Sunday, October 16th 2022. Week 41

It’s very early on Sunday morning but that’s not my fault. I am not watching films or the baseball or college football. This weekend I got a bit away from electronic modification. I did play with my phone a bit. I won’t lie. But what I did mostly was enjoy the silence. If I did use the comp, I did it without sound. Or in other words, I listened to myself speak. Or think. I allowed my own thoughts to be.

I’m not sure that this is a classic meditation technique. I’m not saying it’s any kind of technique that’s worthwhile to teach anybody. I’m not preaching the new greatest thing in the world. I’m just saying that I listened to myself and gave relevance and interest to whatever thoughts wanted to come. I mean, the world is complicated. Perhaps it’s a good idea if we allow ourselves enough Sonic peace to have some time to figure things out.

Maybe this is not worth talking about but what is it like when you let it go silent? I don’t know what it’s like for anyone else. I haven’t got a clue what other people’s minds sound like to themselves. For me though, it was mostly a lot of commentary. Some sarcasm. Some revelation. Really, I’m kind of pragmatic and I just look at things and think what I think. Sometimes I think like a builder, sometimes I think like a strategist and sometimes I just act like my own best friend and try to have some sympathy and understanding for things that hurt.

I ate only one meal yesterday. Well, maybe one meal and a late snack. I pretty much slept most of the day yesterday. I am very fond of this little platform I’ve built for myself and Saturdays make it a perfect place to be. Perhaps when the weather starts dipping below zero, I will need to reinforce the undercarriage a bit. I still haven’t picked up that insulation yet. But as of the moment, it seems to be good down to three. You can’t argue with that. When it’s simple, strong enough to hold your weight effortlessly and brings you great comfort, you have definitely built something worth having.

The meals I had were pretty simple. I made an astoundingly simple hummus. It was very gentle and nuanced. It was mostly nuts and seeds and limited in the amount of chickpeas. I also went somewhat light on the spices and used my blender until very smooth. It ended up being an extremely light cream that complemented rather than overwhelmed the other dishes. I can’t say I made a recipe that I could repeat. I am a terrible recipe person. But I remember the basics of what I did so I could probably come close. Basically, there were some of our roasted sunflower seeds, store bought sunflower seeds (the last of some I got a long time ago), some sesame seeds and some peanuts. An interesting combination of fats.

After that, there were just a lot of veggies. I oil cooked them and added a tiny bit of tomato paste. I deglazed them with a little bit of vinegar and water. The vinegar turns slightly sweet if you use it as a deglazer and then I think I added some cornmeal, this is not cornmeal but it’s oatmeal flakes made from corn if this makes any sense. You can’t really say corn flakes either because that is not what it is. It’s rolled corn and it works like oatmeal. I use this kind of as a nutritional yeast replacement believe it or not. It’s not very cheesy but it adds a tiny bit of sweetness and is an excellent sauce thickener.

After this, I absolutely nailed the bread. It was the softest, fluffiest and possibly most delicious bread I’ve made. I am not fond of speaking in extremes because the whole world speaks like this and frankly, I don’t believe that 99% of the time it really is the best of the best or the worst of the worst. The world is too disappointing in this way. But if I did one thing correctly, I put a tiny bit of white flour in a jar and then poured in some dry active yeast and just let it sit with me for about 20 minutes. I was a bit worried about the taste because I’ve been using baking soda with a touch of vinegar to activate it for a long time. But this really made some beautiful soft dough that rose and puffed up nicely in the skillet and I ate a ton of it. This is the main reason why I only ate two meals over the last 36 hours. It was enough.

As for any deep understanding or realizations, I can’t really say I had any. The number one thought that keeps going through my mind is that I am pretty damn comfortable right now. I’m comfortable in the current weather, I am very happy with my leg progress and with my own medical skills to allow myself to heal, I am really comfortable in my environment and I just think it’s a bloody fucking shame that I have gotten to this place and they are having a war here. That’s really the entire thing. When you get your finances in order, your house in order and your health pretty much in order, you’d think you’d be able to enjoy it. 

