Chapter 166

Up at 7, we packed our stuff in the car and had breakfast at a won ton fast food chain by the in-laws’ apartment. We had an appointment at the DMV to do the car’s annual inspection, a bit of an annoying bureaucratic process but one that has to be done. Then we drove the 400 km home, the girlfriend did the first bit and I did the rest. I put on random non-metal music, she particularly liked an album by Sizzla, a Jamaican dancehall reggae singer, and asked me for his name. Let’s just say that this kind of stuff doesn’t happen that often, the overlap between our musical tastes is a very thin line.

At some point there was a short traffic jam on the highway, the cars were funneled into one lane because a gnarly accident. At least ten cars and one truck were involved and scattered around the shoulder and the left lane, some with bumps and broken lights but at least two that were crushed like a soda can. If the people in those cars survived it’s an absolute miracle, it’s a wake up call as poignant as any and a reminder to drive prudently, especially on roads full of inept Chinese drivers constantly swerving lanes and doing dangerous shit.

We made it home in thhe mid-afternoon and I immediately hopped on my bicycle to go to the bank. I got a new bank card fairly painlessly, and there was a little bonus. The lady behind the counter asked me questions about my account to confirm my identity, one of them was “How much do you have in your account?” and I told her based on the text messages I get when there’s a transaction. But then she transfered about 2500 yuan more on the new card, because there was also a 400 USD in my foreign currency account I didn’t know the existence of.  

On the way home I got my new sunglasses, and then kicked back with a nice beer. I did laundry and cleaned a bit while watching the other fights from the UFC main card. We ate steak, asparagus and garlic food for dinner, and I had a pretty lazy evening watching stuff on YouTube and cartoon episodes. I watched a Dark Side Of The Ring episode about British wrestler Dynamite Kid, in the first 10 minutes I was wondering if I had seen it already because the premise was so familiar, with a young up-and-coming wrestler ruining his legacy with drug and alcohol abuse, conflicts with other wrestlers, and domestic violence.

I went to bed a little too late. Ah well, it's my birthday, and I'm on vacation.

Chapter 165

I slept in quite a bit and had a hangover, such is life. Lunch was a spread of reheated food from yesterday and MIL’s delicious signature bone-in pork ribs, and they gave me a black beer they bought from a neighboring store, some old guy started a tiny microbrewery. It was pretty good, like a lot of German-inspired Chinese black beers it had a bit of a chocolate taste.

I sat around writing my diary and listening to Clown World news. The world leaders got together in England for a G7 conference with climate change as the main focus, and of course they are massive hypocritical cunts. A huge number of trees were cleared just so they can have their circlejerk in a scenic spot, and UK’s prime minister Boris Johnson flew there in a private jet though he could have gone by train or by car. Classic shit.

Then I watched the two UFC championship fights. Brandon Moreno was impressive as hell, I remember him as a middling contestant on The Ultimate Fighter Mexico and then he lost a few fights on the big show, which got him released and eventually brought back. You’d never know that watching his Saturday performance, it was flawless, and he dominated the God Of War, who seemed like he was destined to be champion for a long time, with his well-rounded skillset and ridiculous power at flyweight. Moreno ruined his shit and it couldn’t have happened to a better man. Then Israel Adesanya dismantled Marvin Vettori, stopping all his takedown attempts and piecing his up on the feet with his sublime striking.

In the afternoon the four of us went to the university campus where the in-laws work and where they used to live, they had errands to run so the girlfriend, the dog and I walked around and went to the tall tree under which the old family dog is buried. Then we went to a big glitzy shopping mall to meet friends for dinner, we were there one hour ahead so I went skating and the girlfriend went shopping. I hadn’t been skating since February of 2020 when I was in Quebec for the holidays and I love skating, I used to go quite a bit when I lived in Hefei. I paid, got my rental skates and waited for the Zamboni to finish. One guy put up a plastic fence to separate a small section of the ice for a hockey class, and while the small kid was getting dressed, I excitedly went to the coach and asked if I can play a bit. He lent me his stick and I skated in circles, dribbling a puck and shooting goals. Fuck I miss it. I’d give 10 000 yuan for hockey to be back in my life. After a few minutes the one-on-one hockey class started and I went back to the general section to skate laps for about an hour.

Then we had dinner at the Tex-Mex restaurant overlooking the skating rink. Some of my old coworkers joined, that used to be our Friday night hangout, we’d get the big table and drink tons of margaritas and rant. The girlfriend and I shared potato peels, a burrito and a big sizzling plate of beef fajitas. I thought maybe I ordered too much, but my Texas buddy said “No such thing as too much Mexican food!” and he’s 100% right. We had a great dinner and then went to the fancy imported supermarket on the ground floor of the mall. It was close to 9 o’clock at that point but the mall was still packed, with all this upper-middle-class flexing its consumerist muscle. It’s hard to imagine at times that Hefei used to be a third-worldy city, it took an astronomic leap in the past decade.

We got road beers and walked the half hour home. A great day.

Chapter 164

I woke up at 9. The girlfriend and the in-laws were having a breakfast of green tea, fruit and zongzi, little pyramids of sticky rice steamed in banana leaves, traditionally eaten at this time of the year. I ate a little but drank a lot of green tea, discussing summer plans. Mama-in-law still had her forearm in a cast after the hiking accident in April (see Chapter 94) but she’ll be good to go soon, and it seems like we’ll travel together a bit in western China starting in late July.

An American friend of mine invited me to go swimming with his wife and young kid, I looked at my options. The subway goes there conveniently, but I felt like driving so I got the car and headed there. Hefei is an enormous city, a sprawling mess of over 10 million, and though I like it and have fond memories of the two years I lived here, I also must say that a huge proportion of its population are absolute peasants. If I give the drivers in my current city a B minus, and China a barely passing grade of D, Hefei’s drivers deserve a F and navigating its streets with my bicycle or on foot back in the day I’ve kicked dozens of bumpers, partly out of violent retaliatory rage but also to attract the attention of the fucknuggets about to run me over as they’re swerving brusquely or turning without looking or using their phones while driving. So I was a teeny bit apprehensive but with my defensive driving skills turned all the way up, the thirty-minute drive ended up being fun and smooth. Along the way I listened to Sodom’s M-16 album, from the period when the great German thrash band slowed it down a bit and embraced a more heavy metal/hard rock sound, Sodom has been around for 40 years now and only released quality, that’s rare if not unheard of.

I parked and got in the hotel lobby. The level of opulence was off the charts. I’m always a bit uncomfortable around extreme luxury, sure I like nice things and abundance but gaudy marble and expensive crap always feels like it’s too much, I’m a middle-class person and will likely keep this mindset. My pal came down to meet me and with his wife and 10-month-old mixed-race kid in tow we went to the pool. Even though they live in Hefei, they got a hotel room for the night to have access to the pool and make it a little “staycation”.

After an hour or so we dressed and walked across the street to one of the dozens of dying shopping malls in the city and ate at a restaurant. Most of the stores were empty or piles of rubble but some cheap restaurants manage to still stay in business, like that spicy seafood place we picked randomly from the banner outside the mall. We gorged ourselves with oily shrimp and crab and tofu and rice cakes, a good time was had by all. Back at the hotel, they got the people at the counter to waive my parking fee, and I drove back home.

