Tuesday, September 20th 2022

The end of the war, the end of Putin and the beginning of enormous reparations.

The reality of keeping the Ukrainian infrastructure going.

And the reality of keeping the Russian army going.

I know I sound like a broken record, if such a thing even exists anymore. I know I keep saying the same things over and over and over. It’s just that I do not understand the point of War. Perhaps the simplest explanation is when we allow ourselves to believe that there are others that we never meet, who do not care about us in the slightest except as objects to be used and who suffer from endless mental instabilities, somehow have the right to send you out to murder and be murdered. Somehow, we agree that this is legal and correct and necessary to walk away from our personal lives to take upon ourselves the task of murdering and being murdered.

From a practical standpoint, I don’t understand why we waste our resources on murdering and being murdered. I don’t understand why, when it is so difficult and takes so many hours to create these materials that we waste them so frivolously and in such an ecologically and socially harmful manner. Why do we find it so important to murder and be murdered? Why is it so necessary to keep with our public funds such leadership classes? What reasonable human being would vote honestly for someone to destroy all of our resources, an entire generation of our people simply to create endless garbage, misery, ecological harm and physical and emotional damage? Who in their right mind would waste their money so?

I mean, if we were to have an interview with average work a day people and you ask them if they would be willing to hand over a third or a half of all of their earnings for the purposes of murdering and being murdered, how many people would say yes? With the opportunity to keep your money and do something nice for yourself, how many people would say yes to creating human misery?

You know, one of the ongoing themes of this writing has to do with something a journalist in Florida once told me about a story I gave them. They said that it was just about me and it was not universal. This was a cop out of course. These were just more words used to explain failure.

The truth is that almost everything that happens to me in microcosm, is transferable to the world we live in macro. 

What good has come of the aggression of my neighbors? I can tell you for an absolute fact that for a group who was already completely miserable from living in a dying society, whatever energy they thought they were receiving for their politics of fighting me, they are only the worst off for it now. There is even less love in their hearts now. They have even less soul than they had before. They have all lost pieces of themselves that they will never get back again. Whatever politics they believed they were working with and whatever satisfactions they thought they would receive from their actions, they have received nothing but have only brought more misery onto themselves.

The only people this is not true for globally are people who simply live in their own worlds and don’t pay attention to things that don’t touch them personally.

I mean, I don’t know any other way to say this except to show you exactly what I mean. Here is one more clip I walked into last night that illustrates exactly what I’m talking about. These people have no connection to any hateful wars but they just can’t figure out why their lives mean nothing.

Apparently, it’s all just depression stacked upon depression stacked upon depression.

As an American, the one thing that I noticed about political movements is that we have one party that seems to want to create a decent life for people and does its best to defend human rights and keep money flowing. And then the conservatives somehow managed to get in power, they have no idea whatsoever how to do the work necessary to create a good civil infrastructure and instead rely on propaganda and mind fucks to steal money and then when everything is a mess, they create a War. 

Bread and circuses. Propaganda and lies. It is ultimately really depressing. All cycles of addiction are eventually depressing. Sugar up, sugar down and away we go again to war to murder and be murdered.

***

Не бойтесь делать хорошую работу. Ето не фантазия, но если ты над этим поработаешь, тебе станет лучше. Все, над чем работало, становится лучше. Сделай все возможное! Делай эту работу аккуратно и с душой, и ты никогда не пожалеешь.

This is part of a note that I wrote to my young students this morning. It was a waste of time sending this but I made myself feel better by doing so. The boy is going to act on pure emotion and he is going to feel that he’s been robbed by suddenly finding out that he’s required to do some work. This is pretty normal I suppose for all the young people but entitlement here seems to be a prerequisite of childhood. It is the work of the parents to raise their children like royalty. The results of this have something to do with an absolute brutal divorce rate, the constant seeking for the title of hero for the women and instant alcoholism for the men. And generation after generation of really useless people.