I mean even my place in this village has leveled out and seems peaceful. I don’t feel any extra attention or bother or pressure from anybody. Perhaps the war has everybody freaked out and maybe they prefer not to touch me for fear that it might mean something. I don’t know why. Perhaps they’ve just forgotten me finally. A definite plus. But I do not feel any particular stress or anxiety or fingers reaching out towards me. Maybe it was just saying no thank you to the church. Maybe that puts yet one more little extortion game to rest. I really can’t say.

I think harvest Time should be a time of relaxing into the winter. I understand that we have a fear holiday coming up. The world likes fear. It makes a lot of money off of fear so we have this Halloween nonsense coming out. Are you scared of the dark and the cold? This is a big part of the Russian war strategy. Making people afraid of the dark and the cold. Thanks Vlad. It’s nice to know how your mind really works. It’s nice to know you spend your time figuring out how to hurt people rather than how to help them. I’m sure that’s the number one thing we all want in our elected leadership.

I saw the following video from an ex combat military vet, he’s American, and he makes rather incessant commentary about videos he picks up from the front. In other videos, he has found some GoPro footage from a Ukrainian soldier and spent the whole video commenting on nuances that he saw.

In this video, he comments on the physical condition of the Russian commanders and specifically, that the Russians had created one of these propaganda situations with Russian flags and people obligated to come and clap. He pointed out the misery on the faces of the “crowd” gathered for the ceremony. And then he went into the physical condition, age and general readiness of troops that would literally be on the front before the end of the week. His comment was that Putin didn’t really have to be worried about being reelected so he could do it after he wanted. I thought that was an epic truth that was extremely well said.

That’s the whole thing really. Vladimir Putin is acting without any worry about other people stopping him or not supporting him. He does not need to worry about people at all.

So Vlad has invited himself to everybody’s party this winter and we all have to play his party games. I’m sure everybody is thrilled to be at this party. I’m sure we just thank our lucky stars for the invitation. So much ceremony, so many big fine words to go along with really pathetic pictures and the inevitability of misery everywhere you look.

No, I did pick up some wisdom from a show I watched a couple of weeks ago. It was that hunters so about the Jewish vigilantes who were hunting down Nazis in the late 1970s. It was a moment in the show when one of the characters who was aggressively atheist had an encounter with a rabbi. And the rabbi was asking him not to complain and see the negative side of things so much. To make his point, he told the following story.

So back in Russia in the shtetl, a man goes to see the rabbi to talk about things. He tells the rabbi that he is tired of life, he is having problems with his wife, he is unhappy with his children and his lot in life generally. He doesn’t know what to do about it. So the rabbi tells him that he needs to add life to his life and the thing that would do it would be to invite the goats and the chickens to live in the house with him. This would add some energy and it would bring him out of his poor mood.

So the guy does this and the week later he is back with the rabbi literally hysterical. He can’t sleep at night. The bloody animals are everywhere, they are shitting everywhere and he cannot find A moment’s Peace. The place smells like a barn and he feels his entire house is ruined. So the rabbi tells him to put the animals back outside and to come back in a week. The next week the man comes and he’s amazingly happy. With the animals gone, the house is quiet, he gets a peaceful night’s sleep and he’s happy to once again be able to be with his family.

It’s hard to say what the wisdom of this is in a sentence. I equate this to bread and circuses. The idea that instead of actually working on a sustainable infrastructure that allows the population to be healthy, the powers that be tend to put us into ridiculously stressful situations that make the miserable life situation that they offer us better by comparison.

The truth is that means that people will complain no matter what their situation is. I know this from personal experience as well as what I have observed. I lived with a ridiculously young girl and people thought that I must have had the best life possible but I wasn’t really happy there. I was happy in some ways but the lack of sustainability of the situation basically drove me crazy. I couldn’t stop and enjoy the moment because you can see the inevitability of failure.

