaks come on stage and drive fish hooks through his flesh. This shit is pure squirm, one of my friends is into this bizarre sado-maso stuff, he even did a bungee jump held only by hooks going through the skin of his back.

Then I watched a documentary about underground indie pro wrestling. I can’t say I’m the biggest wrasslin fan in the world and find it hard to sit through whole matches after being so used to “real” combat sports, but I do think the culture behind it is fascinating. That doco was about a troupe of wrestlers going on a tour to remote places in Manitoba, we’re talking Native American settlements of 500 people separated by tens of hours of driving on narrow icy roads in the boreal forest. It was well done and showed the dichotomy between the highs (the feeling of entertaining crowds of people not used to out-of-towners coming through to put on a show, the northern lights and beautiful serene winter scenery, the camaraderie between wrestlers) and the lows (the novelty wearing off as they sit in a van for 30 hours, shows with less than 10 spectators, and the wear and tear associated with getting repeatedly body-slammed).

It got me musing, like yesterday when I was pondering why travel addicts like myself and Dan Grec put ourselves through hellish situations on purpose, why those guys and girls would risk (and often, get) serious injuries for such a bizarre carnival act with only the slightest chance that they’ll make it big, let alone make a living form it. Same reason why the Amenra vocalist and my Slovenian buddy drive needles through their skin, same reason why there are bare-knuckle boxers, same reason there are free climbers (rock climbers who forego ropes and all that stupid useless protective gear), and the list goes on. People don’t want to live in comfort boxes, and do get addicted to things that the average human would never dream about.

It’s been about 72 hours since my second shot of the ‘Rona vaccine, so it was about time I opened a beer. I started with one of my homebrews, a spiced ale I made with crushed mandarin oranges, ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, Sichuan peppers, and other random spices that caught my eye on the rack. Felt good to be back on the wagon, the beer wagon that is. I also opened a black Kirin that I drank with a giant plate of reheated pasta.

I sat in bed and played a bit of GTA V before taking a nap, that got interrupted when someone outside our door made a sound above 10 decibels and prompted the dog to repeatedly bark. I got up, gathered my stuff, and went to the gym where I practiced judo moves with my eccentric Ukrainian homie. He got pretty badly injured playing soccer a few weeks back, so we went light and avoided putting stress on his messed up knee. I still had energy at the end, so I practiced capoeira moves and did pull-ups.

I made it home by 21:00, ate curry, drank beer, and watched a condensed 50-minute version of UFC 2, which took place in 1994. Let’s just say the sport of MMA has gone a long, long way since. I also watched the first episode of the series Age Of Samurai, and poured myself a glass of sake, to stay within the theme.

Throughout the day and evening, I also played four albums from positions 396 to 393 of the Rolling Stone’s Top 500. I barely remember anything about that mound of unsalted mashed potatoes from Todd Lundgren, and D’Angelo’s Black Messiah was just as boring. And just when I started wondering why the hell I’m putting myself through this exercise in tediousness, next up was Diana Ross’s eponymous LP, which was absolutely great. Taylor Swift’s album was also excellent, that surprised me.

Chapter 64

I did my tai chi, drank my green tea, and sat down to read the news while listening to a chillwave playlist and then an album by The Go-Gos. The UFC just cut a 9-figure deal with a big betting site, and fans are furious. As much as I love the sport and religiously tune in every week, the way the organization is run reeks of pure scumbaggery. Fighters used to get a big part of their income from sponsorships, in most cases getting paid more for having a sponsor’s logo on their shorts that what they’d get from their fight purses, but that ended abruptly when Reebok became the sole apparel sponsor and they started wearing those bland uniforms. In the face of the backlash from the athletes (who also mentioned the poor quality of the gear, and several serious blunders like misspelling names), the UFC said it looks more “professional” that way. Yet, the octagon is plastered with shitty ads, and the announcers are constantly reading ad scripts before, during and after fights.

I listened to a lot of post-metal and sludge in the early part of the day and between classes: Amenra, Farer and Impure Wilhelmina. I like how these subgenres mix crushing heaviness and ambient melodies, and I also like how fresh they feel to my untrained ears, unlike death and thrash metal that I still love but feels stale oftentimes. I had three organic chemistry classes with the eleventh-graders in the morning and they went well, I’m struggling to even remember anything worth saying six hours later as I’m writing this, which is a good sign. Or maybe I have onset Alzheimer’s.

