Thankfully, I’ve been spared by most people.  There are occasional small tricks pulled on me (“Hey you’ve got something on your face” is particularly effective, due to my ability to eat like a feral animal and my nervous habit of pawing at my face), but there’s never been anything life ruining.  I’ve had the good fortune to have never been part of an elaborate prank that starts with peanut butter smeared on my alarm clock and ends with me locked in a Honda Accord sinking slowly into a large body of water.  I take that as evidence that I’ve surrounded myself with people who have found me affable enough not to destroy me as a human being.

I’ve not been totally left out of this devious madness though.  The worst trick ever pulled on me was on April Fool’s of 2011.  I had the day off, because back in Jinzhou I only worked weekends but got a full time salary for reasons I don’t care about, and was sound asleep.  Then my phone rang.  The coworker in charge of me was calling, and in a tone of voice equal parts sternness and worry, she asked me why I wasn’t at the train station.  “[Our boss] is waiting for you at the train station!  You’re supposed to go to the head office in Shenyang today, and your train is leaving in fifteen minutes!”

This was at a time in my life where I had just gotten back from a disastrous and soul-dissolving trip to Seoul, South Korea; I was trying to make up for my lack of job experience by being professional and agreeable all the time; and I was basically just trying to figure out how to make it on my own for the first time in my life.  Missing a train to go to my company’s headquarters a couple hours away, where only important things happened, was a problem.  It was a sign that all this troublesome bullshit that had been happening to me lately was not just freak occurrence; rather, I was unfit to take care of my barely twenty-three-year-old self.  That version of reality would have crushed me, and I couldn’t allow it.  And of course, I was twenty-five minutes away from the train station.  As is typical of me, I panicked.  I sprang out of bed, and though I had made it a point to not use crass language around my coworkers, I blurted out a very scared “Are you fucking serious?”

Of course, she wasn’t.  She cackled and shouted “Happy April Fool’s Day!” just before hanging up on me.

It was a simple trick, but so, so effective.  It left me shaking and wide awake in my bedroom.  Whether it was on purpose or not, it played on deep-seated fears I had about being on my own and my unshakable feeling that I was in way over my head with this whole “China” thing.  I think this is the way the best, and dirtiest, tricks work.  They pick their victim apart piece by piece, exposing and exploiting the dark center they are so diligent to hide.  The feeling of being played like that is terrible, and one I rarely wish on others.

Fast forward to today, and I’m standing in front of an open class.  We have several different types of courses, and the purpose of this one is that it’s a free lesson or activity designed to get my students to practice and show off their English as much as possible.  I was only vaguely prepared for the lesson, as I’d been somewhat busy before it and planning out an extensive lesson had fallen by the wayside.

And that’s when Phoebe came in.  Phoebe is a leggy local girl with a very open mind and a degree in something called “pop music performance”.  She apologized for being late, and then effortlessly pulled off the aforementioned “You got some shit on your face” trick on me.  I was suddenly struck with inspiration.  I looked around and noticed that I had a trained performer, a teenager, and a psychology major all in one class; they were an A-Team of manipulation, and mine to command.  So, I did the only thing any reasonable person would do: I used my students to wage psychological warfare on my coworkers.

So we schemed.  We talked about potential targets, and what we could do to them.  Soon, it became clear exactly what we needed to do: we needed to toy with them.  We needed to create a believable situation and then turn it straight on its head, and here’s how we did it:

Pheobe stormed out of the classroom, looking incomparably upset.  I chased for a second before going into the teaching department, filled with teachers who most definitely saw her storm off, and started stammering at Lynn, her study adviser.  “She just ran out of class!  I don’t know what I said wrong, but I said something wrong and I need you to go talk to her.”  It was a believable story, because Lynn, acutely aware of my rough edges and faced with the horror of a student demanding a refund because the foreigner pissed her off, ran after her.  She caught up with Phoebe, calmed her down, and brought her back to the office, where there was our plucky teenager waiting under her desk, poised to scare the ever-loving shit out of her.  And then poor, sweet Lynn was scared to death.

Emboldened by our victory, we ran variations on that grift for the remainder of the period, switching out students, figuring out the best ways we could manipulate these hapless rubes.  No one was safe from our reign of terror.  Some might call me Machiavellian for my manipulative tactics, others might just say I’m a dick, but mostly, I was bored.  Bored, and ready to take revenge on an entire nation for waking me up at 9AM for a train that didn’t exist.

Ever since, it’s been mostly a fluid dance between “acceptably ponchy” and “put down the Oreo and make a fucking effort”.  These days I’ve been hovering around the “ponchy” end of the spectrum, but as my hairline makes a cowardly retreat towards the back of my fat head, my patchy beard makes no attempt to cover that withdrawal.  “Giant baby dropped on a barber shop floor” is not a good look for anyone.  I’ve always believed myself as possessing a lot of inner beauty (as this blog has so eloquently demonstrated for these past three and a half years), but as I approach the quarter-century mark, maybe I could stand to show some of that on the outside.

