Monday, October 17th 2022

Reintroducing water voles into the English countryside

It’s 5:00 a.m. and I’m just waking up slowly here. I’ve actually been up for about an hour. This does not equate to a sleepless night. In fact, I went to bed very early last night. I was definitely tired after yesterday’s work. I contributed a lot. I even dug almost all of the holes for the new shrubs. My ex partner Doug the one next to the orchard for the super tall berry bush. And by the end of the day, I was definitely a bit worn out.

A good night’s sleep is a good thing but waking up and catching a silent version of the Yankees game was also not bad. I prefer watching my baseball silently now. The broadcast and the commercials are annoying enough but I find if you just take the sound off it and let yourself do the commentary, it’s a bit more palatable. Sorry, I am really getting used to the quiet.

Somewhere before she went to sleep, my ex partner sent me a link for a Belarusian website that specializes in seeds and garden needs. Sure enough, we have kale for next year. Very nice. I didn’t see the perennial varieties of kale I’ve been looking for but I think we have the opportunity for some really excellent greens for next year. This year, I’ve come to appreciate all of the cabbage we planted. For a long time, I genuinely think we wasted our time because for most of the spring and summer, I was getting by on horseradish leaves without any problem. Now I have all the cabbage I want fresh from the field and I’m pretty happy with the progression. I would definitely do this again.

The film that I posted at the beginning of today’s journal/blog is just something really interesting about rewilding.

Rewilding, or re-wilding, activities are conservation efforts aimed at restoring and protecting natural processes and wilderness areas. Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration with an emphasis on recreating an area’s “natural uncultivated state”. This may require active human intervention to achieve. Wikipedia

There is a view of the world that is propagated mostly by vegans that says but if we would turn away from animal agriculture, we would probably take the largest possible steps towards stopping global warming and returning our habitat to something more livable and sustainable. The point of this is that animal agriculture requires an enormous amount of land, the chemical fertilizers and pesticides needed to retain the gigantic mono crop growing techniques for feeding the animals causes massive harm to topsoil. And of course the farms themselves aside from the inherent cruelty create massive ecological damage because of waste products concentrated in a specific area. They say that this is the most detrimental single thing to the environment.

If people could change their appetite slightly and allow for non-meat variants, the potential is not only that we could more easily feed the human population but that it would require something like 70% or 75% less land use. What to do with this newly available land would be to allow the forests to return. This single act, simply forgetting about hamburgers, would lead to probably as much restoration as possible from the damage caused by the last 200 years of human civilization as any single thing any corporation could possibly think of. Just allowing the trees to do their job of sequestering the carbon from the atmosphere and allowing nature to reclaim itself would eventually come as close to righting the planet as possible. Maybe within the lifetime of our children.

What would happen if the world went vegan?

Billions of farm animals would no longer be destined for our dinner plates and if we couldn’t return them to the wild, they might be slaughtered, abandoned, or taken care of in sanctuaries. Or, more realistically, farmers might slow down breeding as demand for meat falls.

If we all gave up meat, around eight million fewer people would die each year, as a result of lower levels of heart disease, strokes and cancer. But most crops have lower levels of micronutrients per calorie than meat – especially vitamins A, B12 and D, and some essential fatty acids.

A plant-based diet can have a significant positive impact on the environment and your health. Research shows that meat and dairy products are fueling the climate crisis, while plant-based diets—focused on fruits, vegetables, grains, and beans—help protect the planet.

If everyone became vegetarian by 2050, food-related emissions would drop by 60% Should we all go vegetarian, ideally we would dedicate at least 80% of that pastureland to the restoration of grasslands and forests, which would capture carbon and further alleviate climate change.

These blurbs came from various sources from that original search. Forgive my laziness for not identifying each one but you’re welcome to look around for yourself. 

The point is that the only thing bad that would happen if people went vegan would be listening to people complain mindlessly about having their drugs taken away from them. They would not be harmed particularly by this change. In fact, general health would improve, stress would be taken off medical establishments, people would become a little lighter, a little faster, a little smarter and probably a lot less hateful and aggressive. 