I reheated the curry, adding a big glug of coconut milk, and like every curry I’ve ever made, it was much better the second day. In the future I should cook the curry and leave it in the fridge overnight. I watched a few wrestling and MMA related videos, including the UFC 259 press conference. Israel Adesanya spouted a bunch of uncharismatic clichés, Amanda Nunes was all smiles, being UFC’s first mom champ (though she went through a serious loophole to get that distinction), Jan Blachowicz got very little mic time, and Aljamain Sterling tried to engage Piotr Yan in an exchange of insults but the fact it had to be done through a translator made the whole thing look stupid.

I did the dishes and put the rest of the beef chunks in the slow cooker after browning them, frying some onions in butter over the caked up browned bits, and deglazing the fond with huangjiu, a bitter Chinese wine that old people around these parts drink but that I mostly use for cooking. I also threw in basil, oregano, bay leaves, paprika, tons of black pepper, cumin, sugar syrup, and a spoonful of chili paste. I let it cook on low for five hours.

My afternoon rolled by fast, I had a double with Attitude Class and some students came back from the break really late. I told them to wait another five minutes before knocking on the door. I have to admit I sometimes come to class a bit late myself or right as class is scheduled to start, which is a bad example. I’d better sort this out.

I listened to a Ryan Long podcast. He talked about the Karen meme and the feminist publications who are outraged by how it’s used to silence women’s voices and also how many accusations of “being a Karen” are unfounded. Ryan pointed out that a lot of feminists have been doing the same exact thing to men and just like cancel culture in which sometimes the canceler becomes the cancelee, they shouldn’t be surprised that they can also be put in a virtual pillori. Not only is Ryan Long extremely funny, he’s also quite the astute social observer and commentator.

On the way home, I bought a pound of jackfruit, and ate it all in one sitting. I watched the 7 Jours Sur Terre episode from last week, the two topics were Australia trying to legislate Google and Facebook ads, and the need for a new nuclear weapons treaty that takes into account smaller warheads that were not built during the Cold War and also the fact that China now has a pretty big arsenal and should also sign. Of course they don’t want anything to do with it.

The stew in the crockpot now filled the apartment with a delicious smell, and I added some pieces of shanyao (some kind of root like a potato or a yam) half an hour before I turned it off. That stupid fucken vegetable is the most annoying to handle, you need to be very careful not to touch its skin when you peel it, otherwise you’ll itch like a motherfucker. Also, it’s very thin, so its surface-to-volume ratio is high and therefore requires a lot of peeling just to get a few small pieces. I only peeled two of them before I rage-quit, and dealt with a terrible itch on my left hand and my upper right arm (that I touched with my left hand like a derp) for the next half-hour.

The girlfriend came back from work, and we went to walk the dog. There was a lady walking her pug, and both dogs circled around trying to smell each other’s butthole. A lot of people love pugs and think they’re cute, I can’t say I dislike them or any other dog breed aside from pitbulls (fuck pitbulls and pitbull apologists), but they clearly are genetic abominations. That poor little pig-like animal kept wheezing, due to its deformed head, and couldn’t even walk properly on its atrophied little legs. It’s a bit disturbing but hey, my dog has a massive underbite and a deformed penis so who am I to talk?

Entering the top 400 of the so-called best albums of all time, I was faced with a Brian Wilson album. Fucken hell, the Beach Boys, again? Surfin’ USA is no doubt a fun song, but the rest of their catalog is cringe, this album being no exception. Then it was The Raincoats, a late-70s female experimental punk album that I can’t describe as fun to listen from beginning to end, but at least it was wacky and way the hell out there.

I went to play badminton. On the 10-minute bike ride there I listened to one of my favorite albums of all time, Agent Orange by Sodom. A true old-school thrash metal masterpiece, and its imperfections (Tom Angelripper’s strong German accent, questionable lyrics in the track titled Incest, recording quality that could be a tiny bit punchier) only makes it more addictive. I played a few games, working up a good sweat, then rode home.

I made myself a burrito with shredded cheese and the beef I’d been braising all day, it hit the spot. Then I took a hot bath. The next Top 500 entry was Billie Eilish’s debut from last year, I’m a bit surprised something that recent would make it there but at the same time the critical and commercial reception of the album has been very positive so it makes sense. I listened to it when it started making waves on the internet and found it very boring, and my opinion hasn’t changed.