I understand all the benefits of healthy living, but there are two major roadblocks between me and becoming a finer specimen of man.  The first is that Burger King tastes great to me.  The second, and potentially the bigger issue, is that I’m intensely bored by exercise.

To fall back on familiar gags about going to the gym, it’s kind of fucking stupid to run for an hour and get nowhere, and that stupidity is amplified by the fact that the scenery that surrounds most treadmills looks like a public bathroom from The Fifth Element.  Sure, running outside is the cure to that symptom, but Xi’an’s air quality is poor, and I’m not the kind of person who enjoys the shame of having to shuffle back home after I blew everything on an over-confident two kilometer jog.  So then I think that maybe I could go to the gym and just not run on a treadmill, but then I remember the time I once belonged to a western-style gym in China and was rewarded for my vigor by a young Chinese couple who used their date night to stand in front of the window of the gym and watch my tits bounce.

So, that and my laziness has resulted in a life where my only exercise is by walking everywhere, and by everywhere, I mean to and from work and then home from the bar.  I’m maintaining, sure, but me “maintaining” is sort of like keeping a mid-90′s Toyota Camry on the road.

Normally this doesn’t bother me, as I try to avoid mirrors whenever possible, but I got an email the other day from some friends I haven’t seen in months.  This email contained an attachment: a JPEG invitation to their wedding in April.  It was a fun, classy little thing; a mocked-up movie poster called “the Wedding Party”.  Their names were across the top, as they were the “stars” of this movie, but in the top-center, in a more eye-catching font-size, was “Introducing: TIM KING as THE PRIEST”.

It was right around then that I remembered that the three of us got drunk about six months ago and decided that I was totally going to be the minister at their wedding.  And maybe the fact that it was a movie poster helped, thereby making me think of cameras, but I finally made the connection that I was probably going to be in lots of their wedding photos.  I looked at myself in that dreaded bathroom mirror, and recognizing that my physique was less Simon Pegg and more Louis CK, I decided I needed to do something.

So, I returned to the only readily available option I could think of: the Insanity workout.  I had tried it over a year ago with some decent results, and as the Wedding Party draws close, it could be my only hope.  Now, before you go off and think that this is going to be some sarcastic, yet glowing endorsement of those exercise tapes, stop worrying.  Me and Shaun T have a distinctly “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” relationship, in so much as our mutual adversary are my breasts.  That’s about it.  Otherwise, the tapes don’t do much for me.  Instead of having great form, I end up spending most of my attention trying to psychoanalyze Tanya, because there is no way her and Shaun T weren’t practicing low planks on each other during taping, and I’m trying to suss out the nuances of their relationship by the things that he yells at her.  At any rate, I’m more of the impression that those videos actively hate me and anyone with a BMI higher than Kate Moss.  Sure, they put in that one struggling guy with the power-brows in the back so you can catch a glimpse of him having a coronary and then not feel quite as bad about your fat ass, but deep down his inclusion is the same as the stereotypical black guy in crappy slasher movies:

He was put there because someone has to die first.

My mission to become a sexy priest in the next forty-nine days is going to be long, and arduous, and largely Whopper-free, but this is something I have to do.  I’m not going to be a supermodel any time soon, but as long as I can outlast Power Brows, then there may be hope for me yet.

She’s a local girl, yes, but more importantly she’s the snarky woman I’ve always dreamed I’d be mocked by.  As I’ve told everyone who asks (and I’ve said it dozens of times without ever changing my choice of words), she’s as big a fan of brutal and relentless sarcasm as I am, or as a friend of mine puts it, “She’s got a mouth”.  She thinks some of my clothes are silly, she hates my plum blossom tattoo, and my now unable-to-be-ignored balding has come up more than once, but she likes me and accepts that the questionable aesthetic, borne of a half-decade in confirmed bachelorhood, is just part of the package.  It’s proof positive of the cliche “love is blind”, and has made me finally realize that “Underneath Your Clothes” is not a warbling, carnal plea for Shakira’s man to get into his birthday suit.

There are a million things I like about her, and I’m superstitious enough to not list too many of them for fear of jinxing it, but one of the most welcome parts of my new relationship is the support it brings into my life.  When I had a mysterious, likely bass-induced hand sprain, she wasted no time bringing me to the hospital to get it checked out.  When she’s having trouble focusing her ideas to use when teaching for the TOEFL test, I’m always happy to lend a hand.  There is no keeping score; there’s just affection and concern and willingness to help each other.

But the latest in these little favors has me troubled.  You see, she’s got this cousin looking to study abroad in the U.S. for high school.  I kind of don’t really like this little bastard, mostly because he does things like call her up and say “Hey, let’s go to lunch!” and then has her take him to a Japanese restaurant (expensive) and then makes her foot the bill (more expensive).  Now this isn’t, in and of itself, an issue; I myself love having dinner with my cousins and if I have the means I’ll foot the bill.  Two differences though: my cousins never DEMAND that I take them anywhere and pay for the whole excursion, and if they did do that to me, it still remains that none of my cousins are from families that are vastly more wealthy than mine.  In case that was confusing, let me put it into context: this is a fifteen-year-old with an iPhone 5; my girlfriend sometimes has to borrow taxi money from me if she wants to make it back to her house at night.  But to be fair, he did once give her something.  It was a second-gen iPod Touch that he was “done with”.