We took the dog out for a little walk, there’s a big park right by the in-laws’ apartment. Then I watched some UFC. I have been watching tens of thousands of fights at this point and it takes quite a lot to make me jump of the couch and go OH SHIT!!! but Nate Fucking Diaz managed to do just that. After 24 minutes of getting outclassed and beaten to a pulp by Leon Edwards, the cult hero threw a slap-cross-taunt combo that got the British likely next title contender doing the fish dance. He didn’t have time to capitalize and finish and ended up losing the decision, if he managed to get the KO it would have been the upset of the century.

Then we went to a restaurant around the corner for a dinner with the MIL side of the family. Her elderly father, her two sisters and their husbands were there, and also the daughters who just entered university. Eleven people total including me, that counts as a pretty big family gathering in China. They’re pretty rich I think, though they don’t really look or act rich. I still don’t know if that’s an aspect I like or dislike about Chinese culture. The girlfriend’s aunts are nice enough but can also be a bit condescending, let’s not forget that most Chinese people have never met foreigners and don’t know anything about what’s outside China except clichés that are not always true, and also they have no filter at all. The food spread on the spinning lazy Susan table was incredible, nearly everything on there was excellent. Five million baijiu toasts were made and a birthday cake was served for my birthday and the girlfriend’s, that are coming soon two weeks apart.

I went to meet my friends at the main expat bar, a good 8 km away. I rode a rent-a-bike to sober up a bit and get some exercise, and made it to the bar I’d spent many, many nights back in the day. The girl at the bar gave me the narrow-eyed “Hey don’t I know you from somewhere?!” look when I ordered my Carlsberg, she tattooed me a few years ago.

Some of my old pals joined me, guys I hadn’t seen in a year or more, in fact some of them I thought were still stuck out of China but did sneak back in in the past months, doing the two-week quarantine. We downed  pint after pint and caught up. The bar has a small stage, which is cool if you come to enjoy a live show, but now there was just a solo guy with an emo haircut playing an out-of-tune guitar and singing sappy shitty ballads, I would have proposed to bounce to a neighboring bar that doesn’t do this stupid shit but a couple of my friends had already ordered a plate of fish n’ chips. Small annoyance, we just had to lean in closer as we talked about what’s been happening recently and reminisced about the good ol’ days and the litany of bizarre characters we interacted with along the way.

One of my former coworkers has two kids now, and was ranting about the two-year-old. He doesn’t get to go out that often so he was relishing the bro-time, and he suggested we go check out a new bar he saw on the way. We walked about 10 minutes and got in, it was very quiet, with only three Africans sitting around watching a soccer game.

I extended my hand. “Habari za mchana”, I said, which got me confused looks in return.

“Oh you guys don’t speak Swahili?”

“We’re from Cameroon, and the boss here is from Benin”

“Ah, vous parlez français alors?”

We stayed for a bit, chatting with our new friends, in English when the American guys were involved in the conversation, and in our common colonial language when it was one on one. The bar had a decent selection of craft beers, I got an IPA and a raspberry sour. A good time was had by all and at around 3 AM I took a taxi home.

Chapter 163

I forgot to bring my phone charger and though there was over 20% battery left when I went to bed, I was scared it could die during the night and I wouldn’t hear my alarm. So I slept without my eye mask on and the curtain ajar. I was crashing in a dorm room again, and it was still 120 yuan, accommodation prices are rising in the big city.

I got awakened by the sun before 5:00, with less than four hours of sleep, and couldn’t fall asleep again due to the guy snoring across the aisle. Is there a more pathetic way to fail at life than being snorer?! You can’t even fucken breathe properly, something that our branch of the animal taxonomy has been doing for billions of years, and instead of inhaling and exhaling silently, you make RRRRRRRKKKKKKKHHHHHH shhhhhfffffuuuuuh RRRRRRRKKKKKKKHHHHHH shhhhhfffffuuuuuh RRRRRRRKKKKKKKHHHHHH shhhhhfffffuuuuuh disgusting gargling noises.

I took a shower and got on my merry way at 6, making it to the train station with one hour to spare. I made a beeline for the massage chairs, and every single one was occupied by an idiot not using the massage function. I awakened one of them and told him to scram, before scanning the code bar with my phone and getting the 35-minute program.

The train stopped at every damn station along the way but still got me to my destination in 1 hour 10 minutes. There was a maze of fences to walk through, with a bunch of bored cops enforcing some pandemic measures, I became quite used at navigating this nonsense, taking screenshots of all those green health codes to avoid opening those malfunctioning piece-of-shit bloatware tracking apps, and putting on my fayssah mursk only when absolutely necessary. I got my bicycle from the two-wheeled vehicles parking and rode home on a brand new boulevard, listening to albums I hadn’t listened to in a while: the Spaniards from Looking For An Answer and their groovy grindcore, and the all-female American rock band Sleater Kinney.

I was dead-ass tired from the heat, exercise and short night, so after a cold shower and a bowl of R n’ S made from the leftovers the girlfriend had ordered, I took a nap for an hour before putting on my suit and going to the graduation ceremony. The twelfth-graders were there in their gowns and goofy-looking square hats, along with their parents and their siblings (for the 5% of them who are not single kids), I got ushered to the front table and there was even a little placard with my name on it. There were speeches, songs, awards, it was mostly very boring and tacky and not a lot of English was spoken on stage, which usually annoys me slightly but now I kinda understood, as the parents were present. Some of the videos put by the students were pretty cool, though they were stretched horizontally to fit the large screen of the hotel banquet room the school had rented and everyone in them looked short and fat. Most of the time during the speeches I sat there reading my Kindle, time went by acceptably fast.

Then my school year ended for real, and I excitedly rode home. Two kids of about 10 waited at the red light, on their bikes. “Hello!” the fat one said in English. “Where are you from?” the skinny one asked in Chinese.

“You guess”

“Europe?”

“No”

“The USA?”

“North of there”

They looked puzzled and racked their brains for a while.

“Oh I know! Canada!”

“Smart kid”

I got home, changed into comfy clothes, finished packing and we got in the car. The girlfriend drove, technically I’m not supposed to drive on national highways for the first year of my drivers’ license, unless I have a co-pilot who’s had his/her license for three years, and now we had 400 km to cover. Soon it started raining, but the girlfriend managed pretty well. After a halfway stop to get the dog to walk a bit and for us to wolf down our BLT and grilled cheese sandwiches, we kept going, I fell asleep and woke up as we approached Hefei, her hometown and my old stomping grounds. It was around 11 when we got to her parents’ apartment, we had a bit of a chat and soon went to bed.

Chapter 162

I woke up at 7 and got ready for my last day of work. I had nothing to do so I just sat around the office listening to some black metal albums: Glaciation from France, Forteresse from Quebec, Drudkh from Ukraine, before switching to the death metal side with an album by a Czech band named Sněť. What’s up with the weird accents? No idea. Czechs be Czechs. It was a pretty good mix of old-school with a bit of that atmospheric dark sound that got popularized by Dead Congregation and a few others in the past 10 years, at least that’s what I got from it.

I went home and did the calisthenics routine. It was so damn hot I felt the sweat seeping through my skin in real time. Then I ate leftover pasta and garlic soup while watching some UFC embedded videos. Aside from the fights, a big part of the UFC fan experience is looking at the individual fighters’ personalities and their work leading towards the grueling and ruthless competition they undertake. At times this leads to a big contrast, like in the case of the Moreno-Figuereido rematch, the former being a happy-go-lucky kid who likes collecting Legos and the latter acting like a meathead thug, which can come out as weird given that he’s around 4 foot 7. And then you have Israel Adesanya spouting all of his usual uncharismatic clichés.

