July 17, 2022
D41: 长岭 → 孝昌
The seeds of something unpleasant happening to me will be planted today but, because it happens in an online space, I won't be made aware of it until tomorrow when it blows up into something big. When it comes to the world of internet nutjibs interacting with reality, unlike my 2018 Incident¹, although I'll have days upon days of my inbox being flooded with hate filled messages, at least this the the keyboard warriors have nothing personal against me.
As when the seeds of the Incident started getting planted back in 2006 (when I dared to treat my position on staff at the first Tour of Hainan as the subject of a tour journal on a bike touring website), I didn't do anything "wrong", I merely existed in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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Even as someone who is as knowingly defiant, abrasive, and rude as I am, I somehow never manage to fall into difficulties caused by actual misbehavior on my part. This is potentially because, when I misbehave—when I aim to misbehave—I'm in control of the situation; whereas, when I accidentally step into a steaming pile of dogshit, it's because I wasn't expecting to find it there.
Starting my morning out annoyed at the owner of the guesthouse for being one of those types that likes to come into my room without knocking to chat at me². I was already fair unhappy with the room on account of it being my second night in a row with a bed hard enough to cause bruises (and no extra blankets around to bulk up the lack of a mattress) and this just led to my being even grumpier which in turn led to me deciding not to breakfast with the Happy Excited People from the night before as I knew I wasn't in a sufficiently pleasant mood as to appropriately give back what I would receive.
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The random place where I had noodles was fine. The ride out of town on the county road roughly equidistant from the Provincial Road or the National Road truck route was lovely. The weather pleasant, the scenery pretty, I even found some really cool 50s era Maoist slogans on buildings whose owners were simultaneously confused by me and my interest and proud to tell me all about the neighborhood.
The unpleasantness that I wasn't aware of happened only shortly after I left town, while I was still in the interstitial space between town and country. Houses on both sides of the road with no gaps between them but only the one road, no side streets, and hardly any businesses³.
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I had seen an old Supply and Marketing Co-op, photographed it, and spent a moment copying down the characters that I wasn't sure I'd be able to clearly read in a photo. While doing that, someone inside one of the buildings took two photos of me before combining them into a video "who's this freak in my village, ignoring my attempts to say hi, just taking pictures of buildings, is it a foreigner or an ethnic minority" and putting it up on Douyin.
It was probably still in the first 10,000 views when someone who recognized me got ahold of it and tagged me. Still in the first 50,000 views when my followers started brigading it with "don't be a dick" comments and reports that riled up the Keyboard Warriors, got more engagement, and—even though Douyin agreed that this was a rule breaking video that should be taken down—led, when they didn't bork it the way they said they did, to the algorithm prioritizing it for still more shares.
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Of course all this online mess happens the next day, not this day. This day is when I'm happy to have true ruralness, and then, equally as happy to get out of the rural and into places with food and shops.
But, because the seeds of the unpleasant were planted today and sprouted today, and because I'm somehow a full week behind on writing, they are what made today notable.
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¹ As with the last time it was mentioned in this journal, I'm going to assume that people know I was arrested for drug smuggling after a certain individual with mental issues decided sending a package full of contraband to my home address was a great way to "get back at me" for what he considers to be my remotely trying to murder him.
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² Eventually, he reveals that he wanted to leave for the city and that my still being there was preventing this.
³ Unlike the usual "hardly any businesses" situation where businesses once existed but have stopped existing because improvements in transportation mean that people rather go into town instead of choosing from a limited selection of products in a small shop, this is one of those areas that was has been a close satellite of the nearby town for a long enough period of time that the only hint of a "business which once was" among the 5 and 10 and 25 year old houses is the lone 50 year old co-op building.
Today's ride: 71 km (44 miles)
Total: 2,449 km (1,521 miles)
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