Thursday, October 20th 2022
I’m starting off with an update today. The news is generally not good from Ukraine. It seems that the mobilization exactly managed to slow down the Ukrainian counter attack. In terms of humanity, Russia is the mafia. It’s a feudal state. There is no thought that life, any life is important. However, even cannon fodder serves a purpose. They are there to waste Ukrainian ammunition and time. If this is all people are good for, there is no hope.
Politically, it seems that Israel is not interested in helping Ukraine with air defense systems. Firstly, they need what they have for themselves but also there are quite a few Russians holding seats in the Israeli knesset. This is all anyone needs to understand.
It also seems true for United States conservatives who absolutely love the Russians. New articles suggest that if the conservatives manage to take control of the house or Senate in the elections coming up in a couple of weeks, they will of course do everything they can to cut aid to Ukraine. Anything that serves the Russians and the oil business is fine. And besides, the American Republican party does not really want to have to go through the effort of being elected. They love the idea of a feudal state and their constituency is just drugged, stupid, fat and broke to believe in it. Slugs for salt. That’s all it is. Slugs for salt.
Normally, when I post links, I’m more interested in actual facts more than I am opinion. I just want the information and I really don’t need all of the pre-digestion. I like to do my own thinking. But concerning future strategies of the Russians, it is difficult to rule out their use of weapons of mass destruction. And with the evacuation of the city of Kierson, I would not put it past them to do something rather egregious there. Actually, removing everyone from a city is also pretty egregious but like I said, social benefit is not high on the list of Russian priority. I will attest to that personally after speaking with the medical bureaucracy yesterday. I’ll get to more of that later.
But here are two more links talking about this exact subject and whether or not the Russians are open to doing the most horrible things to achieve their goals.
I’ll give you a hint. They are.
A bit of opinion that says the worst is yet to come from the Russians.
And even more opinions about whether Putin is getting ready to use gas or nukes in Kierson.
***
It’s coming up on 5:00 a.m. and I’m not feeling very well. I’ve got a bit of a tummy ache. As to where this has come from, it’s tough to say. It might be from this pot that I am using. Perhaps there was something in there from however long it’s been since the last time I used it. It might have been something I picked up from my ex partner or even Lena. It might be from these bloody apples. I don’t know how many apples you’re supposed to eat. In any case, I’m not feeling particularly well. It’s not the kind of thing that stops you from doing things. I don’t feel broken by this. I just have a lot of food going through me very quickly right now. Sorry for the details.
The temperature has not quite dropped as far as the weather report said. It usually is coldest at around 6:00 a.m. so we might have a further drop within the next hour. Or maybe it has. According to my weather apps, it’s only about one or two degrees right now. I went outside about an hour ago and I didn’t see any ice on the ground. Everything was a little wet but I didn’t see any signs of Frost.
In the warm room, things are holding up beautifully. I am making use of my new platform and I am quite comfortable. I did need to build a fire last night. I built it actually a little bit late in the evening. I was getting away without anything but my small electric heater until 11:00. I then built a small fire and the place has been very comfortable. You can tell that it’s cold. There is a feeling of cold in the air. But it’s not brutal and I am not wearing all that much in terms of clothing right now.
I can’t say what will happen when we go below zero significantly. As of the moment though, I am saying that my building skills are okay. My plan seems to be working out. The construction is solid and the platform’s ability to not only hold me but to hold temperature seems to be working just fine. It’s a small sampling but so far so good.
I mean, this was not high architecture. It’s the most basic building possible. But sometimes simple is better. Actually, most times simple is much better.
Basically, I still have three boxes that have food in them. I have some beets and carrots and cabbage still in the ground. I think there are also some daikon radishes and I have quite a bit of cilantro and parsley. If we really do get a frost, the greens might not make it. I’ve been thinking about whether I should bring in the carrots and the beets or not. For sure a lot of that will come in before tomorrow night.
My ex partner met Ria on the bus going home last week and the two of them struck up the friendship. My ex-partner told me that she is probably coming up on Sunday and that next week she will have some holiday time from work. Part of her free time will be spent with Ria going mushrooming in the forest. I say she absolutely should. Ria for sure would like the company, my ex partner would enjoy the walk and all of this is good for me. I owe Ria a lot of favors that I have no real way of paying back. If my ex partner goes with her, she will end up kind of my proxy in this and we’ll even go home with some mushrooms.
