Chapter 49

I read a chapter on the Norman conquest book in the morning. One of my absolute favorite historical characters makes his appearance: Harold Motherfucking Hardrada. An intimidating giant of a man (sources report he was seven feet tall, though it’s likely exaggerated), he lived a life filled with pure badassery, getting exiled out of Norway when he was fifteen, after getting wounded in a battle alongside his half-brother who wanted to reclaim the throne of Norway, and then spending time in the court of a distant Viking relative ruling present-day Ukraine. From there, he went to Constantinople, working as a mercenary for many years, which brought him to Sicily, Egypt, Anatolia and Mesopotamia, before going back to Norway, rich and with a fearsome reputation, winning the throne, and ruining Denmark’s shit in a series of crazy Viking-on-Viking sea battles. Then in 1066, just a few weeks before William’s invasion in the south, he brought an army to northern England but got defeated and killed. I hope they make a movie about him.

I listened to a lot of music today. First I caught the Metal Minded podcast, the boys reviewed four albums, one of them by Handsome Prick, a deathgrind outfit from Indiana. I liked their 2016 album, and when the livestream was over I listened to the new one and it was enjoyable as well, some tight modern death metal in the vein of Benighted but with a fun punk touch.

While the livestream was playing in the background, I compiled albums of Chinese heavy metal and put them on YouTube. Even though I listened to them countless times in the past, I still played two of them, the Underground NWOBHM Bands demo by Dinkumoil and the Sexy Big Butt EP by Tractor (a side-project from a Dinkumoil guy). They are both hella fun foot-tapping riff fests, too bad the vocalists are not up to par. It must have been quite hard to even put together a full band in China over 10 years ago when these were released, I tend to give some slack to bands from non-metal countries (without falling into the trap of the bigotry of low expectations). I also put together a little compilation of local bands I liked when I lived in the northern city of Jinan several years ago. All of these can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd8KGfOnqiqwlpVXylGh6yQ.

I listened to some more brutal stuff: Gatecreeper’s old-school death metal and Mass Extinction’s furious grindcore. Then I moved on to something a bit smoother with the positions 444 to 442 of the Top 500, occupied by Fiona Apple, David Bowie and The Weeknd. All three were okay but I haven’t got much to say about them.

In the afternoon, I took the dog out and he ate a dried up nugget of shit left by another four-legged resident of the area. I scolded him and brushed his teeth when we got home. I left soon after to go play badminton with two friends.

Along the way, I finished the podcast about La Vérendrye, a man nearly forgotten by history despite being one of the first Europeans to make it to the Rockies. Overall he didn’t play his cards very well. Despite being from noble lineage, he didn’t smooch with the other members of the French aristocracy, but wasn’t respected by his men either, who at times refused to follow him. His journeys to the west both had a commercial and exploratory goal to them, but he angered both the colonial administration and his financial backers who felt he was spending either too much or too little time trading beaver pelts/trying to find a road to the west. And he never managed to have the Algonquins and others truly see him as one of them, unlike many of his contemporaries, who learned their languages and went full-blown native.

My pals, a British BJJ training partner and his coworker from Montreal, haven’t played badminton much before but could hold their own. We played a few games in the quiet municipal gym, before it fills up at night. They’ve been in China for a while and can speak and read the language, we talked about the omnipresent propaganda banners, like those that lined up the walls of the gym. One said, paraphrasing, “If the people exercises, China is healthy”, one said “Do not forget why you show dedication, for the country’s prosperity and to bring happiness to the Chinese race” and the other was a list of the 12 Core Socialist Values.

Overall I don’t mind them, the message is more often than not a wholesome and positive one, even though of course the constant mention of the race (民族) feels a bit awkward for us and our multicultural upbringings. Patriotism is quite strong in China, unlike in the west where public displays of patriotism are seen as either ridiculous or problematic.

On the short ride home, the podcast finished, and alphabetically in my mp3 player, an album by Mgla came next. Mgla hails from Poland and is one of the most respected newer black metal bands, their albums are all absolutely great. I went to buy vegetables and I made a “leftover soup” when I got home. I browned some bacon, reserved it, added some chicken fat and oil from a sardine can to the bacon grease, fried some mirepoix (onions, carrots and celery) then added garlic, all sorts of spices and herbs, cabbage, broccoli, tomatoes, canned lentils, and leftover broths. I simmered it while writing this entry.

We ate the soup, watching an episode of The Office. Then I did a bit more reading online, with a vaporwave playlist. I like vaporwave quite a lot, with its relaxing yet sinister aesthetics and subtle criticism of the modern world. I finished my day with a yoga session, a 30-minute sequence on my friend’s YouTube channel, and then some reading in bed. Namaste.

Chapter 48

Up early in the morning to go on a short bicycle commute and get the Covid vaccine. Now that’s a bit of a controversial topic and a lot of people are skeptical about “an experimental drug created by pharmaceutical companies with no liability and a track record of greed, addiction creation, and environmental and social destruction for a disease which I'm 99.9% likely to survive even though being vaccinated won't stop me from getting sick, being infectious, allow me to travel or not wear a mask”, to quote a particularly eloquent friend of mine but that’s really not a hill I want to die on. I’ll get the damn jab and get it over with, I foresee a near future in which it will be mandatory to travel and work in certain sectors, like the yellow fever vaccination and others.

We had to line up in the cold outside a dedicated wing of the hospital, and once inside, it was pelvis-to-butt with a bunch of nurses shrieking. We had to put on masks of course. Still, after registering, signing paperwork, getting the needle and waiting for 30 minutes to ensure we don’t have adverse effects, I was out before 9 AM and had the chance to catch up with coworkers and have a quick laugh or two.

I got home and relaxed a bit, I was a bit hungry so I made a small quesadilla to try my hot sauce, a tiny dab still burned the back of my mouth and had a pleasant mustardy volatile feel. Satisfying. I watched one Roman history video and then got out with the longboard and the dog to go meet the girlfriend at a restaurant near her workplace. She started working again, but only had a half day today. We ate noodles and flatbread at a Muslim eatery.

Then she drove to a florist, it was hidden in a creepy semi-abandoned industrial complex, one of those strange quirky things about China. We had to navigate rusty and crumbling husks of buildings until we found it behind an unmarked door. They had an impressive variety of beautiful flowers in buckets on the ground, and it’s cheaper that the florists in town, which is why she made the detour there.

I noticed the front wheel was slightly deflated, and we contacted the car mechanic, sending him a picture. In the afternoon she dropped the car there and yeah, the tires are old and long overdue.

Some friends in a chat group were asking who wants to go play pool at 2:30. I looked at the time, 1:30. Might as well go. So I rode the longboard there, listening to a hilarious Ryan Long podcast. There were four of us, we played 8-ball in teams and then a game of cutthroat in a pool hall filled with 14-year-olds with bouffant haircuts.

I got home and whipped up a quick fried rice while listening to more music from the Top 500, that had been playing on and off since the morning. Alice Coltrane’s album was some pretty cool jazz, and then it was something by prog rock band Yes. I saw that I had already clicked on the YouTube link in the past but not finished it, which is a bad sign. Now I listened to the whole LP, it is good music but I don’t like the overly high pitched vocals.

I took a nap and then went to play soccer. On the way, I listened to an album I hadn’t revisited in a long-ass time, Nattfödd by Finntroll. Holy shit it’s good. I have the weirdest relationship with folk-metal, I can’t stand the vast majority of it but there are two bands that I absolutely love, Finntroll and Nine Treasures.

The soccer complex was deserted, as most Chinese people are still too drunk or too hungover to play. It was insanely cold, hovering around zero Celsius, my hands and the tips of my ears were numb and we had a few game-ending injuries due to stiff muscles. We started 6 vs 6, but played 5 vs 5 at the end. I scored a goal, a very rare occurrence.

