Chapter 133

I got up at 6:20. My disciplined routine is falling apart, slowly but surely. I need more sleep since I exercise quite a lot, perhaps I should go to bed earlier and drink less booze so that my sleep is used to repair my muscles rather than spending a significant amount of time metabolizing the delicious poison I pour down my gullet every day. Ha.

I still did a 15-minute yoga routine, with the dog bugging me for about 14 minutes and 47 seconds throughout. I took him out for a quick stroll around the block and then made my way to work.

I mostly sat around and wrote my diary. There are still some chemistry exams, but they’re on the distant horizon, I’ll do review sessions when we inch closer, until then I let the students prepapre for their other exams. The twelfth-graders are nearly done, I walked around and made small talk, asking them about the universities they’re about to attend. “I’m going to British”, one of them said. That’s something I noticed, Chinese people often mistakenly use the adjective instead of the country name, even when their English level is otherwise quite high. My girlfriend does it all the time, saying German instead of Germany, among others. No idea where it’s from, as an amateur linguist I sometimes try to break it down and find out if it can be explained with a phonetic or grammatical particularity in their native language that creep its way into their English, but regarding that one, I’m not sure what it’s about.

I listened to the Metal Minded podcast, with four album reviews. None of them especially interested me. Gojira released a new album and it’s pretty hyped, but I’ve always found them incredibly boring. I then listened to an album by a young Quebec City band named Hatalom, who very competently play technical death metal. It’s a style I’m really not a fan of, especially when it’s more tech than death, but nothing on their album made me go “Naaah fuck that” and press stop. If anything it helped drown the ambient noise.

I got a proof of tax payment from the government app, and one from the school. The secretary printed it, but of course in Bureaucracy World it’s not valid without the precious red stamp, jealously guarded in an office on the other side of the campus. I went there, the building was mostly empty as the office drones had left for an early lunch break to beat the hordes of students rushing to the dining hall. There were two women in the photocopy room, I asked where the financial affairs office is, and one replied in intelligible English. But instead of rewarding her efforts (and giving her face in front of her friend) I just kept speaking in Chinese, saying “I just went there, but it’s locked, I need a stamp”. I alphaed her, and that wasn’t nice, I regretted it afterwards. I hate when people do that to me. Multilingual people know how sometimes choosing which language to use can feel like a tug-of-war of sorts. Anyway she didn’t seem mad, complimented me on my ching-chongs, and brought me to an office where she put the stamp on my paper.

I got home, ate a big bowl of spaghetti, and fell asleep for two hours. I had the afternoon off to go do banking duties, there was a bit of a fuck-up at first because the guy behind the counter kept inputing the wrong amount. I told him to change 65 000 yuan into CAD, but he gave me a form to sign that showed an amount in yuan being changed to 15 000 CAD, and then, after a few minutes correcting the mistake, he wrote 15 000 yuan on the tax form. I lost my cool and raised my voice “NO! 65 000 I SAID!” and grabbed a pen, condescendingly writing 65 000 in huge blocky digits on the back of an A4 sheet. Of course my Chinese is not 100% perfect but goddamn it, it was more than clear enough, I’ve done number transactions thousands of times in the past decade and 65 doesn’t even sound like 15, I don’t know why he kept hearing that.

They photocopied all my documents. Passport, tax record from the government, tax record from my work place (with the red stamp).

“Did you bring your contract?”

“Of course not”

He turned to the supervisor standing behind him with her arms crossed. I felt a shiver going down my spine. In Chinese banks there’s always a sour-faced senior employee pacing around behind the clerks, you’d think it’s to keep an eye on their mostly inept subordinates and make sure they don’t eat paste or whatever, but more often than not what they end up doing is pull out a shurgwayding out of their asses and stop the process you want done dead in its tracks. So many times in the past I was almost done with a money exchange or transfer or other tedious procedure when some cunty manager came out of nowhere and stopped it, telling me about some dogshit new policy or requirement in place, and I’ve theorized that the reason they’re behind thick panes of glass is not to stop armed robbery, but to prevent angry customers from reaching over the counter and bashing their brains on the marble.

“We need a copy of your contract”

“No you don’t”

“Yes”

“No”

“Ah, OK then”

They admitted defeat and I got the foreign currency exchange form I wanted. Then I went to another room and proceeded with the remittance. Again, it sounds a bit bitchy, but it’s because I have a lot of time of my hands and elaborate on what turned out to be non-stories. I’m mostly satisfied with the service at that bank branch, especially compared with some harrowing experiences in the past, and I’m especially happy that they stay open despite the heavy refurbishing going on in their building and also that nobody bugged me to put on a fayssah mursk.

I got home and drew a label for my homebrew, using a black pen and the girlfriend’s color markers. She came home as I was halfway through, I asked her for help choosing suitable colors. Being colorblind sucks a bit but hey, no use bitching about it. It could always be worse, for instance, I could have been born in Djibouti.

The girlfriend proposed we go eat frog meat, so we made our way there with the dog. Frog is one of my favorites, they chop the amphibians and cook the pieces in spicy oil with a bunch of add-ons we choose from the menu, we ticked corn, tofu, crab, rice cakes (and cheese-filled rice cakes!), cauliflower and potato slices.

“When we go hike the Appalachian Trail in American, can we catch frogs and make niuwaganguo?”, she asked.

“I don’t know, I can’t imagine the frogs and toads there will be big enough or even edible. Also we won’t have the seasonings”

“Can we eat chicken wings on the trail? I like chicken wings”

“I’m pretty sure we’ll eat mostly dried food, meat is too heavy to carry. We’ll eat all the chicken wings we want when we go through towns on the trail.”

“Maybe when we resupply we can get wings and barbecue them on the first night? We can light camp fires there, right?”

“At campsites and shelters, yes. Not sure about wild camping, it probably depends on the season and rules given by fire marshalls.”

Yeah, we got a bit of wanderlust I guess, and talk about travel often. After dinner, she went home, as she had work stuff to prepare, the dog and I went to the bar. I stopped at the craft beer trailer and had a triple-hopped IPA, it was good but a bit flat, and their location next to a stinky tofu trailer was funny at first but now it’s getting a bit oppressive. The stench emanating from there is enough to gag a maggot. Then I went to the main expat haunt, there was a pub quiz scheduled tonight. One of my teammates from last time was to be the quizmaster, which means our defending champions team dissolved and the other guys got drafted by other teams. I ended up partnering with another dude, the principal at my girlfriend’s school who hates his job. Being a team of two rather than a team of four wasn’t a disadvantage at first, as we slayed it in the opening rounds, even getting a perfect score in one of the general knowledge sections with a lot of obscure history questions. We were lining up to win the cash prize and only having to split it two ways, but then the last round had questions about Lord Of The Rings and Harry Potter and I saw the panic in my friend’s eyes, as he saw mine. I think I only saw on Harry Potter movie, and don’t remember anything about it. In the end we placed second, by a small margin.

The quizmaster bought us shots of whiskey for our ballsy effort of going in there as a duet, not as if we had a choice, but thanks.

I pointed at the dog on my lap:

“If there were questions themed around dog buttholes scents and flavors, we would have aced it and left the other teams in the dirt”

“Speak for yourself!”, an Irish dude on a rival team interjected, to general laughter.

“Also I call bullshit on the question about how many countries have a presence on the Iberian peninsula. We said five, because if you count Andorra, you have to count a bit of France as well, no?!”

All in all a good time was had by all. Some of the local muslim expats were also chilling at the bar, celebrating the end of Ramadan, I hung out for a bit then rode home.

Chapter 132

I woke up at 7. My alarm rang at 5:48 but I was too damn tired and decided that some sleep was a better use of my time than the mindless web browsing I usually do before yoga or tai chi, while the tea is brewing. Also I do my share of mindless web browsing throughout the day, so it’s not like when I’m actually teaching a lot of classes and want a slow relaxing start to my day.

I still had enough time to go on a leisurely stroll with the dog and do tai chi in the square. He was sitting by my side, but now he has a bad habit of running towards strangers. He doesn’t lash at them or even bark, he just wants to play, but while this amuses the grey-haired laoyeyes who giggle and shoo him away, it traumatizes small children. I have to keep an eye on him.

I rode to school and went straight to the cafeteria, where the students had a math exam. They were hanging out in front of the building, I got the seating plan and called them so they’d line up in order. Some students from classes I don’t teach were laughing at my prononciation of their names, hey assholes, I don’t laugh at you when you can’t put more than three mangled Chinglish words in a row even though you’ve been learning English since kindergarden. I didn’t feel like calling them out on this beautiful morning though so I let it slide.