Now that I’m done explaining why this kid is a prick for making my girlfriend shell out hundreds of RMB and then give her an Apple product older than Steve Jobs’s pancreatic cancer, I return to the matter at hand.

This kid is trying to study abroad, because apparently if you’re Chinese and rich you just ship your kid halfway across the world for a couple of years because fuck it why not.  There are two major obstacles when it comes to Chinese people trying to go abroad for whatever reason, the first and foremost of which is money.  The second of these problems is English speaking ability.

Now, when these same people find out their kid might be a total dipshit, the kind that barks out “MY MOM LIKE COOKING” when asked “What’s your mom like?” they’re throwing money at it to make it go away, like any other “minor” problem in this country.  I can’t imagine this is working particularly well on any of the academics interviewing these idiots, but regardless of that, various affluent individuals have been keeping my darling girlfriend late at work to get her to help their idiot somehow cheat on the Skype interview with a school administrator.

I haven’t been asked to help Cousin cheat on anything, because it seems to me the kid can actually speak and understand English, but I was asked to compose a recommendation letter for him, just as a backup in case their mutual cousin studying in Cambridge was unable to do the job.  I wasn’t thrilled about the idea, but I do like some of the tricks she shows me when we’re alone and would like them to continue, not to mention I’m a master of the bullshit, so I went for it.  Over a cup of coffee, I gave dear girlfriend a clinic on bullshit, turning this putz into a misunderstood scholar in disguise (mostly I used the same kind of bullshit I put on my resume to make it look like I’m not a moron with little applicable job experience).  I put it on a flash drive, gave it to her with the instruction to not put my name on it, and went about my business.

As is wont to do when these things happen, the plot thickened.  Cambridge cousin never replied to repeated requests, and though I was reluctant, my name was put on the letter and submitted.  The fine people at whatever stupid high school he’s trying to get into agreed that Tim King is probably a fake name and that “anyone could have written that” (an assessment that my artistic sensibilities take great exception to), and have now requested my contact information.

So, somehow deluded with the idea that I have or someday will have a professional reputation in the New England secondary education community, I did the only sensible thing I could think to do: panicked, gave them my email, and made my girlfriend lie and say that I had no Skype or phone number, right before she texted me a 68-word primer on her cousin’s life story so that I would be “prepared” if they ever “contacted me”.

We’re a mess.  We deserve each other.  And if her cousin squanders the good will packed into every rosy word of bullshit I put into that letter, I will not hesitate to kill him with my bare hands.

First it was when I started this whole stupid thing, I just wanted attention and, as an ancillary, almost accidental goal, to entertain.  Then I left college and thought my life was over, so I kept writing to try and maintain some feeling of relevancy.  Then I moved to China and wanted to prove that my life was crazy.  Then I stopped caring about engaging in the modern era’s custom of having a Facebook Timeline pissing match over who has the more awesome life (a contest I’m winning, by the way).

I’ve never been much good at fiction, so this chain of events ended up stopping most of my writing in its tracks, and these days it’s more or less about showing up to work forty hours every week and then biding my time in my apartment with cheap beer and my Playstation, waiting for the day I can afford to have the Internet installed in my apartment so I can torrent Superbad to watch with my girlfriend, because somehow she’s gone through twenty-three years of life without having seen that foul-mouthed opus.

But those are my goals right now.  And that’s the problem with complacency, is just that black hole of ambition.  It’s a time warp in which you go to sleep at age twenty-six and wake up at forty, and little has changed.  You want for nothing, you need nothing.  You have everything, including the immense privilege to someday suffer over the fact that you don’t suffer at all.

The drive is still there, somewhere, and I want to try to harness my creative energy again.  Because I’m far too young and have too much opportunity in my life to get complacent.  Hence the interest in the writing contest.  This will be good for me in a number of ways:

1. I will not only start writing again, however briefly, but I’ll also have an excuse to use the typewriter that a couple of friends gave me because it was broken but then I fixed it so now it works and therefore I have a usable typewriter.
Nothing bad about an opportunity to settle in on the couch with some Jameson and get to work, like all my literary drunks heroes.

2. It’ll be an excuse to shit some fiction out on the world without worrying too much about it being perfect.
I talk to a lot of people in this town.  They can read, sure, but I meet few who have a background or interest in literature.  Some mousy laureate will probably come scrambling out from under the woodwork from a university in the north of town and put up a fight, but my braggadocio makes me think that the field of competition won’t be too fierce.  And since I haven’t written in a while, and my fiction is especially rusty, it’ll be a good way to shake out some of the cobwebs.  It’s kinda like when they send a dude down to the minors after he gets Tommy John surgery.

