Monday, September 19th 2022

The problem with the successful counter attack is that suddenly you uncover what the occupying enemy has been doing. It’s hard to put any kind of common Sense into a time of War or even on a country who believes that war and dominance is an appropriate manner of governance. Fascist states do not bring happiness or prosperity. That is almost axiomatic. But in place of any kind of better way of life, in place of any understanding that people would be better off living under Russian rule, we just find tortured and killed people. We just find abuse. War crimes. Absolute lunacy, psychotic criminal activity, pathological murderers. And under what justification do they do this? To what genuine governmental goal do they do this?

The counter offensive continues. It’s a slog with winter coming. Things don’t happen overnight and the ukrainians do not have unlimited resources. But they are effective in what they are doing. They are moving forward.

What good could possibly come from such an experience? What will happen to all of the lives touched by this psychopathic activity?

I notice now the effect on people who have purposely been harmful to me. This change in the war is bringing on some actual thinking. They don’t think in any kind of human terms. They think more like dogs, locked into the present and unaware that their actions might have resonance or repercussions. They don’t worry about any breaches of morality or if they’ve made any mistakes. They only worry about potential danger coming to themselves.

I might be overthinking this. I’ve always believed that the difference between human beings and dogs is the existence of the future. A dog can certainly remember when someone has caused them pain. They remember when something good has happened or something bad has happened. But it’s the future and understanding the repercussions of your actions, the antecedent consequence, that makes the difference. Planning. Planning for the future is what I’m speaking about.

I’m beginning to think that this philosophy was simply wrong. Either by Nature or by force, it is possible to drive people into a fearful present. You can take away everyone’s future simply by an act of violence. You can take away people’s hope. You can take everything away from someone simply by saying they have no potential future.

We turn people into dogs or basically refuse to understand that there’s any difference between people and dogs. Or maybe it’s better to say that we refuse to allow anyone to be anything but a dog. We demand pack obedience. We demand fear and compliance.

It’s all sickness and misery and death. This counteroffensive seems to be successful and people have an emotion rising from this. They jump on the bandwagon, they do fist pumps, they scream “yes!”, They use the word “we” a lot.

There is no vested interest. The Fate of the destroyed people is still to be determined. What compensation can be offered? What guarantees? What assurances can people have that this won’t happen again and again and forever? What security can possibly be arranged against people who do this? How do you live with murderers? What kind of life can be had living next door to murderers?

***

It’s about 8:00 on one of these no-move Monday mornings. I’m beginning to understand the extent of my leg problems now. It’s ridiculously ironic that I am so close to being finished with one episode but now I’m being blasted with others. It’s just one thing after another and it’s becoming rather daunting.

I know I cannot stay inert. I know I cannot just lay here on the floor. I know that I have to move and at the very least there will be some basic bodily functions. But I have never felt like this in my life. I have never felt as unwilling or uninterested in doing anything. Everything is going to hurt. Getting up is going to hurt and it’s really getting so fucking helpless and hopeless.

I tried discussing this with my ex partner yesterday. When I consider My overall options, nothing has a future to it. I feel I’m going to end up in the hospital again to do yet another surgery to repair my left leg. I don’t think anyone can convince me that this last one was a lasting success. They did something and at the moment I was happy about it. But now it’s a year later and I’m right back in exactly the same position I was in last year. Only worse. And what makes this situation even less hopeful is that I cannot even count on the better Russian medical establishment to get me through this. They seem as bent on scapegoating and persecuting me as even my lowest neighbors. I can’t trust them to do their job and now, it looks like it’s all been a waste of time.

Well, that’s not true. If their job and their intention was to kill me, they have been very successful. When it was possible to save the situation, they refused me medical Care and just left my problems to Fester. When they did get worse, even if they called me and said I could come in it’s too late. They wasted their money by asking me to pay where I shouldn’t have to. By blackmailing me, they have actually wasted money.