In the afternoon we had a meeting. The principal thanked us all for our hard work, especially over the past few weeks that had been particularly hard. I was wondering what that was about, as I did very little since the exams started, but yeah I did go to my boring invigilation sessions and had two stressful days with the chem lab exams. He talked about a few pieces of minutiae regarding the graduation ceremony, vacation time and when we have to be back, then had a few nice words for the Croatian who’s leaving for another school in our network. He then talked about something that’s been on my mind for a while: apparently the school didn’t request corporate office for a replacement, they’ll just get a “bilingual” teacher (read: a Chinese person with 75 words of English), and the principal said it’s a trend in Chinese school programs for rich kids to go study abroad like ours. I’m often wondering, in fact, how I’ve been able to suckle on the golden cow’s teats for so long and why schools want to hire people like me as opposed to Chinese staff that command one sixth of the salary, don’t need expensive and complicated visa paperwork, can be bullied with cuntfucian intimidation tactics and threats of how expandable they are, and don’t try to do stupid barbarian shit like teaching to think critically and learning English through immersion and relevant practice rather than rote memorization of vocabulary lists. I’m not even sure if the cynical common explanation of “they need white faces for marketing” applies that much, at least it weighs little compared to the results of how many alumni have been accepted in whatever prestigious universities.

Either way, as long as they wanna keep me around, I enjoy the work and I think I do a more than decent job. After the meeting we had an early release, I went home, changed and hopped on my bicycle. I rode to the train station, 17 km away, it took me a little over an hour but it was pleasant, it was damn hot but I had a bit of a breeze in my face and I listened to a compilation of Quebec hip-hop tracks that got my head bobbing. I got a ticket and five minutes later (just enough time to freshen up and change my t-shirt) I was on a Shanghai-bound bullet train. I got a rent-a-bike to my hostel and then rode to meet my friend about 7 km west through the cute tree-lined streets of the former French Concession. Along the way I stopped at an ATM to withdraw cash, and left my card in the machine. Fuck!!! A hundred meters out, I had a bit of doubt, and when I looked in my wallet, it wasn’t there. I rushed back, there was an old man at the teller I used but he said the machine had already swallowed it. I checked my phone, where I receive notifications of transactions, and there was only the bit I just withdrew so at least there’s that. I’ll deal with it later, it will be a slight pain but for now better just enjoy my night out.

My friend told me to meet him at the Xujiahui intersection, one of the biggest and busiest in the city, with huge malls and thousands of pedestrians everywhere. I had to leave the rent-a-bike and cross the street by going through the underground subway station, and here he was, noticeable from far away due to being a blond-haired 6’6” Russian-Canadian guy. We met at the metal gig in Suzhou a few weeks back, hit it off, and when I told him about the rock show taking place tonight he said he’d tag along.

He chose that spot because he thought I was coming by subway and apologized for setting up such an inonvenient place to ride to, if he’d known I’d come by bike he’d have chosen another place. We walked the 45 minutes or so that separated us from the venue, stopping to get road beers along the way, and got there just as the first band of the night, a four-piece named Airsfx, started their set. It was some good dissonant rock n’ roll, and so were the other bands. I saw Ctrl Shift last month and again there was a teeny something missing, with only a bassist and drummer on stage and a pre-recorded guitar track, though they now have a singer who was there for the second half of the set. Still, it was groovy, catchy and heavy. Trash Panda brought some punk energy, a newer band formed with four expats whom I’ve seen in other bands, notably their Dave Grohl-lookalike bassist is fronting the Faux Fighters.

Between two sets I talked to a guy with an Expos cap, I asked him in French if he’s from Montreal but he’s an American guy who lived there for 10 years and only picked up broken French. Still, we talked about that amazing city and its old baseball team for a bit. My Russian homie had left at that point to go open the door for his roommate who forgot his key, and I left after a few songs by the closing band Cloud Mirror, not that they were bad, but I was damn hungry. I checked the Didi app (Chinese Uber), I’m the 72^nd in line. I guess I’ll just take a rent-a-bike then.

I stopped at the complex of bars and restaurants to get pizza slices and Brazilian pão de queijo to go, but there was a fucking line-up to get in. A relic of those anti-covid policies, or one of those dogshit “let’s make the peasants line up outside to show how hip and cool we are” retarded things that nightlife venues do, not sure, either way I bolted immediately. I went to a Chinese restaurant by the hostel, ate stewed chicken and stir-fried julienned potatoes with a cold beer and crashed.

Chapter 161

I woke up around 6:30 and slowly started my day listening to some good hip-hop from the Boot Camp Clik, a collective of rappers from NYC. Then I rode to work. Jocko Willink received a pilot of his podcast, he was a member of Top Gun, I thought this was just the cool name for the slightly homoerotic movie from the 80s but no, there’s really an elite Navy flight school called Top Gun. The US military is crazy, even their navy has a bigger air fleet than most countries’ air force. I sometimes wonder what the hell I’d be doing if I wasn’t institutionalized in this expat life, if I had stayed in Quebec I probably would have gone for a military career. Not as a pilot though; I’m a useless colorblind derp.

The Metal Minded podcast was scheduled to start at 9, with four album reviews. I listened to one track from each album, and none of them tickled my ballsack. Yolin and Taï also weren’t overly impressed by neither. Another guy on the Facebook group gave a good review of a Canadian band named Goreworm and I gave it a spin (or, well, a YouTube click), it’s tech death, and you know how I feel about tech death. That one was a bit more enjoyable than your average riff salad though, with plenty of melodic death metal elements that made it catchier.

I went home and made spaghetti carbonara with added sausages cut in slices. I watched Clown World news, StyxHexenHammer666 had a short commentary video titled “Corporations Are Right to Exploit Idiots with Wokeness Campaigns”, and he’s 100% right. That whole shit about changing your logo for something with a gay pride rainbow has fuckall to do with anything other than virtue-signaling for a cheap cash grab. Few things are funnier and more telling than seeing all those multinational companies changing their logos for the US, European, Canadian, Australian, etc. market but not a single word about LGBT month on their Middle Eastern or Chinese social media pages.

Speaking of the rainbow flag, the Lotus Eaters had a segment about all the add-ons some activists are making, like adding light blue and light pink for transgender people, and a black and a brown stripe for ethnic minorities. I thought the whole point of the rainbow flag was to symbolize the whole spectrum, not that each of the six colored stripes were explicitly about a certain group of people! Now it’s just becoming an endless race of “my flag is more inclusive than yours” and it’s a bit stupid.

I have a small gay flag at home, that I strung along the other flags I’ve collected from my travels. I got it at a previous school I taught at, when one class of students paraded with them at the opening ceremony of sports’ day to celebrate their openly gay homeroom teacher. I thought it was cool in that context, but all the zillions of pride flags you see now in the west just make me cringe, because there’s no substance to it. Rainbow flags in China represent progress, rainbow flags in European or North American countries represent, well, nothing at this point.

Of course I’ve never walked in a gay man’s shoes but from what I’ve observed, China is not super homophobic, at least not compared to Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East and other hotbeds of tolerance. But it’s also clearly not accepting of homosexuality the same way that western countries are, and it stems more from a traditional family oriented “Oh no, my son is gay?! Goddamnit he’s my only child, who’s gonna give me grandchildren then?!?!” point of view than some religious or hateful position. As time goes on, the erosion of those Cuntfucian rigid family values and the embrace of modernity does come with negative aspects, but it will also make life a bit easier for my gay and lesbian friends.