Nonetheless, it’s probably good advice. It’s actually just a lot of words saying do your homework. If you can’t understand Russian, it says something like this:

Don’t be afraid of doing good work. This is not fantasy but if you work for this, you will become better. You get better at anything you work at. Do the best you can. Do this work accurately and with heart honey will never be sorry that you did.

I mean, it’s not a Shakespearean War speech. It’s just another bit of propaganda to try and get some enthusiasm. I’m just an old teacher trying to get some work out of a student. The only thing that I’m offering is a good feeling of satisfaction. This is not my feeling of satisfaction, it would be his. He would be the one with the knowledge of how to succeed in life. To not be afraid to do the work and to become the person or the best version of the person it is possible to be.

I mean, I’m not going to be the only one in the boy’s life to tell him to try hard and do a little work. I’m not going to be the only one to ask him to put out a few watts of electricity to help a project succeed. I’m probably not even the first one.

In any case, this is crunch time. This is where we find out who is who. This is where we either have a student or a few more years or even decades of spoiled childhood.

Don’t ask me what my true opinion is of what’s going to happen. I think you already know what I think. But really, it doesn’t really matter in the end what happens. Even if he does come through and takes the hero call, it just means he’s doomed to a life of taking hero calls. Some people like it and some people don’t. Either way, it’s just time spent on the planet Earth. We either help or we cause harm. And if the boy it’s not going to be helpful, well, we get what we pay for.

I’m sorry. I’m just not very good at placating these days. I don’t really have the energy to waste on nonsense. I don’t eat sugar foods anymore. It’s too much work for me to stroke egos. 

Next lesson is on Thursday. I guess we will see the results when we start reading this rather lovely children’s book about the life of a boy and his relationship to a tree. I mean, you can’t get anything out of the book If you don’t take the trouble to read it. And if you do the work to figure out what the book says at the beginning, you get really good at reading books. And then you know something.

I mean, what the hell do you think I’ve been doing for the last two decades?

***

It’s about 6:00 a.m. and I’m feeling much better. My body is weak from a lack of motion. I would not say that my leg is better in any way but I can feel that it’s on its way out whatever is causing it to swell. It’s crazy how I require one healing process on top of another.

Perhaps I’m to blame. I was feeling pretty good and pretty strong and I picked up some gardening tools and started doing some work preparing my garden beds. It was just a couple of hours out in the air doing some labor. But I just don’t have the leg for it. Somebody’s mistake. Everybody’s mistake.

There is some chance that Ghenna will show up today with a load of straw. This straw is going to be mulch and a top dressing for the garden beds. The question is whether or not I want to add yet another layer of purchased topsoil on top of the fertilizer and before the mulch. I guess it’s in the budget and it’s not very much money but it is an enormous amount of work, even 100 wheelbarrow trips and then the raking. If we add in the wheelbarrow trips for the straw and all of the wheelbarrow trips and the raking and cleaning and fertilizing of the garden beds that have not yet finished, that number becomes something like 200 trips. The same number perhaps but I ended up doing this spring before my leg gave out.

For my part, I would be happy running my wheelbarrow. I know this sounds like bullshit and if we just count the amount of money being wasted, not spent but wasted, this is a completely futile act. But the truth is I would be thrilled to spend a couple of hours a day running a wheelbarrow if I could just possibly do it without pain or injuring myself. It was all I wanted and this opportunity to do this now seems only to be leading to the situation of having others do this work for me.

You know, it’s an interesting thought to maybe hold back the topsoil addition until next spring or even next fall. If we have access to fertilizer and we will have at least some compost next year, maybe I should not invest in this one particular item. Certainly, you want to do the best you can. This is my advice for the boy. But perhaps I should wait until such time that I can actually do this work myself.

There was that moment yesterday when Ghenna was driving the horse cart past the lower gardens in order to turn around and to get out of the property that he paused and admired the work my ex-partner did in setting up the garden. He absolutely admired the perfection. We did the best we could to give adequate distance between the trees but for the absolute start, it was even military grade precision. It was even symmetrically beautiful.