I think I still have some American options. I could possibly ask them for medical assistance. This would end up being pretty expensive. I trust that they would do a reasonable job and that I might not only get mobility back, but actual postoperative assistance. Hell, I could even go to the press and tell them my story and maybe this would lead to some attention to my catalog and some opportunities. I could just sell out the Belarusians for being the cunts that they are. Seriously, what do I owe them after this last year?

Unfortunately, that’s a massive Gamble. It’s not like there’s no coming back from it but coming back would just be this piece of property that I own. Surrounded by complete fucking savages, alcoholics, thieves and low rent blackmailers. Spending money I don’t have trying to build a minor place of natural beauty in a land where nobody gives a damn about natural beauty, nature, humanity or beauty in general. These people actually think they can compete in an economic situation where the government believes they are the only ones who have the right to live and that everyone else lives only to serve their needs. Meanwhile, all anyone does is fill the landfills with unnecessary garbage and give away all of our local profits to out of town businesses. And to fight for the right to participate in this absolute loser game, we must poison the air and water and land. We are fighting for the right to be exploited and to catch cancer, diabetes and to ruin our land forever.

Talk about being in the middle of a rock and a hard place.

So the problem is with swelling. The infection is causing swelling which is the thing that’s causing me the most discomfort from walking. The wound itself is closing, slowly but surely, but in the meantime I’m having negative side effects. I can’t put any weight on the leg, I can’t walk, I don’t even want to try participating in life and I can’t see any way of getting out of this. If I go to the hospital, they might help me out but there is absolutely no follow-through to look forward to. I’m going to end up right back here again.

Hence being smashed here on the floor. I have some weights to play with. It’s not too hard to get over to the kitchen on the crutches. I have some soup left over from yesterday. I made what I thought would be a romantic harvest soup for my ex partner. Soup seemed to be the best idea for a cold rainy day. It was our chickpeas and our sweet peas, onions, potatoes and greens. She of course brought along some supermarket food for some reason. I know she’s trying to be nice but the moment just went over her head.

The soup was pretty good though and I still have a lot left over for today. Maybe starting the day with some warm soup will help. Soup is always good for what ails you.

It doesn’t have to be chicken soup by the way. I learned this lesson several years ago. I got really sick during a vegan period. I wasn’t eating a mixed diet that covered my needs and I got really sick. A diabetic thing really. So I went and bought some chicken and made some chicken soup and felt better. This stayed on my mind and several years ago, when I first started this vegan stretch I ended up doing something stupid and staying on my bicycle in the cold all morning. I tried going back to chicken soup but found that it absolutely sickened me. It was a mistake. My eyes no longer see me as food. I almost vomited from putting it in my mouth.

After that, two things happened. One, I noticed that I never got sick. This went on for years that really nothing could hurt me and it stayed this way up until last year. That was when things fell apart and put me in the position I am in now. But one thing I did learn is that bean soup is perfectly adequate. It does the same thing that chicken soup does. It’s the same warming liquid. It’s the same easily digestible human food. It’s the same light meal and it has the same healing properties.

I haven’t made bread in a while but something tells me there’s a lot of bread and soup in my future. Not store bread. Just some homemade flatbreads is usually enough. Bread and soup, human food for cold winter months. Cheap, easy, healing and infinitely good for you.

Does this sound completely unexciting? Does it sound not beautiful? And my painting and unappealing picture? I’m not trying to be anything here. I’m just talking about my situation. Life is pretty miserable right now. When you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything. But in trying to figure out some kind of satisfying ending to give me at least a couple of nice years walking around on this planet, I can’t believe how arduous the path is. And even with my personal complaints, I can’t help feeling that my problems are nothing compared to what the ukrainians are suffering.

This part of the world has become terminal cancer. Perhaps somewhere in the last couple of years, I could see a mass turn of thought leading to a genuinely clean and enjoyable future for humanity. I remember putting together some utopian literature in which just the slightest change in public policy, the slightest movement towards ecology as being the most important thing, and suddenly this place would just become a giant Park. Even economics would benefit the people who live here. We would have so much tourism simply for the fact that we would be the only clean place in the world. Such a beautiful idea. Such a nice dream.