I read a few chapters from The Road Chose Me before bed. Dan was driving down the western coast of Africa, dealing with corrupt scumbag cops constantly trying to extort money out of him, malaria, gas shortages and impassable muddy roads. Reading this, I was wondering what the hell is the point and why he puts himself voluntarily in such situations, before remembering that my favorite hobby, in which I’ve put tens of thousands of dollars over the years, is rough off-the-beaten-path travel and that I also have been through immense piles of shit like that, although maybe not quite to that level. I know the highs and how addictive they are, that’s why I and countless other intrepid (crazy?) travelers keep going back on the road. Barely a day goes by where the girlfriend and I don’t talk about near- or medium-future plans.

Chapter 63

Up at 6 again for my morning tai chi and my walk with the dog. The music was Haydn first, then a powerviolence band called Afterpill, from Saguenay Quebec, blasting 20-second tracks in the vein of Spazz and Charles Bronson and all that good stuff.

Two students forgot their lab books, so I had to send them to the office and ask a teacher to print today’s experiment for them. Today’s music was Ravel and Muddy Waters. After that I had a double with the twelfth-graders, I went over an exam problem from 2016 and gave them the rest of the period to work on another past paper. About half of them chose to put their head on the desk and sleep instead, but I ain’t mad at all, after all when they do that they are silent. I dislike noise. With grades 10 and 11 I’m a little bit more proactive when it comes time to make them do stuff, but with the seniors, I can’t be bothered too much, next year they will be in college and nobody will take them by the hand, so if they don’t have a bit of self-discipline at this point, it’s too late I’m afraid.

I rode home, enjoying this sunny day. I started a new Jocko Willink podcast, he’s discussing with a British photojournalist who’s been covering war zones.

The dog was happy to see me, and I gave him “candy” since he didn’t chew or displace anything he wasn’t supposed to. When I played with him on the couch, he rolled on his back and I noticed a huge lump. “What the fuck is that?!” His penis was twisted at a 180-degree angle, inside the sheath of skin, it sure didn’t look natural but he didn’t seem to be in pain. I wondered for a second if I should just go straight to the vet, but first I held his face with one hand in case he’d lunge and bite me, and readjusted it with the other. He squirmed a bit but was fine afterwards, thank fuck. I know it’s the second time I talk about my dog’s dick and that’s two times too many, but his micropenis does seem to cause him inconvenience and potentially serious problems down the road so I’ll have to monitor it in the future.

I reheated some of yesterday’s pasta and sat in front of the TV, I couldn’t use YouTube due to the VPN not working so I watched a Rick And Morty episode from my external hard drive. I fired up my backup VPN, which needed updating as their engineers are constantly working on new patches to circumvent the restrictions imposed by fascist governments, and it worked like a dream. That surprised me, but I’ll take it.

There were pieces of beef thawing in the fridge since the day prior, I cut them in big chunks and dry rubbed them with a mix of spices. That will be our dinner.

I got back to the office and sat around for a big part of the afternoon, planning my lessons for the upcoming week and listening to podcasts. British comedian and social commentator Andrew Doyle has been making a lot of waves with his alter ego Titania McGrath on Twitter, a so-called “intersectional poet”, one of the best pieces of satire ever made about the current state of the world. As much as I enjoy the parodic content he creates, he’s even better when out of character, very articulately and accurately discussing the “wokeism” religion taking over the West.

One of the most recent incarnations of that gangrenous decadence is how some school boards in the USA are dismantling their honors programs because they’re mostly attended by white and Asian students. Talk about leveling down. And I’ve seen screenshots from some kind of bizarre campaigns to “decolonize mathematics”, saying that the objective, dry nature of the discipline is an enactment of white supremacy. What a crock of shit! All three math teachers at my schools are African, have master’s degrees, and do complicated calculus that I can’t do. I wonder how they’d feel if they were told by pink-haired intersectional academics that black people are not supposed to be good at math.

I also listened to the Metal Minded podcast, the guys reviewed four albums. The Plague Weaver album that annoyed me a bit with the Zerg vocals was well received, I should go revisit it. Then, finishing off the first hundred entries of the Top 500, I finished the Fela Kuti I started earlier and started Blondie’s self-titled album. After I finished my lesson planning, I designed a label for my latest batch of homebrew, using a hand-drawn picture I photographed with my phone, MS Paint, and my piss-poor editing skills. It’s a spiced ale, with cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, and all sorts of stuff I randomly picked up from our spice rack.

