Sunday, October 9th 2022. Week 40
Well good morning. It’s about 7:00 a.m. and I feel pretty good. This platform I made at the end of last week made for perhaps the best day off I’ve ever had. I don’t like making statements like that where you go to the ultimate this or the ultimate that. Everybody stresses their rhetoric that the thing they are talking about in this moment is in fact the best of the best or the highest of the high. But this week truly was special. I don’t remember being this comfortable. I don’t remember ever doing something for myself that fit as well as this thing that I built.
It’s nothing particularly special. It’s basically a pallet but with a solid top and no bottom. It’s just a slightly stronger than normal futon. It’s just a platform made of wood. But it fits my body perfectly and has this wonderful combination of solidity with just the perfect amount of softness. I’ve got some carpeting on top of the wood and a blanket on top of the carpeting. It is actually warmer than the floor even without insulation and everything about it from the slightly increased height to how comfortable I am being on it made for a complete sleep day. I just feel perfect and well rested here this morning.
Technically speaking, it’s not even finished yet. I originally planned it as one huge box but then I decided to make it into two squares for better portability. It was the right decision. The lumber for the second half is cut already and just needs to be assembled. As of the moment though, just one seems to be working just fine. This isn’t to say that I don’t need the second one but there is a possibility that I don’t need the second one. We will see how this goes but maybe this was enough.
The plan for the day is that the ex partner is coming up. We are going to work on last year’s trees to give them a little relief, something to eat and a bit of mulch to keep them warm and the land wet. I don’t want to say that last year’s planting was no good but I didn’t do the most perfect job. I was basically crawling at the end of last year trying to get the trees in the ground. There was nothing in any of the holes to feed them. I was on my last minutes before going to the hospital and in fact, this was the action that put me in the hospital. The result was that we lost one or two trees and the ones we got didn’t really have a great year. The drought and the heavy sun in June and August didn’t help anything. This year, the idea is to do better.
Both Ghenna and Lena broke protocol yesterday. Lena was sent on a mission to see if she could find some kvasheni kapusta at the market on Thursday. She was supposed to show up on Friday no later than 2:00 or to generally forget it. She hung a plastic bag with the cabbage on my fence in the middle of a very hot sunny day yesterday. Absolute ridiculousness. Also, Ghenna again tried to call me on the phone and I had to block his number again. I just can’t seem to get through to these people that there is no game on Saturday and I don’t want to be bothered.
Maybe this is a Christian thing. Maybe the latest group of people who just can’t get enough of me are the church people from the House of prayer. Last week, they told Lena that she should invite me over. It didn’t sound like an invitation I needed and inviting more Christians into my life is not high on my list of priorities. I have more than enough people fucking my mind, thank you very much. I don’t really need it anymore. I’m saying this because they just can’t seem to get out of my Saturdays. It’s like they’re making it a priority. This, and the last few times that Ghenna has talked to me, he has been vociferous in his Christian blessings for me. It’s worse than fist bumps.
The answer to the question is just a few modifications to the plan. If I’m going to find something for Lena to do, it now has to move from Thursday to Wednesday. The original idea was to have her help clean up for Fridays but if she’s going to bleed over, you have to give up something to get something more reasonable. If we move to Wednesdays or even Tuesdays, there’s no chance of screwing up enough to drag over to my day off. As for Ghenna, he has a genuine proclivity for screwing up when he’s needed. He is an excellent tool for self-sufficiency because of his lack of trustworthiness. For him, I’m just going to have to remember to cut off his telephone before prayers on Friday night. That should do the trick.
The ex partner is coming up today at about the usual time. She says she is getting on a slightly earlier bus so maybe this means she will arrive slightly earlier. I don’t have a whole lot of prep to do. I should probably make at least some oatmeal or something like that. I’m absolutely not hungry but my ex partner has a way of revving me up.