I walked the dog, and when I released him in the park, he ran around for a bit and then ate a dog turd. I scolded him, brushed his teeth when we got home, and locked him in prison for the afternoon. I got back to the office and applied myself at the tedious task of writing recom letters. I had ten to do and wanted to finish the whole thing. Of course there’s a bit of copy-pasting and template using involved, but still it has to be adapted to each student. Some are highly achieving and it’s easy to give them praise, and for the less highly achieving ones, I talked about improvement and effort n’ shit.

I was fueled with pu-er tea and music I blindly clicked on a grindcore Facebook group. Some was good, some was unlistenable shit recorded with a potato. The short and fast nature of the genre made me rifle through a lot of albums and EPs, I can’t remember every single one of them, but one that stood out was Swedish crust punk band Ursut, that sounded exactly like every Swedish crust punk band ever, and that’s a sound I can enjoy once in a while.

I got home, released the dog from his cell, and he was all excited and looked at his leash with his tail wagging. As we were heading out, two things happened simultaneously: it started raining, and the girlfriend came back from work. So we retreated indoors. She took a nap before going to her Chinese chess class, I watched videos about military history and the upcoming UFC event. Later I made soup with chicken broth, bacon, sausages, sliced garlic, tons of paprika, and cubed bread. A Spanish recipe, I think, I saw it online somewhere. I also pan-seared a steak. A lazy night with a few nice beers.

Chapter 160

Up at 6:20, half an hour of yoga with the dog poking me with his triangle face. I rode the short distance to work and went to the eleventh-grade classroom I was supposed to babysit. The students were not there, so I went to the math teachers office next door and asked them if they know anything. The students were at a meeting in the auditorium apparently, so I stuck around a bit chatting with my Ugandan coworker. Uganda was my favorite country of the 7-week trip I took to East Africa in 2013, maybe because of its intrinsic great qualities or because it was the last one so I was used to how things work in that part of the world, either way I have fond memories of my time there and often talk about Uganda with him.

Then I got to the office and finished the 6-hour, 20-band grindcore festival. It was great, ending strongly with three back-to-back Brazilian bands, but my brain was fried and saturated after that so I looked for something a bit more mellow to rinse my ears with. I settled on an album by a French DJ who goes by Degiheugi, some nice groovy hip-hop-inspired electronic music, that’s the kind of music to listen to in summertime with a large fruity cocktail in hand.

Just before lunch, I had a call from one of my good friends, he’s been stuck stateside since the beginning of the covid outbreak and is hopefully coming back to China soon. He’s the guy who got me in capoeira back in the day, the leader of our group, and now he told me some pretty disturbing news about the world surrounding this Brazilian martial arts we all love. Some #metoo-style reports emerged in Brazil about instructors and high-level mestres abusing their position and doing some pretty heinous pedo shit, the whole thing is under investigation and will likely splash the small niche world of capoeira with all sorts of negative coverage, even people who are clean as morning snow. He told me to keep that in mind for when I go to the annual batizado in Beijing a few weeks from now, the Chinese authorities are unlikely to put us under higher scrutiny but people might be on edge and one should watch his mouth and not make comments that could stir the pot. Not as if I’m known for dark humor and awkward comments, but as much as I will joke about pretty much anything, pedo stuff is not something I find funny the slightest. Still, it’s good to know, and also the whole situation is fucked up and saddening.

I had a shortened lunch break so I didn’t have time to do the calisthenics routine, I just banged a few sets of chin-ups and ate whatever was in the kitchen: a cream cheese plain bagel, a chicken soft taco, and the rest of the watermelon. Then I rode back to school and invigilated the first part of an exam.

In the afternoon I listened to the Lotus Eaters podcast and wrote letters of recommendation. I have fifteen more to do, it’s extremely boring but I want to finish it before the end of the week.

I went home and took the dog out for a little circuit, then took a nap before heading to BJJ practice. It was stupid hot, and my thick gi was soaked with sweat. I rolled with one of the newly minted blue belts, a stocky Chinese guy who usually smashes me, but he was so exhausted from his previous rounds that he couldn’t mount much of an offense and I got him with a kimura from guard, there’s no way I’d have tapped him if he was fresh, even if I’m getting a bit better.

Afterwards I didn’t go home, I went straight to a bar for a little get together with coworkers, the Croatian physics teacher is moving to another city soon so he invited us for a going away party of sorts. The bar has a wide selection of craft beers, I picked a Great White from Lost Coast that I downed quickly, thirsty as I was, and then a thick and boozy imperial stout from Reservoir Dogs brewery in Slovenia. I also ordered some fried chicken and it hit the spot.

We stayed there till about 11 PM and then I rode home, took a cold shower and crawled into bed.

Chapter 159

Woke up at 7:30, after falling asleep late and waking up through the night. Insomnia sucks shit. I only had time to brush my teeth and get dressed.

First thing was a short one-on-one meeting with the principal, to debrief and discuss how the academic year had been. I’d say it was a good one overall, I’m mostly satisfied with all levels of the pyramid: students, coworkers, support staff/facilities, administration, and corporate over in Shanghai.

Then I sat in the office for a bit, browsing the internet and writing. I listened to an excellent grindcore album by Finnish band Feastem, and then a friend sent me a link to a 6-hour video of a virtual grindcore festival. I listened to three quarters of it through the day, some of the bands were so-so but most were on point. The only one I’d seen live before was Final Exit, a duet from Japan playing some extremely weird noise grind, they’d start a little jazzy or old rock n’ roll beat and then immediately switch to blast beats and cacophonic distortion for a few seconds. Just before them was an American band named Fed Ash who was using noise samples in a much different way, to emphasize the bleakness and post-industrial apocalpytic nature of their music, complete with visuals of rust belt factories and a heavy VHS filter. Other bands had a much more straightforward grindcore or powerviolence approach, with no gimmick, no dress code and no fucking around, letting their music do the talking.

At lunch I had a bagel with cream cheese, bacon, and I ate out of a half watermelon with a spoon. I watched Clown World news, a Yale professor of Indian descent went on a weird, psychotic and extremely racist rant, talking about how she can’t interact with white people without wanting to shoot them, which she sees as what would be a service to society. There were so many quotables in there that made you go “Calm down there, Pol Pot!” and it wasn’t out of a drunken conversation recorded without her knowledge, it was in a university speech. She also said that no white person is redeemable, and that people of color are gaslit into believing they are crazy for getting angry at the constant barrage of racism they face. I’d say it’s more the opposite happening, anyone taking offense to dogshit like that shit she spews (and moreover seeing it promoted at high levels of academia) is told they are expressing “white fragility”. As if you’d have to be white, or have any sort of racial allegiance to think it’s horrible. I say fuck that cunt. If she said anything like that against blacks or Asians or Latinos or Indians or whomthefuckever I'd find it just as reprehensible. At least the one part of the story that shows that perhaps we’re not in Full Clown World yet is Yale University reprimanding her for being such a psychotic bigot. It’s mostly a slap on the wrist, but hey.

After an uneventful afternoon, I got home and made chicken broth. We keep all our bones and leftover bits of carcass in a bag in the freezer, and once in a while I throw it all in a pot with onions, carrots, celery, garlic and whatever other aromatics I have around. I opened a German beer and watched the Logan Paul vs Floyd Mayweather boxing match. It was very stupid. The announcers and commentators were the usual A-team for Showtime Pay-Per-Views and they were discussing it as if it was a legit main event, I wonder how much of it they believed themselves.