Maybe this is the best wisdom that I can share here this morning. Maybe the trick is to establish a sustainable world. I prefer when it is possible for everybody to be able to do this. I am of course talking about just having enough to eat, not worrying about the cold and the dark or profound medical catastrophe. And of course, that we have all the help we need when we wish to be more helpful and to learn more things to help us become better people. I don’t really see much that is necessary other than to be good people or to be the best human beings we can. This does not mean that we are rich Instagram Stars waving our dicks and clothes and money in other people’s faces. I’m not talking about bullshit influencers. I’m talking about people who are genuinely helpful to other people and to the planet itself. Good people are only good people when they are also green.

I believe in the daily effort, the Zen repetition of keeping a community going, people will have a reason to wake up in the morning. I also believe there will be natural stresses and strains. But I also believe there will be these moments of beauty. I don’t believe we need to manufacture them or to demand that a crowd show up at a particular time to revel in the beauty of the patriotism of it all. I don’t believe we need to do anything special to create beautiful moments. I believe we will have them, many of them.

I need to change the language of that last paragraph to would. Although the picture that I am painting for myself here in my own thoughts is a beautiful one. It’s clean and it’s sustainable and it’s the sort of thing where you can understand that the future exists and that the future will have actual beauty in it. It’s an extremely satisfying thing to dream about sustainable Utopias. They are the most beautiful dreams of the future I can concoct in my head. I just don’t believe we have the capacity to get off all of the drugs we’re on right now to be competent enough to build it.

Yeah, I feel a great sense of Peace in my own life. I don’t think I’d like it very much if they cut off the electricity. And even if I didn’t really need it so much on my day off, I suppose I’d be happier if they didn’t turn off the electronic entertainment. Although I could get by without it, it would be nice to know that I can get a gas delivery when I need it. I don’t need much but I like the convenience of cooking on a gas stove. I suppose I would also like access to food. I have a lot of food saved and I don’t think I would starve going through this winter but it is nice having access to food when you need it. I don’t order pizzas, I’m just talking about basic Staples.

I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not completely self-sufficient. Perhaps somewhere in the future I will invest in some solar panels for myself facing roofs. I guess I could even invest in a windmill to generate electricity. I guess if I could figure out how to do it, I could put a dish that would allow me to pick up satellite signals. This would take me completely off grid.

This is a pretty good aspiration and honestly, I think it’s probably the way to go in a peaceful future. If everybody builds their houses with some functionality towards self-sufficiency, there’s less stress on the community to do so. But the issue is that the vulnerability would come from hysterical violent actions that we cannot seem to live without. They are having a war here and if I did have a house that was self-sufficient, because I would be the only one in the area who does this, if push came to shove I would be overrun almost instantly.

Which brings us back to the big fat “but” in all of this. It’s one thing to understand the principles of reasonable sustainability. It’s one thing to have some basic knowledge of organic farming. It’s one thing to have an ear for scientific fact rather than an emotional predilection to follow people in the wrong direction. But when you are swimming upstream, no matter what you do it’s heartbreaking.

There is one thing that I didn’t mention about this episode with the boy I was teaching. I didn’t mention it last week when I wrote about our ending. I certainly wrote about the entire month in terms of lessons so the story itself did flesh out rather well. The nuance was in the timeline. He started his lessons 2 weeks before the beginning of school and we ended it two weeks after the beginning of school. The boy was looking for an out because he didn’t like the discipline of doing homework but he had help making this decision. The boy himself was not this clever. Somebody told him that following the school system would be a better idea. And if we look at his attitude towards the class and when he went from being a student to a boy staring at me and thinking political thoughts, we can go directly to the moment when he spoke to his school teacher about why he suddenly was better at English.

It is very important in the schools that the staff never forget the local politics. It is very important that political thinking be a part of everyone who draws a state paycheck. It is vital that the people who draw State paychecks show up at demonstrations and clap at appropriate moments. 

So that’s the whole thing. They never stop having the mafia here. There are no utopian thoughts anymore and even though they spent a lot of time practicing living together well, and you do get better at anything you practice, now they are working on creating the most wasteful and insane and violent and non-sustainable world it is possible to make. Instead of trying to find a way for people to live well with each other and with nature and allowing for individual pragmatism to be the rule of thumb, now they are just doing nothing but making garbage. Now the Russians are doing nothing but throwing their garbage everywhere like an ape bored in his cage has nothing better to do than to throw his shit at people staring at him.