I had one class at the tail end of the school day, resulting from the schedule change after a physics teacher covered a class of mine yesterday so I could go get the vaccine. The students were confused when I walked in, and joked that I killed the physics teacher.

I got home and had a lazy evening, just me and the dog, as the girlfriend has to stay at work until much later. I’m not supposed to exercise strenuously while the vaccine is incubating so I sat around reading and watching stuff on YouTube. I watched bits of a documentary about pro wrestling, and the UFC Embedded episodes. The upcoming event is a monster, with three title fights and a stacked undercard.

I cooked some curry, but I couldn’t find the fucking can opener so I had to get creative with the coconut milk can, and by creative I mean “smashing it with a hammer”. And then while the sauce was delicious, the chunks of beef had the consistency of a rubber shoe, so I chopped them into smaller pieces and simmered them for longer. Not my day. I’m still grateful to be alive.

Chapter 62

I woke up at 6 and read the news while drinking tea and stretching my sore muscles to a Brahms soundtrack. Then, when the girlfriend left and the field was clear, I put on some death metal to put my day in third gear. A friend of mine sent me a link to Ripped To Shreds, maybe because they have Chinese album titles, though the band is American. Next up was Afterbirth, that I saw in the belatedly released top of 2020 list by Teufel’s Tomb, a guy who really, really knows his metal. I ripped it and uploaded it to my mp3 player for a skateboard ride with the dog. They play some progressive/technical death metal that failed to really tickle my scrotum, as I’m not a tech death fan at all.

First two periods were a lab, I put on some Mendelssohn, a lesser known German classical music composer, and then the 2020 The Kingdom album by British grunge band Bush. It’s got a few songs I like, notably the first two, but it’s overall a bit too limp-wristed for my general tastes. Still, it was there on my laptop’s hard drive, and playing some extreme metal to my students would be a bridge too far, I have to train their ears first.

I did some prep work in the office, listening to the next entry on the Top 500, called Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era. Excuse me, what the fuck?! I was already puzzled by the decision to include best ofs in there, but now we have a compilation of many artists?! Why can’t the CDs I was burning for my friends in the early 2000s be nominated, then? Anyway I don’t take that list very seriously, it’s just a window in the mind of some boomer music journalists and a way to explore the classics, and it turned out to be an enjoyable listen for the most part. Some bands were poor Beatles clones, but some played fun garage rock.

I had one more class, then went home and cooked some pasta. I made a sauce with sausages, onions, garlic, canned tomatoes, chili peppers, leftover wonton filling and black olives and then mixed it with the al dente penne and shredded cheese. Cooking is fun. While I was in the kitchen I was listening to the Lotus Eaters podcast, Coca-Cola mandated that their employees take seminars about “racial equity” that teach them to “be less white”. It’s nice to know that multinational sugary water corporations are so woke to the current societal problems, while they contribute to immense health problems and employ third-world indentured slave labor. I wonder if Chinese companies condescendingly lecture their workforce and ask them to be less yellow. Oh wait they don’t, because China is not suffering from terminal Clown World syndrome.

I listened to two new metal releases: Insect Inside from Chyelabinsk, Russia, who sounds like every slam/brutal death metal in existence (satisfying and greasy but nothing that memorable, like a gas station meat pie) and Plague Weaver from Mississauga, Canada, with a modern doomy black metal sound and vocals I couldn’t really get behind, it sounded like the Zerg from Starcraft to me.

In the early afternoon, I didn’t go back to school, I rode to the hospital to get my second shot of the ‘Rona vaccine. I made sure I had a SLUGF (Stupid Little Useless Glass Fogger) in my coat pocket, grabbed my passport and my appointment sheet, and off I went. In my earbuds was Otoboke Beaver, an all-girl Japanese band playing chaotic punk rock with the deviant eccentric wackiness that is so common in the music coming out of the Land Of The Rising Sun, and then Cianide, a super underground American death metal band with a superb old-school sound that reminds one of Unleashed’s first albums. That mostly drowned the ambient noise that came with having to wait in line with Chinese people yell-chatting.

The place is called a “Traditional Chinese medicine” hospital, but instead of having an illiterate nonagenarian make me drink a potion of boiled twigs and rub licorice on the back of my hands, they used real pharmaceuticals, developed by scientists, not the result of oral tradition from generations of farmers and the cultural refusal to challenge what senile elders say. I asked the nurse whether I’m allowed to drink alcohol, she said no, for the next three days. Hmmm, Saturday afternoon will be when I’ll have my victory beer.