Yesterday was a beautiful sunny day. I didn’t make much use of it. The neighbors, the tree butcher neighbors, showed up to do something. I completely ignored them. I couldn’t think of a thing I wanted to say to them and I really didn’t want their noise on a Saturday at all. I’m not getting paranoid about Christians, I’m just avoiding Christian concern. Well, Christian concern and manipulative Belarusian women.
This morning I watched the Mets come back and break even with the Padres. It was a tight game until the Mets blew it open in the 7th. Adam Ottavino nearly blew the thing in the 9th. I guess we didn’t have enough acid in our stomach and allowing an easy win is too much to ask for. Tonight or tomorrow morning is the rubber game of the match. Lots of sports out there these days. Lots of stuff to do if you can’t sleep.
The big news from the war was a double attack on the russian-made bridge leading from Russian territory to Crimea. Bombs managed to blow up 2/3 of it, taking out the railway line and half of the motorway. This bridge was built by the Russians in 2014 as a part of their original invasion of Crimea. Blowing up this bridge has both a logistical benefit to the Ukrainian war effort and a symbolic meaning for the ukrainians. It makes supplying Crimea very difficult and long-winded. People there are already hoarding gas and they are worried about the amount of oil that’s on hand. But for those positive towards the blue and yellow, this was seen as the very best possible birthday gift for Vladimir Putin’s 70th jubilee.
The Ukrainian forces continue to retake land. It is a slow constant movement pushing the Russians back towards their own border. However, one of the stranger things to come out of this was not in the war but in the people doing their best job to give news of the war. For some reason, YouTube and their beloved community guidelines fascist bylaws have decided that the bloggers who have invested so much of their time doing really legitimate reporting as to what’s going on on the front have now suddenly been demonetized. Several of the map reader bloggers that I have been using to keep up on things have both been wiped out in one stroke of the pen. The idea being that people talking about the war, either for it or against it, seems to go as inappropriate media to make money off of and their entire channels have been stripped of their ability to pay them money. Several of the guys I trust for good information made specific videos whining about how their entire livelihood has been taken away from them. I don’t know if it means anything, but they seem to have destroyed only the Eastern European map readers. This guy here is American and they don’t seem to have touched him at all.
I don’t want to get into conspiracy theories about this. But there is obviously something to this decision making. Personally, I do not have my own deep network of information as to what’s going on in the front. I am not connected in any way to the war effort nor have I made friends with soldiers or friends of soldiers. I’m a peacenik vegan snowflake pacifist tree grower. However, I like these guys for my news a lot better than corporate media. Their enthusiasm and one-sidedness can be a little annoying but at least they generally just show information instead of relying on emotional filmmaking or talking heads filling the space with useless opinions. I’d hate to think that this was one of the reasons they got shut down. God forbid, we should just have information available to us.
I guess if they want to continue, they’ll just have to do it like me and work for nothing. In some of these cases, these guys had income in the six figures. Considering where they came from and that they probably have overbuilt their lifestyles according to their income, this is going to hurt. We’ll see how they continue but some of them have already threatened to make their patreon pages the genuine news source. Fuck you very much YouTube.
All of this sent me into a spiral about how much people love propaganda. This thought started to solidify in my head while watching pirate broadcasts of American sports TV. The commercials are always for corporate products that can afford the time. They sell us meat and they sell Us cars. They sell this image of an intelligently working, smartly dressed middle class with a nice racial cross section who can afford all of the things being sold to them. Apparently, you dress impeccably, you are in the prime of health but yet you cannot exist without a daily dose of meat served to you by addictive fast food restaurants. The food there doesn’t cause any problems with your health as long as you have a brand new car to get you through the drive-thru.
The films that are being made still about violence the vast majority of time. These are either horror films about psychopaths who are violent and killing people, vigilante, Mafia or tough cop films where strong guys with no fear of death have correct weaponry to shoot their way through violence psychopaths or sci-fi films or superhero films where fantasy gives us the power and the weapons to deal with violent psychopaths. The world according to the media is filled with violent psychopaths. My neighbors certainly watch a lot of television.