Earlier in the year, I took a delivery of somewhere between five and six cubic meters of firewood and took several days to stock it in the woodshed. My stocking work was very accurate and the woodshed is incredibly well organized. This is the type of thing you get when you have a vested interest in the result. When you personally care about what you are doing, you get a higher class of work.

Maybe having access to fertilizer and straw will be enough to add some life into the gardens and garden beds for next year. Maybe just letting the fertilizer so can and to cover the ground to protect it from the Sun and allow all of that beautiful microbial action to take place in the soil, to allow life to happen will be enough. Perhaps I do not need to inflict those hundred wheelbarrow runs. Perhaps it’s a good idea to do such a thing but maybe I should wait until I can do it myself.

My ex partner thought that we could bypass the purchased topsoil and go back to the forest. She very much likes the quality of the dirt that we take out of there. The difference is that she doesn’t understand but there is a limit to the exploitation that we can get away with there. She just finds a place to dig and starts digging holes. This is incorrect. My plan was to go in the existing canals and clean them out of leaves and then to dig from there. These ruts already serve a function of collecting water and feeding the trees. Making them more functional is a positive addition to the forest. Just stealing resources because it’s convenient is not.

But coloring all my choices here is not money. What is coloring it is that I really wanted to do all of this myself. Last year, my neighbors conspired against me and disallowed me from getting fertilizer. There was also an argument about whether I wanted it or not. That would be a vegan argument honestly. This year, I don’t have this problem with resources except for the unreliability of my alcoholic supply chain, Ghenna, but I wonder if simplifying the amount of work needed now and just putting the garden to rest without the overkill isn’t the best answer. 

We can always add topsoil, compost and more fertilizer. We can always take care of the plants the best we can. But maybe we should hold back a bit until such time that I can physically participate in the work again. I still have hope that this is possible. I still have hope that a little reliable medical attention and I’ll be back on my feet and feeling useful again.

It is all I wanted. All I wanted was some fresh air, to be a little closer to Nature and to get my exercise doing some gardening. I really didn’t come up here for the politics or the war or dealing with lunatic alcoholic murderers for neighbors. I did not come out here for a reenactment of World War II.

Anyway, it’ll be several hours before anybody shows up to do anything today. For myself, it’s going to be another do-nothing-but-lift-weights day. Another day lost to self hospitalization. Another day lost to what was once a pretty decent body but now one that just wants to fall apart on me.

***

What causes diabetes? It’s fat. And specifically, animal fat.

It might seem kind of redundant but it certainly seems that the standard diet is the thing that’s going to kill us in the end. This is one of the most specific scientific findings about the subject of eating a high-fat diet. I am diabetic for very specific reasons. I personally believe in this as fact. I wish I had known this much, much, much earlier in life. I wish I had learned the things I’ve learned in the last few years a long, long time ago. 

I’m not telling anyone what to think. I am just suggesting some things I know to be true and to ask people to act accordingly.

***

I apologize for posting this but I suppose I need to post it. It is very, very sad.

***

I know there are a lot of links today but I found this interview and I thought I really needed to share it. It is one of the most honest depictions of what you could call Russian mentality. This is exactly how people talk and think. This is completely true. And though there are those who are genuinely cynical and quite a few people who don’t believe in the war or in war in general and quite a few people who don’t like the government or who genuinely believe Russian policy is a mistake, this is what it’s like talking to Russian people. This is how it works when you ask questions and look for logical answers. So there you go.

***

It’s about 2:00 and believe it or not, I had some ambition today. I’m going to have to check back and see if this is a Tuesday thing or something like that. I actually stayed down for a very long time and didn’t even get out of bed until almost 10. But when I did, I started solving necessary problems to do necessary things. I call this ambition.

First of all, I don’t really have any help. I can’t count on my ex partner to do anything except when she’s not at work, Ghenna is a loose cannon at best and all I can do is try and harness whatever energy he brings to the game whenever he shows up. Lena is actually too blind to do anything real. I know I sound like I’m stroking my own ego but the truth is that all of the basic nuances of staying alive fall down to me. If I don’t do these things, they will not get done.