I went to the waiting room adjacent to where people were lining up to get in, and some of my coworkers were there. My Ghanaian homie saw I was adjusting my belt and asked “Did they make you take off your trousah?!” I joked that this shot was not on the upper arm like the first one but in an ass cheek, but no, I was just tucking my shirt in my pants.

I went back to work for one more class, about proton NMR, then went home, buying strawberries and jackfruit on the way. I munched on the fruit while watching the latest BKFC event. MMA is my favorite sport to watch, but I like all combat sports, whether it’s boxing, kickboxing, muay thai, lethwei, grappling, and now bare-knuckle boxing. The raw and brutal nature of it, even by combat sports standards, make it appealing to purists like me, and all the fights were fun. The fighters battle in two-minute rounds, start in the middle of the ring and are allowed active clinch, which means the pace is always explosive. BKFC is a fairly new organisation, which means it’s both exciting and mysterious in the same way that early UFCs were, but it also means there are also some serious rough edges and can feel a bit silly at times. And by this I mean “I feel a bit dirty watching that hillbilly circus”. Their main sponsors are kratom, a CBD company and a shady offshore gambling site, for F’s sake!

Their main problem is that the talent pool is very shallow, with low-level journeymen and has-beens. Since their inception, they have relied on bringing in aging or even retired MMA fighters with name recognition, which works to some extent (that’s why I started watching after all) but can’t be sustainable.

The best example of this is how their biggest fight ever, their PPV headliner, was Paige Vanzant’s bare-knuckle debut. Vanzant had a middling MMA career and was fast-tracked to the forefront of the sport due to how marketable she is, and had been mostly inactive for the past few years, making more money as an Instagram model than her already inflated UFC payouts. I didn’t care too much about the main event and will watch it later, but I really wanted to see legendary brawler Chris Leben’s retirement fight and the 135-pound championship between Johnny Bedford and Dat Nguyen. Dat Nguyen was a high-level boxer until he transitioned to no-gloves and had been impressive in his first two BKFC fights, way ahead of some of the brawling rednecks and inner city gang members that seem to make up most of the roster, but he’s 38 now. The only way BKFC would take it to the next level is if they have enough promising or accomplished fighters who make the switch earlier, rather than at the tail-end of their careers.

I listened to a bit more music from the Top 500, while I was writing or reading. First Anita Barker and her soulful R&B, then Ghostface Killah’s sophomore Supreme Clientele. It’s been a while since I listened to it, and holy shit is it frustrating. Some parts are excellent and a perfect display of what east coast 90s hip-hop is about, but there’s so much filler on there and some beats just suck ass, like the one on Stroke Of Death, which almost gave me epilepsy strokes. I know it’s seen as blasphemous in some hip-hop circles, but I feel that the Wu-Tang Clan is very overrated. Just my opinion.

My Spanish garlic and bread soup from yesterday tasted even better reheated, and I had a late dinner after eating all those fruits at 5 o’clock. I watched a Ryan Long skit about a feminist homeschooling single mom, it was hilarious. Then I went to bed and read a few pages from the Norman history book before collapsing.

Chapter 61

I had a weird dream, about driving a van in a weird country and suddenly being stuck at a roadblock with soldiers trying to extort money from us. Some of the soldiers were African, Latino, white and Asian, I guess stemming from a mish-mash of stories I’ve been reading in The Road Chose Me (Vol.1 Alaska to Argentina and Vol.2 Around Africa), stuff I’ve seen on the internet about Central Asia and Russia, and some of my own experiences.

This morning I didn’t do a structured yoga session or anything, I just stretched and did bridges. My bridges horrendously suck. I also spent more time looking at stupid memes on Reddit that I’m willing to admit.

I listened to the album Buried Death by Japanese band Coffins while walking the dog and on the way to work. I had a dumb smile plastered on my face because the music is so damn good, and I was slowly bobbing my head to the mid-tempo crushing riffs. Students and colleagues thought I was nodding at them as a morning greeting, and nodded or waved back. Who said death metal couldn’t foster a harmonious work environment?

In the morning I also listened to Présages, a promising death/black/doom outfit with a modern sound, and the album Alpenpässe by Minenwerfer. Great stuff. There’s more music thrown my way that I can handle, and everytime I open a portal to the underground, I get overwhelmed with a pile of awesome bands. You sometimes hear hipsters breathlessly lisp about how they wish they lived in the past because “tEh mUsiC wAs bEtTeR” but that’s nonsense, the present time is the best era to live in as a music lover.