But this relentless media has destroyed the planet. The relentless salesmanship of for-profit ideas has ruined the world. People are in a trance. Their brains don’t function very well. We are programmed day in and day out and never given a moment of peace. The human noise never stops. The teaching never stops. The lessons never stop. The fear never stops. The clock never stops and we are never really allowed to live without it.
One thing I have learned from taking these days off is to give myself a chance to turn off the noise. The first simple decision is simply that I’m not going to work. This is exactly where the foundation of everything else comes from. But it is in the philosophical question of what is work that has truly opened things up for me. It’s not just working for money, although the moment you say that you are not going to handle money or talk business that you realize what most of your conversation is about with other people. It’s not just making a great effort which means not doing anything which will give you a particular amount of stress. This also teaches you about your interaction with others. And it’s not just about relinquishing your responsibilities for a day, although this also puts into perspective the kind of things you have taken responsibility for.
It’s not any of these things but when you start putting them all together, you do get a really interesting perspective on your own life. Suddenly, things that you were doing simply out of habit appear to be acts of masochism. Suddenly, ideas that came to you as being relevant turn out to have been nothing more than begging. But begging for what?
Maybe the best thing about taking a day off is that you realize you can take a day off. Once you agree that you can stop, you understand that you have created for yourself something called personal choice. If I say I’m going to stop and I stop, no matter how many Christians wish to disturb my rest or whatever they think I’m doing, it is just no that allows me a more complete sense of self. These things that I do become my choice and not some obligation fixed on me by someone else. I am living by my own personal choice and not on some track set for me by others.
Of course this is the reason I don’t make so much money anymore. It’s also the reason that no matter how much media I publish here, I am not popular because I’m not available for monetization. I do not sell products. I do not appeal to a bloodthirsty Mass audience. I mean, for the most part, there’s almost no blood in anything I do here. There are no pictures to look at other than those that I get from other people for free and I myself am nobody’s action hero. I’m not weaponized, I’m not aggressive and most of the time, I just avoid people who are. How can you use that to sell hamburgers?
Perhaps we should simply split the internet into for profit and not for profit sites. We can allow everyone who wants to do whatever they want to do to make money on one side. You can have all of your commerce and all of your shopping and all of your services on one side. We don’t need to break it up into education or society or all of these other vagaries. We can just say that if you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing in the hope of making money, put it on this side and let people use it as they like.
You can say blah blah blah about children and porn but nobody seems to mind the violence or the meat advertising for children. Nobody seems to mind children getting everything they want on their whim through their electronic advice even before they’ve had the slightest life experience. I’m just saying.
I’d be interested to see what the non monetized internet would look like. It would be interesting how slick the presentations would be if the people giving out information were not worried about money. It would be interesting to see how much religion would be there, how much political discussion and other group thinking would be out there. I can’t kid myself to believe that there would be a place for pure information, where you could just find out the math and the statistics behind what happened. It would be lovely to have a place where there were just pure facts without the commentary and opinion. It would be nice to just hear the original idea without having it spun for me to fit someone else’s political, religious or economic ideology.
Maybe the last thing about taking days off is that it simplifies things. It’s just an eat and sleep day. I am not perfect in my Judaism on my days off. There are a lot of rules that I break constantly and knowingly. I don’t mind cooking for myself, if it’s cold I will light a fire, lights go on and off as I need them and if I feel like it, I’ll practice guitar or something like that. I’ve even gone for bike rides.
The point is though it is not a normal day. It’s not a day of responsibility. It’s not a day where I particularly care about my politeness to my neighbors. I generally don’t talk to anybody. I don’t want to talk to anybody on saturday. I like not talking to anybody on saturday. I don’t like people trying to talk to me on Saturday at all.