3. I could win a prize (and if said prize is of some monetary value, I could use the income boost)
The prizes have yet to be determined, but as is the case with most brooding male writers, I happily accept awards in the form of cash, alcohol, loose women, and Burger King.

However, this opportunity not without its risks.  Some possible drawbacks include:

1. The shattering of my ego
So, it turns out that I do consider myself a good writer, but I have that annoying habit of hating everything I write within moments of completing it.  This blow to my confidence goes double if other people hate the things I write.  And if my arrogance is helping me correctly predict the pool of writers I’ll be competing against, and I lose in that cloying sea of “Eat, Pray, Love” acolytes, I’m probably going to light that typewriter I’m so excited about on fire and throw it off my balcony while sobbing screaming and listening to Taylor Swift Mastodon.

2. I’ll probably write something less that I’m dying to write and something more that I think whoever is judging this will enjoy, because I’m a pander-happy jackass.
Not that I’m going to write something badly or differently, but the subject just might not be one I’m psyched about.  I don’t know, something about animals or feelings or smoking pot with blind people.  Think of it as Oscar baiting.

So I don’t know.  I’ve got about a month to stress out over this, but the brainstorming starts now.  Supernatural love stories are somehow still all the rage these days, so I’m thinking a star-crossed merman romance would be pretty alright.  Working title: “Do Mermen Dream of Aquatic Peckers?”  Sounds like a winner to me.

FULL LENGTHS

1. White Lung – “Sorry” (and I’m going to go ahead and count their 7″ as well) (Punk)
I can’t say enough about this band. Easily my favorite punk outfit going, and they don’t disappoint.  Whirlwind instrumentals, pissed-off vocals, everything’s here.  Standout track: “Glue”.

2. Japandroids – “Celebration Rock” (Punk/indie)
Japandroids continue to write the sing-along soundtrack to my mid-twenties with an album that demands that all year be a summertime bash with everyone you love to hang out with.  Lines like “Remember that night you were already in bed/Said “Fuck it!”, got up to drink with me instead” are singularly responsible for the 100% increase in my cut-off jeans supply last July (now holding strong at two pairs).  Standout track: “Younger Us”.

3. Godspeed You! Black Emperor – “Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!” (Post-rock)
Apparently GY!BE just showed up to Boston one day and was like “Hey, we have an album”.  Not complaining in the least.  Standout track: The ones that aren’t drone tracks.

4. Puzzle – “Nothing But the Rain” (Post-rock)
Puzzle is from France, I think, and they seem to listen to a decent amount of Red Sparowes.  A nice surprise for those of you disappointed by the Sparowes’ side-project this year (See: Kitsune’s “Marriages”, which was good but not exactly great).  Standout track: There are only three, but maybe the first one.

5. Loma Prieta – “IV” (Screamo)
The skramz melodrama is always going to be there when you’re listening to something like this, but they just do it right.  Potentially the best band doing this sound.  Standout track: “Uselessness”.

6. The Pirate Ship Quintet – “Rope for No-Hopers” (Post-rock)
A multi-instrumental affair with a lot of interesting rough edges.  Standout track: “Dennis Many Times”.

7. Best Practices – “The EP LP” (Punk)
Pretty sure these guys used to be in Light the Fuse and Run, and this album is over before you know it, but it rocks the whole way through.  Standout track: “All the Bull”.

8. Converge – “All We Love We Leave Behind” (Chaotic metal)
Converge makes a record.  It’s good.  No one who listens to Converge is surprised.  Standout track: “All We Love We Leave Behind”.

9. Family Cat – “Dealing With Depression” (Punk)
Every year there’s at least one album that makes me, once again, give a shit about that midwestern-style punk I used to love so much.  This is that album.  Standout track: “This Christmas Isn’t Going to Get Drunk and Ruin Itself”.

10. Every Time I Die – “Ex Lives” (Metal)
Gets off track every once in a while, but is still more of the clever and snotty ETID you’ve grown to love.  Standout track: “Typical Miracle”.

EPs

1. Driveway – “South Ossetia” (Emo)
Remember feelings?  Ireland’s Driveway does, and puts samples from movies into them.

2. Desaparecidos – “MariKKKopa” 7″ (Punk)
My favorite band of all time (and the best thing Conor Oberst doesn’t do so he can have plenty of time to cry behind his acoustic and pretend he’s some sort of wuss Bob Dylan) puts out an A-Side criticizing Arizona’s immigration policies and a B-Side telling Clear Channel to go to hell.  It did take some time to grow on me though.  Like a minute or two.

3. Comadre – “Cold Rain” (Punk/Screamo)
I heard somewhere that Comadre doubles as the backing band for Heartsounds, and if that’s true then the sense of melody is rubbing off and making Comadre do some really awesome things with their sound.

4. Fucked Up – “Year of the Tiger” 12″ (Punk)
I thought they were on hiatus?  Who cares, the Zodiac series marches on, and I couldn’t be happier.

5. Wild Moth – “Mourning Glow” (Punk/indie)
A great little record with a little touch of post-punk.

6. Locktender – “Collected” (Post-everything)
My best friend complains that Men As Trees were better.  Even if that’s true, it doesn’t diminish how crazy Locktender is on their debut.