But then they decided to keep all of the attention on Moscow and they just started murdering everybody. They started murdering everybody and showing off their loud and fast warplanes. They started shooting missiles and blowing up civilian structures. At least started raping and murdering people and committing war crimes for some reason. Instead of even contemplating a sustainable future with some sense of happiness for people, they brought absolute death and misery to every living thing in the region. Instead of thinking anything life-affirming, they chose the most brutal form of death possible. As if there was no other choice. As if they could think of nothing else.

You know, when I was still in the states or in Canada, I started reading Russian literature. Hemingway talked about this too. It was the depth of emotion that struck people. It was how deep the depression and how hopeless the situations they would write about. It was so compelling to read such darkness. It was hard to escape the Russian writers in this way.

The same was true for the music composers and the dancers and the actors even. I remember admiring theater when I came out here. Even if I could not follow all of the dialogue, the depth of emotion was astounding. I have never seen anything like it in western theater. It wasn’t even close.

But now actually living in a situation of deepest despair, why in hell would anybody want this? Why in hell would we bring this nonsense on to ourselves intentionally? Why would we purposely create an endless death with no hope of any future specifically? Why would people even conceive of such plans?

So, it’s pretty dark going into winter. I suppose doing absolutely nothing might lead me to something positive happening after a while. The last of the healing actually happens, I get used to my situation as it is and just deal with it. Maybe the medical establishment decides to do their job. Maybe I can even find a lawyer and get that one bureaucrat fired from her job. I doubt that would ever happen. I doubt the legal departments of this country would be any better than the medical ones. I doubt any possibilities of anything good happening here.

Can I say anything positive? Sure. We have 11 new fruit trees well planted. The lower gardens have been filled up with trees. I don’t know about this coming spring really but spring of 24 and 25 might be astoundingly beautiful. Maybe in 2025 or 26 there will be fruit. Maybe next year we’ll have those strawberries. Maybe next year we’ll have a crop of excellent peppers. Maybe next year we will have a ton of squash to bake in the oven to make the most delicious snacks in the world. Maybe next year we will have a huge variety of beans waiting to be made into soups all winter long. Maybe next year I’ll get to enjoy a walk in my garden.

***

Well, that was something unexpected.

I managed to get to the kitchen to finish the rest of the soup from yesterday. I added noodles but I can’t say that they added so much enthusiasm to the meal. They are not bad noodles. Factory stuff theoretically from Japan. I didn’t read the label too closely. They are made with pee and cornstarch but interestingly, they hold their texture and are quite easy to soften. You have to add your own richness to the soup but if you like noodles or noodle soup, I would definitely say A Plus. Also, the previous cornstarch noodles suddenly disappeared from the market. Something about Russian relations with China. When they came back, they were three times the price. This particular group was cheap so I bought a bunch and so I have.

That’s not the story I’m telling her. I realized that this business with my leg is pretty serious and there was no moving around to do. I can’t put any weight on it nor can I wrap it. It’s just a throbbing mess. My best decision was to call it a day. I lit a fire, crawled under the covers and just went back to sleep. Surprisingly, I absolutely could. My body just doesn’t want to be awake today.

But then a little after 1:00 I got a call. Ghenna was at the gate and he had a load of fertilizer. I told him it would be 15 minutes and he agreed.

It’s pretty funny when you try to describe what it’s like when you can’t put any weight on your leg. I suppose if you’ve ever had a broken leg, you understand something about this. But I don’t even have a cast. I just have whatever the hell is going on with me and apparently, I really didn’t have much choice but to get up and open the gate.

I actually got lucky. I tossed him the keys and told him which one opened up the back gate and he managed to let himself in. I decided it was okay to drop this load in our original staging area. I think we have enough to cover both the lower gardens and the upper boxes and we need fertilizer for both.