I had a double class with twelfth-graders and it went well, then I went to the noodle shop and ordered my shrimp fried noodles, no mushrooms. I got home, opened the plastic container, and lo and behold, mushrooms. Ah well. There are worse fates that can afflict a man, I just picked the disgusting pieces of fungi and left them for the girlfriend, perhaps she’ll eat them.

I watched YouTube videos about Joe Biden, apparently plenty of democrat voters have serious buyer’s remorse, even that fat guy from The Young Turks lambasted him for... what? The military action in Syria? Constantly lying and posturing as progressive even though he’s the biggest puppet of the prison-industrial complex? His condescending talk about black people not knowing how to register for the vaccine, among many other seriously racist comments that mysteriously fly under the radar? Generally being senile and incompetent? Not sure. Some of my friends on my Facebook who are far from being Trump fans also noticed how they are constantly being gaslit by the media and how the treatment of both presidents is night and day.

Now the lie du jour is that the Trump admin didn’t have any plan for the pandemic, even though it can all be debunked in a few seconds. I think that’s the problem with a so-called democracy, especially one as bipartisan as this. When a new set of crooks take the reins from the previous bunch of crooks, they don’t want to give them any sort of credit, so they either scrap what the first bunch of crooks did or just minimize or deny their accomplishments. Chinese history is pretty much that shit, chapter after chapter, but at least it happens every three or four centuries as the dynasties get toppled, rather than every few years.

In the afternoon I supervised a lab. Now that’s one of the perks of being a chemistry teacher, of course it’s much more stimulating than being in the classroom for everyone involved. It was with the weakest grade-11 class, but they’re doing okay, just lots of small details to correct so I went around and helped them out, without just giving them the answers. At any rate they are way more stimulated being in the lab than sitting in the classroom for nine hours a day.

Now that I don’t have to talk that much to the group, I usually play music at low volume in the lab, to make it more interesting and to show them what real music is like. I put on The Roots’ Things Fall Apart, and then Blink-182’s Enema Of The State, an album I hadn’t listened to since forever. I think it’s the first album I ever bought with my money, when I was 14 or 15, so it obviously evokes my own carefree and youthful and immature high school years. But then I thought about it a bit further: my current students, doing titrations and calculating molar masses and measuring temperature changes of exothermic reactions around the room, were born in 2003, a good four years after Enema came out. For them, it must sound like what boomer music sounds like to me. Something I eventually learned to appreciate (listening to a 1969 Neil Young album as I write this line), but much later.

After that we had a meeting. I had to pay attention and couldn’t just day-dream, since it was my turn to write down the minutes. Tomorrow we all have to go for our second dose of the vaccine, at different times of the day.

I had one more class, with Attitude Class, but nobody gave me any attitude. I appreciate that.

I got home, sat around a bit, then went to the gym. Now that the jiu-jitsu gym closed, I’ve been trying to get some of my old training partners together for an open mat of some sort, and the boss of the Chinese kickboxing gym lets us use the premises. When I showed up the door was wide open, but it was completely empty and pitch black, I had to fumble around looking for the electric switchboard. My two friends showed up soon after: an Italian guy and a Chinese girl, both of them blue belts. We warmed up a bit in the unheated gym, then grappled each other for a few 5-minute rounds. I couldn’t wipe that grin off my face, I really had been missing it. I hope we can make it a regular thing. Sure, it’s not as good as a structured class with a coach who shows us drills and corrects our errors, but it’s much better than nothing.

I rolled with the girl, for the first time. At the original gym she’d only practice with other blue belts, or girls. She told me to go light, and yeah it would be stupid to go all brute force on her. We fought for position, but she is so small I would just buck her off and she wouldn’t manage to keep me down, and when I attacked with my noob white belt moves, she did everything correctly like the four-stripe blue belt she is, tucking her elbows in, but I’d just manage to effortlessly pry her arms open anyway. People say BJJ is all about technique but the weight factor is clearly crucial. I’m almost twice her weight and though I’m very average, I have man strength. I wonder how good a girl would have to be to beat me.

So in that case what we have to do is “flow-roll”, kind of like the Italian dude is doing with me, letting me practice my offense and defense instead of just crushing me like a bug. I was left on my hunger a bit at the end, flow-rolling is cool and all, but I was craving some whitebelt-on-whitebelt action, where we’re roughly evenly matched and we can go hard and try to outspaz one another.