I could also blame the mushrooms for my stomach issue right now. I don’t think that this was the cause but that would be another thing that showed up right before I got sick. I’m thinking it’s the cook pot or Lena. The cook pot has since been used several times and cleaned but that’s a case of locking the door after your girlfriend leaves the house. The damage is already done and everything else is just more drama.
***
The weather report was honest. It’s about 5:30 and we are definitely Frosty and cold. It’s not a brutal cold. If my ex partner was here, she would be complaining but when you live here, you do kind of get used to it. I’m not going to burst into any game of thrones rhetoric about people from the north but you do get used to it.
This is technically what you call first Frost. It’s about 10 days early but it’s normal. Again, when my ex partner declared that the season is over, she was being a bit prophetic. and exactly at this moment, I’m glad I paid attention and finished my work on the warm room in time. It was last minute, but it was in time.
I’m back inside now and in the kitchen drinking some tea and waiting for some beans and rice to finish cooking. I don’t know if I’m actually hungry or not but it’s cold and eating something warm will definitely help.
As far as today goes, I don’t really have so many plans. It’s been like this for the last while. Other than world news, I don’t seem to have any pressure on me at all. The summer seems like a dream to me now. It was all just a giant fight against Time, against myself, against the medical profession and against the world for allowing global warming to get so far out of hand. I don’t know if I can find a way to get out of this next year and just go about my business peacefully. Perhaps next year we will have a generally peaceful world to live in and I will be able to putter around in my garden finally. When you think about it, it’s not that much of a dream but it seems a shame when the world just doesn’t want to let you do it.
No, it’s not really drifting, it’s just living without a particular feeling of pressure. It’s not boredom. You should never confuse being at peace with boredom. I have no problem with my current life exactly how it is except for the bloody War. And the Minsk medical establishment. But that’s just politics so it’s all the same.
A friend of mine from the Jewish community once told me his opinion about Israel. He said he kisses the ground with love but can’t stand the politics of the country. I guess I understand what he’s talking about. I don’t have exactly the same emotions for exactly the same reasons, but the words as written work for me as well.
***
More interviews with people in Moscow. I think the only thing to keep in mind for these interviews is that nobody is dropping bombs on these people. The facts are out there and people hear them but they don’t feel the heat of the blast and they don’t hear the screams of pain.
***
I mentioned 2 days ago that this week was the holiday where we finish reading the Torah and then turn around and start again. That means that this week begins at the beginning. This week’s Torah portion is called Bereishit(בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית), which literally means in the beginning. And that’s exactly where this book starts.
I’m not copying out here but this is a pretty huge reading and goes all the way up to the story of Noah. That means everything gets created including man, woman is created and when you put the two of them together children get created. The children turn terrible of course and one kills the other and suddenly God has to perform his first punishment. Well, it’s actually his second punishment. In the third portion, the woman decides to go walking around the garden naked and surprise surprise, she wakes up a snake. Stiff metaphor there. And they go straight into it together doing the snake dance. Eve realizes that she needs to bring good old Adam into the corruption game, you can’t sit there enjoying life and doing drugs whenever you want but have a straight partner who doesn’t get that you’re no longer so stupid. If she can get him to try drugs, she just knows everything between them is going to be amazing.
Of course, the landowner has no interest in having a bunch of drug addicts living in his garden and sends them out into the world to make their living. He also invents misogyny along the way, like he didn’t know what would happen.
I personally have always felt that this story was a metaphor for growing up. I do not believe it is inherently necessary to have there be forbidden fruits lying around. The idea that certain things are yours but certain things are off limits immediately limits freedom of choice. I believe in education and honesty rather than doing things in the shadows. I also believe in having a world that is understandable to all people so that they understand their place in it and can help out. It’s this Shadow stuff that actually breathes the problems.
For example, instead of saying that there is this remarkable drug in the middle of the garden which will immediately make you a woke person and give you complete freedom of choice, why on Earth wouldn’t it be the most attractive thing? Perhaps better would have been to teach people that there are certain fruits in the garden that will rock your world. There are great natural drugs in the world and frankly, they include walking around naked in your garden. Going swimming in clean water without your clothes on is also absolutely wonderful. Fresh Air if you’ve been stuck in the city is an unbelievable high. I’m also a fan of marijuana which is of course illegal here which means you have to involve yourself with criminals to get any. Sad situation.
Wouldn’t it have been better simply to say that taking care of the garden is a Six-Day affair. On the 7th day, everybody rests. And while you’re not working and if we can trust you not to burn the place down, you might want to try that forbidden fruit on Friday nights and let me know what happened when you come back to life on Sunday. Again, if you can just learn to avoid property damage (and killing your brothers and sisters), all you have to do is make sure there’s enough forbidden fruit for the whole winter and you’ll probably be okay.