The actual work didn’t take more than 10 minutes. The only two things of note or interest had to do with me advising him not to let the horse eat the cabbages in the box next to her. He of course said okay and didn’t listen until he heard me screaming at the horse to get his face out of my cabbage. He then tied the horse’s head so it couldn’t bow down to eat. Suitable punishment for the horse. She, her name is Marsha like almost all horses here, knew she had been a bad girl and took the punishment with humility.

When he was finished he took her down for a brief loop around where we can bring a cart in the lower gardens and he paused for a minute to admire my ex partner’s work. It really is accurate and she really did do a professional job. I can only take credit for the logistical decisions and the spacing. All the labor goes to her and I think Ghenna suddenly understood that he had fucked up deeply by not bothering to show up yesterday. There was no happy talk.

He then took the horse cart off my property and parked it across the street where Masha could get a bite to eat and came back in to close up the gate for me. He asked me if I wanted my last delivery today, this would be the straw but I told him that probably tomorrow was better. A combination of pure pain, a temperature and a complete lack of desire to stand around outside in the freezing cold seemed understandable.

I showed him where we have one more important work to do. There’s a lot of work to do this fall but as far as pure muscle work goes, there’s not that much left really. I showed him what I wanted to do in our berry garden. There is a pear tree that was planted last year that I’ve decided was a mistake. It needed to get removed to a different location. I haven’t quite figured out where that location is but it’s not that much of a problem. And then after that, we have to clear out some of the wild grasses growing and dig five holes for the five Newberry bushes. One to the front replacing a bush that just never took off this year and four more directly and back them, probably 50 or 60 centimeters away. I have to check that distance.

This leaves unspoken this business of the bench or fixing the well cover or putting the posts in the ground for the grapes. It doesn’t include spreading fertilizer as the boxes come open and has nothing to do with the straw. These items have already been paid for. But today, something extremely strange happened. He didn’t ask for anything.

I have some cash lying around to help pay for the topsoil if we take it and when it comes. I’m still not 100% sure we need this. My ex partner seems to think we should go 100%, it’s not really so much money in the grand scheme of things and we’ll probably allow ourselves a genuine bumper crop for whatever we plant next year. But when he called me, I only pulled out a five and stuck it in my pocket. It’s less than he wants and probably not even enough for a bottle of wine. Basically I’m too sick to get into an argument with him and my plan was to tell him that until we break even on all the deals he charged me for up front, he should never plan on more than a fiver from me. Nobody is debating the pain of alcoholic life but I’m really tired of feeling like I have a hook in my mouth.

But nothing ever happened. He agreed that we can do what we are going to do tomorrow and instead, gave a pleasant goodbye and simply drove off down the road. He has done his job and been fair about it. He had said and done nothing bad. I don’t know if he actually felt any emotions looking at our beautiful and accurate new orchard at the bottom of the land. But it doesn’t matter. He took it all well, understood his situation and just did his job.

Don’t think I’m expecting major life changes from this. Don’t think I’m going back to any level of trust. I don’t really like doing carrot and stick work to get people to do their jobs. I am not an exploitation person. I believe people are supposed to make their own decisions and I am happy to know and be associated with people who do the right thing of their own choice. You’re not going to find too much of it in this neck of the woods but this is what I believe in.

I am back in the warm room now and I’m going to continue with my plan of just sleeping this day away. I really don’t feel very good and all I can hope for is that I have enough of an immune system to do something about the swelling in my leg, the pain in there or whatever infection is causing these problems. I know generally what’s going on but not specifically. I should probably engage myself with the medical community but eventually, they are not really going to be able to help. They might have a few ticks to the better for antibiotics or something like that. I might be able to get an x-ray to tell me if I have any bone damage. But to the negative, it creates a hassle to try and avoid eating their horrific food, getting poked by nurses three and five times a day, to be forced to sit for drips and worst of all, to have to suffer people having access to me who only want to make me suffer because of what they think I am. And of course, give me all of their diseases in the process.