I made it home and made a sopa de ajo with ham, sausage, paprika, stale bread and of course lots of garlic. Another comfort food recipe I got from Chef John on YouTube. I poached an egg towards the end of the cooking process, to add some runny goodness in there.

I plopped on the couch and looked for something quick to watch on YouTube while I ate and waited for the laundry to finish. I randomly clicked on a video about “Top 10 overrated cities”, and the list was Paris, Rome, Sydney, London, NYC, Shanghai, Rio, Barcelona, Athens and Amsterdam. I’ve been to every entry except Sydney (though I did go to Australia) and disagree with the pompous own-fart-smeller, they’re all worth visiting. I guess they’re only “overrated”, by definition, if you have overly high expectations, but I knew before even getting on the plane that all of them (except Shanghai) would be giant rat-infested shitholes with tons of bland development beside the iconic architecture, a certain sense of modern uniformisation, overpricing, and legions of people of lower socioeconomic status (to be polite) whose delinquency I’d have to be wary of. But I also knew that they are major centers of culture, economics and politics. I mean, what are you gonna do, be an überhipster and skip them altogether if you go to that country?! As much as I like traveling to smaller towns, the countryside, and untouched nature, cities are also an integral part of the whole travel experience. Some of the points he brought up were tired clichés, like the good ol’“Parisians are meeeeaaaaan”, well to me they weren’t, because I speak their fucken language, I’d like to imagine you if your city had been overflooded with clueless tourists 12 months out of the year for the past two centuries. Maybe the first time some mouthbreathing American or German with a camera around his neck asks “ex-koo-zay-mwah, woo ay la Tower Eye Full” you’d feel helpful, but on the 384^th occurrence you’d just zoom past as the busy working ant you are, on your way to the job that allows you (but barely) to dwell in such an overpriced and joyless dystopian metropolis. And he also talked about Shanghai not being the best place to experience real China, another humongous cliché, I won’t even fucken start with that one.

My dose of Top 500 music was the aforementioned Neil Young, who’s rightfully seen as a legend, and then a turd of an album called 69 Love Songs by Magnetic Fields. I got to the third track of the sappiest shit ever before tapping out. 

Chapter 60

I just noticed we’re starting a new month, time flies! I haven’t skipped a day of diarying (if that’s a word) and don’t plan on slacking off until December 31^st. Not sure what I’m getting out of this exercise exactly, certainly not fame and fortune, but for sure it will be nice in the future to re-read it and have a window into my 2021 life, and while there are more productive things I could do instead, well we can also say that I could be wasting that time watching shitty Netflix shows or masturbating or whatever.

I started the day with a bit of tai chi (I normally use proper standard pinyin when transcribing Chinese words but I feel like it would be a bit douchebaggy to write taiji or taijiquan when the word has already been widely adopted into English as tai chi) to loosen up, watching some bald guy perform the movements in front of a pond on YouTube. When I get familiar with them and when the weather stops sucking ass I’ll go outside and get my tai chi on like the old Chinese man I am.

Yesterday, after posting the diary, I started a Grateful Dead album and I finished it in the morning. I remember checking them out years ago after reading about their cultural importance and thinking it was boring hippie shit. Well, that album Workingman’s Dead, the 409^th best album of all time as decided by that congregation of Rolling Stone writers, wasn’t half bad. Then, at 408, it was Ace Of Spades by Motörhead. Now that’s what I’m talking about! I never listened to the album, but the title track is one of the most beloved by metal fans of any denomination.

I had a full block of four classes and did my thing like a good worker ant. I gave the twelfth-graders a worksheet to complete, and some of them didn’t do anything. I’m not mad at that, it will take less than a second to grade, just enough time to draw a “ZEROOOO!!!” (said with the voice of Infinite Elgintensity)

Also I got a message from the driving school, they told me that I’ll take the driving exam on March 10^th. A Wednesday. I replied that I’m pretty busy on Wednesdays, but the whole process is bureaucratic and inflexible, so after a bit of back-and-forth, I realized I have to play the game and looked at ways I could have someone cover me. Thankfully, the Chinese teachers have, like, 6 hours of classes a week (but a lot of homeroom duties that require them to be there early and leave late and deal with the parents, and also are paid a pittance) so I could find one to cover my morning class on that day, and the principal is cool so he understood and approved the schedule change.