The planet itself would also become a little less sick. As I mentioned about the opportunity for reforestation, the air would definitely begin to clean up pretty quickly and most probably the rivers would again start to flow cleaner. Wildlife would return and ecosystems would reestablish themselves. Probably the land would become generally more fertile.

We could go on and extrapolate into completely orgasmic utopian fantasy and say that hunger and War would come to an end and we would have a new opportunity to establish a human community with a lot of love, support, art and general happiness with the progression of life being the backdrop instead of whatever the motherfuck we do now.

I guess you need to forgive me for this beginning here today. They let some rats loose into the water in Cornwall and all of a sudden we’re saving the whole world. I’m just saying that it’s one Domino to push over. The world would probably right itself if we would just let it.

That work that I was able to do yesterday I came as a result of my legs simply being allowed to heal. Of the two major problems that have plagued me this summer, one is almost completely healed and the other is well on its way. Lately when I have been checking, I have been receiving gifts every time that leave me quite optimistic about my mobility in the future.

If man is created in God’s image, this might not mean that God is a bearded white guy in the sky, it might simply mean that our species comes from nature like all other species of Life on this planet. If one man has the ability to heal himself simply by removing the toxins from his diet and allowing himself a bit of rest when needed, we could extrapolate easily at the same would be true for the planet Earth.

The only other thing that I want to say here this morning is that all I keep thinking about is the absolute massive explosion of garbage that this war brings with it. It’s not just that everywhere that the army’s camp now becomes a fly-invested zone of plastic residue. Everywhere where the army wants stopped itself looks exactly like where the alcoholics have camped themselves along the river. Broken glass and plastic residue from their garbage everywhere. 

Then of course we get all of the plastic that covers any food supplies that come in. When you bomb a cities infrastructure, suddenly the appearance of a billion tons of plastic water bottles need to appear. Once these are spent they go into the landfill of course forever and ever and ever. Also, there is no natural food being fed to people and everything is factory products which further does nothing wonderful for people’s biological functions.

After this, we have the massive use of gasoline to move all of these people around. This is not only the military vehicles which have absolutely zero ecological restraints on blowing poisons in the air but also all of the cars used by the people running away, all of the airplanes and helicopters that need to fly, all of the emergency vehicles that need to come in to repair whatever damage is done and in the end, the hundred thousand or so people that lose their lives all get wrapped up in plastic bags to get shipped somewhere else. This war is one of the greatest wastes of resources and the greatest creators of garbage in the history of mankind.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we do this to our planet? By what mentality do we create such things and allow them to be seen as normal?

Sometimes when I’m eating, I start to dream. Mostly I dream about peaceful solutions to miserable problems. Sometimes I dream of having magical powers to make things happen. Usually when I have these dreams, they are more prayers for reason. I mean, I dream about finding some kind of Superman solution to a problem but inevitably, it is a problem that could fix itself if people would just stop being aggressive with each other and calm down. It is the one thing that people are never allowed to do. No one is ever allowed to calm down.

Last night I had one of the best dreams I’ve ever had. It was sort of a mass non-Hysteria, a massive state of reason that just suddenly came over the entirety of the Russian military contingent located on the territory of Ukraine. just One moment of clarity and rational thought overcoming everybody. In just a moment everybody wakes up as if from a dream and says, “Fuck it. I’m going home.”

Just like that and regardless of orders from above. Officers and enlisted men both. Everybody just puts down the gun right where it is, stands up slowly, puts a hand in the air and waves and says, “I quit and I’m going home. I don’t want to do this anymore. This is bullshit. I don’t need this in my life.”

That’s it. It’s over in one second. Poof. Nobody wants to fight the war and the war just stops. Nobody is yelling, nobody is shooting, nobody is stopping them from going home. They just start walking in the general direction of the Russian border. Eventually they start catching rides. Nobody stops them or yells at them or arrests them. Nobody does anything but generally help everybody find their way back to their people. Nobody throws any more bombs or shoots any more guns. People just suddenly decide that this is not what they want for their lives or the lives of their children. People suddenly realize that they don’t want to do this anymore and they just leave.