Seriously, no thank you. If it’s not life and death or a necessary piece of surgery, I’d rather just keep my distance and do the best I can to take care of myself. Call me stupid but I don’t have much of another choice. I live where I live, I can’t afford to live anywhere else and the only place I have that I can call my own is the one I’m sitting in right now. And of course, this includes the surrounding fascists and alcoholics and glad-handers and anti-semites. It’s just a big package of shit either way.

By the way, this is an absolutely tiny Plus but I found that I can carry about four pieces of firewood under my arm while on crutches. This was an amazing find. Four pieces is about what’s needed to build enough of a fire to charge the brickwork. Depending on how cold it is, you do thistle two or three times a day and the place keeps some measure of warmth. It doesn’t help much on the floor the way things are but in the bed, things get toasty enough. I know this isn’t a whole gigantic deal to be happy about but it’s a good piece of self-sufficiency under the circumstances.

***

It’s 6:00 p.m. and I’ve just opened my eyes from a little nap. Earlier at about 3:30, I absolutely thought I was done for the day and was drifting between feverish reality and dreams when my alarm went off. Why was my alarm going off? Had I set an alarm?

Indeed I had. Exactly 30 minutes in the future I was due to show up for an English lesson.

Let’s be honest, I did rush through all possibilities to make explanations for not showing up. My cause was genuine. I’m definitely sick, I have a temperature, I am immobile and I have almost no strength to do anything. I could have canceled this lesson and lived the rest of my life without feeling a little bit bad. But I didn’t. I never have. That was the problem. In all of the pair of decades that I have been teaching English, the list of classes I have missed is all of five. That is a true number. In 2 decades of teaching English, I have failed to show up only five times.

I don’t want to overstate this. I don’t want to use words like taking a hero call. It’s just a pre-adolescent boy who needs to read some children’s books and try to understand what he’s doing while reading. This is the lightest of light and requires the least amount of actual professional teaching in the world. However, I was still obligated to show up.

I played with the alarms. I kind of snoozed the first one and agreed that it would go off in plenty of time to show up. I had not actually prepared for the lesson but preparation was nothing particularly hurtful. We would be reading and working on understanding one children’s book and at the end of the class, I would give him another book to chew on.

The only thing was that I really didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to be obligated to sit and pay attention. I didn’t want to have to sit at attention. I didn’t want to have to concentrate. I didn’t want to have to be nice or say nice things or be encouraging. Even this obligation was a little more than I wanted. But if there is a reason to call this a hero call, it is specifically when you do something you’d rather not do simply because it’s your responsibility to do so. Even if the kid would have been happier to miss the lesson and be given an excuse to do nothing, that is not what we are talking about.

So I showed up and we began and honestly, I was a tiny bit tougher on him today. I had set him up to do minimalist work and to trust his instinct to understand something. Okay, this was a bit of a bait and switch. He’s only 11 years old but still, you don’t just sit there and sound out words and say I’m happy guessing what’s going on. That’s not an English class and that’s not studying and that’s definitely not getting better. Sure, we can look at the situation and the pictures and use some logic, that’s absolutely a skill as well. But you still need at least a basic lexicon of words in order for things to make sense and learning this is not trickery. It’s good old elbow grease. Make a list of the words you don’t know, look them up in a dictionary and then write the new word next to the difficult one on a piece of paper. It doesn’t take long. It really doesn’t take long.

Would I have done this today if I wasn’t sick? Would I have been hard on the boy if I didn’t feel pushed? Probably yes. We were going this direction anyway. He’s going to have to do something in the class even if it’s going to be the basic ideas and no more. He’s got to put in a little bit of time doing something. The game is not just to sit and stare and pretend that you know.

I know I hit a negative button with him when suddenly the speed of looking up words in the dictionary dropped from only a few seconds during his time of complete enthusiasm to complete failure and simply trying to wait out the tediousness and difficulties of the moment. When he believed this would be an easy game, opening up the dictionary was easy and he was pleased to show me his lightning-like speed to find words. But sitting in a moment that was obviously failure and having to work his way out meant different energy.