The eight rounds ended without as much as a knockdown, and being an exhibition, no winner was announced. Mayweather obviously outboxed his foe but Paul had likely an even bigger claim to the moral victory, having survived eight rounds as a 0-1 amateur against an undefeated boxing legend, albeit one who was 50 pounds lighter and coming out of retirement in his mid-forties. I checked what people on Reddit had to say, of course they were mad at the shitshow, but I disagree with the idea that Mayweather took it easy, he seemed to be going pretty hard especially in the latter rounds but the YouTube vlogger was tough, much bigger, and likely better than anyone anticipated. I also don’t really agree with those who say “it’s an insult to boxing”, it’s not as if exhibition matches against NFL players or actors or wrestlers or whatever haven’t been a staple of the sport since the 1800s. Either way both men made millions of dollars and are currently laughing on their way to the bank.

I cleansed my palate with the last UFC card. The fights on the beginning of the main card were pretty good, then Santiago Ponzinibbio and Michael Baeza stole the show with a blood n’ guts brawl. For dinner I marinated chicken cubes, cooked them in the pan, and rolled them in a tortilla with cheese, nacho crumbs, lettuce, sour cream and salsa. I made the salsa by adding diced onions, lemon juice, cilantro and hot peppers to the blended tomato, garlic and basil mix I made for the bruschetta a few days ago, and the basil taste was overpowering. Not that it was bad, it was delicious and got me rubbing my beer belly with satisfaction, just that it was a bit strange and outside the realm of normal Tex-Mex flavors.

I went to bed early and read the intro to Andy Ngo’s book about antifa before crashing. Four more days before freedom.

Chapter 158

I woke up at 6, started my day slowly and did half an hour of yoga. I rode to work, listening to Jocko Willink telling me to GET AFTER IT. Despite being a discipline machine and a proponent of constant self-improvement, he also has a good sense of humor, and is aware of all the memes about him. He was reading some of the funny comments about the white tea he sells on his website, like “Since my wife started drinking Jocko tea, her deadlift has improved to 1200 pounds” and “Our fire station has purchased hundreds of gallons of Jocko tea, since it’s three times more wet than water, it extinguishes fires much better”.

I had three classes with eleventh-graders in the morning but let them study for their economics exam that was taking place at noon. So I sat there, writing my diary, listening to kickass music, and once in a while answering a question. The last chemistry exam is tomorrow, and some students came to me through the day, whether I was in the classroom or in the office.

I listened to live sets by grindcore bands Convulsions and Ona Snop, and then, following what YouTube suggested me, a classic album by shrieking grindcore outfit Discordance Axis and a split by Excruciating Terror and Agathocles. I love grindcore and am clearly in a phase where I listen to a lot of the stuff, but then I felt like something different and put on a black metal album on a blind click. It was by a Norwegian band called Djevel, in a melodic/epic vein, and it didn’t disappoint. I rounded up my day with a Sacramentum album, a Swedish black metal with melodic death metal elements that sounded like a carbon copy of Dissection.

In fact now would be as good of a time as any to comment positively on something about China that’s been good recently. I like China and my life here but at times perhaps I can sound negative, since when things go well, you either don’t notice it or don’t feel like taling about it, while if something bad happens, it impacts you. One thing that’s been frustrating me to no end in the past is the restricted internet and how it can turn into an unusable crock of dogshit at times. Even with VPNs, there would be crackdowns that would mean days without internet access. It usually happens when there’s a political event, or if the Powers-That-Be are scared that their proletariate will disseminate information of a certain nature, and it’s been a fixture of early June periods in the past few years, as we get to the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square events. Well, knock on wood, but the internet has been behaving recently and not acting like a drooling derping retard, so there’s that.

Halfway through my day I went home and did the calisthenics routine, sweating buckets in the heat. I listened to Clown World news, migrants arriving in the UK used to be placed in military barracks but they were complaining, rioting, burning down buildings, and now they’re placed in hotels. It seems to me that if I were a refugee fleeing a war zone and awaiting asylum, I’d be happy with whatever they give me, but as anyone with half a brain knows, calling those people refugees is a complete lie. Who can blame them for gaming a system that’s so dead easy to game?

In the afternoon I wrote a story for my French travel blog, about my visit to Egypt in 2013. It was right during the Arab Spring protests, so I had the pyramids nearly for myself and then, after being told I shouldn’t have any problems with my personal safety, I went to Tahrir Square among the protestors. It was quite surreal. I got carried away and the whole text ended up being over 3500 words. It can be found here: https://quesstuvascrisserla.com/2021/06/08/tahrir/

I got home, took a nap and then went to train BJJ. A good time was had by all. After three rounds of rolling I was completely drained, but after a bit of rest and some Gatorade I walked over to the ring where guys were sparring. I got in and people were hesitating, I don’t know if they see me as the big bad evil foreigner but eventually a young guy came in and we got a few licks in and then another one. Even though we didn’t go that hard and I don’t remember getting hit in the face that much, I had a sore jaw after. Boxing is fun but I don’t want to spar more than once a month or so.

On the way home I detoured to the ATM to get cash and then to a bakery. I bought bagels and slices of cake, the girlfriend has her monthly stomach pains and some chocolate cake would get her morale back up. I showered, did laundry, ate a cream cheese bagel and a sausage and R n’ S leftovers and watched a short documentary on a 1972 music festival that ended up in absolute disaster, it was quite interesting. Then I went to bed and finished the novel Haute Démolition by J-P Baril-Guérard, all of his four novels were pretty damn good.

Chapter 157

Again, I slept in, and lazily finished the morning cuddling with the girlfriend on the couch watching episodes of Love Death & Robots and videos about overland travel from the channel The Road Chose Me, eating watermelon and cherries. At around 12:30 I rode to a university campus a bit out of the city, where there was a soccer game. It was a mixed crew of kids from the college team, Korean expats, as well as my homies from Ghana, Mexico and the USA. Since I had a blue t-shirt on, I played for the Korean team, and they kept making calls in their strange language. Some of it I could understand, being an American puppet state (like Japan) they adopted a lot of English words, like “midupirdu” for “midfield”. It was stupid hot, I was covered in grimy sweat and my feet were steaming like xiaolongbaos in my cleats, but it was a good way to spend the early afternoon.

I rode back home, was damn glad the girlfriend had turned the AC on, and took a cold shower. I drank a Leffe, now that’s a beer I used to consume in large amounts but haven’t in a while.

Not long after, I went out again, one of the grade 12 classes invited me to their graduation dinner. I wanted to bring the dog so he’d get his day’s worth of exercise but the skin on his front paws is peeling and he didn’t want to go outside. He seems OK to walk and even run around on his own but gets aggressive if we’re about to touch the torn skin.

Dinner was in one of those run-of-the-mill banquet halls accommodating hundreds of people at once and serving set menus of mediocre food, but it was quite pleasant. One of the students gave a little speech (in English?!) and then the meal started, cake was inexplicably served right in the middle of it. I sat at the teachers’ table and had a few nice conversations. My Srilankan coworker is an audiophile and generally a big fan of electronic gadgets, he told me that once you invest in a good pair of headphones you can’t use subpar ones anymore. I was always a bit scared of paying a significant sum of cash for headphones, but with how much music I listen to perhaps I should take the plunge.

The students toasted us, I’ve been teaching them ever since they got in the school three years ago (incidentally the same time I started teaching here). Seeing them grow from children to adults is one of the nicest parts of the job, and as cheesy as it sounds, I’m glad I was alongside them during that time. They’re good kids, I wish them well.