This is kind of why I see this as a metaphor for growing up. Your children are tiny and completely helpless in the beginning. They become more adept at moving around by themselves and then at some particular age, Jewish people believe this is about 13 but I think it’s quite a bit earlier for girls and quite a bit later for boys, suddenly you have conscious original thought. You have decisions being made.
This is a bit Freudian I know but I think it’s actually girls who understand responsibility the moment they understand that they have the capacity to have children. This comes if they are lucky during education but for sure it shows up on the day that first period arrives. You can swaddle that event with gauze as much as you want and continue the princess treatment but the truth is, that first uncomfortable moment basically means you’re available to have children and you should probably act accordingly.
A lot of people feel that boys never have a clue about genuine responsibility until the day she tells him that he is going to be a father. I have experienced this moment myself and I believe there is a lot of Truth in this. In my case, my ex-wife never actually said the words, she just stood there in front of me and somehow I knew. But, that is definitely responsibility knocking. Better to be somewhat educated about what to do in life and how to be a good person before this wonderful soap opera moment. It is those without a life and without education that cost the most money from our public trust and inspire the most rhetoric from good misogynist Christians and oil Business people. They live on tragedy and pain so they absolutely love this.
If it seems I’m not paying close attention to the words, I am reading this through but frankly, if anybody anywhere ever gets the idea in their head to read the bible, they probably got this far before they quit. It’s just a story. It’s just the story of how completely untrustworthy and horrible entities got on the planet Earth and started taking over the place. We have just never gotten over ourselves even from the very first moment.
I want to make one more mention of something a bit important. On the fourth day of creation, God made the animals, mostly fish and birds. We’re not going to argue dinosaurs here although he did create sea monsters and even the stuff we don’t particularly like. And he told all the animals to just go and do their thing. Be fruitful and multiply. The only directive he gave them is the only one they needed to live. On the 5th day, he decided to put animals upon the Earth. And again, all he said was go and do you. Just live.
But then on the sixth day, he decides to make man. Man waould be somehow different from the animals. Man was supposed to have some brains and was told to rule. He made males and females which is exactly in the image of God like almost all mammals. But then in Genesis 1:28-30 God says something pretty interesting:
28And God blessed them (maan and woman), and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the sky and over all the beasts that tread upon the earth. “
29And God said, “Behold, I have given you every seed bearing herb, which is upon the surface of the entire earth, and every tree that has seed bearing fruit; it will be yours for food.
30And to all the beasts of the earth and to all the fowl of the heavens, and to everything that moves upon the earth, in which there is a living spirit, every green herb to eat,” and it was so.
The intention was to be vegetarian! Greens, beans, fruits, seeds and nuts. Veganism is the intended diet of man who was created in the image of God. God said don’t kill because he intended man to be a herbivore. Read it and weep. He doesn’t say to eat the animals or enslave them and commit endless atrocities on them for their meat. He doesn’t say anything about going on mass murdering rampages or encroaching upon the borders of neighboring countries. He doesn’t say anything about being bloodthirsty psychopaths. He only says only to manage the animals because man is supposed to be smarter. Manage them means stewardship not murder. Man is the boss but his food is the greens of the Earth. The job of mankind according to the Bible is to make sure the garden runs well. No words about murder and no words about money. Just keep the garden clean.
And if you doubt the meaning of this, it is repeated right before he actually creates Frankenstein and his bride in Genesis 2:5.
5Now no tree of the field was yet on the earth, neither did any herb of the field yet grow, because the Lord God had not brought rain upon the earth, and there was no man to work the soil.
There it is. That is our place in the world. To grow vegetables and plant trees. According to Moses, we are supposed to be vegan agriculturalists. Actually, we are supposed to be vegan agriculturalists who refuse corruption for the sake of our community. Of course we screw up. We always find a way to screw up and make God angry. But if you want to know what at least the original plan is, it’s this.
By the way, if you doubt my words, google it:
Were Adam and Eve meant to be vegan? Apparently yes.
And I simply have to post this one video.
This guy gets it. Living in Paradise means living a vegan existence. Meat is a horrible addiction, literally a plague and the cause of all of the evil in the world.
I rest my case.
***
It’s a little after 4:00 and I am sitting quite comfortably in the bakery. I am comfortable because I have cleaned the place well.