On the way back I listened to a history podcast about Pierre Gauthier de La Vérendrye, a French-Canadian colonist who went all the way to the Rocky Mountains in the mid-1700s to open up fur trade routes and try to find the Western Ocean. I love those stories of pure badassery. I had listened to half of it by the time I finished my half-hour bicycle commute, by that time La Vérendrye and his band of coureurs des bois were embroiled in guerilla wars with their Algonquin allies against the Sioux, and the foolish man was trying to teach them to fight in lines in open fields like “civilized” people. Though he was born in Canada, he went to France as a young man and fought in numerous battles in Italy and Flanders, getting shot and hit with sabers. I imagine his Native American friends were scratching their heads at that very strange idea.

I got home, took a steaming hot bath and called it a night after a late meal and a few YouTube videos. No beer; I’m not supposed to drink until the next Covid dose. Now that’s a bummer.

Chapter 47

The bombarding started at 5:27 this morning and was sustained for more than two hours. But hey yOu hAvE tO rEsPeCt zEiR cULtUrE. I have often toyed with the idea of buying a big crate of fireworks and blowing one or two every time I’m awake past midnight.

I started reading a book by Dan Grec, the Australian guy who took long overland trips with a Jeep and has an informative YouTube channel called The Road Chose Me. His first book documents his two-year trip from Alaska to Argentina, I guess after all this forced sedentarism I am looking to travel vicariously.

The girlfriend prepared a breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausages and dim sum. I wolfed it down while dicking around on the internet and listening to music. I’m almost done with the first 10% of the Top 500, next up was Nine Inch Nails, I never listened to a whole album nor paid that much attention to them, despite the fact that they are somewhat metal-adjacent and some of the guys in high school who were into the same nü metal bands as I was liked NiN. Their bleak and nihilistic industrial sound is quite interesting and no doubt influential, but it doesn’t sound very scary to my ears after all those years of avid extreme metal consumption. Still I have to appreciate that at least a little bit of alternative music made it to that Top 500, there’s been some serious fucken unsalted mashed potatoes blandness in there thus far. The Supremes came next in a very different register, and I bobbed my head to all their hits, many of which I had heard before like Where Did Our Love Go, Baby Love, You Can’t Hurry Love and Stop In The Name Of Love. You can’t say the themes of their lyrics are tremendously varied but it’s fun music.

The temperature rose a bit compared to the frigid weather of yesterday, and it was very sunny, so we went outside. She rode her electric scooter, I was on my longboard, and the dog happily ran along. We went to a bakery that makes bagels, but they were closed for the holidays, so we went to another bakery, one that unfortunately doesn’t make bagels. Then we rode home. I saw a meme the other day that said “You know you’re an adult when going on an errand counts as going out”, I dislike a lot of that depressive millenial humor but this one I can totally relate to it. We considered staying out a bit and perhaps sitting at the plaza around the fountain having an early afternoon beverage but the fucking retards in charge of the place are always blaring the most inane and dissonant music on outdoor speakers, the kind that makes me want to claw my face off.

The confines of our apartment are infinitely better, here I can choose the music. I kept going down the Rolling Stone’s Top 500, with Roberta Flack’s beautiful soul music, a Paul McCartney solo album, and The White Stripes. I only knew Seven Nation Army, with its supremely catchy guitar riff that got overplayed to the point of being annoying, but the rest of the album is great stuff. I worked out in the home gym, a bit of punching bag and then the two rounds of calisthenics, then did more writing.

I wrote a story for my French blog about a visit to Bergen, Norway, in 2008. I’ll reread and proofread with fresh eyes tomorrow. The girlfriend cooked a dinner of stewed beef and fried rice cakes, it was amazing. I washed it all down with a can of Patagonia Weisse, a beer I enjoyed in Argentina and somehow made its way to the imported section of my supermarket half a world away, and then a large bottle of my homebrew. We watched another double episode of The Office, what a great show, and it has aged quite well.

I finished the album by soul musician Otis Redding, and then put on the next one while I did the dishes. It was a godawful mumble rap piece of shit, in Spanish. Mumble rap in a Top 500 of best music of all time?! What’s next, a pubic hair sandwich in a foodie’s list? I angrily turned it off after two tracks, failing the self-imposed rule of listening to the albums to their entirety as much as I can. So I put on Joe Rogan’s podcast with Francis Ngannou, and his insane rags-to-riches story.

I took the mixture of hot peppers I had been fermenting, drained them, and made hot sauce. I improvised the recipe, throwing a bit of mustard, wasabi, beer, rice vinegar, chili powder, black pepper and dried mango pieces in there before pulsing the whole thing into a homogeneous goo. I dipped the tip of a spoon and tasted, it was crazy spicy. Success! I’ll wait for it to rest overnight before doing a proper taste test and adjustments, if needed.

I didn’t feel like listening to more albums from the Top 500, so I retreated back in my comfort zone and put on a mixtape by Celph-Titled, a badass underground MC with an extensive catalog (or gatalog, like his collection of mixtapes is called) and then the album Two Hunters, by an atmospheric black metal band called Wolves In The Throne Room. I did some Chinese studying, about car parts, and then a negroni cocktail by my side, I read chapters from the Norman conquest as well as the overland travel books before crashing early.

Chapter 46

I wanted to eat cereal for breakfast but we ran out of milk so I went out to get some at the corner store. It was cold as fuck, the weather has been playing weird games recently.

I ate my cereal while watching some stupid meme compilation on YouTube. I read the news and answered emails while listening to music. Sinead O’Connor’s album at number 457 of the Top 500 was OK I guess, and then I listened to an EP by Salò, a French band churning out grindcore/crust with the coldness and unsettling atmosphere of industrial music, with keyboards and samples. After that I listened to their interview on the Metal Minded podcast, it was live on YouTube at 5 AM China time so I caught it later. Pretty interesting stuff, like a lot of bands from that musical sphere, they take their inspiration from the disgusting and saddening aspects of humankind and they mentioned a few documentaries that I’ll check out.

The blogger who interviewed me put it online at https://jonathanleprof.com/blogue/enseigner-en-chine-cest-le-monde-a-lenvers/, you can go check it out. He changed the format of my answers, breaking all my paragraphs into single sentences, like is the norm for a lot of blogs apparently. A lot of people don’t have the attention span to read paragraphs, and also something about SEO or whatever. Still, the content wasn’t changed, now that would have been dumb if it were.

In the afternoon, a friend came over and we watched the UFC main card while eating nachos. Middleweight Julian Marquez snatched the victory out of the jaws of defeat with a submission less than a minute before the end of the third round, and then bantamweight Brian “Whitey Mouse” Kelleher got outwrestled by Ricky Simon, which was a bummer, since I put a small bet on him. Both men usually compete at 135 pounds, but now since the fight was on short notice, they were 145 pounds at the weigh-ins. Weight cutting has got to be one of the dumbest things about the sport, the two guys are the same size, why do they have to drain themselves?

Then Kelvin Gastellum dominated Ian Heinisch, snapping his long losing streak (albeit one against top-level competition) so it was nice to see him so relieved. Alexa Grasso edged a boxing-heavy victory against Big Carb Barb, and then in the main event, Kamaru Usman retained his championship by dispatching Gilbert Burns with piston jabs combined with elite wrestling, which seems to be an excellent base to be a dominant welterweight title holder. I’m sure GSP watched the fight and nodded with appreciation.