We had to wait a few minutes before starting the exam, because the kitchen staff were having a meeting. About thirty cooks and dishwashers were lined up in two ranks, all dressed up in blue scrubs, hairnets and rubber boots, and the manager was giving them instructions for today’s work. I worked in a cafeteria on a military base back when I was a youngster, so this triggered some memories, mostly positive ones, that shit was fun, the work was hard and thankless but the camaraderie in the kitchen was nice, with tons of extremely vulgar jokes constantly thrown around. I wonder if they also use that kind of no-nonsense crude language, like “Hey Xiao Wang, I know you’re a migrant worker from Chongqing so you probably got huajiao in your ears, but didn’t you hear the runner just now? If you don’t bring that tray of banmian to counter 6, the sous-chef will stuck that broomstick up your ass faster than you can say Xi Jinping wan sui, and he’ll turn you into a shabichuanr” “Give me a second, you Zhejiang lisping faggot, if you brought that sliced garlic earlier instead of dafeijiing at your prep station, I’d be done by now”

I don’t know how much they’re paid exactly, but I’d estimate about twelve times less than I am, for long shifts of constant manual work in a steamy, high-pressure environment, while I’m doing mostly fuckall these days. I can’t say I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and didn’t put on some work to get where I am, but for sure there is some kind of privilege involved, being born middle-class in Quebec and being born working-class in China isn’t the same deck of cards.

I went to the office and worked on some review materials for a bit, listening to music. The internet was intermittent and I had to play that heinous game of “VPN musical chair”, constantly changing servers and hoping to stay connected for more than a few minutes. When it sucked too hard, I put on the Rorcal & Earthflesh album I had downloaded for the fifth time in as many days, and then I checked out two other albums from Rorcal. Világvége and Muladona were in in a similar crushing doom metal vein, without the noise and with more black metal elements, excellent shit, this Swiss band will enter my regular rotation and stay there for a while.

I got home, played with the dog, reheated the cabbage stir fry and fish slab and watched random YouTube videos from my feed. There was one by Internet Comment Etiquette, one of the funniest channels out there, recommended if you like absurdist vulgar humor and internet culture.

In the afternoon I brought my external hard drive and cord to connect my mp3 player to the computer. I flushed all the music, it was getting a bit stale, and I uploaded some new albums and podcasts in, bit by bit, throughout the afternoon. In my death metal folder, I stumbled upon an album by Defeated Sanity, a German brutal death metal band, and it was candy for my ears, a lot of bands in this genre sound generic as hell but Defeated Sanity is among the elite. I browsed online for more music like the insatiable beast I am, after reading my negative comments of the Dillinger Escape Plan album I listened to an older one titled Calculating Infinity, on some friends’ recommendations. It was much better, and there were no whiny emo vocals. I rounded it up with a spin of the new Abominable Putridity album.

I babysat a group of twelfth-graders for a while. They were bunched up in front of a laptop computer, one boy was sitting on a classmate’s lap, their arms interlaced, and the guy sitting on the adjacent chair had his legs on top of theirs. I’ve been in China since forever and am still puzzled by how they don’t see anything gay about that.

I got home, ate a protein slurry, slept for one hour and headed to the gym. I made sure to buy a sports drink and even added two pinches of salt in it, to avoid crashing in hyposodium shock like I did Monday, though it wasn’t nearly as hot. I had much more energy, as we drilled sweeps and rolled five-minute rounds. One guy was there for the first time in months but didn’t take much of a step back, he really has a knack for the game and is strong as a horse so despite my improvements, he still wiped the floor with me. His cardio went to hell though, and he was wheezing heavily.

After four rounds of BJJ, I went to the boxing ring with my headgear and gloves and sparred a bit. The whole group was all like “Ho-hooo, what is going on there?!”, stopped what they were doing and all huddled around, like it often happens when I step in a ring. I don’t think it’s a case of nationalistic pride hoping the yellowman beats the filthy barbarian, more of a novelty factor. I boxed three successive guys of increasing skill, the last one was throwing lightning-fast combos and bobbing and weaving a lot, but I got some good licks in. We all went pretty light as agreed upon but I still had a misaligned jaw afterwards. Good times. Boxing makes you feel alive.

I was drained as hell when I made it home, threw my sweat-saturated rags in the machine, but forgot to add laundry soap like a derp. Ah well, it still gave my gi and undergarments a needed rinse. I put on a playlist of old-school British dubstep, drank a liter of homebrew and made spaghetti with two boxes of sardines, onions, celery, raisins, peanuts, fennel, bread crumbs and parmesan cheese, that I devoured in front of the TV. I also ate a roast quail I bought from a street vendor, it is just like a chicken but the size of a baseball, so it was hard to get some of the bits of meat. I gave parts to the dog, he loved it. I watched the UFC, Donald Cerrone is getting up there in age and mileage, and got blasted in the first round by an under-the-radar welterweight named Alex Morono. The main event had been received with mixed reviews online, because a large portion of the MMA viewership is made up of sexist inbred morons. If it was two men instead of Marina Rodriguez and Michelle Waterson slugging it out with grit and skill for 25 minutes, they would have had a different opinion. Rodriguez won the decision with her higher output and varied muay thai attack, but Waterson had her moments too with her grappling and karate kicks that took the stoic Brazilian by surprise and gave her a Jean Chrétien-style grotesquely swollen jaw.

Though I was tired and in need of restorative slumber, I couldn’t fall asleep, maybe it was the nap I’d taken at 5 o’clock. I started a book by a young Quebec author named Jean-François Baril-Guérard and read in bed. Perhaps I should write novels instead of this navel-gazing diary.

Chapter 131

Another slow and lazy morning, gradually getting in gear, doing 15 minutes of tai chi like the elderly Chinese man I’m slowly becoming, walking the dog, and going to work. Again, I didn’t have much planned for the day, the twelfth-graders finished all of their chemistry exams, and the eleventh-graders were self-studying. I only had one task to do, a small but mildly annoying one: one student applied to a Korean university, and rather than just taking the recommendation letter I wrote, they asked me to fill out some kind of form. I printed it, ticked the boxes they wanted me to tick, and wrote “refer to recommendation letter” when they asked me to elaborate. This is just dumb, like when you apply for a job and they ask you to input every goddamn thing from your resume separately, yet also ask you to attach the resume.

I listened to the Rorcal & Earthflesh album again, and read an interview that a friend of mine did with them for an online metal zine. I decided to investigate a bit more and check out their catalog, starting with Earthflesh. Seems like that solo artist from Switzerland is quite prolific, with a lot of projects and collabs released in 2021 alone, I clicked on the most recent one. It’s a type of music called “harsh noise” and well, that describes it adequately. You feel like you’re listening to a rusty washing machine with screws missing, layered with the noise from a radio stuck between two stations, it’s by design very oppressive and disturbing, and you’re wondering what the fuck is there to like. I like noise when it’s used as intros, outros or interludes side-to-side with extreme metal genres like grindcore or doom or black metal, but without “real riffs” eventually starting, noise music just feels like interrupted penetration. It’s a VERY niche genre, with a hardcore underground following, but don’t count me among them. I talked to a friend about it and he said he learned to appreciate noise when he saw it live, and yeah I imagine it’s quite an experience if done well.

I put the finishing touches to a travel story about Armenia. Check it out at https://quesstuvascrisserla.com/2021/05/11/armenie1/

At lunch I went home and did a calisthenics workout. Pull-ups, ATG squats with a big-ass kettlebell, chair dips, one-legged deadlifts, push-ups, bodyweight rows using straps attached to my pull-up bar. I first put on a G-funk compilation but it was a bit too smooth for my mood at the time, so I switched to something a bit more hard-hitting, from the grindcore tracks I had saved on my external hard drive.

There was a burger in the fridge that the girlfriend had ordered the night before but not eaten, I reheated it in the oven and pimped it out, adding a fried egg, a slice of ham, sauerkraut and spicy mustardy sauce. I ate it while watching videos of Gavin Mcinnes doing man-on-the-street interviews with Trump supporters and antifa militants.

I got a message at 12:40, from a Chinese colleague asking me if I can switch her invigilation period with mine, as she wanted to do a review period with one of her classes. The problem is we were scheduled at the same time. I rushed to school and did a double, starting at 1 PM, and the Ghanaian math teacher switched with her. I forgot to bring my water bottle and was parched for a bit, but then I remembered it is Ramadan now and my muslim friends spend every day famished and thirsty like that. Doesn’t sound very fun. As I get older and dabble in all those health trends and talks, I hear about the benefits of fasting and practice intermittent fasting myself (AKA “skipping breakfast”), but at least water and non-caloric beverages are allowed.