It’s insanity.

So I feel kind of robbed. It’s not the first time I’ve been robbed. You live in the world, you get robbed. You live around incredibly needy people, you get robbed. You get kind of numb to the robbery after a while. But it is kind of a bitch to be settling down into retirement and to have the entire sham infrastructure that you’re building your retirement on get threatened with physical violence and terrorism. And you can’t even blame the Russians because everyone in the world is now investing all of their money and security and guns and being afraid of each other instead of simply feeding each other and learning to get along.

If I said this before? Many times? Yeah you’re right. It is getting kind of redundant how often I say these things. 

We used to call this a broken record. Back when we had vinyl, you would get a scratch and sometimes the record would just keep flipping back to one the same place in the rotation and you would just hear a snippet of music playing again and again and again. Now we do this electronically and we call it a loop. I’m beginning to feel like I’m caught in a loop and I’m just repeating myself again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

Anyway, my legs are in kind of good shape. I could definitely use some appropriate medical care but they are too busy torturing me to actually help. My ex partner is due up today and I guess we will throw a couple of bushes in the ground and come a Little closer to finishing up our year. And this week is Simchat Torah and I am mildly thinking about perhaps going to Temple on Tuesday. Don’t take that as meaning too much. I probably will not go and simply do the reading for myself. But if the spirit moved me and I really needed it, I could. This is when we get to the end of the Torah and we start again at the beginning. There is a big to do hence the thought.

And there is also the thought that perhaps this will be my last week of writing this journal. I don’t know whether this is true or not or whether I will keep it going for one more month which was the original plan. It is an interesting habit and I’m not particularly tired of the work. In fact, I’m not tired of the work and I am really pleased with the skills I have given myself from all of this logical practice. I am pretty amazing at putting arguments together these days. But, and there is always that big fat smelly gigantic “but” in all of these thoughts, I’m a little tired of the redundancy. I feel as though I have said what I wanted to say. The only thing left is local War journalism but as far as that is concerned, the only thing to look forward to in that is one violent moment. Ironically, I probably would never even be allowed to write about it if it came.

So, probably some breakfast is in order. I’m thinking potatoes with some veggies and the last of the hummus as part of the soup. This is my usual Sunday morning breakfast these days. I guess I should clean up a little bit. There is no rush. My ex partner won’t be here for 4 more hours. I’m just a little sick of lying around and I feel like doing something.

***

Links.

To start out with, let’s listen to some enthusiastic pro Ukrainian map reading from The Russian Dude about Russia’s bargaining for Khierson.

Meanwhile, outside of the safety of home studios, here is a bit about the unfortunate and miserable realities of War.

It is debatable whether the numbers back up these facts or not but I’m going to go with them as true.

As for the state of the troops that are now being sent to the front, let’s just say it is sketchy at best. Normally I would consider this straight propaganda from Ukraine but I’m going to post it anyway. It just seems too true not to.

Nevertheless, officially Belarus is in. Why? Were we coerced or are we just as stupid as I think we are?

Europe however is finally getting tired of Russians coming to their country. I definitely can’t say that I blame them a whole hell of a lot.

So with all of this public knowledge available to anyone who wants to know about it, what do Russians think of television propaganda?

What do I think about all of this? I think it’s a complete waste of resources. I think the Russians are just sending their garbage to other people. In fact, this war is about nothing other than the Russians demanding that other people take their garbage. My garbage, I’m talking about the misery they bring people with their violence, their non-professional way of soldiering, all of the steel and garbage of their war machines, of the destruction that they cause with their stupid muscles and even with all of their people running to other countries to live just because staying at home is unthinkable. They are just giving everyone else their garbage and forcing them to take it.