We took the dog out to run in circles at the park like the spaz he is, and soon after I got changed and went to play badminton. On the way, I made a slight detour to go top up our gas, there’s some kind of ATM where I insert a card, scan a QR code with my phone, and buy units of heating gas. I played several doubles games with two guys with serious skills and another one who, like, me, was slightly below their level but could still hold his own. It was a lot of fun, everyone hooting and hollering when someone would pull off a sneaky shot or do an impressive save.

Back home, I ate dumplings and steamed brussel sprouts with a weizen beer. I watched an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, the previous ones I had seen were true crime stories but that one was about a UFO sighting in Massachusetts in 1969. The now middle-aged or elderly people talking about it seemed lucid and in possession of their mental faculties, and the records from that time show that several people over a large area, who didn’t know one another, all reporting seeing some weird large shiny ball in the night sky. Two people even pretended having been abducted and dumped back, confused and with lapses in memory. It was pretty weird.

Throughout the day, and late at night as I was reading, I listened to more music from the Top 500. Al Green’s album (another Greatest Hits? should that even be allowed for such a Top 500?!) was a nice and uplifting piece of soul and funk, and then it was a Bo Diddley proto-rock album from 1958 that was simplistic to the point of being childish and sounded like it was recorded with a potato. At number 454 was an album by Can, whom I’ve listened to a bit in the past and are one of the most notable bands of the genre called “Krautrock”. It’s some weird shit, especially put in the context of the early 1970s, a mix of psychedelic rock and deconstructed noise that no doubt influenced, directly or indirectly, some of the more avant-garde metal I listen to so I have to give those drugged up Germans (and their Japanese singer) credit.

Chapter 45

I woke up reasonably early, brewed some black tea and wrote yesterday’s entry, as I was too drunk to type when I came back home after the hash. I ate scrambled eggs while watching more history videos on YouTube, that Dovahhatty channel truly is special, an erudite knowledge of Roman history mixed with a caustic sense of humor. One thing that grates me sometimes about history books and documentaries is how milquetoast the narration is and how they go to great lengths to say we shouldn’t judge it with the standards of today, as if it wasn’t extremely obvious. Dovahhatty goes the opposite direction and takes a strong comically exaggerated bias for the Romans, to the point that his videos now have a disclaimer saying “Hey this is a work of parody OK, not a bunch of explicit calls to violence against Germans and other barbarians”

Today’s music was quite smooth, with Lorde, Kid Cudi and Jason Isbell. Then the girlfriend left to go play majiang at her friend’s place, and I listened to three albums by Windir, a respected black metal band I had never paid much attention to in the past. A semi-famous Quebec blogger sent me interview questions about my life in China, I spent a couple hours answering them and sent the Word document back.

In the late afternoon I rode my longboard to the bar, along with my triangle-faced companion. It was raining slightly but soon it stopped. A group of my friends were there to play poker, last time I managed to win a few hands but now I played like shit and got cleaned quickly, 200 yuan down the drain. Ah well. I stuck around a bit, finishing my beer, then rode home and gave the dog a shower to clean off all the mud and grime in his fur.

In fact the girlfriend had urged me to come home early enough so we could have a Valentine’s Day dinner, but she was the one who ended up staying at her friend’s place until 8. I was too hungry, so I ate a box of sardines with crackers and cream cheese and a spicy duck head while watching the UFC prelims, very romantic.

The prelims were a good display of up-and-coming talent in stacked divisions, and the best fight was the last one, in which a hype train got seriously derailed. An enormously muscular Brazilian jiu-jitsu world champion named Rodolfo Vieira had made quick work of his two previous opponents, taking them down and submitting them with his steroid-enhanced grappling prowess, and he started this fight in the same fashion, but young gutsy Anthony Hernandez defended the chained choke and armlock attempts and when they got back to their feet, Vieira was beyond exhausted and got picked apart by his Mexican opponent’s punches. In the second round he was moving through Jell-O and eventually got submitted himself.

The girlfriend came in, and we drank gin tonics while watching The Office in bed. We just started Season 4.

Chapter 44

Hash day! The meeting time was 1 PM, so I lazily enjoyed my morning, drinking tea and watching some news videos on YouTube. Some celebrity is accused of “fat-shaming” because she retweeted a funny cartoon showing a morbidly obese person on a mobility scooter, McDonald’s soda cup in hand, yelling “Wear your mask! You’re putting my health at risk!” at a thin woman. I don’t know why fatphobia and all this shit is still talked about in that way, it should be simple, really. Don’t be mean to people just for being fat. Don’t make jokes in general with a hurtful impact and/or intent. But going as far as saying that losing weight or encouraging people to lose weight is an attack on fat people (like in the case of British singer Adele) or pretending that there are no health problems coming with obesity or linking it to white supremacy or sexism in a bizarre display of intersectional mental gymnastics is pure Clown World.

The Amazing Atheist commented on Gina Carano, women’s MMA pioneer and actress who got fired from some Star Wars spin-off due to her conservative views and posting some rather spicy takes on social media. One of them was comparing the demonization of Trump supporters nowadays by the media to anti-Jewish propaganda, and she had to know that making such far-fetched exaggerated parallels to the Holocaust wouldn’t be well-received by her Hollywood employers. Nonetheless, as TAA pointed out, her takes were pretty mainstream conservative opinions, and the whole cancel culture thing is a slippery slope.

The next albums down the list were a catchy country record by The Flying Burrito Brothers, and some ultra-boring piece of folk music with high-pitched vocals by a guy who goes by Bon Iver. I made burritos with beef, refried beans, salsa, sour cream and lettuce, and devoured them before getting ready to head out.

The weather was surprisingly beautiful, a few days ago the forecast was announcing rain but it turned out to be a 15-degree sunny day. A good turn-out, about 30 people showed up, including some new faces. The trail brought us through parks, a wetland reserve on the edge of town, and a big lake. At one of the numerous beer stops (usually there is one, the hares put four!) I stripped down to my boxers and jumped in the lake, it was freezing, and felt really refreshing.

Total distance was a bit above 8 km if I heard well. Then we went to the regular post-hash bar and had a few more beers. I ate a burger and the girlfriend had fish n’ chips. There’s always a bit of drama between and within factions of expats in town, including people who have a problem with me and my edgy sense of humor, but I don’t have time for this shit. When I see such outbursts or listen to someone vent about another person I just nod and shrug.

I got home and watched 7 Jours Sur Terre while doing laundry. The two main topics were a domestic one and an international one: privatisation of wind energy in Quebec (a nation that pulled itself out of the dark ages through secularisation, and successful nationalisation of its hydroelectric power), and a coup in Myanmar. Of course the latter topic lead the analyst to start talking about China, and how they benefit from an unstable southern neighbor staying away from US influence. Seems like all roads lead to China when it comes to international geopolitics, and the editorial was urging Canada to boycott the Winter Olympics which are to be held in Beijing next year. My opinion on the matter is that yeah, boycotting Olympic Games can send a serious message but is ultimately a limp-wristed empty symbolic gesture if it’s not accompanied by economic sanctions. Also I can’t help but feel bad for the dude who has been working hard and sacrificing a lot to ultimately get to the top of the heap of a niche sport that has nearly zero visibility except on a small window every four years, and now has to sit at home and see his dream vanish. It’s doubly sad if he and his fellow athletes are used as pawns in that way, while the hypocritical government and corporations keep doing business with China to get that cheap manufacturing and access to a huge emerging market. I’ve always hated symbolic gestures.

Chapter 43

In the past year, I’ve been reading quite a bit on World War I, and went through the colossal series of podcasts Blueprint For Armageddon by Dan Carlin, which is highly recommended like everything he’s done on Hardcore History. It was said that through the numerous stalemates and wars of attrition, artillery wasn’t always used with the only goal of destroying targets, but also to corner troops, as a psychological tool, and as a way to cause severe disturbance by preventing sleep. On the morning of Chinese New Year, I could totally relate to that, as the shelling started before dawn and only paused mid-morning.

