Thursday, September 8th 2022

I am on the couch in a room that I guess I have not completely named yet. There are not really so many rooms in this house and each one has its own character and use. Two of them are absolutely not being used right now but have potential for something someday. The others definitely have their uses for something and the office, though a place you absolutely don’t want to be in the winter, is the number one location for enjoying life in the summer.

As of this moment, Lana is cleaning the floors and trying to explain to me the final ends and outs of her adventurous last few days. That telephone, she assures me, was found on the bus stop bench near the store. Someone, she refused to name names, found it there and brought it to the store supposedly for safekeeping. This story is without fact checking. I say this because this morning I tried to call Lana to tell her to take an extra 30 minutes or so before getting here but I got the same answering machine. Despite all the talk of this great 500 Google telephone, I have yet to lay eyes on it or have the ability to call it or be called from it. For what it’s worth, I couldn’t get her by standard telephone either this morning.

One of the first things she asked me to do was to see if she smelled good. She is using the cologne technique. Apparently, the cologne technique is very big in the local alcoholic set. I am sorry I have a sense of smell. It’s not my fault.

The big news here this morning is that I am walking. If yesterday was the Genesis of new bipedal possibilities, today I am moving around freely. I’ve already been out to the end of the field to collect some horseradish leaves and have had a look at the very frosty grass and broken garden beds. The garden is a dismal site these days. Too much drought. Too much heat. Not very beautiful results.

It’s an incredibly debilitating experience not to be able to put weight on your legs. It is mind-numbingly crazy to have to deal with country Life with such limited abilities to work. Getting around on a pair of crutches is not the end of the world. Especially when you have two legs to balance yourself. That’s not a problem as far as simply going someplace. The problem arises the moment you’re obligated to use your hands for anything. And if you’re using your hands for something like physical work, picking things up, carrying the hose around or even aiming it, it’s an act of geometry and architecture to find the appropriate balancing angles that let you do it.

My current idea on the subject is that it was not a break. Perhaps the break was real and it is some kind of a hairline fracture that is healing. Most likely, it was some kind of severe business similar to what I had last year. A serious internal infection, possibly going septic or something like that and this led to something pressing right on a nerve. Brutal shit.

It might have also been my fault. I might have overstepped my limitations and was not taking care of myself as well as I should. This was not a matter of being lazy, it was about putting too much salt in my food and eating for pleasure without regard to vitamin content. Too many empty carbs, playing too hard with the glycemic index and too many cheat meals. Heads up alert: you can eat like crap as a vegan too. You can get fat as a vegan too. You can overwhelm yourself with comfort food as a vegan too.

But what apparently is also possible as a vegan is simply stopping the self-destruction for even a couple of days and recovery, resiliency and clean blood flow allow for quicker healing. I kept trying to bring this up in the hospital. I kept asking people if there were measurements. I wasn’t trying to be a know-it-all, I just wanted to know the local statistical facts. I always mistake local doctors for scientists. I always forget that just because I’m with a medical professional, this doesn’t mean they automatically read journals. Or are they politically allowed to have such conversations or opinions.

I’m not smooth and 100% back to normal and I noticed that if I Rush, I end up putting pressure on the one point that was the home of all the pain. Whatever was in there is in there but the severe pain is now gone. It is now possible to put weight on the leg without it feeling completely lame. All of this to me is really good news.

Genna is bringing by a third steel post this morning. I’m not sure when we are going to bang them into place. I will probably opt for next week for that. We’re going to need wire and of course, if I wait for later in the day, Ghenna will already have drunk whatever money I gave him. Another negative to all of this is that though he said he had a bank card to transfer money to, today when I asked him to bring it along with him he took a discount on the price in order to accept cash. I am low on cash already this week. It was the potatoes that did me in and I’m not going to have any spending money after today. Not that it matters. There’s nothing I need to buy. It’s only a matter of cash management.

As of the moment, the house has that beautiful moist shine of just white floors. Everything has been swept and the dust and the debris have been put away. I’ve already started cutting up some of the fruit to put out on the drying rack. I’ve decided to bake the sunflower seeds as a way of saving them. The morning is crisp and cold but the sky is clear. They say it’s going to rain like hell on Saturday and Sunday. It will be the first rain in about 3 weeks and the whole world is brown and lifeless for lack of it.

***

“We just thought you were something clean that was available.”

This was the strangest thing that I’ve heard as an explanation for how my neighbors related to me and what our situation is now. Some of this comes grudgingly from both realizations that I was and am a human being and that I am pretty serious in my own opinions of other people. I am a bit heavier and do not treat certain things too lightly. I don’t party hard basically and I’m not an alcoholic so I don’t make alcoholic compromises or invite alcoholic company.

Or more briefly said, the whole picture is way more sober than people were expecting and yesterday it led to some explaining.