I don’t know how this dream ends. Maybe Putin gets frustrated and pounds his fists and rants and raves and starts sending orders to launch all the nuclear missiles that Russia has. Maybe somebody just shoots him dead and everyone says “finally, we have some quiet again”. Or maybe he also has this divine revelation and agrees that enough is enough. 70 is old enough to retire. He also agrees that he doesn’t need this noise anymore and just heads off to his estate in Sochi,  reading seed websites and thinking about planting some fruit trees.

On his desk he leaves a very simple note that translated from the original Russian says “I think we need to invest in indoor greenhouses, windmills and solar.” 

***

It’s 2:00 and I’m sitting in the kitchen and taking a break. I guess today is another one of those manic Mondays where I have energy and I do not wish to sit around. It all has to do with my leg getting better and my willingness to use it more and more.

Today the original thought simply was that I had a ton of work to do and thinking about it was not going to get any of it done. So I got up from where I was standing and started seeing things to do everywhere. That’s the problem with wanting to be useful. You can’t help noticing how much needs to be done. Daunting.

I landed in the kitchen and decided that this was the best place to start my fight. There were things about this place that I simply could not tolerate and they needed to get fixed.

Okay, I’ll be honest with you. I saw this video of a guy who purchased a burnt out relic of a French chateau. It was more than a century old, an absolute relic but with some very pretty brickwork and a bunch of property.

I came into this story he was telling in the middle. I didn’t know who he was or how rich he was or what his story was. I just saw a guy wandering into what had basically become a forest and saying that he was now the owner of this rather attractive and decorative pile of bricks. It made no sense and I wondered why a millionaire would take the trouble to film such a thing.

Intrigued, I went back into his catalog to find out who this guy was. His story is that he bought an old bakery in rural France and basically rebuilt it from the ground up. He says that he hardly had any money to start with. He had some hands and the willingness to do the work but basically it was a struggle to get by and to find the materials to build this old pile of bricks into a functioning and enjoyable house. He and his wife also took the trouble to have a couple of kids while this was going on.

The only trick to this seems to be that he YouTube himself doing this work and telling his story and either donations via a patreon page or simply advertising revenue from the amount of views he was getting on YouTube allowed him enough additional income to get finished with the project. People liked him and they liked his films.

Now we fast forward a couple of years, the house is completed and the guy has bought this mansion in the hopes of fixing it up and of course, youtubing himself in the process.

I would say that the guy inspired me. I don’t know why but he did. It’s just the daunting size of the project he has taken on for himself is so unreal and so ridiculous to conceive of. There is no way he could have enough money to rebuild this bloody place. Even if he does all the work himself for 10 years, the cost of building materials alone will be monstrous. Nevertheless…

So I got up off the couch and said that I had enough legs to do something and I have enough weather to do it. I also rethought almost everything I have been thinking of about taking care of the house and decided that I have all the time in the world. Yes, perhaps I’m forgetting the ridiculousness of the war being nearby. On the other hand, when it’s cold, and only one room of this house is going to be kept warm, you either eat something hot, put on lots and lots of clothes or move around. I’m going to need plenty to do this year to keep me warm during the winter.

Anyway, I would not say that I’ve finished the kitchen exactly as my original plan but I have certainly cleaned it out and made everything a bit more neat and tidy. I just tripled my cooking area which is enough to make me happy. I’ve also made it a little less busy underneath where there were quite a few garden supplies that had gathered. Those are all put away and awaiting this spring. And I fixed the main cabinet that I use as a cooking area. I found the reason why it was moving on me and shimmed it up and leveled it and put it in a perfect location next to the stove. Ship shape.