Bored out of my skull, I paced around, looking at the students hunched over their physics papers. Every single one out of the 180 or so present was writing with his/her right hand, no exceptions. I know there’s probably a predisposition for humans to be right-handed, but there are supposed to be some exceptions, no? I imagine this is nipped in the bud as soon as they begin their incarceration in the Chinese school system.

In the afternoon I listened to the Olivier Aubin-Mercier podcast. OAM is an MMA fighter from Quebec who cracked into the top 15 of the extremely competitive lightweight division after winning seven out of eight fights, but then he lost his next three and was cut from the organization, sadly. He’s an extremely laid-back guy and his podcast is quite fun, I used to listen to it before the pandemic. His guest on this one was Marc-André Barriault, a hard-hitting middleweight, one of the two Quebecers left in the UFC. It was an interesting discussion, Barriault is quite well-spoken and insightful, I do not want to imply I half-expected him to be a dumb meathead but to be perfectly honest I kind of did. Then I listened to an episode in which OAM and his sidekick dissected UFC 261, I didn’t like it as much, as even though they are hardcore fans of MMA they were dead wrong on some takes (notably the state of MMA in China) and I felt like I knew more than them on many topics they were talking about, me being an obsessive MMA nerd and all that. It was a good back-and-forth though and it was nice to hear what they had to say.

Speaking of the UFC, when I got home I opened a homebrew bottle and fired up last weekend’s main card. Some fights were excellent, some were duds, the most exciting and most significant was a lightweight contest between Gregor Gillespie and Diego Ferreira. Then the girlfriend got home and we went on a walk with the dog, I’ll keep the co-main and main for tomorrow. We bought fish and vegetables and made dinner together in our cramped kitchen. While the fish roasted in the oven, I made a stir-fry with cabbage, carrots, Sichuan peppers, ham and duck hearts, in bacon fat, and she made a chicken noodle soup. We ate while watching The Office. A great time was had by all.

I made a negroni and read Houellebecq in bed. I remember when I read Plateforme for the first time, I was in Thailand, coincidentally. Very few novels had the same emotional impact on me, after the horribly brutal ending I stayed in bed staring at the ceiling, numb and mouth-gaping, for a long time. Even on my fifth reading it still hits me like a left cross to the liver.

Chapter 130

I woke up at 6, took a nasty shit, read the news, did yoga, walked the dog. I rode to work, listening to the Jocko Willink podcast, he was talking about the Rape Of Nanjing. Boy oh boy, what a terrifying exploration of pure evil.

Another leisurely day, reading and writing and occasionally answering questions from students. I wrote this diary, and a travel story about my visit to Armenia in 2012 that I’ll put online sometimes soon. I read articles from a 90s magazine called Answer Me!, that I found in PDF online. I listened to the first album by Strapping Young Lad, called Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing, it’s very weird, some kind of futuristic metal with thumping industrial beats. I only knew the album City and a few tracks from later albums, and I plan on checking out more of Devin Townsend’s extensive catalog. I also listened again to the Rorcal & Earthflesh album, and it’s insanely good, it gave me an excellent first impression yet it is still growing on me.

I also listened to the Metal Minded podcast, they were talking with a musician from Abitibi (a remote mining region in northwestern Quebec) and they went through the whole spectrum of emotions, from uncontrollable laughter to really touching stories. The guy recently got a leg amputated due to cancer, and one of the hosts had lost several family members to that evil shit. I keep saying this, but it’s important, crucial even, to enjoy life to the fullest and be grateful.

I went home and ate cold noodles the girlfriend prepared and left in the fridge. Cold noodles are obviously a wonderful hot weather dish and something the west should adopt. I watched some Gavin McInnes videos, he’s been canceled to oblivion due to his dissidence and provocative humor but there are a few compilations emerging on YouTube here and there. He’s actually pretty moderate in his political views, but as an old punk, he loves to stir the pot, and I think he’s absolutely hilarious. I also watched a video by left-wing political commentator Shoe0nHead about the cringeworthy CIA “woke” PR videos, in which some employees from the intelligence agency talk about how Mexican and female or black and gay they are and how they’re so welcoming, yet, it’s the CIA we’re talking about, known for pretty damn unsavoury actions. She talked about how this is just one more example of how identity politics is a cancer and a tool used by the elites to control the plebs, and there’s one tangent bit that really struck me: there was a chart with the list of Fortune 500 CEO and some feminist asking “Where are the women?” and Shoe0nHead said “Who cares?! Don’t you think the second-highest grossing company being a healthcare firm something more worrisome than the lack of girlboss representation?”

I cut my lunch break short, as I had to go invigilate an exam. Then I went back to the office and resumed my reading and writing.

I got home, made a protein slurry with yogurt and whey powder, and slept for an hour. I rode to the gym, and as I turned the corner from my apartment block I saw something I hadn’t seen in a while: a couple holding their kid with his legs in the air so he’d shit. This used to be a quite common sight in China, even on sidewalks and indoors, the Chinese are friendly and all but some of them still have one foot in the rice paddy, to be euphemistic. The city I live in is developed and modern and therefore such uncouth peasant behaviors are more rare, but still happen.

It was hot as balls in the gym, even with the windows open and the occasional breeze bringing us a bit of salvation. We drilled sweeps for a bit then rolled, I usually do at least three rounds but now after only two I was light-headed and completely drained. Even after a few minutes of rest, I was exhausted and felt huge drops of sweat poking through my skin. Part of it could have been because I was defending chokes, but I also feel like I was dehydrated and with depleted electrolytes. I will bring some Gatorade-like drinks next time.

I got home, took the dog running outside, sipping a strawberry beer. I ate the rest of the cold noodles, a can of sardines and a box of crackers, watching an episode of Dark Side Of Football. It was about Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson and was a bit vanilla compared to some of the horrible shit in the Dark Side Of The Ring catalog, it was a pretty “normal” rise-and-fall story. I imagine there will be some seriously disturbing topics in future episodes, stuff about concussions, injuries, and the heinous criminal behaviors of some football players.

Chapter 129

I woke up around 8:30. The girlfriend was leaving, she was going to Suzhou to sit a Chinese language exam. Obviously it’s her native language but so many people in China speak Mandarin with atrocious accents that to get a teacher’s certification or a lot of jobs related to public speaking, they need to pass those tests. Also, as my hellish driving course and my knowledge of the local education system shows, retarded and meaningless and convoluted exams are part and parcel of Chinese culture, and have been for millenia. Confucius himself had to pass extremely difficult tests to be a bean counter for some local chieftain up there in Shandong 2500 years ago, and from what I understand of the Taiping Rebellion, the guy failed the Qind Dynasty public servant exam so many times that he was driven to insanity, thought he was the brother of Jesus, and boom, 50 million peasants massacred each other.

So even though she speaks Chinese with an accent that is quite neutral to my ears, she was nervous. I wished her good luck.

On the front page of YouTube was a clip from Kamala Harris talking to the Mexican president, it had a 12:1 dislike-to-like ratio, quite the feat, even Justin Bieber videos don’t get anything that bad. She opened by greeting him with a painfully condescending “Hello! How... are... you?” the way you’d talk to a toddler or a senile elderly person (hmmm perhaps she’s getting used to it these days), throwing a few of her trademark cackles around, and then going on a tirade about how they must work together in this migrant crisis, Mexico being the USA’s closest neighbor. Hmmm, I’m not sure what Canada has to say about that. It seems like every Biden or Harris speech on YouTube gets downvoted to oblivion, sure, it might just mean that a bunch of angry conservatives or edgy teens brigade all the videos, but it’s not as if they’re not always on the front page of YouTube and that normies could “reestablish the balance” if they thought that the current presidential administration was doing a good job. Yet, the media is still trying to force-feed us the idea that they are the most popular administration ever.

I did yoga, walked the dog, wrote in my diary, did a good calisthenics workout, and ate a light but hopefully proteinated enough lunch of sausages and black cherries. I listened to hip-hop mixtapes, one by a trio called Little Brother I’d never heard of and was quite good, and one by Brother Ali, a talented rapper from Minnesota. I also put on an episode of the Chewjitsu podcast, their guest was a former soldier and cop, he had really interesting points of view, and finished listening to a Jocko Willink podcast, he read a letter written by a WW2 Australian soldier to his daughter and asked a difficult question: since war brings the absolute worst but also, perversely, some of the best out of mankind, can we access all this goodness without the traumatic and destructive pressure of war?