I’ve been mulling over this group of words. I’ve been trying to find the heart of what this means and what the thinking is. If you are Russian or at least native to the region, you ignore the concept of semantics generally. If something is said, it is understood for what it is. The very last time I talked to my millionaire friend, he wrote me an answer to a question via text that was badly written. The grammar was just off. But when I asked him what he meant, his only answer was that I knew what he meant. I suppose I did.

And on this level, I do get the basic emotion behind this sentence. What is interesting is how deeply true the statement is. Specifically, I’m talking about that clean part. They believed I was something clean that was available to them.

There are lots of ways to look at this. As a businessman, this means something like I found a product that satisfies a niche. It also means there was a lack of clean things available. How very interesting. How very interesting to live in a world where nothing is clean and that this is a genuine issue because people begin starving for it and going crazy when they believe it’s there. On a personal level, if people think they have the ability to get what they need but then suddenly find that it’s not available to them or worse, it’s a fish with a hook in it, they get a little crazy.

This wonderfully explains quite a few people becoming angry at me for no apparent reason. Getting attacked in the hospital is as much to blame for people having nothing to do all day as it is for exactly this reason. Suddenly something clean is right in front of their face but they can’t have it because of political reasons. It’s my fault that the image doesn’t work for them.

But why don’t they have anything clean? What do they think would satisfy this?

When I first came here, I met an old lady near the church who was sweeping up and she cried that the town was dying. I believe she was talking about global warming and desertification but she was talking about the economics that had stopped The village from being a town. There are no children here anymore and she was referring to the Innocence that children bring to life. She was crying but she had no children to eat and play with. There is a severe urge in Russian women to bully people and women are just the absolute perfect opportunity to do that. Maybe this is true for women everywhere.

For what it’s worth, I grew up with a Russian Jewish family and I can tell you that there is no pleasure in feminine bullying. It also snaps and turns into physical abuse and Hysteria. I’m not in any way sympathetic to their problems. I figure the children are lucky not to have them honestly.

But aside from drugs like this, and we are talking about drugs here as in any thing that you use to escape from reality can be classified as a drug, it could also be the dreariness and redundancy of life here. I’m not really talking about the redundancy of retirement, I mean that if you live in a place without any new ideas, things are bound to get stale. If all you do is repeat and practice standard culture from a million years ago, not only do you not notice where you’re destroying the place with your activity but you’re bound to get bored to death.

When I first came here, I wrote a play for the local theater. I went to Great pain to both finish that play, make the translation as real as possible and get it to the theater. This was during my polish debacle which also turned into a literary project. But the play was submitted, it actually won some contest and it was accepted by the theater. They were going to play it. Excellent!

Then they didn’t. Why did they stop? They found out what I was. They didn’t find out who I was, they found out my passport and everybody went crazy. 

It’s ironic that the story I wrote for them is about an interaction with an American and a Belarusian family and that the Bell Russian people could not handle their interaction with an American. It wasn’t like drama, it was one money-grubbing black male after another. There wasn’t a single person in that theater who didn’t try to leverage money out of me every single opportunity they had. In the end, there reasoning and propaganda was that obviously I was going to get something from this. But the truth is, all I wanted from it was to join the town at a reasonable level so that people knew who I was. I’m an artist, I guess I’m a teacher or an English teacher and maybe I’m an ecological idealist. All of this was in the play in its way. Now, I wasn’t looking for any money really, just a place to hang my shingle.

Then there’s another way to look at this. If you can’t find anything clean, why don’t you create your own? This was my intention last year when I donated my time and resources to try and create some green functioning businesses. I tried to find people that were in need of money, apparently I never meet anybody who doesn’t need money, so I tried to create some structures that would work. Bicycle delivery services, fresh bread at the marketplace, I dabbled in some green construction areas as far as thermal heating and cooling, windmills or electric panels. Even simple public service and clean up was available.

I just got screamed at, threatened, interrogated by the KGB and abused for every single inroad. And then when I came up here to get away from the pollution and the noise, I ran into the behavior that led to the above apology or at least explanation.

The only thing people never did was read me or take some of my lifestyle ideas and try them out. I’m not sitting here as a public fixture. I am not anybody’s Instagram model. But I do tell people that I don’t drink alcohol. I say that vociferously. I don’t tell other people what to do with their lives or yell at alcoholics or insult them the way people here do. I don’t automatically piss on people in the street because they’ve drunk too much. Do what you want if you’re an adult. I don’t drink however. I don’t drink and I don’t need to drink and I don’t want to go to parties where people are drinking and I don’t care what you say is normal or appropriate social behavior, I don’t like fucking alcoholics and that’s it. Want to make your life cleaner, quit fucking drinking!