Of course it would be borderline disrespectful to equate my plight with the situation of a French infantryman in the trenches at Verdun, being under the blankets with a woman and a dog by my side with zero danger to my life and a day doing whatever I want ahead. Still it fucking sucked, it’s not as if those are the pretty kind of fireworks with splashes of color in the sky, they just do BOOM.

Ah well. Part and parcel of living in China, just like terrorist attacks are for the city of London, according to its mayor. Smile and enjoy life.

I read the book on the Norman conquest while taking a spicy shit. William was embroiled in a three-way conflict with Henry, king of France, and another neighboring duke named Geoffrey d’Anjou, but both of those cunts died from some kind of medieval disease that could be cured with over-the-counter drugs nowadays, and the succession for their titles lead to internal squabbles. That meant William was free to fuck around with other neighboring duchies and eventually pack some ships full of scurvy-infested mercenaries to go crush England.

Next up in the Top 500 was a Beach Boys album. It sucked. So far I’ve listened to 35 albums and it’s the first one I truly disliked, about a third leaving me indifferent, a third being objectively interesting but not my cup o’ tea, and a third being albums I’d potentially listen to for fun. After that it was some material by King Sunny Adé, a musician from Nigeria. It seems like it’s a compilation, and I’m wondering if it should count as an album, but nonetheless it was pretty cool music. And then the funk of The Isley Brothers made me shake my white ass and bob my head and play air guitar in my living room.

The girlfriend asked me to pause the music, as she was having a videochat with a bunch of her friends. So I retreated to the home gym, where I did my calisthenics and kettlebell swings while listening to Dilated Peoples on my portable speaker. Dilated Peoples is a hip-hop group from LA with cool beats and a positive attitude, their track Worst Comes To Worst is a pretty nice little banger.

I took a cold shower and then cooked myself a lunch of sausages and buttered bread. When I reached into the fridge for the jar of relish, there was a white beer looking at me, batting its eyelashes, and I thought why not, I just worked out.

We were out of tortillas, so I went outside in the grey hazy weather and rode to a shopping mall with a large grocery store in its basement. The dog came along and trotted spritely along on his leash. Before leaving, I uploaded a bunch of new stuff in my mp3 player, and listened to an album by Revulsion on the way. At times I’m conflicted: on one hand, nothing gives me the type of hair-raising “Yes!!!” feeling that a good death metal riff can, but also, I’ve listened to so much of the stuff through the years that most of it just feels so damn formulaic and generic at this point, even if it’s executed perfectly like what that Finnish band does. So maybe it’s a good idea to have a bit of a metal detox.

There was a sign at the entrance of the mall that said “No pets” and another one that urged people to put on their glassfoggers but nobody said anything as I walked in, maskless and with a dog cradled in my arms. They didn’t have tortillas, so I just bought a few random snacks and beverages. Then I rode back home, and went to retrieve the package I ordered online from an alcohol retailer and had been sitting on the oversized mail shelf at the gate. The boxes were too big for me to carry them on my bicycle, so I opened them, removed the bottles from their styrofoam casings, and put them in my pannier.

I dropped it all at home, including the dog, and then carried on with my mission, as I wanted to eat tacos for dinner. So I rode to another big shopping mall and bought the elusive packs of tortillas. I started listening to the Joe Rogan podcast with Francis Ngannou, UFC heavyweight contender and destroyer of worlds. His story is absolutely insane, how he grew up poor even by the standards of his native Cameroon, took the illegal migrant route through Nigeria, Niger, Algeria and Morocco, which implied paying some smugglers to pack him in a truck with twenty others and drive through the Sahara, dodging cops, paying bribes and buying fake passports along the way. Now at this point of the story he had been waiting 12 months in Morocco to break into Ceuta. No matter how you feel about illegal immigration, for sure whe you hear a first-hand story like this you see that it’s far from easy and risk-free, and in his case, the gamble paid off, leading to a budding MMA career and soon after he was knocking mofos’ blocks cold on the big UFC stage. And aside from being the most terrifying fighter on the roster, he’s also one of MMA’s genuinely good guys, doing a lot of philanthropy.

Back home, we poured ourselves drinks (a negroni for me, a Japanese plum liqueur for her) and watched some YouTube videos from a channel called The Road Chose Me, an Australian who traveled big parts of the world with his Jeep. It’s our dream to go on a long overland trip but first I have to get that damn drivers’ license, and wait for the virus to go to the garbage can of history where it belongs. Then I made tacos, they were scrumptious if I dare say so, with dry-rubbed meat, refried beans (from a can), sour cream, lettuce and homemade salsa.

I started watching a documentary on a forgotten proto-punk band from the 70s called Death, made up of three brothers (both in the sense of blood relatives, and African-Americans). Then at 10 PM I paused it to hop on a Zoom call with my dad and uncles. It only took 33 minutes before they started talking about Donald Trump, which is still a bit surprising given how ol’ Donny is nearly irrelevant at this point.

Chapter 42

The fireworks squad has been ramping up its work, trying to create maximum disturbance around the clock. I was too inebriated to be affected much but I remember waking up a few times throughout the early morning.

I felt a bit stiff, especially in the neck area, so I stretched and drank a lot of water before sitting at the computer and finishing up yesterday’s entry. We needed to get another 20-L bottle of drinking water but they’re not delivering on this Chinese New Year day, so we drove there and picked up a bottle.

I ate R. n’ S. while watching UFC Embedded videos, about the fighters in the upcoming card and their preparation. The welterweight title fight between Usman and Burns should be a pretty good one, a lot of people hate on Usman for being boring but a lot of people are low-IQ mouthbreathers and their opinion on every topic should be discarded. A lot of fans and execs are praying that Gilbert Burns sends him violently out to pasture, like they did with Woodley and GSP in the past, the WW division has quite the history of invincible-looking dominant champs whose style isn’t really TV-friendly.

I played a bit of GTA V, as Trevor. I woke up in a drunken daze behind the dumpster of a strip club, stole a SUV and drove all the way to the airfield in a rural part of the state where I run a weapons trafficking ring with a partner. I had to go pick up a crate that had been air dropped, before a rival gang could get to it, I caught up to their pickup truck, and killed them with my Uzi as I was driving. Later, they sent a helicopter after me, I dismounted and shot it down with a powerful rifle. Nobody messes with Trevor Phillip Enterprises.

A German buddy messaged me, he is the next hare and needs the chalk I used to mark the hash trail a few weeks ago. I went out to meet him at the gate of my apartment complex. The hash is scheduled for Saturday, the weather forecast predicts rain but hey, that’s not going to stop us.  

Nursing my hangover with water and grapefruit juice, I did a bit more reading and writing, while listening to music. Jefferson Airplane played some bland 1960s hippie shit, and after that it was a rapper that I didn’t know called Juvenile, and it was just as boring. I do like a lot of southern hip-hop but his stuff left me flaccid. Then it was Manu Chao’s Clandestino, a pretty fun album, it played on the speakers while we ate a hot pot dinner and the girlfriend liked it. At number 468 it was The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls, an album from 1978 that I enjoyed quite a bit and is in fact still playing as I’m writing this.

I put the final touches to a travel story I wrote, about my first year in China (in 2008!). I got bamboozled to attend a dinner with a bunch of people who just wanted to have a white guy there for photo ops, but before they could take their photos, I pretended I had to go to the toilet and ran out, going home on foot and by hitchhiking. It’s on https://quesstuvascrisserla.com/2021/02/11/evasion/.