At around 2 I put on a suit and tie and rode to school for the graduation picture session. We had to wait an extra half hour for the photographers to be done with the junior students, and then got those pictures taken. It felt very disorganised, with a fat guy with leathery skin yelling instructions in a bullhorn at a deafening volume. Sitting in the front row with my fellow educators, his fucking bullhorn was often inches from my face as he yelled in it. With the 45-degree heat, there were about five million places I’d rather be at.

It lasted about an hour, then I went back home and kicked back. I opened a bottle of my homebrew, and it tasted OK, not more. My first three batches were legit delicious, but my fourth one was a bit of a failure, and this one is also not up to standard. Perhaps I’ve been cutting too many corners and chaboodwoing some steps I shouldn’t have, after all it does seem like an exact science, based on the discussions I see online by nanobrewers who meticulously catalog everything they do with near-autistic attention to details.

The girlfriend came back, she won’t know the results of her test until later. She proposed we go eat sushi, something we’d been postponing for a few days now. We walked there, letting the dog run around Commie Square, the plaza built by and for the local branch of the CCP. It’s easy to forget that China is a communist country, or rather easy to wonder what the hell it’s even supposed to mean, given that whole downtown areas look like giant shopping malls and that consoomerism is the religion devoutly followed by the average Zhou. But for sure there is centralization and collectivism and red banners with hammers and sickles out there reminding us of the Powers-That-Be.

We had a great meal with our usual favorites, washed down with Kirin beer, plum liqueur and sake. Then we met up with YRD Hash mis-management team members (an American-Belgian couple), visited two of the short-listed restaurants and decided on one of them, paying a deposit to book six tables. The four of us then went to the microbrewery trailer and ordered a mojito, a Long Island iced tea and two double-hopped IPAs and sat down, chatting about random stuff.

The girlfriend was a bit drunk on the way home, telling me anecdotes from her job that were a bit nonsensical to begin with and nearly unintelligible when she started laughing uncontrollably mid-sentence. Good fun.

I watched the last Wrestlemania match, a triple threat with Roman Reigns, Daniel Bryan and Edge. It was violent and fun.

Chapter 128

I wanted to sleep in a bit but the girlfriend was up early, she had to go to work on this beautiful Saturday. I asked her if I can use the car and go on a little road trip of sorts, but she wanted to drive to work.

“Come on! You have a bicycle, you have a little electric scooter, even on foot it’s about 25 minutes, we walked there and back a million times”

“But having a car makes me lazy!”

In the end I agreed to drive her there and go pick her up later. I’d be massively selfish not to, she came to the goddamn Pudding Airport last week to pick me up in the middle of the night, after all. I picked a CD from the pile, Khaos Mortem by Saccage. Saccage is a great prolific band from Quebec City, churning out aggressive blackened crust punk with French lyrics. I knew (and loved) their first offerings, and this one was just as headbangingly good, especially when played at full volume with the windows down.

Back home, I enjoyed a day of rest. Four of the past five weekends have been spent traveling, which was awesome but it’s also nice to idle and recharge. I watched documentaries, listened to music and read chapters from Plateforme by Michel Houellebecq. It must be the fifth time I’m reading it and I could read it in a loop until the end of time, like all of his other novels. A few years ago there was a bit of a trend where people shared their top 10 favorite novels on Facebook (I’m sure the AI crawling over that creepy site was delighted with all that voluntarily disclosed potentially usable profiling data) and I put all seven of Houellebecq’s full-length novels in there, only half-jokingly, they are all absolute masterpieces. His heartrendingly pathetic characters make me physically cringe in disgust at times but the observations and commentary on the modern world are acute as hell, prophetic even. Plateforme is 20 years old now and some of the predictions in there read as if Houellebecq had a time machine.

At around noon, I ate scrambled eggs and basil sausages, with an amber ale from a Shanghai brewery. I hesitated before uncapping it, but eventually said “Fuck it, I won’t drive this afternoon after all” Then I buzzed my hair. I tried to do the same with the dog and it was a failure, his hair is too fine for my hair clipper and big tufts would clog its metal teeth, and also he wasn’t very cooperative, to say the least. So I brought him to the vet, riding the longboard. It was stupid hot outside, with the sun blasting full force. Fucking hell, it’s not even mid-May.

He must have recognized the place, or maybe the gaggle of vets and nurses hanging out in front of the bay window, because he had to be dragged inside. One young male employee said “Hey, I remember this little guy!” Is he the one who vaccinated him? Or maybe the guy who shoved a Q-tip you-know-where to investigate for worms? Or perhaps he’s the testicle-remover?! No wonder the poor dog was getting all panicky, with his limited intellect he doesn’t understand what a hospital is, he only sees it as a chamber of torture.

At any rate, the clinic was busy, and I could only make an appointment for later in the afternoon. I went home, took a two-hour nap, and drove back there. It took me a while to find a parking spot, and it was a few minutes walk away, almost one quarter of the way home! All my rants about how dense cities aren’t meant for cars and vice versa, well, here I am, adding my own pinch of shit to the already clogged streets. I could only laugh at the irony, especially since soon after the girlfriend sent me a message saying she has to stay at work longer and will just get a rent-a-bike home, so I drove there for nothing.

A friendly attendant in scrubs shaved the dog’s thick fur, and noticed little spots on his skin. A vet came to investigate, scraping some of the scabby parts on a microscope lens, and a few minutes later came back and said “fungal infection”. They prescribed some special shampoo and a spray that we have to apply daily, which means the poor guy will have to wear his cone. I was happy with how he behaved, he didn’t struggle or bark or whine, though he did pee a bit and released a nugget of shit in the pile of hairs, amusing his hairdresser and I.

I dropped him off at home, then set off on my bicycle. For the big hash event we’re organizing two weeks from now, one of my tasks is to find a restaurant for the Saturday post-trail dinner. It has to be big enough to accommodate 60 drunken hashers, a walking distance from the hash bar, and within our pretty meagre budget constraints. I slowly rode around doing my reconnaissance, the area is packed with restaurants but most are too small. I shortlisted three of them, taking pictures of their menus and talking to the managers, then went to the bar where we had a mis-management meeting. The annual Yangtze River Delta Hash is supposed to be a regional event for eastern China, but now a significant number of hashers from much further afield, from Beijing, Xiamen, Tianjin, Kunming, Shenzhen and Chengdu, confirmed their attendance. It makes the thing feel like a continuation of Nash Hash, which is pretty exciting and also a bit nerve-wracking for our little dysfunctional hash chapter.

I got home, made cocktails (one for the girlfriend reading in bed, one for me) and watched the second part of the Brian Pillman documentary. As it turns out, he didn’t die in the car crash like the cliffhanger ending let me believe, but he did get injured badly and eventually died from an overdose of pain pills. He was 35, which means I already outlived him. Scary shit. Every day I’m thankful to be alive and having a mostly good life.

Chapter 127

I did my yoga, walked the dog, and went to work. I had a bit of pain in my right hip, one of the yoga positions put some stress on it and I wasn’t careful, not respecting my “edge”.

At the red light, there was a convoy of old people on bicycles, with tarps and other supplies in their baskets. I asked where they’re coming from, they said they’re going from Shanghai to Nanjing round-trip. That’s over 300 km one way, pretty impressive. I used to be, and still am on occasion a long-distance cyclist, I explored the region and other parts of China quite a lot back in my day. There’s something pretty awesome about setting off for a few days, shutting the world off and doing nothing but pedal forward, eat, sleep, and do it again the next day.

My old friend who went on the Whispers From The Void podcast mentioned that he doesn’t drive, which raised my eyebrow. Not having a driver’s license is pretty rare in the sprawling suburban city we’re from, with the long distances, shitty public transportation and an obnoxious car-heavy culture. I asked him why in a Facebook conversation, he said it’s because he has a crippling phobia of driving, something called amaxophobia. That got me thinking, why isn’t this more frequent? It’s a pretty damn rational phobia to have, with the 900-kilogram piles of metal moving at high speed and more often than not operated by morons. Yet, the majority of people just get behind the wheel and don’t think for more than a few seconds about how goddamn dangerous the road is.

I listened to a lot of music today. First, a crushing noisy slab of doom metal by Rorcal & Earthflesh that was so good I listened to it twice, then the album Ire Works by The Dillinger Escape Plan. For now I gave up on listening to every single album from The Rolling Stone’s Top 500, too many duds and overrated boomer dogshit made the experience more of a chore than an exercise in exploration, so I’ll go back to checking out newer releases and classics in genres I like. The Dillinger Escape Plan is a well-regarded band, seen as the pioneers of “mathcore”, a very chaotic and technical form of hardcore, some of the tracks on this album were very interesting but midway in the tracklist there was some sappy clean emo singing and I noped out of there. I then listened to Friction by Breach, a post-hardcore band that some of my friends adore but it just lacks a teeny bit of punch for me.