Chapter 156

I slept till 11, it was glorious. The girlfriend was eating some of my reheated chicken and rice cake casserole and I got a few bites, then I went outside with the dog. We rode to a park equiped with gymnastics bars, but it’s also unfortunately equiped with an expropriated cabbage farmer wearing a ill-fitting dirty uniform who immediately descended upon me to express with brusque gestures and monosyllabic “Uh! Uh! Uh!” sounds that dogs are not allowed in the park. As we walked away, I could hear him panting and moaning with excitement from flexing his little speck of authority.

So I went to another park, and exercised while a young girl played with the dog. We had a simple conversation, in her sing-song baby talk she told me she likes dogs, and has two at home. She approached the dog correctly, by presenting her hand and then petting him gently starting under the ears, unlike a lot of Chinese kids who are either petrified with fear or roughly coming over their heads, so I let them play, watching in the corner of my eye while I did my pullups and other moves. Then her grandma came and scolded her for touching a dog, washing her hands with the contents of a water bottle, not withstanding that she and the other kids in the park were being their usual selves getting their hands covered in dirt. That’s another paradox in Chinese culture that puzzles me, how they can be extremely nitpicky for some aspects of cleanliness (not sitting on a couch with clothing worn outdoors, washing seemingly clean plates before using them) but negligent for others (chucking garbage everywhere, never brushing their teeth). And don’t get me started on the bizarre superstitions they have regarding female hygiene and childbirth.

I rode home, stopping at a small supermarket to buy food. I drank a protein slurry, and went back out to run some errands. I returned the inflatable mattress I bought yesterday, it’s 200 cm long, which is too long for our tent. I also went to a glasses shop and placed an order for a pair of sunglasses. I’m still limited in what I can say in Chinese, I don’t know the word for “prescription” or even “sunglasses” for that matter (I just said “black glasses”) but made myself understood somehow. And the price was fair, much lower than what Uncle Scumbag quoted me yesterday. I took a little part of my afternoon, but it was fine, the weather was nice and most of the distance was on cycling paths among greenery and beside canals.

I relaxed a bit and then got in the kitchen. The girlfriend was hosting some of her coworkers and grade-12 students and I got asked to cook for them, I made roast chicken with lemongrass, mashed potatoes, bruschetta, deviled eggs and also served the hummus I made a few days ago. First I was listening to Mule Skinner, a kickass grindcore band I’d never heard of before, and just as their album ended they all came in, so they didn’t have to be subjected to that blasting and shrieking. They all sat in the living room and watched some British TV show with subtitles, before we sat at the dinner table and ate our feast. Good wholesome fun.

Then we watched the rest of the British TV show and they left. I poured myself a double white Russian and watched Dark Side Of The Ring while the girlfriend did the dishes. It was about Jake The Snake’s father Grizzly Smith, who was quite a heinous scumfuck and caused a lot of trauma in his children.

I went to bed fairly early and read a bit. I briefly, briefly considered going to the bar but mehhhed.

Chapter 155

I woke up at 7 and got to work. I sat in the office drinking white tea and browsing random shit on the internet. Dödsrit just released an album and I eagerly listened to it, I really enjoyed their furious mix of crust and black metal on their previous releases, but the new one is in much more of a melodic black metal vein. Still some decent stuff, I’ll have to relisten to it to form an opinion.

I had three classes with the eleventh-graders, going through some old organic chemistry multiple choice questions for their exam next Tuesday. One student from the weaker class had a stuffed llama or alpaca on his desk. He saw me staring at it while I got my stuff on the front desk. “Teacher! Look! It’s a caonima!” I talked about one of the “what are the goddamn chances?!” particularities of the Chinese language a few days ago, how they say “nigga, nigga, nigganigganigga” instead of “hmmmmm”, well the word for llama sounds the exact same as fuck your mother, which is why it’s a quite popular animal here even though it’s indigenous to South America, more than 15 000 km away.

The classes went well, and when lunch break rolled around, it meant I was pretty much officially done for the school year. Sure, I have to show up next week, but no more classes. I somehow didn’t feel as excited as I should, in the face of this near three-month vacation. I was more excited at the idea of eating my lunch and breaking my intermittent fast. I got home, heated a leftover chicken burger the girlfriend brought home yesterday, that I pimped out with an extra thick tomato slice, hot sauce and sauerkraut. I also ate a scotch egg that I got from the lady who bakes and delivers pies, scotch eggs are delicious, a good protein and fat bomb.

In the afternoon, I was pretty much free to sit at my cubicle and do whatever I wanted. Looking for new music, I listened to Choroba, a German black metal band that was pretty good but also had clean vocals that turned me off a bit, the second time the whiny high-pitched vocals came in I NOPED hard and turned it off. I then decided to relisten to albums I recently discovered and liked, or check out other albums from these bands. First I put on an album by Lectern, an Italian death metal band I listened to last week. It’s really, really good, they have a track called Fluent Bilocation that has got to be one of the catchiest I’ve heard in a long time. Then on my quest to explore Inhumate’s discography, I played their album Growth, and it was some awesome deathgrind, I really wonder why those Frenchies never hit my radar. Too many good bands out there. I rounded up my afternoon by listening to Cranial Obsession by Anatomia, the Japanese doom/death band with a tortured, slow, crushing bass-heavy sound.

I got home, made a huge gin-tonic, and relaxed for a bit. Not that it had been a stressful week by any means. I cleaned the apartment a bit, with the Clown World news on the TV. Investigative journalist Andy Ngo got attacked by communist agitators in Portland again, the footage was a bit disturbing. Those antifas are really scummy. I looked at the time, not even 6 PM yet, I couldn’t stay indoors all night, and there was no BJJ practice on this Friday. I hopped on my bicycle and went to run errands, nothing really pressing, but might as well do it now. I went to a glasses shop to enquire about prescription sunglasses, after trying a few pairs I asked the old guy how much it costs. He hesitated for a time, before writing 350 yuan on a paper. I frowned, as I expected less. He then scratched it and wrote 320. Without a word, I walked out, and he followed me, saying “I can go cheaper!” Well that’s the whole goddamn point you old twat, why did you quote me this scammy price to begin with? I hate haggling, I fucking hate it. Some of my fellow aficionados of third-world travel enjoy it and see it as a fun game that is part of the local cultures, well, I hate them too. I don’t miss this at all and am damn glad it’s not something I need to deal with often in China, in the 2021 incarnation of China at least.

Then I rode to Decathlon and got an air mattress for our summer road trip. There was a price tag on it, and on every single item in the store, which means you don’t have to deal with scumbag touts trying to extract as much money from you as possible by quoting you prices based on your ethnicity and how much of a retarded naive sucker you look. Decathlon is right by Metro, we don’t really need imported groceries for the time being, but what does need mean anyway?! Only then did I realize I didn’t bring a fayssah mursk, and the store still clings on that dumbest of policies. A fat lady outside the entrance told me to put one on, then one stationed between the outer and inner automatic doors, and three at the front counter, simultaneously waving their hands at me as I walked briskly past, ignoring them. The store was mostly empty and more than half the customers and employees didn’t have their face diapers on anyway. I got a bunch of beer and snacks and cold cuts of meat then rode the 5 km or so home. I listened to an album by François Pérusse, a cult and prolific and lethally funny Quebec skit comedian.

I made it home, and cooked dinner based on a Korean recipe I saw earlier during the day. I took the chicken breast cubes I had been marinating in a garlic, ginger, hot pepper and honey sauce for the past few hours, browned them, added rice cakes, and finished it in the oven with a layer of mozzarella cheese. It was kickass. I spent the rest of the evening watching various YouTube videos about interests of mine, whether music, jiu-jitsu, military history, politics, whatever.