Perhaps this is the real heart of it. When you take a day off from the noise, you begin to understand how much of it is just noise. Noise is there to distract and to confuse. The noise stops you from thinking your own thoughts. The noise stops you from making your own opinions and drives you to listening to other people’s opinions and becoming a part of a group and giving away your own understanding. I’m not talking about becoming a conquering narcissist. I’m not talking about violently demanding a place for yourself in the world. I’m just talking about having a mind that is at peace with itself and understands what it needs to do to live. In my case, I tried to find a way to live that is at peace with the world. Perhaps not entirely with the lunatic people who are around me. But with nature itself.
This is really the whole point here. The narcissism has got to end. The belief that people are the only important thing on the planet has got to end. The belief that some leader is more important than hundreds of millions of people has got to end. The belief that the wealth of a few is worth the misery of all living things on the planet has got to end.
We are not the alpha male. We are just one of many species sharing the planet and its resources. Our ability to steal and to cause ruin and harm and damage really should not be taught and lionized and made to be the center of all consciousness. Constantly teaching competition, War, violence and fear perpetually and without stop and even hypocritically when it comes to actually paying people for being successful at what they do has got to stop. It is constant insanity, Hysteria and needless violence. It is a constant screen for attention and a demand that no one ever be allowed to enjoy a quiet moment.
So yesterday I had a very quiet moment. I’m still kind of enjoying the quiet here. I made myself a little platform that gets me a little higher off the floor. I have some carpeting under it and on top of it and I made a place that is ergonomically extremely comfortable for myself. It was so comfortable in fact that I ended up sleeping most of the day away and this morning I feel much healthier and very well rested. Certainly, I ate a lot. I ate much more than I needed but I didn’t suffer from it.
Today I’m going to try and help out where I can. It was dry yesterday and sunny and if it’s dry today perhaps my part of the job will be cleaning out the grass around the trees. Maybe we will dig up the area around a little, maybe digging up the grass and flipping it upside down before dropping in some fertilizer and spreading some hay as a mulch. Maybe today I’ll take that accounting as to exactly how many plants I have to take care of here. Not counting the boxes, we have quite a few trees and berry bushes now and a few more on the way. Today is just another day for giving them a little love and putting them to sleep for the winter.
As for this week, I don’t know what to say. I don’t have any big plans. Perhaps I will finally get my phone call to go to Minsk and my life will improve slightly. Perhaps I will have the opportunity for something a bit more dependable in terms of mobility. Hopefully, the country will not officially go to war with the ukrainians, an absolutely foolish gesture that will do nothing but invite violence here to a larger extent.
I guess I should add that military helicopters are flying in the region again. I’ve heard the sound of planes, war planes, flying towards the South. I haven’t heard military helicopters flying overhead since this spring. The war started in February and by March I was building my garden boxes this year. Now, with mobilization underway and the Russians seeming to want to go all in on the war, things are heating up militarily here 50 km from the border.
This is really what I mean about the constant noise. I finally get my life to the point that I really can take it easy and then they decided to start murdering each other for oil and anti-semitism and the desire to give your garbage to someone else. You finally get comfortable and then you find out there are new madmen trying to make places for themselves in history and willing to spend all the resources of a country as a beauty product for their own vanity.
***
It’s a little afternoon and I’m taking a bit of a break. Yes, I am taking a break and yes, that does mean that I am working today.
Today is one of these days where you learn something. Today is the day that taught me or retaught me some lessons about overthinking things. It also retaught me a lesson about making decisions from a distance instead of working with what you have right in front of your eyes. General logistics from engineers and architects is good. Understanding the plans is good. Consulting with people who understand projects from an overview is good. But the decision making needs to happen on the ground. You can temper your decisions with some good overview but you can’t really know what’s going on unless you’re right in the middle of the fight.
What all of these words mean is that I feel pretty good today. My legs feel good, I am really well rested from yesterday. I haven’t found the end of my ability and the work is done. I can’t believe it myself but I have done myself what I have believed for a month required assistance.