Another new release I clicked on was a self-titled EP by dissonant grindcore outfit Resin Tomb, which got my head bobbing. When I ran out of internet I played what I had saved on my hard drive: Cold-Blooded Animal by XTX, the self-titled Bleach album, and Dude Ranch by Blink-182. Now that’s an album I hadn’t heard and forever, and it’s some sweeeeet punk rock.

While all that music played, I was reading. I went through a whole 100-page PDF titled EasyPeasy, about porn addiction. I feel like that’s one of the biggest unaddressed problems that afflicts young people (well, young people in the first world) nowadays, but few talk about it, because nobody wants to admit being a compulsive wanker. I’m a bit ashamed to even talk about it and wouldn’t know where to start, I don’t think I was as negatively affected as some of the people who put on depressive stories online but for sure I was wondering what the fuck I was doing. I didn’t particularly like pornography, thought it was creepy and bizarre and exploitative and clearly harmful, wondered whether the mainstream push was organic or had some sinister intentions by very manipulative people behind it, and would go weeks without even thinking much about it. Yet, once in a while, I’d just feel compelled to fire up those weird tube sites and nearly immediately asked myself “Why the fuck am I here?!”

Even just willpower or distractions (this daily blog might or might not be a self-improvement measure to fight that insidious addiction) aren’t always enough, that shit rewires your brain in weird ways, as was stated in the e-book. In the last chapters, it suggests to look at it as a positive rather than a negative, like saying “I am a non-user” rather than “I am fighting the urge to use it”, if I understood well.

I also read an article my dad sent me, about the disastrous war in Afghanistan and how it was, by design, an endless one. US-led forces (and their allies, like all my fellow Canadian soldiers I knew back in the day who went there) would build a road, the road would get blown up by local tribesmen, then they would pay exorbitant costs to construction companies to rebuild it, which included mafia-style protection money to the local tribesmen, and that protection money would be used to buy more bombs and weapons. Rinse and repeat, and of course through the whole process tens of thousands of NATO soldiers die. It’s so fucking cartoonish, like a factory that spews pollution in the air but doesn’t produce anything and just fills the pockets of the cigar-smoking fat pigs who oversee the whole clown show. My dad also sent me a related parody article, titled “Taliban wonders who will inadvertently fund operations after US leaves”, which is lethally funny and accurate. It reminds me of another parody article from The Babylon Bee I saw a few days ago, “ Chinese Government Lays Off Entire Propaganda Team As American Media Doing Their Job For Them”

I went home at lunch, did a calisthenics workout, ate boiled chicken and went back to school to resume my reading. A few students came to ask questions and I was more than happy to help, but most of the time I was in my world.

I took a nap upon going home, then went to the gym. The Italian blue belt showed me a few sweeps from the bottom and then we rolled a few rounds. It had been almost 10 days without jiu-jitsu now and I was getting restless, now that is one thing worth getting addicted to! He asked me if I want to go have a beer after, I went home first to shower and change, stopping halfway at a Sichuan restaurant to order some spicy chicken. I paid and told the lady I’d be back half an hour later, which I did, on my skateboard with the dog running along. I went to the bar and had a few beers with my homies, devouring my pile of chicken.

Chapter 126

I went outside with the dog, he ran into Qiuqiu, the ugly poodle who hates him. Dogs relationships are strange, sometimes they sniff one another with their tails wagging and don’t want to part ways, sometimes they fight, and sometimes one wants to play but the other just barks and grunts. I don’t know what triggers that.

There were exams at the school, and I had to do a few invigilation shifts. One of them was at the physics lab, I took the seating plan and called the students so they’d line up in the order listed, and there was one left at the end, wearing a hoodie rather than the school uniform.

“And you are...?”, I asked him.

The students all erupted in laughter. Turns out the guy was the lab technician. Hey, it’s not my fault if Chinese people under the age of 35 look like teenagers.

I listened to the Metal Minded reviews. Two new death metal releases had extremely positive scores by all three guys, one of them even giving a rare 10/10. I listened to them both afterwards, Death Chamber from Germany and Crypts Of Despair from Lithuania, and they were pretty good but nothing that made me go “Woaaaah!”. They also talked very positively about the new Chadhel tracks that the Saguenay grindcore four-piece just dropped, and it is indeed some excellent shit, too bad they clock in at only 10 minutes. They’re part of a split with a San Diego-based band called Assiduous Assault, and all three reviewers from Metal Minded absolutely hated those tracks, I might give them a listen or just keep the Chadhel side.

I had another invigilation period, then watching the kids study. I clicked on a mixtape by a rapper named Sadat X, I never heard of him before and he’s pretty good, with an unorthodox flow and a nasal high-pitched voice, which could be a deterrent for some but hey, one of my all-time favorite rappers (B-Real) has a nasal high-pitched voice so I can’t bitch about that.

I got home and watched some history documentaries: one about the Celts’ migration and one about the different crises of past centuries and how we could predict one coming up. The problem about that is there are so many new factors at play, regarding globalization, technology, the size of the world’s population, among others. Still, it’s something to think about. The ship has been running (mostly) smoothly for a while now.

Lazily scrolling Facebook, something caught my attention and made me laugh quite a bit. Some health insurance company is targeting expats in China, and the picture they used on their ad is one of the country, somehow designed to offend zealots from every side. There is the famous “nine-dash line” encompassing everything in the South China Sea, from Vietnam to the Philippines to the coast of Borneo, yet Taiwan is in a different color and labeled a “disputed territory”, like a few nuggets of land in the Himalayas. I knew the comment section would be hilarious and it didn’t disappoint, with snarky comments like “Oh so they even cover me in international waters?”, tons of comments in broken-ass Chinglish by Chinese and Taiwanese butthurt nationalists, and questions about VPNs.

The girlfriend had thawed a chicken and made soup, that I ate/sipped with cream cheese crackers. No beer tonight; I’ll abstain from the beverage if I haven’t exercised that day.

I watched two more WWE matches from Wrestlemania 2021. Two black guys beat the hell out of each other, and then a tall lesbian and a chunky Japanese chick with pink hair beat the hell out of each other. Also they listed the Hall Of Fame inductees, for some reason Ozzy Osbourne was in there. I think there’s one more match, I’ll watch it tomorrow or later.

I also watched two videos about overland travel from the channel The Road Chose Me, which led me to get a piece of paper and a pen and list modifications we should do to our car if we want to road trip this summer. I did it in bed, with a glass of Chairman Rum, from the island of St-Lucia.

Chapter 125

I pressed snooze and was up at 6:20. I put on some classical music, made tea, and did yoga. My mood was great, looking forward to a day of doing mostly fuckall, well, nothing unpleasant or that I don’t want to do, at least.

I spent the whole morning writing my diary, until I caught up to the present day. I was initially toying with the idea of bringing my laptop on the trip but I much prefer to travel light, not deal with the possibility of having it stolen or damaged, and also I knew I’d be busy throughout the whole weekend and even on the plane, I’d rather be reading or sleeping. While I wrote, I listened to more of that Decibel livestream, it was good, but I cared mostly for the live performances, not the endless parade of ads and speeches.

I went home and did a calisthenics workout, which took me about 50 minutes. I listened to a podcast called Whispers From The Void, hosted by two friends. Well, I say friends, though I’ve never met them in real life and in fact they haven’t met each other yet, one living in Quebec and the other one in Massachusets, we all know each other virtually through a craft beer and metal online group. They had another friend on, discussing craft beer and metal and various projects, a lot of people start podcasts these days it seems. The video had like 15 views on it, who knows if one day they’ll get a bigger audience, but either way they’ve been regularly making one a week and having fun, worse comes to worse it’s just a nice conversation between friends. The same way I feel about my own writing projects, even if I don’t become famous, it is a worthwhile hobby.

After a quick cold shower, I ate R n S and watched Clown World news. Katelyn Jenner is thinking about running for governor of California, and some wokels are angry at her comments about transgender athletes having a massive advantage over biological girls, something I’d imagine she knows well, having been a male Olympic athlete in “a previous life”. There’s a lot of “no true Scotsman” comments whenever a person identified as a minority group goes against the far-left-wing narratives or doesn’t adhere to the stereotypes assigned to that minority group. Identity politics are very weird to me, and seemingly antithetical to he idea of “equal treatment for everyone” that I support and feel like is the way to go for a prosperous and happy society. But hey what do I know, I’m jUsT a ciSgEnDeR wHiTe mALe.