I think there’s definitely a way in this. There is a way to do things. I had it in my head that I should do something to stay busy. It’s cold today. I don’t feel particularly well and it’s very cold. It’s not heartbreakingly cold. It’s not the cold that forces you into hiding and takes your hope away. But it was cold enough to let you know that sitting around idly is not the answer to the question.
On the other hand, banging your head against every object you find in the hope of finding something good like a chicken is not the answer. The answer is never to hysterically do anything. In fact, when the thought was clearly in my head that I would continue being active and putting things in order, the first thing I did was go back to bed. I don’t know if I particularly felt like I needed more sleep. It was just how daunting the thought was of moving. At the moment, it was simply too complicated for me.
So I went back to bed. It was nice and warm there. I thought about paying attention to something but then decided that was a worthless thought as well and just fell asleep again. I guess I must have needed it.
I got a phone call from Tanya. If I want them, she has more mushrooms for me. I do. She was flirty. Actually, it was kind of nice being flirted with.
I stayed in bed for perhaps another hour. I played with my phone. I rolled over one way and then rolled over the next. There was just an hour of nothingness. But then I got another message. There is to be a delivery. It wasn’t the actual delivery message but it was the message saying that there would be a delivery. Suddenly the gears in my head started to turn and I realized that my actual place in the world was not in bed. I needed to be up to take care of business one way or the other. I needed to be up so I got up.
And here is where all of the work took place. It wasn’t a great violent War. There was nothing particularly technical to worry about. There are a ton of things more to do that I suppose I will get over the course of the next while. Certainly, there will be times when something has to be done. But really I just rolled through my chores as they presented themselves. I just did what I needed to do and that was all.
My laundry list is actually pretty boring but it started with a little laundry. And then I started working on the bakery. I call this room the bakery because I have a bread oven which right now has a very nice fire in it. Perhaps I’m wasting resources by burning this fire but I kind of like being in this room. I like sitting on the couch I’m sitting on right now. I haven’t sat on this couch in a long time and this room has not been cleaned in a very long time. Today it is very clean. The floors are swept, the table has been taken care of, the garbage has been taken away and even the bread oven has been cleaned up and made ready for service. If I wanted to, I could push the fire back and sweep the bricks at the opening and cook a pizza here or bake a loaf of bread. That’s why I call it the bakery.
The office also got swept and my desk got a little cleaner. Things got put in their place and everything was taken care of in a quiet orderly manner.
At some point in there, I felt like sitting on the couch in my office. I guess I was pretty tired and I nodded off there. When I woke up, I noticed that it really was quite cold. There is a reason I don’t use that office in the winter time. I know this like knowledge but it seems you need to feel something in order to understand it sometimes. Perhaps in your mind you feel that there will be a miracle or that the laws of nature will somehow not apply. Maybe this is just trying to hold on to summer for a moment. I’m sure when the springtime comes, I will try to hold on to the cold as long as I can.
There was a time when I rode a bicycle across the United States of America. As to why I did this, that is a question to be asked and answered at a different time. But there was a moment riding across the desert when my tire suddenly began to lose air. I was still 30 MI from my destination point. I had a little bit of food with me and I could camp out if I needed it but basically my goal was to get to town and get a shower.
But that tire suddenly started losing air and I stared at it for a long time trying to find a loophole in the truth. I was thinking of all of the easy things I could do besides fixing that tire. I was actually pretty tired and I had a long way to go through a desert that didn’t have so many people on it. I’m not going to make this more dramatic than it was. We are not talking about anything other than a road that wasn’t really being used. There would be cars if I wanted to go that route. But the thing I was looking for is the reprieve from having a flat tire and having to fix it.
I think my state of mind at that moment was very similar to the one I’m in right now. I didn’t have any responsibilities at that moment except to ride that bicycle across. Whatever happened happened and whatever jobs I needed to take along the way would just have to be done. It was my time. I wasn’t on anybody’s nickel. I didn’t have anybody else’s schedule. And at that moment, perhaps out of pure selfishness, I just didn’t want to have to fix that flat.
There was no miracle. There was no reprieve. The tire went all the way flat and that meant that there was a hole in it. I couldn’t just pump more air into it and pray that it would stay. If you have a hole in your tire, you have a hole in your tire and no amount of dreaming or praying or wishing or wanting will change this absolute fact of nature.
For some reason this thought hit me as rather profound. I don’t mean to be cliched about this but maybe having bicycle breakdowns while riding through the desert is a profound philosophical moment for anybody. Maybe that’s why people went out into the desert. Maybe they hoped to find some profundity and understanding of life.