My leg is still terribly swollen. Much too swollen not to be noticed. Nevertheless, I was going to at least need to drag it around for the next couple of hours. On the plus side, there is a dull miserable ache to the limb and I cannot put my weight on it enough to walk but the frightening, I am horribly injured pain seems to have subsided. It’s at least okay enough to stand up on. I can’t really put weight on it but I can use it to balance.

The first job was that I needed kindling. These are little wood sticks that I can use as fire starters. I know this is ridiculous to try and explain, but to start a fire you need four things. You need something that creates fire such as a torch or a match or even a sparker if you have such a thing. Then you need something completely flammable such as a piece of paper, hay or straw or even some wood shavings. What is important is that it takes almost nothing for these things to catch fire. After this, you need kindling, small dry sticks that need more than a match to catch fire but will catch fire if sitting on burning paper etc. It is the kindling that actually provides the heat that sets the logs on fire.

Again, maybe it’s stupid taking the trouble to explain this but I do this all the time so maybe I know something about starting fires. By the way, you need to set them up in such a way that you like the fire on the bottom and that everything moves straight up in a logical progression, increasing in intensity as more things start to burn and eventually getting to all of your logs and creating an even hot burn. And if you want to know the mathematics, it takes about half a sheet of newspaper or a little less thick paper, three or four pieces of kindling and three or four logs to do the job of charging the brickwork. It’s actually the brick work that keeps the heat pumping for hours after the fire is gone. This is how the house is heated. Well, this and two electric heaters. One very small and energy efficient and enough to make things livable and the other a small industrial blower that gets used in case of emergencies.

Anyway, I managed to make it down to the woodshed. I had brought a bag with me that I could carry along with my crutches. The moment I got there though, to my horror, I noticed that I had long ago taken the stool out of there. It really would have been much more comfortable to have been able to sit to do this work. Well, what was the choice? I could go all the way back and hump a stool back to the shed or I could live with it. I chose the latter. 

Like I said, I really don’t need to cut too much kindling. 20 or 30 pieces is enough for at least 3 Days To a week of fire starting. I started my work standing and balancing on one leg. Then I went down to one knee. And then finally I quit and just sat on the ground to get the last of it and pick up the mess. It seemed such a shame that I was wearing clean clothes for this but what are you going to do? When you need wood, you need wood.

With this done and the wood back in the warm room, I made my way to the kitchen to try and make some food. I decided I wanted some kind of bread. My ex partner started singing her praises for potato based dough. I decided this was a reasonable thing to do and so made a rather horrible tasting blender concoction of a few nuts, some chickpeas, some black pepper and a few small potatoes. I ground these all up smooth and threw them in my mixing bowl and added a combination of whole wheat and white flour until I managed to get it into a reasonably dry ball. I covered it with a towel to let it rest and that’s what it’s doing right now. 

As of the moment, I’m sitting in my office which is almost too cold to be inhabitable. I want very much to go back to the warm room and play with some weights and to make the plates toasty and make myself comfortable but I have two reasons to wait. First of all, if Ghenna is going to show up today, I’d rather not have to get up again to deal with him. And the other is that I really would like something to eat. I’m thinking some flatbreads and then some kind of a chilly/onion/tomato salsa might be nice. And again, a cup of tea just for the warm water.

I just called Ghenna and he said he was coming by with some instruments. Instruments? What the hell kind of instruments did he need?

Both my ex partner and I took a look at the truth about berry bushes and the thing is, you can only really plant in one row. The original plan of planting bushes in back of the ones that we have is probably not going to work out. You really need to plant them in a single row.

Okay, so what just happened is after talking to Ghenna I’m doing a quick recheck to make sure that I was correct in my thinking, I sent my ex partner a list of three possibilities about what to do with these bushes. The first is to take down our pickle beds and continue this row of berries down the left side of my path. The second would be to put them inside the bed where we keep our sweet potatoes. Not with the sweet potatoes but in that part of the garden where we had squash growing this year. The last was to devote one raised bed. She went with choice number one.