I don’t smoke tobacco. You don’t think that there is ugliness and cancer from smoking? The idiot who lives across the street is on my radar daily because he cannot move around without making two types of noises. Either he runs an agricultural instrument that requires gasoline or he coughs. I put two of these things as two oars of the same boat. Ghenna is at least two packs a day and he never stopped coughing up phlegm. You can’t talk to either of them about anything. You can’t reason with alcoholics and you certainly can’t start having legitimate relationships with cigarette smoking alcoholics. I’m sorry, I consider this sort of thing disgusting and if we’re worrying about what’s clean and what’s not, we can start right there.

Listen, I went vegan a few years ago. I went vegan and other than what seems to be major problems from my leg, I don’t ever get sick or miss a day of work. My problem is that I’m always doing too much for my body’s ability to do it. I am clear headed and I wake up clear headed. I’m not some crumpled alcoholic who’s drunk himself into idiocy and I’m not any kind of a narcotics fiend holed up in some kind of a drug den. I’m not grubbing around on the street looking for narcotics or money to buy them. I don’t have any of these societally reprehensible traits and yet, I don’t eat meat. Get it? 

You don’t go crazy when you stop eating meat. You don’t lose your vitality of life or what you think is vitality of life but in reality is just mad nervousness and your own drug addiction. I’m just calm. I don’t know why people don’t get it. I don’t need outside things to stimulate me to keep me from going crazy, I just don’t go crazy!

And maybe this is genuinely the key to the whole thing. I don’t need to be constantly stimulated. In fact, all of this specific stimulation is tiring and energy draining for me. It’s draining of my energy and obviously draining of my resources as well. To be constantly stimulated requires the use of so many resources and to spend so much money just to stay stimulated. How about if you just don’t need the stimulation? How about if you can just make do on simpler easier things? It doesn’t have to be exciting.

It can just be clean.

Now there is an amazing thought. There is a thought that I really wish people would take into consideration. Instead of craving cleanliness, and I absolutely know what this feeling is, how about just living a clean life and then you have it.

A couple of years ago I ended up in the hospital. Same exact problem as last year but I was a bit of a different person at that time. Basically, I was not a vegan and I was in need of some stimulation. I was in need of something clean. I remember when I was sick that I was dreaming of being in a hospital. Oh my god, if I could just get out of this dirty world and into a hospital I would be okay. These were my exact thoughts. I get it.

But then I went vegan for 5 years ago and I no longer see a hospital as being a place that is better for healing than the one I live in right now. I don’t see their food as being cleaner. I don’t see the interactions with the doctors and nurses as being so helpful. I don’t see the insanity of the sick people to be so helpful. 

I definitely don’t see the medical experimentation or the lack of conversation in the bedside manner of the doctors to be clean. Whether in America it is because the drug companies demand that the doctors prescribe their products, the ludicrous money attached to medications or the fear of malpractice insurance on the millionaire doctors. There is nothing clean to look forward to in an American hospital.

And what about here? How about the lack of funding generally? How about we talk about the ridiculous food that they serve people? How about the screaming brutality of the chicken nurses? How about the state rules and demands put on an underpaid medical staff? And then let’s go in to the fact that it is a petri dish for covid and whatever other disease flies around this country. All of these unclean people coming to what they believe to be a cleaner place.

Yeah, what an amazing thing to hear someone say. We thought you were something clean that was available to us. I’m sorry. It was not my intention to cause any harm. It’s just my circumstance and situation. I came here 20 years ago because I thought your people were polite and I myself was looking for something clean. I was coming from a place that was never clean.

And for what it’s worth, I came from a mother who was never clean and used to scream with insanity if anything would make her house look unclean. Not just scream with insanity but become violent with insanity.

Look, I went vegan 5 years ago. I took the animal fat out of my diet and for the most part I have quit eating processed food. My blood is a little bit cleaner and it flows a little bit more easily through my veins and capillaries. I don’t really get infections or sickness very often and I have great resiliency. Before I did this, I ran my body into the ground and became diabetic because of some dirty living on my part and people who deprived me of things I needed to be healthy. Now, I just live alone and live my days in a measured and meditative fashion. I’m not doing anything to harm anyone. I’m not even paying attention to anyone else at all most of the time. I’m just living my own life and I try to live a clean life. I’m okay with it. I’m not starving for what you’re starving for. I stopped eating meat and I stopped starving generally.

There is nothing clean about McDonald’s. There’s nothing clean about meat. There’s nothing clean about killing or causing harm. Having blood on your hands means that your hands are unclean. If you’re starving for something clean, try putting an end to cruelty and violence in your own life. Try not causing harm. Try kindness as a hobby. It’s amazing how fresh you feel when you start heading off in that direction.

Anyway, that was such an interesting thing to hear someone say. I know it’s supposed to be simpler than it is. But I think this is what it really meant.

***