My ex partner is here and she is busy working on the second part of our plan which is spreading fertilizer amongst our bushes and trees. The first part was digging out around the trees to get rid of weeds and grass and make the ground a little more supple and receiving. Part 3 is simply to cover everything with hey.
But if you’re wondering, no, Ghenna just never showed up. He tried to call me yesterday and I immediately hung up on his call and then locked him out for the rest of the evening. I called him this morning a little before 9:00 to see if he was coming and he absolutely promised me at 10:30 arrival. He said 10:30 to 11:00 but he spoke as if he clearly understood the starting time. And if you noticed the time at the beginning of this writing, he never showed.
My ex partner asked me to call him. She’s a little worried about her back giving out. I don’t think her back is going to give out. I’m not calling her a liar. It’s just that the hard part was not that hard and I did my part of it. I’m a little bit proud of myself. I’m a little ashamed of myself for never having come out here and tried. Or, maybe it’s just a matter of the healing process and I’ve gotten that much healthier in the last week. I am not going back to an 8-hour work day anytime soon but, it seems I’m getting more and more function every day.
I guess if I think about it, I’m not really that ashamed of myself. I’m just pleased and surprised that the work that needed to get done was not that big of a deal. We are doing just fine, we are making very good progress and I don’t think it’s really taking that much effort.
There are some clouds in the sky that look kind of fat but that does not really mean rain anymore.
Just now, my ex partner finished her first load of fertilizer. I took over the job of filling the wheelbarrow for her. That is the part with the heavy lifting and part of this deal is to preserve her back.
While I was feeling that barrel, Ghenna decided to show up. He claims he was called into work. He claims that the leadership of the local State farms has changed and now he is no longer working under the leadership of one town nearby but under another town nearby. He says that Sunday morning meetings are fine. This is a State farm and when they call you, you go.
My first thought was that he was drunk. To my best guess, he was reasonably sober. This is not to say that he was not just getting out of bed. I generally don’t believe a word he says and I’m more than a bit angry about being hung out to dry again. My ex partner wanted him to take over some level of work but I was against it. I ended up assigning him to go ahead and get to work on the bench and the well. These were the two projects that he himself suggested. I’ve had more important things to do for the last month or so and these jobs never did get done. Today he can finally get started.
As I’m writing these words, those fat clouds are in fact dropping a little rain. I don’t know what my ex partner wants to do about things but we have done so much of our outside plan already, if she wants to come inside and drink some tea and wait out the weather, I don’t see any reason why that’s a bad idea.
I mean seriously, it really was not that much gardening. It was not that much work and I got in there and did my part for a change. All of this feels very good.
***
3:30 in the afternoon and everything has come to a stop. My ex partner has just put her things together and headed off for the bus stop. The only thing left for me to do is close the gate and this day is officially over.
In case you’re interested, Ghenna never came back. He showed up to help 2 hours late. I couldn’t really detect if he was already in the bag or not. I told him that the work we were doing was already covered but there was something for him to do. It wasn’t my idea, it was his. It was exactly the work that he proposed that he do to make some money probably 6 weeks ago. He said he needed his tools and disappeared and never came back again.
He was not particularly missed. I feel really good about my contribution today. I got a lot done cleaning out the area around the trees with my bocce gata digging tool. My body was strong and I did not mind swinging that Big tool around. Actually the work went really fast and I was very pleased by how quickly the difficult stuff was over.
After that, I did the lifting of shoveling the manure into the cart to get dragged around. It was about here that my legs quit but, like I said, I had gotten a lot done before I reached the end.
I wasn’t actually done for the day. I found a nice place to sit down and rested for a while and then got up and went back into it. I cleaned out the area around our lavender plants and brought some wood chip mulch that we still have from earlier this year and transferred it to a bucket and closed up the area. I managed to mulch two gardens and then, just for the hero of it, I went ahead and dug the hole for our new rose plant.