I also did a bit of Chinese studying, reviewing material from previous sessions and looking up new words I’m seeing on social media about the Chinese New Year. The in-laws videocalled, and we had a little chat. It’s a bit sad that we’re not going to the girlfriend’s hometown this year but we decided to stay home and not take the risk of getting stuck. Also I can’t be fucked going to the hospital and do the covid test upon returning like the policy states, there are reports of it being a total shit show, as expected. That’s got to be one of the dumbest things possible: due to the pandemic, they add up layers upon layers of bureaucracy everywhere, while also chaining up doors with big rusty bike locks to control the flow of foot traffic, which means people get bottlenecked and if one of them turns out to be carrying that benign but contagious virus, boom, now everyone has it.

That said, I’ve seen a report saying that there were very, very few new cases in the holiday period so far due to people traveling less. My dad sent me an email, saying he’s heard the opposite, but also saying that at times it feels like Western media reports about China are written by falun gong members or the Dalai Lama himself, this champion of democracy. I’m glad he acknowledges it.

Chapter 41

The next album in the Top 500 was Barrio Fino by Daddy Yankee. Reggaeton is one of the most repetitive and formulaic genres out there but it’s got great energy.

I ate the last portion of pasta while watching various YouTube videos about MMA or US politics. The new press secretary seems pretty damn useless, they could have saved the money by just having a cardboard cutout with the cartoon bubble “Great question, I’ll circle back to you” behind the podium.

Exceptionally, we played soccer during the day, with a fancy dress theme. I put on a shirt and tie and a carnival mask, and the boys also put on a variety of weird costumes. There was a shark, a dinosaur, a Roman general, and quite a lot of dresses and wigs. It was great silly fun.

Then we went home to regroup and clean up, and met up at a barbecue restaurant for an early dinner. I got there a bit before 5, the Uyghur employees were sitting around tables stringing the pieces of mutton or beef on skewers, listening to catchy Turkish music and chattering away in their weird harsh language, sneering at me. “Five minutes”, one of them said in heavily-accented Chinese. Most of them don’t speak the language much and aren’t the definition of gregarious and friendly, but they make an excellent barbecue so I like them. A poster on the wall caught my attention, with Xi Jinping receiving an ornate cylindrical hat from some prominently big-nosed Uyghurs at a ceremony. I cracked open a liter-sized can of a Xinjiang brewery and soon after the boys turned up, all decked in soccer gear from various teams, jerseys, shorts and socks. We had Liverpool, Arsenal, the local bar’s team, the Nigerian national team, and I was repping Henan Jianye, a team from the Chinese Superleague I used to support when I lived near Zhengzhou and could go attend games.

We consumed a mountain of meat and a torrent of beer, and the conversation went from one disgusting topic to another, every guy trying to up the other with first- or second-hand stories about bodily fluids. A good lads’ night, like they say.

We migrated to the first stop of our pub crawl, a bar with a large selection of craft beers. They also stock FourLoko, one of the foulest concoctions known to man, a sickly sweet chemical energy drink with a 12% alcohol content, that those guys like unironically. I picked a beer from a Scottish brewery, a spiced Christmas ale, it was delicious.

I almost broke my hand in the bathroom. After peeing and washing my hands, I opened the door to the washroom (which opened inwards), at the exact same time the guy in the toilet stall opened his door. The bar has some kind of fake rustic decor, so those were heavy wooden doors, and my hand got crushed at the intersection. That fucking hurt, but I thankfully didn’t break anything.

I got a second beer, a stout by Eviltwin Brewing clocking in at 11.5%, which turned out to be a terrible idea because soon after we started a game of threeman. The rules they were using for that drinking game were very different, and in my opinion inferior, to the ruleset my old friends and I were using back in my college days, but I went along.

We walked 15 minutes to the next spot, a string of bars that are nearly always empty and totally seem like money laundering operations. There was a rule in place for every bar, in the second one the rule was no English, Chinese only, so we sat around the table drunkenly yelling Chinese phrases that made sense only 50% of the time. The third bar had a stage and a computer linked to a karaoke machine, I asked the DJ to put on a song by Xie Tianxiao, China’s coolest rock musician and I sang it energetically. I had also queued Wonderwall and Somebody Told Me, great tracks for drunken singalongs.

By the time we made it to the final bar, I was pretty intoxicated and only remember bits and pieces. Some old and new friends were there, and it was a good time. I got home and passed out on the bed with my clothes on.

Chapter 40

Another idling day. I spent the morning reading and listening to music, then I heated a plate of linguine carbonara for lunch. I cut a piece of beef in slices, seasoned it, and let it rest on the counter to use at dinnertime. I also roasted a green pepper and made salsa with green onions, tomatoes, garlic, lemon juice, chilis and spices. The stovetop was getting a bit dirty, so I removed the cast iron base and used degreasing liquid to remove all the shit that’s been caking there in the past few weeks.

I kept ploughing through the Top 500, and I was enjoying Selena’s Amor Prohibido when the internet started shitting sprays of diarrhea in its own mouth. My VPN works well most of the time but sometimes it malfunctions or crashes. Nonplussed, I put on a Soilent Green album, from a discography I downloaded recently and had been sitting in my BitTorrent folder. Soilent Green is a band from Louisiana that mixes sludge metal with grindcore, what’s not to love about that?! Their 1994 debut album Pussysoul is a great slab of extreme metal and just what I needed.

In the mid-afternoon, I started a Chinesepod session, with the PDF attached. It was about an ad campaign for diamond jewellery, a topic I give 0.01% of a shit about but there were some useful vocabulary words in there. But then, a fellow dog owner friend of mine texted me, she was at the park next to my apartment complex. So I went out to get some of that sunshine and watch our two little pooches chase one another. I brought a can of Preussen hefeweizen, of course. After 40 minutes of that, I got back and resumed my Chinese session, copying those moonrunes in my book.

The girlfriend came home, and together we moved the sofa and removed the enormous amount of shit that had been accumulating there. Might as well use this vacation time to take care of places that we seldom if ever clean.

I usually don’t care that much for 1960s music, which just hasn’t aged very well to me, with the weird vocal harmonies, percussions that always seem to incorporate too much tambourine, and shitty quality of the recording, but The Kinks’ Something Else was a fun listen and I went to download it alongside two other of their early albums. Then it was an even older album at number 474, by a bluesman named Howlin’ Wolf.

A friend sent me an article about the prevalence of mental illness among transgender people, and the possible roots of transgenderism in autism and narcissistic personality disorder. Now that’s a controversial topic, as it’s bound to put people on a defensive foot, thinking that you want to invalidate their identity or justify hatred. The author, who himself lost a transwoman friend in tragic circumstances, seemed to adopt a rational scientific approach as well as showing empathy and the desire to help, but still I doubt those ideas would be well received, case in point the fact that Facebook blocks the sharing of that article, and my friend had to send it through WeChat. We talked a little bit about the irony of using WeChat (an app heavily monitored by the Chinese government) to circumvent censorship.

Ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery, Islam is a religion of peace, transwomen are women, repeat after me seven more times. Here’s my stance on this whole thing: I think allowing transwomen to compete in women’s sports is unfair at best and damn near criminal at worst (in the case of MMA, for instance) and there are stories about hormone therapy prescribed to minors that are more than creepy, but aside from that, I don’t care if someone is transgender or non-binary or pansexual or whatever, and will gladly use the pronouns he/she/they/zir/xe asks me to.