You’d think I would have known this already. You’d think I would have been prepared with this information before she even showed up with the trees and the bushes. I wasn’t. In my mind, my original plan was aesthetically fine and I had a nice place to put berries. As of the moment, experts agree that my plan would not work and as soon as I read this, I could see their point that if and when these things grow to maturity, there is no way we could even get to them.

Okay, it is cold as hell and I want to get out of this room. My leg is absolutely killing me and I think I would prefer to tell Ghenna to forget about this help generally. On the other hand, if I dress a little more warmly, find a nice place to sit down and he has enough ambition to do some serious digging for me, I need 10 holes dug. Five for the berry bushes, one pear tree dug up and replaced in a different location and four post holes for the supports for my grapevines. If we can get this done today, I will consider today a great success.

***

You know, there really is such a thing as ambition Tuesday. Maybe I should not be jinxing this by talking about it but there really is something in the air on Tuesdays. Today was an ambitious day. Today the work got done. Today, I am tired, a little sick, very cold but at least proud that much of the planned work has been accomplished. Not everything, but a lot of it. Today, we are logistically sound.

As of the moment, I am in the warm room. I still need to build a fire. Maybe I don’t or maybe I do. It’s raining outside. I got a call from my ex partner asking me if it had arrived here yet. When she called it had not but almost at the moment I finished putting the last thing away, it started coming down. It is a positive to get some water. Unfortunately, all it’s doing is overflowing my buckets.

To begin with, the bread I made today made a huge difference in my mood. If you haven’t had bread in a while and suddenly you take a bite of something that is fresh and out of the oven, or off a grill like mine was, that first bite seems to be the end of the world. This was the thing you’ve been waiting for.

I’m not lying that I have gotten pretty sick of a breathless world. The beans and rice make sense and even the occasional macaroni is nice for what it’s worth. But all of these things eventually get old. There’s really nothing you can do to them that truly makes them interesting. I suppose if I was into fry cooking, I could toast everything up so that it had some crispiness to it. Perhaps that would be something truly nice. But this bread was my first food orgasm in a long time. This bread rang the bell and made life worth living at least in the moment while I was enjoying every hot bite.

The wet ingredients with the potato and a little bit of nut fat was unconscionably horrible tasting. I’m glad I didn’t balk or adjust the taste. You need to add heat to these ingredients in order for them to wake up. What is horrible tasting becomes delicious and sweet and nutty once allowed to heat up. This is always the secret.

The salsa was also very nice. There was still a little bit of the wet ingredients at the bottom of the blender and I just let them be a part of the sauce. I didn’t cook any of it but for some reason, when mixed with the tomatoes and peppers, we got a nice acid base combination and it was also amazingly tasty spoon after spoon.

Immediately at the end of my meal Ghenna showed up. He had a plan of what he wanted to accomplish but instead, I asked him if he wouldn’t mind following me and taking care of some important business first. It wasn’t his idea but he didn’t mind following me around and this made all the difference.

The first job at hand was to take down the pickle Garden. The first thing he did was pick up a knife and an ax and I told him to take it easy. All the materials involved in supporting the trusses could simply be untied without destruction of materials. Creating more plastic garbage was the last thing I ever wanted here. We had a moment of discussion that the village has a garbage service and even though they only charge about one ruble a month, I really don’t need them more than once a month. The only thing I have that genuinely needs to be removed from my territory is the bloody plastic. All of those food packages from the grains and the lagoons. All the factory products that end up being kind of a staple for me. The spaghetti packages and the noodle packages. This has no place here and if I could do without it, I probably would. Let’s see what happens in the next few years.