I have no idea how long this mood is going to last. Maybe it’s a Monday thing. Maybe it’s the residual of hanging out with my ex partner. Maybe it’s the residual of my day off meals. Or maybe it’s just me getting better and stronger finally after a little bit more than 2 months of self-hospitalization. But the basic point is that if I can walk, I should walk. If I can do things, I should do things. And besides, doing physical work is so much more satisfying than living in my head. I like writing and I like solving problems and I enjoy planning. Nobody’s arguing with this. But I get a lot more satisfaction from doing things. This is an absolute obvious fact.

***

It’s 5:30 and I’m in the kitchen and sweating a little bit. It’s a really warm day and I just ate a very warm dinner. I used a different pot. I used my Dutch oven. I haven’t used it in a while, preferring to use my giant skillet. But with the kitchen newly clean, and I’ll have some wall space and I put the giant pot up there to rest a while. The Dutch oven is extremely efficient and transfers heat to a smaller space. The effect was delicious even though at the end it was only vegetables and oatmeal. Just a simple savory dish that blasts you with flavor.

Lena came by today. She was angry at me for not calling her. She talks very loudly unless you ask her very carefully to speak quietly. She’s nervous as a bird. She talked me into giving her my laundry. There wasn’t so much of it but it got cleaned and came back pretty quickly. 

Afterwards, we sat out on my bench and she again asked me to come to the house of prayer (дом молитва). I again told her no thank you. She told me that they were all kinds of people that went there. There is only one God and we all agree that this is true. And then she said that we all agree that we pray to Jesus and that obviously no matter who we are, this we have in common.

I just smiled.

Then she asked me what I believed in. I asked her if she really wanted to know. She said yes. I doubted she would listen but it was nice of her to offer to let me talk for a while. Usually she just screams orders at people. This is what women do here. They feel it is their job to scream at men and make them do things so that they never actually become Free people. If they did that, they would drink themselves to death. They are probably right.

I told her that I’m very proud of my heritage and my roots. I told her that I know who I am and who I come from and why I am who I am. I told her that tomorrow was a special holiday. She asked me about it and why it was so special. It took me a few minutes to explain that we keep reading the Torah over and over and over again. It takes us a year to get through the thing and tomorrow, we get to the very end and then we start in the beginning.

She nodded that she understood that we begin at the beginning of the book. I told her no, we begin with “in the beginning” and I think she finally understood.

But then I broke away from the understandable stuff and I explained that I believe that we are animals just like all other animals and every other species of Life on this planet. I do not believe that we are formed in the image of some great white guy in the sky with a big beard and are somehow ethereal and separate from the planet. I believe that we are a part of the animal world which is to say we are a part of the world. We eat, drink, shit, fuck, piss just like every other animal who walks the Earth. We have life cycles and we live and die and no nonsensical beliefs of mystical paradise’s need apply. We have only our home and we are supposed to live on it respectfully.

Because we are sitting outside, my neighbor’s house is clearly visible and I just turned towards their house.

“These people believe they are higher than others. Everyone in this town looks down on you and the other workers who wander around looking for something to do. She believes she’s better than you, that she has no need to work. She has a fat ass and sounds like a chicken but she thinks she is some kind of high ethereal being. She’s nothing to me. She could die tomorrow and people would say “oh, oh, oh she died, isn’t it terrible?”. But I would only say “well, today is Monday and tomorrow is Tuesday and that’s all this means to me.” Why should I care about someone who doesn’t care about me or sees nothing but the possibility of taking money or manipulating me like a fool? Why should I have anything in my heart for someone who knowingly harmed me many times?”

And then I went on to say that I only believed in respecting nature and respecting people. I see no difference between Lena or anybody in this town. We’re just a bunch of insane apes trying to get by in a system that never lets anybody be anything but a slave. That’s the real knowledge, I told her, she is a slave and my neighbor is a slave and all of that cackling hysteria to find more money is nothing but a different level of slavery. Everybody is caught in a web and we are no better than farm animals. And for any of us to think that anyone is any better is pure insanity and wishful thinking. It’s dreaming and oftentimes it only adds to the misery of slavery.