In the afternoon I listened to the album Monkey Barz by Sean Price, one of the all-time great hip-hop pieces, and then when I was in a classroom too far from the Wi-Fi router, I listened to some random hip-hop tracks I had saved on my hard drive. Then I saw a link posted by a friend with excellent musical taste to a new release by Body Void, an American doom metal band. It was crushingly superb.

I met the girlfriend and the dog at the park and we walked home. I took a nap for about an hour then went to the gym. All my BJJ buddies were busy but I didn’t feel like idling, it was either badminton or boxing, and I went for the latter, it had been a long time. I warmed up, hit the pads with a trainer, then sparred a bit in the ring. First I was against a coach, a long lanky guy with precise and quick punches that connected to my headgear quite a lot, and with his sanda background, he was using a lot of lateral movement more reminiscent of karate than boxing. Then a 50-year-old stocky delivery driver stepped in and we had a few nice exchanges, we agreed to go light and mostly stayed on that course, stepping back and even apologizing when a connection was made, and having good fun. Some gyms I went to in the past sparred really hard, and yeah it’s an integral part of boxing and can be quite exhilarating, but I have a day job and it’s not fun to go to work with a misaligned jaw, fucked up hands or even headaches.

I was in a great mood when I got home. I opened a triple IPA from Sierra Nevada, heated a pork pie that I ate with cold noodles, took a shower then watched a Dark Side Of The Ring episode. I love this documentary series about the tragic stories and characters of the pro wrestling industry, and now they just started the third season. This one was about Brian Pillman, a 90s wrestler I’d never heard of, he had a “loose cannon” personality, playing the WCW against the WWF during their ratings war and exposing industry secrets at a time where kayfabe was still mostly unbroken. The first episode ended abruptly, with a car accident, I’m very much looking forward to the next one, to see what happened.

Chapter 124

 For the first time in months, I woke up at 7 on a workday, but I felt like it was already hard as is to peel myself out of bed and go earn my rice. I had very little to do aside from being there, with the exam season underway. Students follow the regular timetable when they are not sitting an exam, but at this point most teachers just give them self-study time, and I sat there with my computer catching up on my diary and listening to music. Decibel magazine held a six-hour-long livestream on YouTube to celebrate its 200^th issue, I listened to live performances by Municipal Waste, Repulsion, Pig Destroyer and others.

I was scheduled for one invigilation period, starting at 12:10, so I didn’t go home for lunch and just sat at my desk eating the tortilla bread, tuna spread and carrot sticks I brought. The tortillas had turned a bit moldy, I removed the nasty hairy grey bits and ate them anyway. I hope I won’t get diarrhea. I watched some clips from the Lotus Eaters podcast, one that made me laugh quite a bit but also cringe uncomfortably was a compilation of videos about the covid vaccine and mask mandates. Also the saga about the “knife of peace” is still going strong, the more I read about it, the more it looks like a bizarre parody of the racial powder keg that is called the USA, something that could have been written by Michel Houellebecq or any other acerbic observer of contemporary reality.

The grade 12 chemistry exam was held in the dining hall, still being hosed down by a team of janitors after lunch service. The students were bunched outside and let in in a single file, my coworkers and I had to check their (transparent) pencil cases for unauthorized materials. They had been told very clearly that they can’t wear a wristwatch, but of course a number of them had one on, especially among those who breathe mostly though their open mouth. The principal, normally a very laid-back man, yelled at them.

I was there for my half-hour shift before getting replaced, then I went back to the office and the classroom, alternatively. A pretty easy day. I made pu-er tea from the brick of dark compressed leaves I bought in Kunming, some people dislike pu-er and say it tastes like boiled leather, I for one think it’s a delectable beverage.

I listened to the Metal Minded podcast, they had the Saguenay grinders from Chadhel on. I discovered that band through the podcast on their first appearance last July, and their guitarist/founder Georges is one of the funniest men alive, he should totally be a comedian rather than a blueberry farmer or whatever he does in remote rural Quebec. Their music also slays, some excellent no-frills grindcore, they just dropped a new split and I have yet to listen to it. At any rate this podcast was also absolutely hilarious.

I got home, the girlfriend was in her pyjamas, rubbing her eyes. She was off, it’s a 5-day weekend for nearly everyone in the country, the reason I had to go to work is because Cambridge scheduled an exam today. She said she slept till 11, ate some takeout, took the dog out for a walk, and then went back to bed.

I did my laundry, putting all those sweat- and beer-soaked hash clothes in the machine, then took the dog out while the girlfriend was getting ready for her online classes. I reheated the leftovers from her takeout lunch and ate a bowl of R n’ S topped with fried chicken, accompanied by a Lithuanian lager, while I watched last weekend’s UFC card. All five fights on the main card were worthwhile, in the co-main event a Georgian striker named Giga Chikadze dug his toes in Cub Swanson’s ribs with a slick body kick, sending the tough veteran to the canvas, folded like a lawn chair. Then the headliner was a batshit crazy fight between Jiri Prochazka and Dominick Reyes. I remember watching Prochazka’s action-packed fights in Japan and wondering how he’d do against A-league competition, and so far he’s delivered, with two unorthodox and ultraviolent bouts. He also showed a lot of weaknesses, getting almost knocked out in both contests (and in fact he did get KOed in this Reyes fight for a second, something an on-the-ball referee would have likely stopped) and having suspect grappling, but his entertaining style and looks make him the talk of the town now at light heavyweight. It could very well turn out to be a Johnny Walker scenario, but while the Brazilian madman beat journeymen and midcarders on his rise, the Czech samurai was thrown in with two guys (Oezdemir and Reyes) who fought for the title, and he didn’t just beat them, he dedded them. I for one am on the Prochazka hype train, no matter how rickety it is!

Chapter 123

My alarm rang at 9:10. I felt surprisingly good. The aches from the previous morning weren’t there, likely it’s because my body is adapting. Also I didn’t feel any adverse effects from the alcohol. I’m morphing into a hashing machine.

I did my ablutions, packed my bag and went to the Holiday Inn across from the hash bar where I dropped it in a friend’s room before going to the bar. People were sitting around, recalling events from the previous night. “Oh hi, [redacted hasher name], I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on”, I greeted one of the bar top dancers. She laughed and claimed she didn’t even realize she didn’t have a bra on until long after she took her dress off. I’m a bit dubious, but I’m not shaming, it was a fun party and it’s a free countr... well...

The third day of Nash Hash started with a hangover run of about 5 km in the city, then a brunch buffet with copious amounts of bloody marys. People taking part in the Rusty Man triashlon had to drink at least one full pint of the strong, spicy, tomato drink before setting off on another urban trail of 5 km, this one with one beer stop every kilometer where we have three minutes to finish our beer and keep going. Some people showed racist behavior (walking so fast that both their feet leave the ground in a hopping motion, I think it’s called “renning” or something weird like that) for the first one or two segments but then were too bloated and walked the rest.

We went around the city, parts looked like a giant shopping mall and others were some kind of slum with old crumbling commie buildings and a pungent garbage smell. The last leg was alongside a canal with beautiful flower trees, and at the fourth beer stop, a guy named C3PeeHoles took out his bagpipes from his backpack, assembled the whole thing, and started playing. It was glorious. I’ve always loved bagpipes.

The last stage of Rusty Man was a potato sack obstacle race, and in the name of equality, it was rigged so that a girl would win it. A lot of the men were instantly disqualified for bogus motives, the reason for my disqualification was that I carried a handheld fan that I got at an advertizing booth and that is something a “poofter” would do. We were encouraged to obstruct the way of the incoming potato sack hoppity-hoppers, instead I took one of the stragglers in a fireman’s carry and ran towards the finish line, clumsily and drunkenly zig-zagging through. I must have zigged when I should have zagged though, because I bumped into a girl and she fell down, hurting her knee. Woopsy.

The circle was also quite fun, with all the shenanigans of the day thus far. I called a punishment on myself for hurting that girl’s knee, and got my buttocks whipped a few times. Ironically, the girl’s name is 狗s (Goes) Down Ruff... she was limping a bit and was initially mad but forgave  me and we laughed about it later.

The Rusty Man hares were all wearing kilts, and to ensure they were wearing it the proper way, a few female hashers lied on the ground before the kilt wearers walked above them in single file. One of them had shorts underneath, so under chants of “SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!” he got durian beer sprayed on him. Another notable moment was when someone proposed that, after all the “nipple shots” from the night before, one of the female hashers does a “scrotum shot”. The mad lass did it. A guy named Gobblin’ King is a big fan of hot peppers and had stopped at a market stall as we walked through halfway between two beer stops, getting a bag of threatening-looking peppers. People were dared to eat one and I did, in one bite. It was sweet at first, but the capsaicin crept in, it was a bit painful.