7. Ritual Mess – “Ritual Mess” (Screamo)
Is someone from Orchid involved with this?  Kinda sounds like it, and that’s definitely a good thing.

8. Riviera – “Parla Con Gesu” (Indie)
Any band who can tastefully fit brass into their sound automatically gains my respect.

9. Your Highness – “Blue Devils” (Stoner metal)
Black lights and heaviness and crunchy guitars ‘n’ shit.

10. Lowtalker – “The Marathon” (Post-hardcore/emo)
A couple of friends and me call this kind of music “Bauer-core” after the fact that our old roommate seemed to love high-polish pseudo-heavy shit like this, and every once in a while something like that sinks its teeth into me.  This managed to do just that.

10b. (the conflict of interest pick) Green Bastard – “Threshold” (Stoner metal)
I say this is a conflict of interest because two-thirds of this band is my old band, and their bassist was in Get Gorgeous, who were our best band-friends, but I can’t deny that this is a strong debut and should be checked out by anyone who’s ever owned a Sleep or Red Fang record.

DISAPPOINTMENTS

Hot Water Music’s comeback record makes me wish they’d stayed dead and left me with the memories of driving to Jersey to go to their reunion show, how Caspian’s new album sounds really good but seems to have no staying power, bands that used to have Springsteen influence have moved on to Springsteen worship and it bores me to fucking death, the noodle-emo epidemic is still going strong, and that new Lightning Bolt album is mostly kinda crappy b-sides.

I wrote this letter because I feel irreparably unhappy at my job.  Any enthusiasm I had has been sucked from me and replaced by frustration, cynicism, and the crushing weight of futility.  Part of it is the empty pageantry of everything, that I’m expected to be a magician in the classroom, and the only way of showing “results” is by creating tiny little parrots of myself instead of English speakers.  My kids can answer questions but they rarely if ever understand what they’re saying or why.  We all just kind of accept that it’s what my boss tells me to do and so we do it, because as much as I implore her that our textbooks are fucking garbage and the Chinese method we use is fundamentally flawed, especially when learning and teaching languages, she doesn’t listen to a goddamned word I say.  Why would she?  I’m just the dancing, smiling white face that keeps her school open.  I’m not a teacher so much as an angry, unmasked Big Bird (and occasionally a discount Raffi).  That’s all I’ll ever be here.  Equal parts being silly and getting shit on by privileged, spoiled rotten four year olds.

But there’s only so much of that I can take.  Only so many times I can be so blatantly disrespected and ignored by some shitty kid.  Only so many talks I can have with my boss, pleading with her to intervene and stand up to one of these awful parents, because the level of privilege of the students and their families, and the desperateness with which my boss pursues their money, is so unchecked that the TA and I have no meaningful way of reprimanding someone for bad behavior.  The second a student is unhappy, someone is there to shower them in rewards just for fucking existing.  Teaching and keeping students entertained have become mutually exclusive objectives.

This all came to a head a week ago because of this kid named Bruce.  Bruce is a fucking asswipe.  Everyone’s quick to remind me that he’s just a child, but I was a child once, and I have now spent a stupid amount of my professional life dealing with children, and there are, indeed, kids that are just straight up bad.  By nine years old (which Bruce has just turned this year) every child has made a firm life decision as to whether or not they’re going to be a total sphincter, and he had made the decision to be a disrespectful asshole to every teacher and student he had shared a classroom with at our school.

Bruce came to a Halloween activity I’d prepared.  He was unruly, kicking other kids, doing all kinds of douche bag little kid stuff.  I finally pulled him out of the room and said, in both languages, “Stop.  Be good.  Next time I have to talk to you, you’re leaving this activity”.  Puckered him up for about five minutes until he rather violently shoved some kid to the ground.

I lost it.  In some ways (probably in most ways), Bruce became the four-foot-nothing embodiment of everything that was pissing me off about this job, and he was running rampant.  I screamed at him to get out.  He eventually did, crying.  A TA pleaded with me to let him back in, but I was fuming.  I saw no reason to allow him back in.  He spent the rest of the activity crying in the waiting room, then he went home and told his mother and grandmother that I’d shoved him to the ground, then dragged him out the door.  So they came down to the school to lynch me.  The TAs told them my side of the story, and somehow fended them off.  But here’s the kicker: the environment at this school is in such a way that they begged this kid to come back, and to do that, I was basically expected to apologize to this kid for him being an asshole.  I was supposed to praise him, tell him how good a student I thought he was.  All kinds of stupid bullshit like that because at this school, we can’t kick out one of the worst behaved students in our school.  Because money.

I ended up not having to do exactly that and the thing has mostly blown over, but I spent a solid forty-eight hours thinking things like “What the hell is this all for?”, “How did things get this bad?”, “Fuck this I quit!”

Hence the thousand some-odd word resignation letter, and the wake of malaise that followed, knowing that if I just hit “Send”, it would all be over.  I haven’t yet, but that hasn’t stopped me from sending out a few resumes.