Finally I pointed out that I tried to live as respectfully as possible. I don’t need much. I don’t need to travel around and I don’t need to eat expensive food and I don’t need to wear beautiful clothes. I don’t need to tackle like a rooster and tell everybody that I’m the greatest man in the world. I only want whatever animal wants on this planet. I just want some clean food to eat and clean water to drink and clean air to breathe. And because I’m a vegetarian, I just want a little and that’s clean so I can grow some food. I don’t need to hurt anybody and I don’t need to kill anything. Everything I need comes from the Earth and I don’t really have time for anyone who disrespects the Earth or anything living in it. I don’t respect anyone who doesn’t understand what respect is.

“I believe in God but I believe God is nature and nature is God. I don’t need to go to a house of worship and pay money to have my soul saved. God is all around me everyday and the very best thing I can do to serve God is to not let any gasoline powered instruments onto my land. I show my love for God everyday by living as naturally as I can.”

Lena stood up and said thank you and headed for the gate. I thanked her for washing my clothes and for coming by. I flirted with her a bit and she flirted back to me. We are never going to get anywhere that she thinks we should be going. Whatever she is thinking we already have everything we are ever going to have. We both live here, we both understand each other and occasionally we get to hang out together. Unfortunately, the woman is a meat eater and thinks like a chicken. I didn’t do that to her. I just treated her with respect. Forgive me if she liked it.

Right now, I’m having some tea. I don’t know how many times I’ve poured hot water into My Little teapot. I’m horrible about putting fresh tea in every. I don’t mind that it’s mostly hot water. I’m not being cheap, I’m just lazy and truthfully, I probably mostly just want the hot water. This particular blend was a combination of blackberry leaves, green tea and some mint that is still growing in my garden. We have two places where mint is growing. My ex partner wants to increase our medicinals and teas. I can’t blame her for this thought. I like drinking tea quite a bit. Sometimes it seems like the best part of any meal.

I still haven’t made up my mind about tomorrow but my guess is I’m not going to go to Temple. This is no offense to the people there but I think I might get more out of it just by reading Torah tomorrow. It’s a special holiday and I guess I’m going to do my Torah reading tomorrow instead of Thursday or maybe both days. I don’t know, whatever the calendar says we do is okay by me. I’m just not convinced I need to make the ride to town. I know they would be happy to see me and they probably would give me an Aaliyah. Ad Aaliyah is where you are invited to say a prayer before the individual readings. A couple of them are very status worthy and special. Perhaps that’s going to be the eventual reason why I’m not going. I mean, I’ve been reading Torah all year and I’m happy about it. I don’t need more than this. I don’t need confirmation. We all know each other. We will stay friends.

If there is one thing worth mentioning today it was that my leg felt wonderful. There was no tightening after I walked around and then sat down. I was able to get up and sit down and get up and sit down and do all of my work today. I understand that I’m not perfect and I guess I should really understand that I’m never going to be perfect in the way that I was when I was young ever again. I’m not crying about that. I am who I am and I have become what I have become. No regrets and no apologies. But it is nice to have this tiny little bit of freedom that I have been hungry for for a very long time. I don’t need shiny things or expensive anything. I am completely pleased that I can walk around a little bit.

Lena said something about money being available at the post office and food being available at the store. I told her the truth that I’m not really in great need of carrying so much money. It’s not that I never need money, it’s just that 99% of everything in the world is done electronically now. Even Jenna is a card transfer. Poor Lena seems to be the last woman on Earth to find out that the world has passed her by.

But there was a moment in there when I started thinking of going to the store or to the post office. I could take my bicycle. The weather is very nice. It’s not even going to be cold until Thursday. I haven’t been on my bike in over 2 months. It might be nice to get on and push my old friend around a little bit. My heart would probably thank me. My lungs too.

My ex-girlfriend only goes on Instagram when she travels to new and exciting places. She loves to take pictures in front of castles and with expensive meals in front of her. These are moments of jealousy and status. Me? I think tomorrow I’ll go for a bike ride. Why not?