The day drinking continued, and to my great joy, I saw they hadn’t cleared the brunch buffet yet. The food was all cold but it didn’t matter, the hash browns and bacon felt great in our beer-filled stomachs. Eventually I had to leave, gave a round of goodbyes, and went to take a shower in my friend’s room before going to the airport, sharing a taxi with two other guys who also had flights around the same time.

Of course the damn flight was late, it’s a wonder why I expect any different. I sat on a massage chair, getting my back and shoulders kneaded by the robotic bumps and listening to metal and grindcore tracks. We got on the plane about an hour late, and as I was walking in, I got yelled “HARRO SIR PUT ON YOUR FAYSSUH MURSK” at. Fucking hell. I looked in the depth of my bags for a SLUGF and feigned to put it on.

I was falling asleep, my head resting on a makeshit pillow of a raincoat stuffed in a drawstring bag, when one of the flight attendants told herself “Hmmm, look at those glasses, would be a shame if they stayed unfogged. Also the lower half of his face is not all clammy with sweat, that’s unacceptable!” She nudged me awake and spouted the same “HARRO SIR PUT ON YOUR FAYSSUH MURSK” phrase they had to memorize in their training, along other things about seatbelts and the names of beverages.

I said before that I applaud the efficiency with which the Chinese government and population handled the pandemic, and I stand by it. That’s because it was done seriously, rather than the half-assed horseshit measures put in place in Quebec and elsewhere that don’t contain the virus at all and just cause seemingly endless inconvenience. So that’s why this mandatory fayssuh mursk in the airplane grates me so fucking much, I can say with authority (because I have more than five brain cells) that it does absolutely fuckall. Case in point, they gave us snacks. So even if just being shoulder-to-shoulder with a bunch of strangers in an unventilated space didn’t do the trick, does anyone really think the virus would just go “Oh wait, I won’t propagate while they’re chomping down on their cookies” if someone in there was infected? Fuck this moronic shit. Epitome of zealous retardation.

At least this gave me the opportunity for a ruse. I had my bag of roasted green peas on the reclining table, and would eat one every several minutes while reading my Kindle, which seemed to satisfy the bored shurgwaydingers pacing up and down, looking to sate their Napoleon complexes. Also, a significant number of passengers had it in the chin strap position and didn’t get bothered. At some point though, my seat neighbor politely asked me to let her go to the toilet, and I forgot to get the almost empty bag of peas out of the seat pocket after she squeezed past. This time three of them came, one was wearing a suit, perhaps he’s their leader, the Head Shurgwaydinger or Shurgwaydinger In Chief perhaps. “I’m eating!”, I protested, but it was denied. I admitted defeat, and sheepishly put the face diaper on. I’d rather not go to jail over such trivial shit.

I emerged from a restless sleep when we touched down in Shanghai’s Pudong airport. I originally had a flight back to Wuxi, a much shorter distance from home, but it got cancelled and they put me on the 11 AM flight. That would have meant missing Monday’s hash festivities, so after a bit of consideration I got it refunded and flew to Shanghai instead. I thought about taking an early morning train and make it to work with enough time to go home and shower, but the girlfriend said she’d drive there. Isn’t she awesome?!

We embraced at the arrivals and walked to the underground parking lot. I got behind the wheel, after assuring her I hadn’t had a drop of beer for the past eight hours (but barely). The two-hour drive home in the middle of the night went by quite smoothly, there was very little traffic but heavy rain, I drove prudently. I see it as a worthwhile sacrifice to the weather gods, I’d rather have rain on the drive home than during the hash weekend. The front of my right shin felt extremely numb after this long weekend and all the walking I’d done, so it was a bit painful to move it around and press the pedals. I wish our car had cruise control.

The girlfriend soon fell asleep, I had music to keep me company: an excellent groovy and melancholic sludge metal album by Aulnes, and the mysterious black metal EP, which turned out to be from an American band called Windfaerer. Both of them played twice and when we got close to the city and Sleeping Beauty yawned and stretched awake, I accepted to take the metal out of the stereo and put one of the CDs left by her parents, the previous owners of the car. I was bracing myself for, well, music that Chinese 55-year-olds like, but it was a compilation of American music from the 70s, Sound Of Silence, Take Me Home Country Roads, California Dreaming, stuff like that, so it was pretty nice.

I hit the sack a bit after 3. Short night ahead.

Chapter 122

I woke up around 9, sore all over but especially my right ankle, which felt like it got crushed by a buffalo. And this is despite sleeping almost eleven hours. I popped some ibuprofen, took a cold shower and walked it off a bit, then I got a rent-a-bike and rode around looking for a massage place with the help of Baidu Maps (out of fairness, because I’m a fair guy: I trashed Baidu’s search engine not long ago, and it is indeed worthless, but Baidu Maps is pretty good). They were either not open yet, or overpriced spas in shopping malls, or dingy-looking hovels that looked to be made out of 50% crumbling concrete and 50% mold and were probably quite seedy as well. I kept riding, it alleviated my soreness, and I stopped for a cheap breakfast of baozi (stuffed buns), youtiao (fried dough, like a savoury donut) and hard-boiled eggs (chicken eggs that had been boiled) with a C-100 lemonade.

I still had a lot of time before today’s chalk talk, so I stopped at one of Kunming’s five million tea shops to buy some pu-er tea, a brick for myself and one for the in-laws. The boss was extremely friendly and invited me to have a few cups with him, one of the joys of tea shopping. I stayed there for a while and then got a message from a hasher friend, she was having brunch with others in a shopping mall, I had eaten already but I thought I’d join and eat a bit more. There was a rent-a-cop at the entrance of the mall telling people to put their face diapers on, and pretty much one second after passing the door they’d remove it. Another hasher asked me if I have one to spare and I happened to have a second one, so he could go through this most pointless of checkpoints to enter the huge glitzy empty mall.

We ate a few dim sums and fried rice at a Cantonese eatery. My Hong Konger friend obviously loves this food, and she talked about how she doesn’t fit with either the Chinese or the Asian-Americans and how she doesn’t understand them culturally at times. She also told me she espouses accelerationist views, I was a bit surprised to hear this word in the wild, I usually only encounter it when browsing political forums on the internet. That got us talking about Clown World and the western media outlets trying their hardest to ignite a race war, I understand accelerationism but I’m myself more of a popcornist, finding entertainment watching the world crumble and living my life with a certain apathy knowing that I’m powerless in the face of all of this, which might seem cripplingly nihilistic but is also very liberating.

So yeah, just to be clear, the key to still live a good life as a black pilled popcornist is to unplug from the matrix and do fulfilling shit. With that firmly in mind, we went to the hash bar, ready for the hash day. Everyone was in good spirits, beer in hand, some were limping a bit or hungover or sunburnt but the conversations flowed and soon we were on another bus headed outside the city. As I’d seen riding my bike around, Kunming itself isn’t very special, it’s a huge Chinese provincial capital quasi-identical to any other, but it’s surrounded by forested hills, in an almost tropical environment. It’s also almost 2000 m above sea level, something that caused a bit of a problem for visiting hashers, most being from lowland cities.

Again, a really cool trail was on the menu, bringing us through the woods to a beer stop on top of a hill with a temple and a spectacular view over the whole city. I overdid it a bit, drinking four Beerlaos that went down wonderfully after such a long climb, and when people started joking about the time being almost 4:20 (marijuana enthusiasts’ favorite time of the day), one Shanghai hasher gave me a tobacco dip, saying I’d get a buzz from it. Well, fuck me... my head was spinning and my stomach felt hollow as we went down, single file, down a steep rocky path. I had to really be careful not to miss a step. All along I was having a really cool conversation with a guy named Keg On Legs, about languages, long-term expat life, and Taco Bell. I was getting to know a lot of people from different backgrounds, but I knew few of their real names, only their trail names: Master Wanker, Chuquita Hammock, Socradeez Nuts, Limp Fish Dick, Psycho Babble, Verbal Diarrhea, to name just a few of the hilarious ones on the list. The Nash Hash t-shirt was personalized with our trail name on it, and I commented to a guy named Goat Fucker that he now has to wear that in public.