Then we broke out the drill and he pulled out the screws holding the uprights together and threw them in the screw bucket for reuse. Whatever he was thinking staring at the apparatus, it was a simple cantilever and once the uprights came down, the actual box was not even tied together. They were literally eight sides stuck into the ground with no connection to each other. Both boxes came down in less than 20 minutes, the wood was transported down with the other junk wood next to the barn and the dirt from the box spread out in about a meter pattern. Whatever is good in that dirt will now drip into the land below. There is not going to be a box there anymore.

With the boxes gone, it was time to dig some holes. The number would be 10. I would have happily shown him the plan but he seemed to be having a hard time understanding what I was getting at. Like I said, I either hang around with him or things get kind of out of hand.

The first job was to dig up the pear tree. It is still alive and we will find another home for it but its place will no longer be in this Garden. I like the view from my kitchen window better. I am leaving the cherry tree exactly where it is and in the future, I will protect it from the climbing vines and make sure that it has plenty of nutrients and is mulched well. But this pear tree had to go and it was added to the bucket with the berry bushes. My ex-partner swears that leaving them in water for a few days is not going to hurt them one bit. Let’s hope not.

With this out of the way, there were nine holes left. There was a place where we tried to plant something last year but the thing failed. It had already been pulled up and a new hole was dug in its place. Certainly, there might be something terrible about that particular spot. We have more fertilizer this year and something tells me, we might be more successful given a new start.

Then there was a place that we started digging but then decided it didn’t fit our plan. You could see that somebody had dug up the place but there was no Bush there. Today I decided to make use of that spot as well. This made two holes done and seven to go. The 10th would have been that pear tree but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around where I actually wanted it. We will figure that out by Thursday.

The three holes that got dug where the pickles used to be were in a perfect row and we seemed to have a moment of completion. The man needed to smoke, he got a phone call from some salesperson and actually took it with interest. Forgive me for being an American but I have no time for anybody selling me anything over the phone. Apparently, this was a free massage at the local hotel for former servicemen. I guess I can understand his enthusiasm.

Right in the middle of all of this dreaming of rubs and tugs, I got a call from of all people the land inspector. She started talking very quickly. She needed to make an adjustment. There was 40 cm worth of mistake in the area where the steak is near the plum tree. The error is in my favor and her metal Mark needed to be moved 40 cm further. She was calling from in front of my house. She was not coming on my property. She would enter through the neighbors fence and do everything without bothering me. I’m sure I should have just been kind and generous and told her to do what she needed to do but frankly, I am really, really sick of the Belarusian government bureaucracy and how long they take to get anything done.

If I juxtapose this land document bullshit against my current disability and inability to put weight on my leg, you can see how little I wish to have to deal with their bureaucrats.

You know, in the old days they would use a sextant and a tripod and somebody would stand there with a stick and they would get an elevation and a direction and they’d be done. Surveying a piece of land was not an all day affair. You didn’t have to climb through the foliage trying to get your GPS up above the leaves so it actually read the satellite to some level of accuracy. And despite all of the complaining that she told me about being bogged down and having so much work to do and having to rush every day and how hysterical it was trying to do this job, why did it take five trips to do this? Why did it take an entire year?

This land inspection is a bureaucratic necessity that was given to me at the time when I bought the house. This would be something like last April. I understand that I missed the original payment last year to make this thing happen. I was woken up with a letter telling me that I was going to lose my property if I didn’t fulfill this. But this letter was last summer. I got this threatening letter more than a year ago. I apologize, paid my fee with happiness and then it was more than a fucking year.

I told her I didn’t give a flying shit about that 40 cm. I told her I would give this 40 cm to my neighbor with pleasure as a gift. I pointed out that it was all forest and nobody was using this land for anything. The neighbors didn’t even live here anymore and their last act of occupancy was to cut down their orchard so that really, not giving a damn about trees had been stated with alacrity already.

She came and went, there were a few taps of metal on metal and then the sound of her internal combustion engine coming to life and she drove away. Keep in mind, five trips here and back means an awful lot of gas wasted. Maybe that’s why they want things to the millimeter. They really like their people sitting in cars. And for what it’s worth, the car they were driving, I’m not sure what it was but it even seemed like a Ford had the word Patriot as a moniker on the back door.