Chapter 154

I got up at 6 on the dot and slowly started my day. There’s a British dubstep playlist that’s been on a browser tab for a few days now, that I put on when I’m at home and don’t want to put on some gargling blasting metal to anger the girlfriend. I did yoga for half an hour, washed my face, brushed my teeth and went to work.

I only had one class in the morning and it must have been going well, as I don’t remember a single thing about it aside from a very vague recollection of having been there and seeing what I wrote in my teaching log. Well, I say “teaching log”, it’s more of a loose sheet of paper where I record what I did in class so I know where to pick up next.

The live Metal Minded podcast was about to start, they were reviewing an album by Inhumate and I checked out a few tracks, it’s some truly superb deathgrind straight outta France. This seventh album is their last, I’ll have to check them all out, no idea how they flew under my radar like that. Another album they reviewed was by Impaled Nazarene, a well-known Finnish black metal band with a punky attitude, I had listened to it a few days ago and found it enjoyable but unmemorable, like all their other releases. Their highest recommended album of the week was by Stormruler, so after the podcast ended I checked it out, I couldn’t find the album for free online but there was a well-recorded 30-minute live set and it was indeed some excellent Swedish-style black metal.

I got shrimp noodles at a local eatery and went home for lunch. I watched Clown World news, it’s now Gay Pride Month and plenty of corporations are virtue-signaling by telling us how down they are with the LGBT folks and all that shit, though they are ruthless and exploitative money-making organizations who don’t see any issue with employing third-world indentured slave labor, interfering with politics and making business deals with backwards countries where gays are thrown off rooftops. Classic shit. I also saw in my recommendations a short animated documentary about the Battle Of Mogadishu, that happened in 1993 and inspired the movie Black Hawk Down. It made me realize I’d never seen the movie, so I told myself I’d watch it at night.

I took the dog out for a walk and rode back to the office. I spent the afternoon browsing random corners of the internet, I was so bored out of my mind that I downloaded the IBJJF (International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation) rule book and read it from cover to cover, a 50-page PDF. Then I drew a comic, scanned it, edited it, and put it online at https://laowaicomics.tumblr.com/. I had a decent following during the two- or three-year period I was publishing this webcomic, getting quite a bit of fan mail and offers of syndication on China-related blogs (as well as a few haters, of course) but it’s been dormant for a while, I’m mostly retired as a cartoonist but will draw one a year when I have an idea I can’t just let go. This one points the rather confusing paradox of Chinese people being scared of small dogs but stepping out of the footpath in national parks to go photograph large herbivorous but potentially dangerous animals. The internet is chock full of videos of idiotic Chinese tourists in Yellowstone or whatever disregarding instructions and common sense to go take a selfie with a moose or elk. Sadly, few of them involve serious bodily harm.

I listened to a bit more music, including the album Inhumane Minimalism by Greek black metal band Human Serpent. Man, even in a week filled with great underground music, this one rose even higher than others, and I listened to it twice. I then checked out a Russian band called Lethality, two years ago some Russian metalhead in Shanghai just gave me their t-shirt and for the longest time I didn’t even know which band it was, with their illegible logo. They only have released one short EP before disbanding, and as expected it is some ridiculously brutal death metal.

On my way out, I saw there were tables set up for some kind of university recruitment fair. Various American, British and Canadian colleges had a little kiosk, with monolingual Chinese brochures, hustling hard to get a prime spot to suckle on the golden cash cow. Rumors (and a good guesstimate) say that the whole market of rich Chinese exchange students will eventually dry up, as their rich Chinese daddies start wondering if it really comes with a high enough ROI and also as Covid is scaring people from going abroad, in which case, my job would be doomed. Ah well, what can I do but ride it until the wheels fall off? 

I went home, drank pre-workout and did my calisthenics routine. My legs were afflicted with a crippling case of DOMS after Tuesday’s pistol squats and a three-year-old kid punching me on the thigh would have made me cry like a little bitch, so I took it easy on the legs and just did some normal bodyweight squats as opposed to holding a big kettlebell like usual. After showering, I wanted to kick back, eat and watch Black Hawk Down, but the torrent file I had downloaded was an .exe and likely a dangerous virus, so I had to download another one. In the meantime I watched a documentary on Broadmoor, a psychiatric prison in England. Some of the inmates seemed nice enough when on their meds but they are one tiny chemical imbalance away from murdering you with a hammer, and then the craziest ones couldn’t even appear on camera as they are too dangerous and too kookoo to give informed consent.

Then I watched Black Hawk Down. It was cool as shit, the kind of war movie where it’s a shootout from beginning to end. I am very, very, very nitpicky and critical of a lot of movies and all the tired clichés and unrealistic shit they throw in but this one was pretty well done for the most part and didn’t peeve the fuck out of me like a lot of war movies do. I noticed though that all the “Somalis” didn’t look like Somalis at all, I didn’t go to Somalia but I went to Kenya years ago, home to a large Somali population, and they have a very distinct look that I’d describe as halfway between sub-Saharan African and Arabic, while the actors and extras in the movie were not like that. Wikipedia told me there weren’t any Somalis employed for the movie, not sure why, perhaps because they’re not really portrayed in the best light. There was also a bit of controversy coming from Malaysia and Pakistan, both countries with a UN peacekeeping force on the ground who actively took part in the battle and felt they were underrepresented in the movie.

The girlfriend was at her Chinese chess class and I was getting ready to go ride the longboard with the dog to go meet her as it ends, but it was raining so I stayed in and waited for her. Thus ended my day.

Chapter 153

 Another day another dollar. I woke up at 7 and didn’t have time for yoga, ah well. So I went to school, I had two classes with the eleventh-graders in the morning, giving them organic chemistry review. They were the only two 40-minute sessions on my schedule today, and it still counts as a pretty busy day, as we’re on the last mile before the summer vacation and most of my days are spent doing very little.

I listened to the Lotus Eaters podcast, one piece of news they covered was WWE wrestler turned actor John Cena apologizing to China after calling Taiwan a country. I knew John Cena can speak basic Chinese, I remember seeing an ad he made for Laoganma chili paste and thinking he’s seriously not bad, much better than Zuckerberg and other celebrity retards who think they can speak Chinese, so I’d have thought he’d know how to avoid such a blunder in the first place if he wants to keep getting all the China bucks. So yeah, it was a pretty pathetic grovelling apology and he got slammed by the whole political spectrum for that.

Regardless how you feel about China, it’s fair to say that they are the main geopolitical competitor to western superpower status (I thought about writing “enemy” but it’s a bit strong, for the time being) and all this pandering just empowers them and feel them entitled for more and more and more. Give an inch, take a mile, all that shit. The same can be said about the islamists in western countries who constantly have the “infidels” kneel in front of them and submit to their unreasonable demands. I don’t really read Chinese news, whether in English or Chinese, but am a bit curious regarding how they feel about this John Cena story. I assume it is a sense of smug superiority from the politicized ones, and condescending mild amusement at seeing that big bumbling white guy mumble some broken Chinese phrases about how much he loves and respects China.

I went to the small market to buy vegetables, it smelled a bit bad in there. They don’t have the strongest hygiene and the refrigeration in the meat section is piss poor, so the warmer the weather the more it reeks. I still buy my stuff there because it’s convenient, and frankly that’s what mankind has been doing for 99% of its existence. I got home and made a big batch of hummus, that I ate with carrot sticks, tortilla bread and Italian cold cuts.