This is actually what they are physically doing but they are also being big time wrestling bad guys. They are taking on the role of most hated pariah Nation. They are serving their function in this regard and making sure that all the other countries in the world invest in security instead of food and sustainable infrastructure for life. Instead of creating a decent human society where life is peaceful, we are all investing in perpetual destruction and murder. We are investing in oil and insanity and weapons globally.

I mean, of all of the historical possibilities, why on Earth do we have to lionize the fucking Nazis? Of all of the models we could have chosen to follow, why did it have to be narcissistic psychopaths?

Inedible bread and grotesque circuses. What a way to live.

***

https://youtu.be/Zqi-jt1LEg8

Just an update. There are no major advances of the Ukrainian army. Apparently flooding the region with conscripts prepared or not has the lines being held. But there is one very successful invasion. The Russians have invaded Southern belarus. Not exactly my region, thank you for small favors, a bit to the east where they will be more aggressive towards the regions they are trying to retain. But like I said, Russia is really good at sending other people their garbage. It’s not going to get better in the immediate future for anybody.

***

It’s about 20 minutes to 9:00 and I am in the kitchen in the warmth drinking some post breakfast tea. Breakfast was absolutely fine. Perfect comfort food. A lot of potatoes with pretty much all the vegetables I have. Not all but most. Technically, there was a sugar beet in there. I don’t know how purists would react to this but I believe we could call it borscht. I am not as fond of borscht as most Russians are. Most Russians go for the sweetness of it. I don’t need to get into the body chemistry realities of this or that sugar from beetroot is one of the industries here in Belarus. It’s just not something I go to. But, it’s a fall morning and it was creamy anyway.

My ex partner just called. I can’t believe that these things constantly happened without my approval or disapproval. It seems we have six bushes on the way. I don’t know how we ended up with six. I know how I ended up not knowing. That is simple. My ex partner called me and said she wanted to drop some in the back side of the house where we have a pair of holes pre-dug. I asked her if she had any genuine feelings why putting two bushes in those places was a good idea. We have five other bushes surrounding these two holes and when these bushes mature, we might not have a path to the ones in back. They are also pretty close to the border fence of our property, further restricting motion.

I made the mistake of asking for her reasoning and the science behind her choice and the conversation died a horrible death. Never ask the ex partner for science or math. I’m not going to be any more facetious than that. You just can’t do it.

I was expecting three. I understand that two of the blueberry bushes will end up growing very large in maturity if we do a good job. They end up like very bushy trees. I know that where I had originally planned to put them, down the row of berry bushes we have leading down to the orchard, she said we would need a lot more space for them. This is what started with the entire situation about real estate and berry bushes.

I believe where they are going to end up is going to be in a small plot that we reserved for corn and sunflowers this year. After we took the corn and sunflowers, these are the same sunflower seeds that I used in hummus this weekend, we used that spot for a staging area for fertilizer. Obviously, there is still a ton of fertilizer lying around there and we could very easily maneuver that into two nice places for a pair of very big bushes. 

As for the other four, I guess we will have deep intimate conversations about this. I believe this is going to be the last of my additions to this Garden this year. I have in my mind the desire to plant even 10 more trees. Some of them would not be necessarily for their fruit value but simply for shade and relief and in a couple of places, privacy from The neighbors. I can see investing in infrastructure a little bit to help with watering the plants. I do not believe I want to put in a full drip system but I could see putting up a central sprinkler head in a couple of places or at least investing in some hose that could be dragged in different directions to allow for less kinking. But generally that would be it.

Other than all of this, the big job to do is to empty the water barrels. I think today would be a good day to use the old pump loud as it is. We are going to be planting so we are going to want a lot of water in each of those places. We could also go ahead and water everything. We really don’t need it but it hasn’t rained in the last few days and some water is never a terrible thing. Mostly it would be just making use of all of the water we have in these buckets before we empty them and move them over to the barn for the winter. They won’t be needed and it’s not a very good idea to have them lying around.