While she was here, I had Ghenna toss some manure onto the final mid garden bed. That didn’t take more than 5 minutes really. It took longer to gather the tools and put them away then it did to toss the material and rake it up. Whatever, one more Garden was ready for mulch.

With this, there was only about an hour left in his free time and I asked him if we would be able to dig the final four holes before you left. Tuesday is ambition day so the answer was of course a resounding yes.

These last four holes were in fact for the supports for the wine grapes. Another something that I have been waiting for for more than a year.

At one point, going to try to make a big deal about the lengths of the supports. They were all different sizes and he said that maybe he should get a grinder and make them all the same size. I told him I didn’t care. One was incredibly short and he said that he could probably lengthen it by putting some rebar in there. I said we would deal with it at a much later date.

There was some argument as to where we put these four things. It was strange that suddenly he did not understand that I was looking for supports for eight Vines. We had four on one side and four on the other and I needed at least one meter hole between the two of them. You had to be able to get out of your house and into the field somehow.

He started digging but he wasn’t particularly happy about it. Something was wrong but he agreed to keep going. I pointed out that I was as fastidious as the land inspector making sure that we had at least one meter of opening between the two sets. We both expressed opinions on how to dig and where to dig. I did not allow him to stray too much from the plan. In the end, I’m not really convinced we’ve done a very good job of putting these supports in but as of the day, there’s 105 cm between the two posts. One fence will go on one side of the grapes and the other fence on the other. We might have to fix this before we start tying everything in. But no matter what, there were four tall green steel posts coming up out of the ground.

If he only understood what my plan was now, he mentioned that we probably need two more posts. He is of the opinion that we should not go more than two plants before having a serious support. I could see his point of view and I didn’t mind. We can fix these things on the go and he mentioned that we would probably be finished with this by the end of the week. Two more posts would come and I would definitely have a delivery of straw with a tarp to cover it to prevent rain from causing it to break down before we needed it before the end of the week.

And then we were done. It was 20 minutes after 5:00. We went long 20 minutes but nobody was complaining. He started carrying his bicycle outside and I asked him if he didn’t want anything. My guess is, he was absolutely planning on just leaving without anything. I don’t know whether this was pity because of my medical situation or simply him trying to keep the peace between us but when I asked him if he didn’t want anything, he popped back in with brightness.

Whether or not this was important to do, during the last moments of the day as he was transporting the tools back to the barn and gathering his own goods was to do a genuine accounting of our deal. It is good to know what the dollars and cents are. The rubles and the kopecky.

I started counting the materials and workmanship for everything we have planned. Certain parts of the deal are finished and there has been some work done that was not originally included in his contract. The prices for all of this are extremely Fair. I don’t really want to be burdened with how much he pays for these materials. I doubt he pays anything but if this doesn’t bother him, I can’t see why it should bother me. I just want things to be orderly. I’m not really interested in paying top dollar to artisans if I don’t have to. It’s just plants in the ground. A few natural basics to help them grow and everything else is drama.

It was a revelation when I noticed that I had not overpaid him. In fact, I owed him money. Even if I counted the work that was still not yet done, the cost of materials and all the work that he has done still had him ahead of me by several rules. I was really not expecting this. I did not want to rub his nose in it. I just wanted him to know that the business would be accurate one way or the other. I’m not in the pity business and I don’t need him to be either. Either this contract works or it doesn’t.

I had planned to hand him that same fiver I’ve been carrying around since yesterday. I had hoped he would be okay with this but suddenly, with the ledger pointing in the other direction and my actually owing him money made this a really empty gesture. I put another 20 on his card. Let him buy what he wants for the evening.

And with that, it was done. My ex partner says that she’s coming up on Thursday and she specifically wanted to plant these shrubs herself. When she comes, the holes have already been dug. That’ll make it easier. Three of the five lower gardens have been fertilized and are simply waiting to be covered by straw. The one remaining Garden is a little tricky because I think we want to leave the sweet potato roots in there over the winter in the hopes that perhaps next year, we get a nice crop.