The last few days at work have been predictably listless and so phoned in that China Telecom is charging me money for it.  Class after class of students passed by me, and I barely registered any of them.  Until Frank came in.

Frank is barely three years old and barely three feet tall, all around just an adorable kid.  He sort of looks like you could win him at the county fair from the ring toss booth.  He’s excitable and surprisingly bright, despite the perplexing holes in his English vocabulary (colors and being asked “How many?” have largely eluded him).

This morning he was late for class.  Normally that shit kind of annoys me (but I was already checked out mentally for the day even though it was only 10:30 in the morning, so whatever) but he walked up to me and presented a pomegranate that was just about the size of his head.  Teacher, here you are, he said.  Not in English, mind you, so it wasn’t exactly a slam dunk, but it was still pretty cute.  I asked his mother if I was really being given a pomegranate, and she confirmed that yes, I was really being given a pomegranate.  I think it’s probably the reason why he was late.  Kid just likes me and wanted to get me a pomegranate.

Here you are! he repeated, lifting it up as high as he could and looking at me with his dark, glassy teddy bear eyes.

So, obviously, I took it from him.  It was kind of like the universe saying “Hey, I know you’ve been dealing with some stuff lately, but here’s a pomegranate.  Don’t worry about it.  Shit’s gonna be fuckin’ fine, man.”

In China, it’s very easy to go without reminders of home.  The language, the food, the culture, and even the myriad and surprising ways it fails to imitate western culture are all stark reminders that we’re thousands of miles from anything we’d previously known.  Back in Jinzhou, our reprieve from the world around us was a tremendously greasy, sauceless pizza from a knock-off Pizza Hut called “Pizza House” (it sadly took me a half dozen visits to realize why it was named that), a Cornetto and a movie night among friends that gave us a momentary, very shoddily built illusion that we weren’t where we were.  In Xi’an things are a bit different, in that I can easily tell everything to fuck off and then I can go sit in a Burger King for an hour and recharge over a Double Stacker.  And in a place like Beijing, with its segregated gated communities at the edge of town, I’d imagine illusions of home come even easier.

I can get bacon double cheeseburgers.  I can get reasonably good pizza.  I can go to expat bars where the staff is fluent in English and swill Jameson all night. I can see English movies and I can order Dr. Pepper off the Internet, but the one cultural void I can’t seem to fill is music.

It’s not like I was expecting to find a vibrant independent music community, but I’m not sure that, prior to living here, I would have been able to comprehend the strange cultural tie-dye that is popular music in China.  Chinese pop is its own, unlistenable-to-my-western-ears story that I won’t delve into, out of both ignorance and apathy, but Linkin Park, Adele, and Lady Gaga have all found massive footholds here.  Avril Lavigne is popular, nay, iconic to the point where more than one person conflates her music with being actual punk rock.  I’m pretty sure “My Heart Will Go On” has never stopped being a top ten hit in China, and I’ve lived here long enough to start thinking, “Okay, maybe this song is a total jam”.

But I think the strangest encounters with western music in China have to be at the bars and night clubs.  That’s where you start getting those counterfeit western experiences, like a nightclub singer, who’s wearing so many sequins on her outfit she’s now more disco ball than woman, belting out Ke$ha’s “Tik-Tok” (or as she is more wont to sing it, “tirk-tork”).  Or the three-piece acoustic act that had some Chinese dude attempt to rap “Empire State of Mind” and followed it up with another guest star who felt that “Wonderwall” was a good song, but totally needed some fucking beatboxing smooshed between every verse and chorus.  And what that couple singing at the private club did to Van Morrison’s “Moondance” was appalling, and you should know that I’m saying that even though I fucking despise Van Morrison.

It’s probably borderline racist of me (or actually racist, I haven’t decided yet) to mock these covers of English songs by non-native speakers; hypocritical even, given that I played bass for a white guy who nasally sang Chinese songs at the same bar as the beatboxing Wonderwall singer (and I’m guessing poorly, since we were asked to stop playing those Chinese songs along with “Fuck You” by Cee Lo Green and “Fuck Her Gently” by Tenacious D), but the music snob in me can’t ignore it.  The same involuntary pretentiousness that constructed an entire wardrobe based around band t-shirts and waxes poetic about being a barely competent bassist in the world’s worst post-rock band prevents me from just letting it go it anytime a local screws an English song in half.  Settling just isn’t an option.  And so it remains that the only hole left in my American heart is one that longs to hear good music, live music, as it was meant to be played.

So, when I heard that Reverend Run was coming to Xi’an last month, I was ecstatic.  Not because I even like Run DMC, but because in a roundabout way, it was the answer to my prayers.  Few things can satisfy the longing for authentic, live American music better than one of the godfathers of hip-hop coming to perform at a local club.