There was some nuance for that. I thought I had dug a pretty good hole but exactly at that moment, Tanya came down the road with two buckets of mushrooms. My thinking was that I wanted to get some from her but I also thought my ex partner might want some so I called her up to see what the story was.
Let’s be clear, I did not do this for the jealousy or the drama. Earlier in the day, another neighbor was heading down the road with a bucket of mushrooms and my ex partner called him and asked him if he wouldn’t mind parting with some for some money. He didn’t have the kind of mushrooms that she wanted so she passed. I don’t remember feeling any jealousy when she talked to him.
I guess that’s the big difference between men and women.
When I started talking with Tanya, my ex-partner immediately needed to be in the front and doing something. She didn’t want any mushrooms and then discovered that she didn’t like the whole I had dug either and started reading it to fit her needs. The story with Tanya is that she is still living in town, this business between her and her husband is still ongoing, nobody knows what the right thing to do about it, she likes living here better than town but this is the situation and everyone’s got to live with it. The only reason she came up was for the mushrooms in the forest and she will probably be riding on the bus with my ex partner.
There is really not that much work left to do. All of the bushes, the wine and the flowers have gotten some fertilizer and the ground around them has been loosened and weeded and cleaned. All of the trees, bushes, vines and flowers except for a small portion of lavender have been mulched. Mostly we used the straw but we also still had a couple of bags of wood chips. My ex partner wanted wood chips for the lavender. I have no reason not to agree.
We still have three more berry bushes that need to be planted. They are not with us currently but maybe by next week we will have them. Also, there are still four boxes with food in them. I’m taking my time and I’m not going to close any of them up as long as there is food in there. Technically speaking, there was no reason to stop growing things and I could have continued to grow greens and peas and things but I didn’t. I have not been mobile except for the last week or so so I wasn’t really looking for more work. Oh, and I think there are three or four trees that need to get a roofing panel. Those roofing panels really do help. They create a shady spot nearby and they definitely deposit a larger percentage of water to the roots of the trees. I believe I have seen results enough.
But that’s it. Today was a really good day. The sun is poking through the clouds right now and the light is taking on some yellows indicative of a fall evening. It’s going to be light for three more hours but you can tell by the spectrum that the winter is coming. That is definitely one of the things about 52° north latitude. You can definitely tell when the seasons are changing.
I don’t know what else to talk about here. I’m sitting on the bench in front of my house that is almost completely falling apart right now. I have the materials lying around to rebuild it. I have the legs and the energy and I guess I could start working on this this week.
I hear the road is very nice to ride on since it’s been raining. I guess it’s also possible to get back on my bike and enjoy the month or so before the snow comes. I’m not really afraid of riding in the snow and there really isn’t a lot that I need from the local store. I’m just thinking it might be nice to give my heart and lungs a little work for a change. They have been getting ridiculously lazy waiting for my leg to heal.
The only thing else I can think of to say is that I’m not hungry. I ate a lot from Friday night until this morning. I got around and moved a bit and broke a sweat and I am absolutely full still. That’s not really such an interesting thing to think about except that I like it. It means I save a few rules. It means I have more food for tomorrow. That’s two frugal positives about today. I didn’t have to pay Ghenna for any work and I don’t have to buy myself dinner. You see how that works?
***
And sometimes, you can’t lose even if you try.
I just had the fence closed and was ready to close up shop generally when my phone rang one time. It was Tanya. It turns out, she had quite a few white mushrooms if I wanted them. We haggled for price. Actually, we didn’t haggle, I just waited for her to tell me how much money she needed. She gave me a number and I rummaged through my spare change until I found what she wanted. And now I have about a kilogram of beautiful white forest mushrooms sitting in my kitchen.
She does not really know what to do with herself and neither do I. Her life is a bit more chaotic than mine. I’m just relaxing into retirement. But still, white forest mushrooms…
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