The question about whether or not they were a waste of money is now a genuine question. If I take all of the money that I spent on these barrels and the accompanying hardware to tie them together, for sure it was either the same money or a little bit more than I paid to put in that well. If I had just put in a well at the beginning of the year, I never would have suffered the drought and the dryness and I would not have been so compelled to measure my water every day. On the one hand, it would have been a more efficient use of money. On the other hand, ecologically speaking, we were right the first time. Taxing the groundwater was one of the things I didn’t want to do. And of course, I would not have had such an intimate relationship with how global warming affects this particular region.

About making use of those buckets in the future, each one is 250 l, I’m not really sure. I know I could put a pair of them into the garden and use them as fertilizer makers. We could add weeds and some fertilizer and things to make a nutritious feed for the plants. The buckets are black so they will pull in a lot of warmth which also will create a lot of microbial accent which will be good for the plants. 

I think though that the main thing that I can do unless for some reason we need them to catch rain is leave them in the barn. There are some things that I could do with them as rain catching barrels. The thing is that we just don’t need them. The well is my main water source again right now for the house. The water is fine and I don’t have any issues with pulling up some buckets and bringing them to the house. And the new pump well supplies more than enough water for our gardening needs. 

Perhaps sometime in the future I will need them for food storage. I could also cut them and use them as planters. They are a big enough size to grow serious things like potatoes in. 

I don’t know. This is another reason why I hate plastic so much. I might be able to make a shower out of one of them but I would need enough of a structure to get it up off the ground and have that structure be strong enough to hold one or two of these buckets. And then we could let the sun warm them and end up with a nice warm shower.

Then there are the windows that need to get caulked and the last of the floor platforms needs to get put together one way or another. And of course we still have food in four more boxes and they need to get closed up. And did I want to buy more hay now while we actually have it? A good question.

They say that a farmer’s work is never done. There is a lot of Truth to that. Anyway, it’s Sunday, my ex partner will be up in about an hour, we are going to have whatever kind of a day we have and I guess we will have a few more additions to our lineup going into next season.

***

Philosophically, I wanted to add one more nuance to the argument about listening to yourself think. I think I mentioned before that a lot of people tend to want to get out of their own heads and get very angry with needing to listen to themselves speak. They feel that this sort of thinking leads them to depression or a lack of productivity which makes them depressed or something like this. Listening to yourself think is seen as a bad thing.

What I want to say though is that the argument for this is extremely similar to the argument about whether people using various narcotics should actually be illegal Acts. The argument or one argument about this is that though certain narcotics are blatantly addictive, this would be physically and mentally addictive, it never fully justifies the argument against the fact that the life of the users is often not worth living. There is a separate argument about whether or not using drugs creates a life that is not worth living. There is also a reasonable argument that the world that we must live in, regardless of how hard you work or how hard you try, ends up not being worth living in. It is more disappointing and much, much more unfair than most people can handle. 

There are countries in the world, more and more all the time, that are choosing to decriminalize substances that people use as personal treatments for a miserable world. This is a move in the correct direction. Locally, they are absolutely against all drug use, continuing that Great War on drugs, but they do so so as never to allow people even the slightest relief from the pain that drives them to keep going. This place is basically slavery for wage slavery. Nobody makes very much money and everybody is under pressure all the time to come up with it nevertheless. They of course hide behind Christianity as being the right thing to do in this case. Slugs for salt.

But the thing is, if you are living in a world that is absolute misery for you. No matter what your drug of choice to get out of your misery, and this includes driving around in a car trying to make enough money to satisfy all this pain that you’re feeling, you are going to be seeking relief from the pain all the time. In fact, almost everything everyone does everyday is seeking relief from pain from an incredibly stressful life that truthfully does not provide very much pleasure at all. In fact, the way the world is set up around here, they beg you to be insane and go crazy just long enough so they can hook you in and hook you up to the system so that they have you for the rest of your natural life.

Say anything bad about me you want but I’m not married. Say anything bad about me you want but I worked independently and saved my money. Say anything bad about me you want but I don’t eat meat so I don’t feel particularly frustrated all the time and I don’t drink alcohol so I don’t get belligerent about it. I just live a life that allows me the maximum amount of Peace possible and I spend the minimum amount of money to get here. Good drugs? Great drugs. An actual easy to live lifestyle is the greatest drug in the history of the world.