Plans were made.  We talked of reserving tables; of taking our hard-earned money and blowing it on the nightclub’s insanely expensive liquor; of having one of the most mental nights of our lives, simply because this man would be anywhere near our corner of the world.  I almost took the night off of work, and skipping work is something I rarely, if ever, do.  For fuck’s sake, a friend of mine made t-shirts for it.  The days counted down, the excitement grew, and then…

He never showed.  We bounced rumors back and forth between us about why it didn’t happen.  Many of us believed it was just some shady promoter talking shit, and that it was never a thing in the first place, but it turns out that the Rev postponed the date, and all the China dates, to spend the weekend performing in Philadelphia.  So what was supposed to be a crazy night became one of the shittier nights we’ve had in recent memory (which is mostly my fault but that’s another, pretty much unrelated story).

Well, tomorrow night Reverend Run is, once again, supposed to be in Xi’an.  No one sent around a rabid text message hoping to make plans as soon as possible, no one scrambled onto Facebook to tag dozens of us in a post just to say “WE’RE GOING, RIGHT?”   None of us give a single solitary fuck, because the Rev broke a promise to us.  In July he was supposed to give us just one night where we didn’t have to hear someone butcher “Country Roads” in the corner bar, or suffer through an obnoxiously loud Bruno Mars remix elsewhere, but he squelched on his end of the deal.  It’s like when everyone forgets your birthday and then feebly tries to give you a make-up party a week later; it’s a cheap thought, and life was just fine without it.

So I probably won’t be seeing Reverend Run tomorrow night.  And I’m kind of hoping the show is a bust, because then he’ll learn the same lesson he taught to us back in July: don’t bother getting excited, you’ll just end up disappointed.

First, do I agree with Dan Cathy, CEO of Chik-fil-A, and his assessment on gay marriage, vis-a-vis God’s wrath?  Absolutely not.  Do I agree with him injecting that opinion into what is, to millions, a business that affects them secularly and apolticially?  Nah, not really.  Actually seems kind of fucking stupid from what little I know about running a business.  But then again, it’s not my business, is it?  It’s his business, and it’s his big fat stupid mouth, and he’s allowed to run both.  He’s not a policy maker anyway–he’s just some fucking guy who makes fried chicken.

Now, what about the policy makers?  What about Rahm Emanuel of Chicago and Tom Menino and their decisions to refuse Chik-fil-A’s business, whose opposition to Chik-fil-A has been called a “chilling” curtailment of the First Amendment by pundits?  Does that policy decision, to oppose Chik-fil-A for the opinions of the Cathy’s, demonstrate government punishing the action of free speech?  While this is much more of my personal opinion and/or interpretation, I would say, no, it doesn’t.  The first is that we are a democracy.  If the Obama presidency has taught us anything, it’s that you can create as much policy and talk as much shit as you want, but we set up a system of checks and balances that can and usually will really fuck your shit up if you lose your mind and try to take everything over (or, in the modern day, if you have the audacity to have opinions that differ from those of your opposition party).  Mayors Menino and Emanuel can say as much as they fucking want about how much they oppose the Cathy’s, and the attempt to outlaw them in their cities is certainly a troubling gray area, but there is a system of aldermen and people like that to make the decisions together.  Furthermore, democracy is “government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system”, so wouldn’t it stand to reason that an elected official, which last time I checked is usually the person who gets the most votes, or differently put, a MAJORITY of votes, have a decent sense of what his or her constituents want or think or feel, or in another turn of phrase, represent the MAJORITY opinion?  This gets a little trickier with the near 50/50 Democrat vs. Republican splits we’re seeing in many elections recently, and fickle, everchanging opinion polls, but in general, I think we can assume that if someone is voted into office, there is, in some respect, a majority of people who agree, or at least disagree with the people who disagree with their candidate.  Wouldn’t that politician be doing a disservice to his constituents and the people that voted him into office by not using his free voice to amplify theirs?  And if that doesn’t convince you, Citizens United unfortunately says that money is free speech, so I think refusing money, in this case manifested as the refusal to allow Chik-fil-A into a municipality, also qualifies as such.

Now, the potential congressman from Mississippi who said that those two mayors “need to be introduced to the Second Amendment“?  That’s not free speech.  Actually that’s somewhere much closer to criminal threatening.  Well, it usually would be, but apparently strongly hinting for people to shoot other people is just run-of-the-mill political rhetoric for politicians these days.  And no, it’s not figurative speech, because if my recent internet run-ins with the American Right have made just one thing clear, it’s that the American Right is extremely ignorant and mean, like the asshat blogger who thought it was cute and amusing to try to get me in serious trouble by attempting to get me red-flagged by the Chinese government’s internet police (luckily for me the guy’s a fucking retard and did a terrible job at it), and they have no concept of figurative language, like the mouthbreather who told me my English was bad because I used the word “violent” in a way that doesn’t mean “shoot someone in the fucking face”.