I got home and put on an album by a Polish band named Chainsword, playing old-school death metal with a palpable Bolt Thrower influence. The guys on my metal Facebook group were fawning over it and it was indeed pretty good, a good soundtrack for my calisthenics workout. I did two sets of 60 push-ups, 60 ab exercises (sit-ups first, lying leg raises second), 12 handstand pushups, 12 pull-ups, 30 kettlebell swings.

Then I ate some kind of rice patty with tuna, a Korean-style snack that I got in a Lawson. Lawson is a convenience store chain like 7-eleven, and in the past year they’ve been mushrooming in my city, popping at every street corner and putting the shitty Chinese chains and mom n’ pop baijiu n’ cigarettes shops out of business. I’m very happy with that. Generally I tend to patronize the smaller businesses but at times I get fucking tired of the dusty empty shelves, unlabeled products, mouth-breathing cashiers who don’t lift their eyes from their phones until you say “HEY!”, and unplugged fridges in order to save $0.03 on electricity. Lawson is a Japanese chain that brings the standardized quality that country is known for, and because of their extensive chain of supply, they manage to sell some products cheaper than elsewhere. And also they have those delicious gimbap rolls and rice patties.

I tried out a new hot sauce we bought online, it’s from Saudi Arabia of all places, but it’s a bit disappointing, it tastes just like Tabasco or Frank’s. I also ate a can of sardines with crackers and cream cheese, and didn’t wash my hands properly, so I spent the afternoon with fishy fingers. Before going back to work, I took the dog out for a little walk, and when I came back, there was an old guy in the elevator. He was motioning aggressively towards the triangle-faced animal, even though I kept a short leash and the dog didn’t do anything. I didn’t remove my earbuds to hear what he was saying, it was probably useless information.

Crucified Barbara played on my mp3 player. I think the quality and my enjoyment of their albums is in decreasing chronological order, but it doesn’t mean the later ones are bad, just that their debut In Distortion We Trust is just so much fun. Today I listened to the third one, called The Midnight Chase, it is banger after banger, a true hard rock piece of art. At times I’m puzzled, wondering why Crucified Barbara isn’t more popular, perhaps people think it’s a gimmick band.

Attitude Class were pretty good this afternoon. Some students asked me questions during the break, something a lot of Chinese students are too shy or too proud to do at times. I also gave them time to work on the practice questions in class, I’d rather do that than give them homework that they won’t do or just copy.

I had some time in the office and looked for music to drown out the noise, the Kanonfieber album from a few days ago looked at me with evil puppy eyes when I opened YouTube. There’s one song in it that kind of pisses me off, with very bland riffage that is outside of the realm of black metal, but the rest of the album is excellent. Then, I blind-clicked on Minenwerfer in the recommended videos. Hmmm, an underground black metal band from California with a German name written in old English font, I must have spent too much time reading /r/RABM because I saw a red flag and immediately went to investigate. The fact that their war imagery is exclusively about 1914-1918 rather than 1939-1945 should immediately disqualify them as potential nazifucks, but on Metal-Archives, prominently listed in the “Similar Bands” tab is Ad Hominem, a black metal act that really, really likes to talk about Jews. The plot was thickening before my eyes, but I eventually made a preliminary conclusion about Minenwerfer being safe and it would be a damn shame if they turned out to be NSBM, because the album slayed. I absolutely have to check out the rest of their discography.

I got home and kicked the heavy bag, 50 right and 50 left. When I was training muay thai, this would have barely counted as a cooldown let alone a workout, but I’m far from my old fighting shape and just felt like moving a little bit and kicking something. I then sat down and watched more Infinite Elgintensity videos, that guy is a machine throwing witty, caustic and hilarious insults at scamming fitness gurus, overinflated ego lifters and random celebrities too.

The girlfriend got a gift from a coworker, a small container full of won ton filling made with an expensive fish. She asked me if I want to help her pack the won tons and I immediately replied no. All my attempts at filling any sorts of dumplings in the past have been epic failures, I’ll leave it to the pros. So she sat at the dinner table packing and folding the small squares of dough, then boiled them. It was a delicious meal.

At night, I listened to two albums by 1960s band The Kinks, and then I got relegated to the bedroom while the girlfriend gave her online lesson and didn’t want my distracting presence in the living room. I read in bed while listening to Blut Aus Nord, a rather psychedelic black metal band, and passed out early.