I opened a liter bottle of homebrew and headed to the kitchen. I made nachos and beef tacos for dinner and we ate it while watching a movie called Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Apparently it’s a cult movie, and it’s several shades of retarded, with a dumb plot and clownish overacting from the three bimbos who got cast in there because of their big tits and certainly not because of their acting chops. The constant emphasis on the tits makes it look like a softcore porno at times, which must have been a big deal in 1965 when the movie was made.

Chapter 39

Another late start, after going to bed way past midnight and getting a full night of sleep letting my legs recover. This Monday was lining up to be a resting day.

I drank black tea, did a bit of yoga, and wrote. Going down the top 500 brought me to an effeminate blues rock album and a pretty cool husband-and-wife folk duo. Not bad music by any means, but I’ve heard way more interesting stuff across the music spectrum and especially in outlier genres that I don’t imagine will be featured a lot on this list. Still, some good enough music to put on while the girlfriend is home working at her desk on the other side of the room and wouldn’t take kindly to me blaring some black metal. Then it was Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, an album with a fun and catchy electropop dancing vibe but like it’s the case with a lot of pop albums, the highlights are the singles, by far, and outshine the rest of the album that ends up looking like filler.

I watched the UFC card. The co-main event lasted a whole 26 seconds before Cory Sandhagen assassinated Frankie Edgar with a flying knee, and in the main, 6 foot 7 Russian giant Alex Volkov bust Econoreem open and sent him down on all fours. Both men are likely to fight for the championship of their respective divisions next.

I kept reading the book about the Norman Conquest. It’s great. At times it’s a bit hard to follow the whole game of thrones between England, the Duchy of Normandy, and the peripheral players in Flanders, France, Denmark and even further afield, but at the point I am in the book now, the stage is slowly setting for the Hastings showdown.

The girlfriend wanted to eat bullfrog tonight, and it happens to be one of my favorites so off we went. The amphibians are cut up in bite-size pieces and cooked in a ganguo (dry pot) with lotus roots, sheets of tofu, rice cakes, potatoes, and tons of peppers. Truly some oily goodness.

We got back home and I kept reading and listening to the Top 500. Muddy Waters’s anthology was great, some very fun blues music, and then, at number 482, the first album of the list that I had listened to before, The Pharcyde’s debut album. I put it on anyway, like I’ll do down the list even if it’s an album I’m familiar with. The Pharcyde is a hip-hop group and their stuff is goofy, alternative, jazzy and quite fun, good to see them get some luv on that list.

An old friend was online, and at 10 PM we started videochatting. We worked at the same school 8 or 9 years ago, and he lives in Beijing now, after being stuck stateside through most of 2020. We ended up talking for a whole three hours, about history, futurism, politics, and old memories. The students we taught back then have graduated university since, have gotten married, and post pictures of their kids on WeChat. Time’s arrow marches forward.

I watched a few more videos on YouTube, from a channel called Dovahhatty. The guy makes minimalist videos about Roman history, full of offensive dark humor and 4chan memes. For instance, the Romans are represented as Chads and the Greeks as virgins, from the Chad vs virgin meme, and the plebs are shown as anonymous wojaks. Highly recommended if you like history and internet culture.

Chapter 38

I woke up a bit late and read in bed for a bit. Then I made hash browns and ate them with a couple of runny eggs. I watched an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, some half-black, half-Mexican dude in Kansas went to a party at a farmhouse and presumably got in a fight with some rednecks there, as he disappeared and his body was only found weeks later, by a creek nearby. He didn’t have any broken bones or traumatic injuries, and his body wasn’t as decomposed as it would have been if he had died the night of his disappearance, which led people to speculate if he was kept prisoner somewhere, or if his body was in a freezer the whole time. To this day, nobody knows what happened. Except the scumbags who did it, of course. I wonder if somewhere in the midwest there are a couple of rednecks watching Netflix and laughing through their rotten teeth.

I joined a badminton club, and on Sundays they play from 2 to 4 PM. I paid the fee with an app and went to the enormous municipal gym complex. When I play with the girlfriend or with students or staff at the school, it’s not very challenging for my level of skill, so I wanted to get pushed a bit. Well, pushed, I did get. My first opponent was a chubby woman in her forties wearing a tracksuit, and she slaughtered me effortlessly. Then, as more people came in, we played some doubles, and I held my own.

Three boys were watching the game.

“Woah! Look at that! Is he a laowai?”

“No! I heard him, he said chuxian, he speaks Chinese!”

“He looks like a laowai”

Chuxian means cross the line, a word I’m all too familiar with after derping the driving exam. Just like I’m familiar (and incredibly amused) with people, usually children or “rural” folks, who are confused and wonder “Wait, wait, are you sure this brown-haired, bearded, very European-looking person is a foreigner? He can speak our language!”

After two games full of fast exchanges, I took a short rest, and then saw that the three 10-year-old boys were alternating on another court, which meant one was without a partner.

“Come on, xiaohar, I’ll play you”

And damn, though he was half my size, even when I turned it on and played to the best of my ability without giving him any chance, he’d sneak one on me from time to time. His dad was watching and yelling pointers, I assume the little guy had been handling a racquet before he could even walk.

I played for nearly two hours then said goodbye to my new pals and rode home. The weather was incredibly sunny and warm, hard to imagine it’s February. I put the leash on the dog and went to the park, where I sat with a can of Goose Island IPA and watched him run around.

I got home and started watching a documentary called Hypernormalisation, by a British guy named Adam Curtis, on the recommendation of a friend. It started with two seemingly unrelated stories occurring in 1975, one about Wall Street bankers in NYC ruining the whole city and turning it into an even bigger shithole than before, and one about Henry Kissinger fucking Syria. Then, as we chronologically progressed, there were segments about more seemingly unrelated things, like how Donald Trump built his real estate empire, UFO sightings, the rise and fall and rise and fall of Colonel Gaddafi, punks in the USSR.

The whole thing was three hours long so I had to watch it in two parts. First order of business, make linguine carbonara with sausages, then eat the linguine carbonara with sausages, and finally take a nap, drowsy with the effort of digesting the linguine and the sausages and the bacon cheesy sauce.

I woke up and rode my bicycle to the far southern outskirts of the city, where there is a rooftop soccer pitch. Eight of the boys got together to play touch football. We normally do flag football but now we didn’t have the flags. I scored two touchdowns, one as receiver, one as QB, with a rather prodigious effort by my teammate, who used to play as tight end in college and dove to catch my pass that I overshot to get past the defender. It was good fun.

I was sore as hell when I made it home, even after a half hour on the bicycle, that never fails to loosen me up a bit. Nearly four hours of stop-and-go heavy sports today. The girlfriend was in bed talking to her parents on WeChat videochat, after a day spent playing majiang with her friends. I mixed her favorite cocktail, a modified breakfast martini, with gin, plum-infused baijiu, triple sec, lemon juice, apricot marmalade and blueberry jam, and made it a double so I’d have one to sip while soaking my messed up joints and muscles in a hot bath.

I kept going down the top 500 list. The Stooges and Black Flag were there consecutively, finally some alternative music! The two albums were good, but not that great in my opinion, if you take them for their intrinsic value rather than their pioneering status. But I guess that criteria plays a big role when music critics want to make a list of the best albums ever.

I finished watching Hypernormalisation, while sipping various alcoholic beverages. It was interesting but a bit disjointed, and I was puzzled by the narrator’s logical progression and conclusion:

The USA has been fucking heavily with the Near East and Libya, putting it in a nearly unsolvable state of warfare and chaos

and

The internet was developed by a bunch of nerds as a government tool, then became a free and uncontrolled means of communication, and later became controlled again, by monopolistic corporations tied to the government, using algorithms to push content

therefore

ORANGE MAN BAD AND WE SHOULDN'T BREXIT (because, like, that condescending cunt Steven Colbert said he has a friend in London who reassured him that the UK has a small core of rich douchebags detached from the reality of the rest of the country, who are just no-good stupid racist gammons anyway).