And while I’m riled up about the Right’s ideologies, and we’re talking about rights, the platform of homosexuality being wrong because God said so, and the attempts to codify that discrimination into law?  That’s not just wrong, that’s also in all sorts of violation of the Bill of Rights, because that encroaches on others’ freedom of religion.  Your fire and brimstone church can go a-queer-hatin’ all it wants and refuse to marry them, that’s their right as a religious entity, but the law and the nation are secular and they don’t have the right to tell someone they can’t marry who they love, so long as they’re handing out marriage licenses.  We were never intended to be a religious state, and preventing us from becoming one is not encroaching on the right to be a Christian, it’s protecting the right for the rest of us to not believe in anyone else’s bullshit.

Now I’m officially rambling, but let me sum up: you’re allowed to say pretty much whatever you want, as long as it’s not actively oppressing another person and stripping them of their rights (and I say actively because certain groups of people love to pretend that they’re being oppressed by things that don’t affect them).  You can be nice, or mean, or smart, or stupid, or hateful, or loving, or funny, or boring, or offensive, or offended, or racist, or sexist, or as much of a total jerkoff bigot as you want to.  Just be prepared to get it as good or better than you give it, and don’t fucking cry and complain about your free speech being encroached upon when the rest of us use our right to free speech to tell you to shut the fuck up.

If you haven’t seen Taken yet I will probably like you less as a person, but because I’m a nice guy I’ll catch you up.  Liam Neeson is a divorcee dad.  His wife is a total abject bitch (though I can’t say that’s totally without reason; he did used to be a shitty dad and husband), and because she’s a total abject bitch she leverages the loving relationship Liam is trying to cultivate with his daughter to strong arm him into signing a waiver that allows his daughter to travel freely outside of the borders of the United States even though she’s a minor.  She tells him it’s to go see art museums and bullshit, but it’s actually to do the lamest thing ever conceived, which is to follow U2 around on a European Tour (was it U2? I don’t fucking remember.  It was definitely someone douchey like Bono).  So, you know, what we’re all expecting to happen happens and Liam’s daughter and her friend get kidnapped by Armenian sex slavers (don’t you just hate cliches?).  So then Liam does the only sensible thing and flies to Paris to throw brown people off bridges and shoot some asshole’s wife.  And oh yeah, the Divorcee Dad wet dream does reach its sticky conclusion when he rescues his daughter.  Go team.

That brings us to about 5:30 this morning when I finally rolled in from what was frankly a pretty weird night out, and a dear old friend of mine posted the trailer for Taken 2 on my Facebook.

In the trailer, we find out that Liam has apparently renewed his vows with ‘Merica and has returned to his first love: being a suited and government funded killing machine, and he’s on assignment in Istanbul (I’m assuming that at least, the trailer never actually says why he’s wearing a suit).  We also find out that all those Armenians and Turks he shot in the face, neck, and/or chest had family.  And those family members are also dicks.  Vengeful, well-armed dicks, at that.  So, in this big dramatic mass burial scene (like several coffins at once, not a bunch of people in a pit), a salt-and-pepper haired man with a nice Disney villain accent going on soliloquizes about having their revenge.

So what do you think that’re going to do?  Go to Istanbul and do the smart thing and shoot Liam in the face while he’s sleeping?  Maybe blow up wherever he’s staying or whatever car he’s driving?  Generally kill him swiftly and be done with it?

Nah, they decide they’re going to kidnap his daughter again.

Let that sink in for just a minute.  I mean, yeah, they also kidnap his wife, but they kidnap his fucking daughter again.  BECAUSE THAT WORKED OUT SO FUCKING WELL LAST TIME.  First off, Liam’s daughter might be mentally incapacitated, because after the events of Taken 1, not only does she seem fucking stoked to be traveling overseas again, BUT IT DOESN’T REALLY PHASE HER THAT SHE’S IN TURKEY, WHICH PUTS HER MUCH CLOSER TO THE PEOPLE WHO KIDNAPPED HER IN THE FIRST PLACE.  I mean, maybe it’s unreasonable of me to expect to know what would be going through her head, since I’ve never been abducted and then sold as a sex doll to Zorba the Hutt, but I’d imagine that international travel, especially to the home base of my abductors, would be pretty fucking far down the list.

But that lapse in judgement is far FAR better judgement than these fucking idiots trying to kidnap Liam’s daughter to get revenge for Liam killing all their kinsmen because they kidnapped his daughter.  I mean, if I typed that sentence correctly, your teeth should be attempting to reach around and start eating your own head.  That’s how fucking stupid this plan is.  It’s up there in that top tier of “lessons you should have learned by now”,  along with “you probably shouldn’t drink boiling hot coffee immediately after it’s been brewed”, “no forks in the light socket”, and “you should do everything in your power to avoid getting struck in the penis”.

Now, I’m not saying that this is going to be a lazy sequel.  On the contrary: it is most definitely a lazy sequel.  I mean, I’m still going to watch it and probably maintain half an erection for the badass entirety of the film’s run time, but this is just fucking insane.  Like, I can’t say it enough, kidnapping his daughter AGAIN?  How did those villains even let that idea get into the top ten list of vengeance plots?  It boggles the mind.  Liam Neeson is apparently the only person in the Taken universe with an IQ higher than Forrest Gump.