But at the end of the day, the food Forest is definitely starting to take shape. There is a row of trees from the top of the property to the bottom that ends in a beautiful orchard. Right down the center path, there will be a line of berry bushes that go all the way through the gardens. Eventually, this walk will be somewhat shady and there will be food available every step of the way. We will have plenty of boxes for growing Staples and interesting things that we like to eat. I have more than enough Garden space to allow myself enough greens and peppers and beans and salads. We have enough space to make a nice Garden. We have no problem with water and when I finally take down the water barrels, we will have two natural water features feeding two separate canals. I will take care of the watering myself but there will also be some specific natural help.

I sat in the kitchen and made myself two more pieces of bread and ate them with great pleasure along with the last of the tomato/pepper sauce. Then I closed all the lights and all the doors and cleaned up the kitchen and made my way to where I am now in the warm room.

By the way, just before the call from the land inspector and from the salesman selling my man a full body rub, I sent a note to the father of the boy. This was the time I was speaking of when the enthusiasm would wane. This was the place where he could not just fake it and pass his classes. He was obligated to do some dictionary work and to be accurate with his translation. I asked the boy’s father if he would stick his nose in and be helpful about this. It really was about responsibility and the difference between him doing his work and trying his best and just faking it, is the difference between a good student and a bad one and a successful class and a waste of money and time.

He thanked me for my professionalism and assured me that all was in order. I said thank you and that I appreciated his words. But the proof is in the pudding. Either he shows up ready for class on Thursday, or we have a mild motivation argument. Either the wheels roll or they don’t. Either the boy picks up the book and the pencil and writes the words in preparation for the class or we are babysitting.

Healthwise, I wish I had something good to say. I am completely lame and the one side of my self medical help is looking beautiful, we now have a blister elsewhere. Perhaps this is from me needing to be available on my field today and yesterday. Perhaps I should never have even stood up. But what am I supposed to do? There is nobody here working with me. If I want this work done and the seasons are dictating but it needs to get done, what else am I supposed to do? It’s a hero call. I can’t help picking up the phone for these fucking hero calls. I can’t just let Ghenna alone to do anything because his brain will tell him to go elsewhere when he gets tired, just like the boy. What am I supposed to do?

One day soon I’ll be able to turn off the lights. One day soon everything will be in order. Everything alive on my land will be tucked in and all the garden beds will be prepared for next year. It will be time to let everything rest and not worry about this Garden anymore. That time is coming pretty quickly. I guess my only hero job is to see if I can not die before we get to the end of it. That’s one of the tricks of being a hero by the way. It’s really no fun if you die while trying.

***

I have a nice fire built here and I’m finally ready to let my day go. The moment the fire took off, I realized there were two nuances that I had left out of the story today. They are not huge nuances but they are worthy of mentioning. Both are a bit soul dragging honestly. I really do feel rather foolish for leaving them out.

The first was when the last of the holes were being dug. We were sitting in front of my neighbor’s house and I told Ghenna again how beautiful it would be if the neighbors were to decide to move their driveway to the other side of the property. This would cause them no damage and in fact would be better for everyone’s health. Keeping their cars away from human beings may be something they are not aware of, they are fascists after all, but it would be a nice gesture All things considered. They have in fact taken almost all the happiness out of my life. Perhaps it’s the least I could do. And yes, they were at home and I was definitely speaking loud enough and in the correct language to be understood.

The other thing was after I was home and Ghenna had bought for himself with the 20 rubles whatever it is that makes him happy and decided to give me a call. He asked me if I agreed that we worked beautifully today. He asked me if I also took pleasure with our teamwork. I asked him if he had a genuine point for the phone call and then asked him about what time he would show up tomorrow. He said 11. I’ll believe it when I see it. I don’t mean to be an asshole, but seriously, when do I get relief from this? When exactly does the pain end?