Uh, OK I guess.

Chapter 37

Last night, after posting my diary entry, I kept sitting on the couch reading and going down the Top 500 list. There was a weird 1970s nihilistic synth-based record and a compilation of ridiculously catchy South African tunes, and then at number 496 it was Shakira’s second album, in Spanish, before she became an international superstar. I’ve always liked Shakira more than a lot of the shitty pop bimbos from 15 years ago, her voice was better, her beats were better, the positive energy was better, the Latin and even Middle Eastern vibes added something interesting. And well, though I don’t really give a shit normally when judging the value of a musical artist, it’s pop music we’re talking about here, in which it’s probably the number one criteria, and the teenage me thought she was hotter than her counterparts. I had never heard her old Spanish stuff though, or anything other than the big singles, and it was really great. My favorite album of that Top 500 thus far, one I’ll relisten to, and I’ll check out her other early catalog.

Next up was the RnB of Boyz II Men, I enjoyed the first half of the album but it started to get on my nerves eventually. Then it was a 1964 album by The Ronettes, it was kinda cool but also sounds extremely dated, obviously, so I couldn’t really get into it.

I started the day with black tea and yoga. An old pal from way back in the day when I was in the Army has a YouTube channel with yoga instructionals, I’ve been feeling a bit stiff and have told myself for a while I should introduce yoga in my daily/weekly routine. I started with just a 15-minute morning sequence, and I’ll ramp it up. When school starts, I’ll begin the day by getting up a tad earlier and doing either yoga or tai chi.

I took the dog for a walk, going all the way to the school to see if my package has arrived. I ordered a bunch of CDs from a metal label in Quebec, it said it would be here by February 1^st but no luck so far. I hope it’s just delays due to Covid and perhaps the Chinese New Year holiday, and that it’s not just lost in the mail or worse, confiscated by some fucknugget at the customs office.

There was a curious sight at the entrance of the apartment building, a Tibetan man was selling deer antlers, tree bark, weird desiccated mushrooms and plants, and jarred pickled roots. No idea what any of that is for, probably for alternative medicine purposes, of the dick-enlarging kind.  

I got home, made more tea and heated a plate of R n’ S. I watched a few YouTube videos about self-improvement and positivity by a black metal and folk musician named Paul Waggener, it was quite interesting. I googled him to know more, apparently he’s the founder of some kind of neo-pagan organization and put on some kind of “hate list” by the Ministry Of Truth or whatever its real-life incarnation is. I don’t really give a fuck, nothing in the few videos I watched was remotely about hating black people or anything retarded like that, it was mostly about independence, rugged individualism and masculinity. Nowadays it seems there are more people who get called a nazi than people who don’t, after so much crying wolf (and hiding/distorting the truth, and promoting things that are just plain false), the powers-that-be shouldn’t really be surprised that a lot of people don’t buy their shit.

While doing yoga, I saw up close how dusty the floor was, though I swept and mopped it only a few days ago. So I cleaned the whole apartment again, including my home gym, which is covered by thick mats that have been accumulating insane amounts of dust and dirt. I removed all the mats, rinsed them in the bathtub, put them outside to dry, then cleaned the bathtub.

I finished Homo Deus, started a new book about the Norman conquest of England, and listened to Marvin Gaye’s soul and Bonnie Raitt’s country, at numbers 493 and 492. I also saw that Terrordome just released an album, so I gave it a listen. Terrordome is a new-school thrash metal band from Poland, I saw them live a few years ago in Chongqing, China, and they were pretty cool. I even had beers with the band members afterwards as I was the only foreigner in the crowd and they obviously couldn’t speak Chinese, really nice guys. The new album rips, a bundle of tightly-wound and catchy riffs played at 200 km/h, with a bit of an 80s crossover vibe that is very pleasing. I wonder if that Rolling Stone Top 500 has a lot of metal on it, perusing the list real quick I saw Metallica’s Master Of Puppets in there, but I doubt any of those squares recognize more extreme genres.

I also listened to an album by deathgrind outfit Handsome Prick, which was absolutely excellent, and makes me wonder how come they’re not as well-known as some other bigger bands of that niche. And I rounded it up with an album by Thermohaline, a “quarantine band” with members from four different countries, who made a superb and utterly varied album of post-black metal with elements of tons of genres, from d-beat to harsh electronic and with a constant unsettling vibe which they refer to as “oceanic”. All three will be entering my rotation for sure.

At night I rode my longboard to the bar, with the dog in tow. Beers were drunk, funny and serious conversations were had, card games and foosball games were played. Good times were had. It was a friend’s birthday so I gave him a homebrewed IPA.

Chapter 36

Up early (well, “vacation-early”) for a little day of sightseeing with the visiting friends from out of town. We packed a little picnic bag and walked with the dog to the old part of town to have breakfast. The place had old communist kitsch posters, one of them was the face and upper torso of a benevolent-looking Mao Zedong above a field of sunflowers, with the caption “To the service of the people”. The girlfriend laughed at that one.

I often wonder what would have happened in the first two or three decades of the PRC, if they went straight to the state capitalist approach rather than those absolutely disastrous communist programs that held them back. Hell, maybe we’d all be speaking Mando right now.

The girlfriend’s friends arrived, and we ate hundun (which the Cantonese call wonton) and xiaolongbao (small conical dumplings stuffed with a meatball and soup), it tasted great.

We drove to an area south of the city with a lake, a hill and some cute green spaces. The hill is about 80 m tall but still stands out in this part of China, which is a flat pancake as far as the eye can see. It’s also got a towering temple on one of its slopes, and two interlacing white statues that represent something Buddhist.

“Is this the highest point in the city?”, one of our visitors asked once we got to the summit after a five-minute climb.

“I’m not sure, the hotel attached to Wanda Plaza might be taller”

We all laughed. For many years now I’ve been speaking more than enough Chinese to deliver snarky comment upon snarky comment. Despite its diminutive size, the hill is pretty cool, with a nice view of the surrounding countryside, and it was almost deserted.

Then we went to the lakeside and had a little picnic, eating oranges and cherries and small cookies, and drinking beer. Well I was drinking beer. The other dude was driving and doesn’t really like alcohol anyway, and the two girls aren’t into day drinking as much as I am.

We drove back, and I kept reading Homo Deus on my Kindle. The post-biological dystopian world that is described in there is truly scary, the author makes hypotheses about the upcoming death of humanism and liberalism as the de facto dominating ideologies, as human beings become less important in a military and economic sense, as algorithms and machines are taking over, and also as trans-humanism and genetic or cybernetic enhancements becomes a thing. I was born in the 80s but still feel like an old fart at times, and if I think it’s creepy that the things I write about here influence my Facebook ads, well that’s just the beginning.

I made a gratin casserole with cod, mashed potatoes, a cream sauce with dill and lemon zest, and two types of cheese while they were playing a board game. And to balance the richness, I also made a salad. We ate at 3 PM, which is a bit odd but we had breakfast at 9 and they needed to go on a three-hour drive to go home. I put on a cumbia playlist, something that somehow became a tradition when we have friends over for dinner. I really like all sorts of Latin music and so does the girlfriend, and I feel like it’s good stuff for a dinner party. I got some compliments on my cooking and it was indeed pretty delicious, thank you YouTube’s Chef John for the recipe.