So this thing about being in your own head has everything to do with the state of your life when you go in there. If you walk into a situation where you’re going to allow some silence, you’d better be pretty peaceful in your life or you won’t enjoy it. In fact, when you turn off all the media and just let the sound of your own thoughts be, if you are completely jacked all the time and paranoid about money or your life or getting sucked into the army or whatever your paranoia of choice happens to be, of course you don’t want those thoughts in your head loud and clear. Of course you want your fair share of heroin, electronic or otherwise, to keep you numb.

***

It’s 2:00 and the work is winding down. The discussion about where to plant what we had went pretty well. At the end though, the original decision that we made got tossed away in favor of simply continuing the line of berry bushes that has already been established. The original decision seemed okay but after thinking a couple more times, it seems to be in the way of other things we might like to do with that area. Specifically growing squash. There needs to be a difference between the berry bushes and where we grow food.

I’m still on the hunt for perennial kale. There are two types of bushes that add a multi-year variety to these beautiful greens. The other is called perennial spinach. Not exactly the same as the delicate leafy stuff but another self-seeding perennial. I like perennials.

Among the bushes that my ex partner brought were a pair of blueberry bushes. These are not exactly the same as Forest blueberries. They are not exactly the same but they are similar. For some reason they like full sun instead of shade. Forest berries like being in the shade and these need to be out of the shade for some reason. There were also some special needs as to what kind of soil we should put in there. For the first three plants, our usual combination of fertilizer, planting soil and getting covered with hay was the trick. But not for these blueberry bushes.

For those, it required a couple of trips to the forest. The first to find a pine tree because my ex partner learned from a local agronom that the land underneath a pine tree would be more acidic. This would be to the liking of the blueberry bushes. And then we needed to mulch with Forest leaves. Not just any Forest leaves but look for leaves  from exactly the same type of location. These were not pine needles mind you, they were the same Birch and oak and similar varieties that grow in our forest. But this is what she went and found and brought back. If it means anything, they are handsome bushes. Currently they are the last in the line.

There was also one other Bush that had the possibility of growing into a giant thing. This did not end up on the row of berry bushes but instead went down to where we had our sunflowers this year. After we took them out, we used it as a staging area so there was a lot of fertilizer there. Hopefully it will take. I have room for another three trees in that region. I’m not doing any more this year though. If we don’t die or get deported or go to jail or all of these other really interesting things that could happen, I’ll worry about planting more next year.

I dug five of the six holes myself. I used my Japanese digging tool happily. I also planted the garlic in between the strawberries. Both of these are winter plants for spring harvest. We only had 20 cloves to plant so maybe next week we’ll have some more. My ex partner is completely against using supermarket garlic. She fears that they have sprayed it with something specifically to stop people from growing their own garlic. Restraint of trade or something like that.

My ex partner right now is taking a break from planting tulip bulbs. This is the last project of the day and, exactly in her words, of the year. I am okay with this. I’m a little worried that we do not have enough hay for the remaining three boxes. I don’t think we have enough fertilizer or hay. I was hoping there was somebody who would at least sell us a couple of hay bales. Not that these would be any better but I’m not sure I need to work on another ton like the one we had. I guess we could take it apart and transfer it into the barn and just let it sit but truthfully, I’d be a lot happier with some hay bales. They’d be easier to manage and easier to keep undercover.

So we’re not quite done but we are definitely into the home stretch. The day has been perfect. A little cool but not so cool to make anyone uncomfortable. I did most of my digging in a T-shirt. I can do that because I live here. My ex partner is dressed up in her rock and roll pants, knee pads, two sweaters and a knit cap. Her only comment: it’s warm.

There is a lot to do. There is always a lot to do. Truthfully the place is a mess and could use a lot of tidying up in one way or another. The one thing that I am okay with is that truthfully, I’m not going to be hungry for quite some time. I have enough food in the pantry and even here all around me in the kitchen is a ridiculous amount of food. I couldn’t eat this stuff in a month. This is not all of the self-sufficient variety. There’s quite a bit of supermarket grains here. In a perfect world, I would have set up a grain business where people could come with their own bags and simply shovel how much they wanted fresh. The world doesn’t work like that unless you’re a millionaire unfortunately.