In the afternoon there was some kind of talent show at the school’s auditorium. A physics teacher acted as MC, and not a single English sentence was uttered. God forbid the grade 10 and grade 11 students learn any English aside from the bare minimum rote memorized in order to tick the correct boxes on the exam, some onlookers might think we’re an international school program or something. People got on stage and did a presentation about what they did in the extracurriculars clubs, the skateboarding club I used to supervise kinda dissolved when the cold weather came, and later in springtime the students were too busy cramming for their exams so we were not part of the show. The Japanese culture club did a slideshow about the matcha tea ceremony they organized, the music club did a little concert, and the baking club presented a video. It was narrated by a student who used the grating “laowai accent” that they find so funny and that I understandably hate to no extent, a kind of toneless goofy intentional mispronunciation that I see as a huge microaggression when used in my presence. I should start speaking some broken Chinglish. Then it was the dance club. It’s a bit creepy and unsettling to have my students, whom I see as androgynous asexual beings, cake themselves in makeup and show legs and midriff and gyrate to K-pop like that, but hey, they’re teenage girls, that’s what they like. It’s good that they dedicate time to something physical and that requires a lot of practice, but it’s not for me at all.

I got home and took a nap, waking up in the middle of deep REM sleep that had me feel like I was walking through gelatin. I splashed cold water on my face and got my stuff ready to go to BJJ practice, listening to an album by Suicidal Tendencies along the way. The vocals are a bit grating, but their punky thrash metal is excellent and got me all pumped for a session of simulated killing in a padded room with my buddies. We drilled a few sweeps and guard passes, and then started sparring. My fellow spazzy white belt/gym nemesis had a few nice clumsy scrambles and I started locking a guillotine from three-quarter mount, he bucked his hips but I held on his neck with both hands, which got me landing on the side of my head and twist my neck awkwardly. I freed my leg, grabbed my own collar with the guillotining arm and bent my back upwards, and got the tap. Then we reset, he swept me and got my back, I tried to crawl backwards through the backdoor but he moved his legs and secured the hooks. We’re both improving at a similar rate and moves that used to work on one another are now countered.

The bell rang and immediately the pain set in my twisted neck. “You got the tap though! That’s the most important thing!”, the Italian blue belt joked. But if I were to do it again, I’d release my right arm to protect myself, even if this means losing the submission, so that I’d live to fight another round rather than sit out and suffer.

I got back home and the girlfriend proposed we go walk the dog. I was tired and sore and hungry but I went along, we walked to a drug store and got some topical medicine for muscle pain, the kind of Chinese medicine that smells like Jagermeister. I asked the pharmacist if they have some zinc supplements, she gave me a box with cartoon drawings on it.

“Why did you get this?”, the girlfriend asked.

“I’m out of zinc capsules, it’s a good supplement for men my age”

“But it says it’s for children who are growing too slow!”

After walking back and taking a shower, we applied the medicine, a giant sticker on the side of my neck. I opened a homebrew, made some curry with steak and leftovers from the Indian restaurant, and got the hummus from the fridge. I watched YouTube videos about wrassling and criminal psychology and called it a night. I got to bed, read a chapter from the newest J-P Baril-Guérard novel and passed out. Good night y’all.

Chapter 152

I woke up at 7 and went outside with the dog to stretch and do a bit of tai chi. I was listening to Ryan Long’s Boyscast, it’s been a while, for some reason I thought he had stopped but I was looking at a YouTube channel that wasn’t uploading them anymore. He was as hilarious and astute as ever, though the topics were a bit dated (the episode was from January and the main things on the news were Biden’s inauguration and the Gamestop stocks).

I had an hour in the office before the day really started, I wrote my diary while listening to a new album shared by a friend on Facebook, United In Chaos by Summoning The Lich. I didn’t hate it completely but their Black Dahlia-style blend of tech death and deathcore is not my favorite subgenre by any means, so I don’t think I’ll relisten.

The lab exam was happening, a busy and somewhat stressful day for us chemistry teachers. I filled up bottles of chemicals for individual use, made sure every station had all the apparatus and chemicals for the exam, and supervised two two-hour sessions. It was tedious as hell at times but mostly went smoothly. There was liquid ammonia involved, which has one of the strongest and most pungent of smells, I had to be careful not to sniff it when I was refilling the small bottles, it feels like getting punched in the nose.

I went home and the dog was all excited, I didn’t have time to go home for lunch (I quickly ate a packed lunch just before the exams started) so I took him out. I thought I might as well do my calisthenics workout in a park, the way it’s meant to, so I rode my bicycle there, the dog happily running by my side. I did my pull-ups, pistol squats, hinges, dips, push-ups and rows using the bars in the cute riverside park. I had to adjust my routine to make up for the fact I didn’t have my kettlebells with me, which is why I did one-legged pistol squats, I forgot how hard that shit is. I’ll be sore tomorrow.

Halfway through the girlfriend came to meet us there. We went to eat at the roast fish restaurant, one of our favorites we hadn’t been to in a while, in fact it’s just about everyone’s favorite, and tends to have long line-ups on week-ends. I thought we’d be fine on a Tuesday night, but the place was full, and our waiting ticket said there were 16 parties in front of us. We couldn’t sit outside either, as it started raining. The weather sucks shit in this city, seems like it rains half of the time. We considered just eating elsewhere, but we both were craving the fish, so we just waited around. I got a beer from the neighboring craft brewery, that opened just last year, I remember finding it very mediocre the first time I went but now with my expectations very low I liked it for what it is, a decent enough white beer that is not bad value for how cheap it costs.

“Did you watch the news? Chinese couples can now have a third child”, the girlfriend asked me. The one-child policy was not without societal problems but it solved more issues than it caused, notably it stabilized the population while China crawled out of the abject third-world hole it was rotting in. Now that it’s a prosperous nation, they amended it to allow some exceptions, then everyone was allowed two kids, and now three, as they’re expanding their population to prepare for world domination. I for one welcome our new yellow overlords.

“Do you want to have three children then?”, I replied.

“Hell no! I don’t even want one”

After twenty minutes or so, we got let in and ushered to our table, and less than five minutes after we ordered, our fish dish was there with all the sides. It’s a very efficient operation, and the fish is seriously amazing.

We stopped at the pet shop to get a jumbo bag of dog food, that I lugged on my bicycle rack. It’s always a bit of a bittersweet experience going there, seeing all the incredibly cute puppies and kittens and bunnies looking all sad in their cages. There was a whole litter of kittens meowing at us, and the boss said we can have one for free if we want. The girlfriend was seriously considering it, but we have to be realistic, one dog is enough, especially since we want to travel and need to find dogsitters from time to time.

The rain intensified, so I just went ahead on my bike with the dog running at the end of his leash. The girlfriend followed on foot, with her umbrella, I didn’t have a raincoat on so she told me to just go to avoid catching a cold. I got home, gave the dog a shower and took a hot bath. I then relaxed a bit with a negroni and some random YouTube videos. Internet Comment Etiquette was lampooning the bathtub streamers on Twitch, the platform doesn’t allow pornography or nudity and only allows swimwear if it’s at a pool or a beach, so a bunch of female streamers are exploiting the loophole by putting kiddie pools in their living rooms or streaming from their bathrooms. The whole phenomenon is so strange to me, and I’m always wondering who the hell are those simps who donate money to random girls to watch them play video games or just sit around pretending to be interested in them.