We made it to the end, some kind of park with ponds and pavilions. Everyone was in a celebratory mood, emptying crates of beer, I felt like lying down on the ground first and get my bearings back. Soon after that we sat around little barbecue pits in the huts and they brought huge trays of food for us: sausages, hamburgers, tofu, vegetables, chicken skewers, rye bread, as well as containers of hummus, potato salad and cheesy garlic dip. Quite a feast! There was a table of Beijing female hashers who were pretty drunk already, singing Ke$ha songs and flashing their breasts. And it was still about two hours till sunset, things were about to go crazy.

The circle was a lot of fun, with lots of hilarious charges brought forth to punish or reward hashers who did something memorable on the trail. Durian beer made its appearance, and, well... it was what you’d expect. I can still smell it from here. There was also a baptism, a middle-aged Italian lady getting the name of Mamasan. She knelt down and got showered with beer, being thus welcomed in the brotherhood/sisterhood of Hash House Harriers. There was also an announcement, the next Nash Hash will take place in Suzhou, a city located a pretty short distance from where I live, great news!

We got on the buses again, with a few beers “for the road” and a repertoire of songs to drunkenly sing together. We arrived at a craft beer bar called Chaba, where a dozen 3-liter towers of homemade IPA were awaiting us, the party kept going. A hasher named Kiddie Pool had hurt himself bad on the trail, trying to shortcut by jumping over barb wire, falling awkwardly and hyperextending his knee. He had to be carried down the path and brought to the hospital in a taxi, it was the talk of the town for a bit. Well, he turned up at the bar, his leg all wrapped up, on crutches. He resumed his drinking, under cheers. That’s how legends are made.

Part of hashing culture, aside from the silly trail names, songs and ambiguously marked trails, consists of the patches. Some collect them, accummulating dozens over the years, and sewing them on sleeveless vests like thrash metal fans and their “battle jackets”. Of course kennels (HHH chapters) have their patches and notable gatherings also produce commemorative ones, but one thing I learned is some individual hashers also make their patches, that they give out upon completing a challenge. I asked a bespectacled Chinese girl with a butterfly tattoo on her chest and who goes by Super Squirter what her challenge is, she told me to bring a shot and find out. I bought a shot of rum at the bar, she told me to kneel down, poured the rum in a water bottle with a tiny hole in its cap, and sprayed it. Half landed in my mouth, which is more than most people can say. There was also a guy named Stilett’Hoe with a rather lewd and hilarious challenge that I won’t describe here, because some things better “stay on the hash”, like they say. Also I’m wondering about the legality of the whole thing.

Drinking games and competitions also took place, the most notable being the boat race. Silly me thought there would be an actual race involving canoes on a body of water, but no, it’s a team effort in which five hashers line up, pints in hand. When the first guy finishes his, he upends it on his head, signaling the second one to start chugging, and so forth. There was a bit of controversy, the Beijing team seemed to have won handily but there were claims of excessive spillage by the referee. The IPA towers were now empty and got replaced by a rauchbier, a rare style of German smoky ale that is pretty interesting but not really a thirst beer.

Rip Van Stinkhole, a large bald Texan, announced that a stripping contest was about to happen at the after-after-party bar. Some people had a giant inflatable unicorn and were trying to blow it up, but there was a leak somewhere. I had medical tape in my bag so I saved the day.

The next bar was quite small, and mostly dancefloor. The large group of drunken, smelly hashers carrying a huge inflatable unicorn must have scared the other bar patrons, mostly effeminate teenage rich mama-boys with bouffant haircuts, and a bunch of them left to go play with their phones elsewhere, sneering on the way out in a way that could have been threatening if either of them weighed more than 115 pounds.

I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of nightclubs and dancing and the predictable (but well-crafted to elicit WOOOOs from the females on the floor) playlist the DJ was playing from his laptop, but at least this bar was an old-school student joint, not a shitty shiny glitzy Chinese nightclub. I was just drunk enough to dance, and by this I mean gently sway my shoulders, but my aloof exterior and apparent lack of enthusiasm (not yelling WOOOO like a sorority girl when Usher’s “Pwee pwee, pwee pwee” starts) was mistaken for a vibin’ coolness by a tall attractive Chinese girl in a striped top and later an equally attractive Latina with curly hair, which led them to rub their backsides on my genitals, in this bizarre mating ritual I’ve never fully got a hold of. I deescalated, not that it wasn’t pleasant, but I have to be a good boy.

People were climbing on the bar to dance, and clothes were coming off. The first round mostly featured dudes and it was a bit weird, but then all those Beijing hash girls got on and the windows had to be shuttered. Rip Van Stinkhole handed me a half-full water bottle, I asked “Water?” and in the deafening environment, I thought he said “Water” but it turned out he said “Vodka”. I took a swig and spat it out, I hope he wasn’t offended. Though I had consumed a torrent of beer through the day, I had mostly paced myself, and now as I was about to leave I didn’t want to get pointlessly plastered.

The Latina didn’t want me to leave, or perhaps didn’t want me to leave alone, and was blowing kisses. It had been a long day, so I walked the half kilometer or so to the hostel and was in bed at 2:30.

Chapter 121

I put my alarm for 9:10, to take advantage of the hostel’s free breakfast. I was shacking up in an eight-bed dorm but it was pretty nice, I had a curtain to draw for complete privacy and to block out the ambient light. In fact I didn’t see my roommates much throughout the long weekend, and only for a short time did one of them snore.

I sat in the bar and got my complimentary breakfast, a steaming bowl of mixian. Mixian consist of chewy rice noodles in a savoury, slightly spicy broth and is one of the most overrated dishes in all of China, it’s not bad by any means but nothing that special either compared to all the other signature noodles. Every time I’ve been to Yunnan province I got told I must absolutely eat mixian, even though it’s available pretty much everywhere, not just the southwest. I also question its place as breakfast food, but hey, it’s included, and I’m here, and I’m hungry, and I need my calories for the day to come. The lady saw me peek in the fridge and asked if I want a beer, I chose one I’d never had before and it turned out to be a strong Belgian dark ale, with an ABV of 10%, higher than the time of the day at that point (around 9:30). Starting the day well!

I rode a rent-a-bike to the beer garden, I knew it would be closed so I stopped at a shop to get a jumbo bottle of water and two bottles of cold Dali beer. There were a bunch of hashers sitting around, some hungover clutching a coffee, some already on the beer, people were much more social than yesterday and I embraced some old friends I’d net on trails in Shanghai or Suzhou. The organizers were there and gave me my bag of goodies, with a t-shirt, short, socks, beer mug, aluminium water bottle, patches, and other cool stuff.

At 10:30 we had a quick chalk talk, in which the hares explained how today’s “ball buster” trail is marked. They used chalk when on asphalt or concrete, ribbons on tree branches in the woods, and we have to find our way. Then we hopped on the buses, drove about an hour out of the city, and got on the trail. Right off the bat there was a pretty steep incline to go over a ridge, and throughout the day there would be a lot of ups and down. Some were running, most were walking at different paces. I did a few running trails before but I prefer walking now, it’s more social.

About three hours in, we got to the beer stop, where I drank two nice bottles of cold lager. The group who was doing the half-ballbuster (because they are not in that good of a physical shape or because they were too hungover) started there just a few minutes before, the beer bitch told me if I walk fast enough I will catch up, which I eventually did once we got to a particularly tall mountain. Again, hugs and high fives and handshakes with old pals and new ones. The way down was steep and narrow, and after a time we got to the reservoir where the second beer stop was. We could go for a swim, which was more than welcome, and then sat around drinking and enjoying this beautiful afternoon.

The buses brought us back to the hash bar, where we had the circle. Hashes end with this debriefing, where the hares get punished for laying a shitty trail, hashers get punished for committing infractions (coming late, shortcutting, wasting beer, peeing on the trail), vulgar songs are sung, and lots of beer is consumed. Given that there were over 100 participants it was a bit of a shitshow, especially since the guy directing it was old and had a very thin voice. I saw that the buffet was ready and left early to avoid the huge line-up, and it was a great decision, as it started raining immediately after. I piled up food on my plate and gobbled it down (with a tall glass of beer of course) in the bar, that the whole group of hashers soon crowded. Some were a bit mad, the food was ruined due to the heavy rain, for sure it was a bit of a gamble to have a buffet dinner set outside like that.

A few more beers later, it was still only about 7:30 PM. The program called for an after-party at a nightclub, the bus was coming at 10. Some guys planned on staying there drinking, some wanted to go shower and change, I pondered my options and decided it had been enough for the day. I’d had about 15 beers and walked about 20 km on mountain trails, the appeal of a cold shower and sitting in bed reading a book was higher than the FOMO related to not going to a glitzy club with a DJ playing some ng-tss-ng-tss-ng-tss from his laptop.