I mean, if I went along those lines, I’d be selling golf carts, solar panels, windmills and passive thermal heating and cooling systems for village homes. If I had my way, when I needed something from town, it would have been brought up here on an electric vehicle or on some Hardy bicyclist who wanted to come say hello. I guess I could have lived with a car but the deal is that this food would not have come from the Russian supermarkets but from our local Belarusian growers. There also would have been a place for fresh bread. Why not?

I personally do not have these ambitions anymore. I do not believe that people can deal with the world without inflicting each other with their politics anymore. I was just thinking that there was a time when people would come to dinner and the only rule was not to talk about religion or politics. These were the two subjects that would guarantee an argument and send everybody home unhappy. My ex partner tells me that work should also not be discussed. I am not so sure about that as an axiom. I am an entrepreneur and talking about work is not so bad when you’re the boss of the company.

Now, we cannot even look at each other without trying to decide what form of dog breed we are. Now we can’t look at anything without flags flying. There was a time when this sort of thinking was absolutely limited to State people. There was a time when there were enough Independants that you still had human beings to meet with and talk to. The state has been ruthlessly beating the entrepreneurs out of existence. The president at one time happily said that he would shake the hand of the very last entrepreneur. I’m still waiting for my invitation.

My idea was to save the market. My idea is that it is exactly the market that needs to be saved. We need local food growers giving us food. We need to keep our money flowing locally instead of flying off to Moscow. We can’t continue living on starvation wages and starvation rations while at the same time being pushed to give more and more and more. The fact that this is not understood by people because it is not presented to them is one thing. The fact that they don’t understand it simply because they do not allow this sort of independent thought is quite another. It is illegal to speak against the government or against the war. It is illegal to say no.

When I say these things, I am speaking the truth. I have friends who are in jail because they spoke up at a protest. The lady who we look to for inspiration as the opposition leader is in fact not the original leader but the wife of a blogger who made the mistake of running for president.

And now there is this story from this Ukrainian bass player I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. She mentions that the conductor of the Kherson philharmonic orchestra was killed simply because he refused to collaborate with the Russians. 

I think all musicians can sympathize with news like this. It’s not nothing that 150 Nations have agreed that Russia has become a terrorist Nation. Only four seem to vote against this thought, the one I’m living in unfortunately being one of those four.

If it means anything, the word from town is that everybody is miserable from the thought of this war. The money is starting to hurt, the sanctions are making business very difficult and absolutely nobody likes the idea of military operations taking place so close to home. And this includes the young men from this country who are going to be asked to go south and murder our neighbors for no reason that anyone here can understand.

Sure, we have some pensioners who watch television. There are people here who only listen to State media. There are quite a few people who have never discovered the internet or multiculturalism or any thoughts from anywhere else but what the state tells them is the truth. We are not without such people and I get to listen to them every time I go out. It’s not everybody but a few people think it’s important for them to attack me for one reason or another. I’m just saying that it’s very real when you live with it.

But anyway, this is how our last planting day is going. No worries, no major arguments. A few things going in the ground that will come up nicely in the springtime. And who knows, maybe next year we will have some strawberries and some berries as we walk down the path towards the orchard. Who knows what will be waiting for us at the end of this long winter.

***

All right, 10 pages is more than enough. I don’t need to keep pressing my luck.

As she was leaving, my ex partner declared the season closed. She’s not exactly right. We haven’t finished everything but I can see her point of view. She’s not really into staying here. She likes the gardening and she really enjoys the projects. Planting those blueberries really meant something to her. But it’s just a vacation. Just to get away.

When we talked after she got home, she mentioned again that the war has her more than a bit freaked out. Everybody is thinking the darkest possible thoughts. It’s not hatred or anger towards an enemy. It’s just that nobody wants to die in this. The saddest thing is how little anyone can do about this. Nobody wants to die for nothing. Everybody is scared.