I sat down on the side of the road and just thought for a while. I didn’t burst into my kit and start violently doing my repair. I didn’t treat it as a humorous thing and laugh. I didn’t soldier on and just bully my way through. There was no Christian ethic pushing me. I just sat there and thought about it for a while.
The decision seemed simple enough. If I wanted to go to that town, I needed to fix that tire. There was no one else to fix the tire for me and there was no one but me to pedal that bike. If I didn’t push those pedals, I would not get to town. I could choose not to push those pedals. I could choose to make a camp out in the desert and take my chances. I could just sit there and let the entire day and night pass me by. But in the end, I would have to get back on that bike. If I didn’t get on the bike and ride it, I wouldn’t get where I was going. There was no one in the world who could do this for me. You either pedal the bike or you don’t get anywhere.
Perhaps this is really a simplistic message. Perhaps it’s so simple, you wouldn’t even think to talk about it. But sometimes the real knowledge of the world comes to you without a fancy package. Sometimes the truth is just the simplest thing in the entire world.
I actually picked up quite a few philosophies from riding a bicycle. Some of them are just sentences really. If you just press a little harder than is comfortable, you’ll probably get where you’re going. If it doesn’t fit in the panniers, you don’t need it. If it seems that your tire is going flat, it has a hole in it and needs to be repaired and no amount of Hope or prayer will change the situation.
This is what I have going into winter. Perhaps one of these days I’ll have a call or a good reason to go to Minsk. My ex partner is going to Minsk next week. She also needs to see a doctor. I thought about maybe going up there with her. We could split up and she could go see her doctor and I could go yell at mine. Or maybe they will just call and say a miracle has happened. The blackmail is finished, you win and we lose and come on up and we are ready to see you.
But really, it’s all just going to be a bunch of very quiet days. There will be some reading and some writing. Of course I will do my best to keep things clean and to get out as much as I can. You have to move around when it’s cold. You can’t rely on burning up all of your wood or eating all of your food. If it’s cold, you have to fight it yourself and that means moving around.
I’m just saying that I’m okay with this. I don’t want anything else but this. Perhaps it’s a matter of situation and if my situation was different, I would do or would have done something completely different. But this is what I have and what I have is not so bad.
It’s quite nice sitting in this spot and watching the world go by. It’s quite nice sitting here and enjoying a nice fire in the bread oven. It’s really quite nice here.
***
Tanya is an industrious lady. She went back to the forest and came back with another bag of mushrooms for me. Well worth the price but my drying table is now primarily for mushrooms. I’m only using half of it to dry the nuts and the other half is for letting the moisture out of so many mushrooms.
Pretty soon I’m going to dive into making some dinner for myself. I have pulled out one absolutely Giant white mushroom for this. I think she likes me. Really, you should see the mushrooms she gave me. I feel like an oligarch. This one mushroom is the same size as my teapot.
Tanya is a drama dama. All Russians are dramatic fools. You can’t speak Russian without dramatic inflection. Every sentence needs to drip with meaning and every movement requires nuance. With pain however. Never, ever expect the pain to be taken out of things. That’s my trip. I prefer a painless existence. It’s not theirs. Russians like it as hard as you can take it.
It’s about dinner time. I’m not amazingly hungry but I could eat something.
***
So, that was Thursday. Not a horrible day. Maybe kind of an interesting day. Tomorrow is prep day for my day off. I think I have less to do specifically than” I have any Friday all year. I’ve never felt so tight and put together. It will be interesting to see if I can keep it going or whether I fall into horrible habits. Not really though. It’s not that interesting.
What is interesting, at least to me anyway, is to be as easy moving around as it is. I have not gone deeply into the true nature of what’s going on with me. I’ve left a lot of things vague specifically. This is my choice and I’m going to leave it like this. But whether I’ve made it clear or not, it feels really good to have this much freedom of movement.
What I can say is that for as long as I can remember, every single movement I ever had to make was thought out. Every time I had to get up for any reason, literally I would count my steps and consider the possibilities of failure if I made a mistake. It was under this light that I talked about making hero runs to plant my trees or some bureaucratic thing I had to do. Literally, it was like going to war and I had to assess the risks of failure for any mission. That is how bad it’s been.
Right now, I have new possibilities. It’s funny how I got here. I didn’t think there would be so much weirdness on this road. But the thing is, when you can move and you don’t have to worry about it, you find out who you are or at least I am becoming aware of who I was a very long time ago. It’s like different people. It is like I’m a different person or someone I used to be. I’m grateful for this moment.
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