I was a bit sleepy in the late afternoon, after eating that calorie bomb and drinking wine. I did a bit of writing while listening to a mixtape by Tandem, a French hip-hop duet from the northern suburbs of Paris. They’re among the first French rappers I’ve ever gotten into back in the day, and they have some serious bangers. They got under a bit of controversy back in the day for the line “Je baiserai la France jusqu’à ce qu’elle m’aime [I’ll fuck France until she likes me]”, a lot of their tracks deal with the realities of immigrant communities, and just like with the case of Scred Connexion, I agree with some of their points and virulently disagree with others. One part I found interesting was a sample before a track, no idea if it was from a real interview or from a piece of fiction, but it was something like “Yeah, I’m racist, and I admit it. I live among all the foreigners, I see how they are. It’s much easier to be anti-racist in Neuilly [a rich neighborhood] than St-Denis [a working-class neighborhood that is heavily black and maghrebi nowadays]” And... that’s kind of a valid point. Ivory towers and all that. I’m not defending racism, but for sure it’s easy to be virulently anti-racist when the only black guy you’ve ever seen was wearing a tuxedo and handing out flutes of champagne at a fellow CEO’s daughter’s wedding.

I poured myself a Belgian strong ale by La Chouffe and watched a short documentary about Kazushi Sakuraba, one of MMA’s most legendary figures. The focus was on his feud with the Gracie family, the bunch of Brazilian brothers and cousins who brought BJJ to the USA and changed the whole world of martial arts. He beat four of them, including Royce Gracie, who had won three of the first four UFC tournaments (and the reason he didn’t win UFC 3 was due to injury), and that one was under a special ruleset with no time limit. The two men fought for six 15-minute rounds, with the Japanese cacthwrestler dominating most of it, until Gracie gave up. And then, as it was part of a tournament, Sakuraba came out the same night and fought Igor Motherfucking Vovchanchyn, the number 1 rated heavyweight at the time, a heavy-handed Soviet smashing machine who outweighed him by quite a bit. Truly one of the most fearless men to ever walk the face of the Earth.

For the next several months, I want to go through the Rolling Stones magazine’s list of Top 500 Albums Of All Time, the 2020 updated one. Of course, there’s a bit of criticism about the whole thing because there’s got to be some underrated albums that didn’t make it, but it should be good enough. The first one, at number 500, is Funeral by Arcade Fire. I kind of expected to find it really gay, but it’s actually pretty damn good, a great piece of indie rock with many layers of instruments. Number 499 was an album from 1977 by artists I’ve never heard of, Rufus and Chaka Khan, in a soul and funk repertoire, and I also enjoyed it.

Our late dinner was reheated Sichuan food leftovers over rice with an egg on top, while we watched another episode of The Office. Then I kept reading and called it a night.

Chapter 35

Another day in the glorious People’s Republic of Xijinpingland. This one started a bit late, I went to bed past midnight and slept in. Those soccer games finish late, and by the time I get home, I don’t want to go to sleep right away, I want to relax with a few alcoholic beverages. That’s why during work weeks I tend to take a nap beforehand.

I finished last night’s entry, uploaded it, then I worked out in my home gym, my routine of push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, handstand push-ups, and kettlebell swings. With that out of the way, I heated some rice, beef chunks and gumbo gravy, and ate it with a tasty Revenant IPA from Lost Coast brewery.

My brother sent me an article about the movie Slap Shot, my favorite movie of all time and an absolute cult classic among many hockey fans. It came out in 1977, chronicling the problems of a minor-league team in an era when hockey was plagued with violence, and is very much inspired by true events. The newspaper article was about a man from Quebec who played for the team that the movie was based upon, alongside the infamous Carlson brothers (immortalized in the movie as the Hanson brothers), reminiscing of stories from that time and how it was as outrageous as portrayed, if not worse. I saw the movie over sixty times and must have read everything written about it and some of the other colorful characters from that time, one of my favorite stories about the Carlson brothers is how one of them got in a fight with a big mustachioed goon named Gilles “Bad News” Bilodeau, near the rinkside announcer’s box, and grabbed the microphone to hit the big Quebecer, with the POCK! POCK! POCK! sounds from the microphone echoing through the whole arena.

It was very sunny outside, with skies of a rarely seen blue in this neck o’ the woods, so I had to go out with the dog and get some of that vitamin D. I brought a can of hefeweizen with me, why not, I worked out today, and am on holiday. I put on a Ryan Long podcast in my earbuds, his best one so far, I was laughing pretty hard at how he broke down a Vice article about autofellatio. He lamented how what was once one of the coolest, edgiest magazines devolved into pure clown world SJW garbage, and their tendency to find something done by a small handful of freaks on an obscure corner of the internet as being “the new trend”.

Back in my living room, I watched 7 Jours Sur Terre, I praised them in the past for their quality geopolitical analysis but they’re getting even better. If you understand French, do yourself a favor and check it out. The most interesting topic from this week’s episode was about the Arctic, how as the ice is melting there are opportunities for mining and transportation there, and the subsequent scramble by a handful of powerful countries to get their piece of the pie. Apparently Canada is really shitting the bed in that regard, neglecting the whole issue and letting the USA, Russia and even China step on its delicately painted toes (because it’s 2021!)

I turned on the PS3 and immediately I got stuck in a Dead Space 3 level. I was on some kind of elevated platform that was blocked by a giant dead alien monster and couldn’t go anywhere, I couldn’t jump over nor crawl under. Fucking dumb. I ejected the CD and put on GTA V instead, a game that doesn’t pull that stupid shit, with its limitless open world. I played as Franklin, shooting some snooty rich cunts in my Hollywood Hills neighborhood with a high-powered sniper rifle, and eventually getting shot myself by a policeman. The nerve!!! I woke up in the hospital, exonerated from all charges after it was proven that the cop was racist (duh!), beat up a group of pedestrians, mostly women, then stole a car, drove to the airport pursued by racist cops, and stole a small private jet to really stick it to those racists. I flew around until I lost the racist police helicopter trailing me, then jumped off the plane, parachuting on a beach where, after a few scuffles with racist rich kids living there, I took a parked car and took off. Vehicle ownership is rooted in capitalist white supremacy.

I listened to the Metal Minded podcast, the boys gave a dithyrambic review to the new Werewolves album. I thought the whole black/death/grind/tech/brutal hodgepodge was well executed and enjoyable, but even after listening to it one more time immediately after the podcast was over, I failed to see it as anything that special. Maybe I’m getting a bit burned out with metal, especially the subgenres I’ve been listening to for over 15 years now. I get more excitement with music I haven’t been exploring to such depths already.

With that in mind, I put on the album Zenyata Mondatta by The Police. I give myself a mission to go through the catalogs of classic artists this year, looking at various lists of greatest musical artists of all-time. Oftentimes I’ve heard a lot of their songs already, but not in an album format, and that’s the case with that British band. I like Sting’s distinctive voice and the various influences heard throughout the album, including some ska passages.

The girlfriend had an old friend visiting from out of town, we went to the Japanese restaurant together. The same Japanese restaurant we’ve been to three or four days ago, and where I bought my Kirin bottles yesterday. We truly are regulars. We had a nice dinner, the four of us (me, the girlfriend, her friend, her friend’s husband). I’ll count it as today’s Chinese language practice.

We got home fairly early, I put on a live set by Bérurier Noir, the legendary 80s French punk band, I mixed myself a cocktail with bourbon and crème de cassis, and then I watched an episode of Netflix’s Unsolved Mysteries. That one was in French, about some guy who’s the primary suspect for the murder of his whole family, as he disappeared off the face of the Earth at the same time they all got killed. I like true crime stories, but I have to say those are a bit frustrating, as per the whole concept you end up just wondering what the hell is the answer to all those questions.

I sat in bed and plunged into Homo Deus. I want to finish it soon, as I have quite a few books on my ever-expanding reading list.