Again, would I have put the boy through this if I had felt better? Probably. It had to happen. We all have to grow up sometime. I mentioned to him about this in a tiny bit of a lesson that I added in. It wasn’t a very helpful thing to tell anybody but I thought I would add some wisdom. I asked him if he knew the difference between a child and an adult. He came up with the easiest pragmatic answer in the world. Years happen and suddenly you are qualified as an adult. Sure, this was a pretty logical guess. You can’t say that it was a wrong answer. But I had to tell him the truth of the situation anyway, whether he liked it or not.

The difference between a boy and a man is recognition of responsibility. A man understands that sometimes he has to do things that he just doesn’t like. A boy can throw things away irresponsibly and not care. This of course was essentially the problem that led his father to calling me in the first place. In that way of looking at this, this was the actual moment of Truth of our original lessons. This is when he found out that the class actually requires some work.

At the beginning of the class, I told him that I was not feeling well. I told him that I had a temperature but that we would do our best anyway. But here, I mentioned that the truth is that I must show up for our lessons. I must do my job and I must teach my class and that I have a sincere responsibility to do something to improve the boy’s English. No matter how much of a trick we might like these things to be, there is no replacement to some basic hard work and if he does agree to sit down for 30 or 40 minutes every day until our next lesson, I’m sure he would grow enormously. This is not stupid work. It’s essential work. It’s work that must be done if one genuinely wants results.

Okay, was it a bait and switch? Sure. I mean, it’s not like I put the wool over the boy’s eyes for nothing and I’m certainly not into this for the bloody money. There’s not really very much money in this and if you count taking hero calls for it, we’re not even close to my normal price. But the truth is the truth and either he buys into this or he doesn’t.

When we started lessons, I told his father but I was very happy for the genuine enthusiasm his boy had for the Enterprise. You could tell the boy had energy for it and that he was into it. The class was easy. He would get praise and accomplish things with very little work. This was exactly what he wanted to hear. He could be a good boy and hardly put any effort or endure any pain for it. That this is a false road means nothing and I’m not going to say anything about cultural values that connect to my day laborer or floor cleaner or anyone else I know who never learned this bloody lesson anywhere in their lives.

So the lesson was a double slog. It was a slog for me to keep my face up and it was a slog for the boy looking for an easy out from having to open up a dictionary and look up words.

I tried to tell him that the task itself was not really that big. The list of the 300 most common words in English, a group of words that includes 75% of all the words you ever see while reading or listening to English, is only 300 words long. That’s the truth. It’s a combination of the connecting words, basic verbs, the pronouns and a few basic nouns. This doesn’t really work on every lexicon for every job or every situation. But as far as the absolute basics of English is concerned, you get these 300 words under your control with a basic understanding of grammar, and suddenly you are in. It doesn’t matter how old you are. If you can get this far, you are in and these words are in every book.

He of course didn’t care about this explanation. He was waiting me out. It was an interesting situation, the both of us waiting each other out. Like I said, at the beginning of the lessons I told his father I was happy for his enthusiasm but I also told him that there would be a time when the honeymoon came to an end. This was a difficult concept for the father to establish in his head. What was I talking about in terms of honeymoon? The answer is simply that there comes A Time when the work becomes tedious and it simply has to be done in order to be successful. As a teacher, maybe I’m good or maybe I’m bad but the only thing that I’m not is Harry Potter. I cannot pull out my stick and stick English into his head like downloading a new app for the telephone. He was going to have to work.

The boy did give an interesting answer to one question. I asked him what he thought the most important thing about learning something was and he said fantasy. I understood that I was guilty for giving him this thought. Using your logic and imagination is important but it’s not a class on pretending.

Anyway, we’ll see. Today for me is over. It’s not even 7:00 but I’m done. I don’t know what to do about getting out of this illness. As for the moment, I’m just going to sleep it.