Sunday, October 23rd 2022. Week 42
Yes, I am still here. The idea of stopping came to me because it seems My philosophy has become ridiculous and redundant. Perhaps I was also thinking of stopping because the genuine effort of this year, the gardening or fighting against global warming and drought to make my garden has all faded away. The season simply ran away from us and all of the great effort of closing up the land and doing what we can to make next year better has gone with it. Also, the drama with my health, The blackmailers who deny me care and the necessary efforts of working with alcoholic day labor to pick up the slack is also gone.
I was feeling it. I was feeling like maybe there truly is no point in this anymore. And truly, perhaps there isn’t.
I took a look at the number of words I have written so far and the number is something close to a million and a half words. Last year I put up 1.6 million and my first year was about 750,000. That means I’m either close to or coming up on 4 million words just trying to be helpful. A standard novel is maybe a hundred thousand or perhaps a little more. A screenplay is usually no more than 25 or 30,000 words and 100 pages. At size 10 courier new, you get about 750 words a page on Google docs. 3,750,000 words means something like 5,000 pages. I’ve written 5000 pages on this rant.
I decided to go to the planned ending. I’ll see if I can make it through all 45 weeks. I thought maybe the end of the Torah was a good time to stop. The revelation of how closely Torah reading coincides with the agricultural year was interesting to note. I guess it makes sense. They put most of the holidays around the time when there is the most food and the most desire for free time. According to the rules in the Torah, there’s a lot of barbecue necessary to worship. You have to do your tithing and the priests have got to eat. All of this makes sense that there is the most need for worship services when people are the richest.
Lena has a way of running her mouth wherever she goes. Apparently my paying her a little extra to keep the floors clean is what prompted the House of prayer to ask me to come over. If I could afford more than the absolute minimum, obviously I was needed in church. Obviously, I saw this coming. I’m quite sure I am needed and my soul needs saving. Actually, I’m sure nobody needs my bloody argument and I definitely don’t need theirs.
I also don’t need a larger group of people believing they have regular access to me. I was just tipping for the help. I don’t need more. I was just trying to be nice to the folks who are actually around. It wasn’t a general invitation for needy people to come looking for me for their answers.
Speaking of participating in Torah reading, I did a Google search a little earlier this morning and asked if there were any kind of bureaucratic records amongst the Egyptians to verify the Exodus of the children of Israel. It’s difficult to slog through it. But most of the answers are that there is no proof whatsoever. But then there are some iffy thoughts about how little we actually know about Egyptian archeology and hieroglyph reading. And then one or two people talked about genuine Egyptian history from around 1500 years before our common Christian date keeping started and said there were great population movements.
I mean, you can’t go full in and pragmatically believe the story as fact. It was also pointed out that there are quite a few edits in there and it does seem as though the writer changes their mind and goes different directions often. And of course, we are dealing with someone with sincere emotional problems and by the end of the book, as happens to all writers, he is depressed at the redundancy of how disappointed he is with his people. You can’t take everything as gospel, so to speak.
On friday, I even checked out a couple of videos about Torah and Judaism. That was pretty interesting because most of the videos seem to challenge the perspective of belief in terms of whether or not we believe that Jesus is the messiah or whether the Jews are correct and the Messiah has never come. This was kind of interesting because the arguments were all very strange. It seems as though you need to believe in order to answer questions about belief. Or as a listener, you can’t listen and wait for empirical evidence. All you’re ever going to get is faith based opinion taken as fact. Unfortunately, exactly the same problem we still have thousands of years later. We never have worked out the difference. Blame all of this religion for that.
It is also possible by the way that the House of prayer wants me because they believe me to be a religious person. I say my prayers out loud on Friday evenings and I definitely close my doors and tell everybody to piss off on Saturdays. And I’ve got a wicked beard going on. All of this probably leads them to believe that I am a believer.
Am I a believer? I believe I’m Jewish. I believe being Jewish is in My DNA. You don’t do something for 3,000 years generation after generation and have it not be a part of you. I believe there are things inside me that supersede the natural world but at the same time, the natural world is also a part of me. My ancestors were sent North, dark skin and all, and now I am pretty comfortable with the big seasons. I like the winters very much.
I also believe that my brain works the way it does because of reading this book for 3,000 years. That would be this book and the rest of the encyclopedia of Judaism that exists. I may have corrupted the line in my lifetime but all of my parents were Jewish and their parents were all Jewish. I know this because they were all slammed together as a group by 3,000 years of anti-semitism. 2,000 years of antisemitism really. Christianity is anti-Semitism so we have to go there for the real pain.
Apparently the Nazis have a good hold on the United States these days. That explains a lot about what has happened to Jews over the last hundred years.
The answer I was looking for was the practical one. Somebody wrote This book and that someone was a pretty serious person. Or it was a serious person dictating to scribes, probably different scribes. It’s also been said that Moses had a speech impediment and that Aaron was kind of his translator. It’s also possible that Moses was a complete psychopath. He is responsible for quite a few murders when God gets angry at people’s behavior. He doesn’t take people who try to go their own way lightly. He probably got kind of isolated there at the end and never did find the love he was looking for.
And as we are reading Genesis right now, let’s be honest. We are talking about a genuine lack of science and at best, we just have knowledge about how to live in the natural world back when the natural world was natural. It’s basically the bronze age basically. Humans were just a couple of small steps away from nomadic life. We were just beginning to learn about the corruption of the middleman and those who become wealthy because of the work of the farmers.
The other thing that I really didn’t find is the opinion that the Christian Bible is basically a copy. It was written by someone and not necessarily as the Gospels tell us. It was also allowed to exist basically because it is a religion that teaches people to accept the misery and corruption of the world and to pay your taxes.
Jordan Peterson of all people tried to make sense of the Christian ethic. To him it was important to say that understanding Christianity means accepting how corrupt and miserable the world is but somehow using that as a tool to become a better person. See what I mean? It’s a slave deal. It’s not about personal choice. It’s not agreeing that you are chosen to lead and therefore must be moral and wise in your thinking, it’s that you have to accept pain and corruption at all times and simply take it like a man. Quit your bitching and pay your taxes.
Yeah, so with the Torah coming to a conclusion, I thought about just quitting the year early. There was also a precedent last year that I quit at 41 weeks instead of 45. But that was a medical emergency. This year I’ve gone the other direction. This year, most of the healing came at this time of the year. Right now I’m as comfortable as I have been in a long time. It’s not perfect and I’m not without problems but I am mobile.
I’m also sticking around because the country I am in is at War. We are kind of at War. We are being helpful to the Russians and they are definitely at war. We are kind of participating.
I don’t think anyone in this country wants this war. Perhaps there are a few young psychopaths who believe they are definitely hanging in there for the fatherland and have decided that murdering ukrainians is a morally just act. But most people with even a minor residual common Sense from the old days understand that war is ruinous and no one ever wins. Something is going on in the Kherson region and we are going to get a massive ecological flood or a nuclear bomb or something down there. It is unbelievable the appetite for human misery that the emperor of Russia has allowed himself. I can’t imagine the level of pleasure he experiences by waving his hand and having thousands upon thousands of people face death for him.
I guess I also decided to keep going because I don’t really feel like stopping. Writing these journals is not the best part of the day but sometimes I’m glad to have the opportunity to put things in words. It doesn’t really change things and it does make you generally smarter but I am still not such a smart guy. I make mistakes and I make emotional decisions. I can be put under stress and it definitely affects me. In this way, I’m really no different from old man Moses. I am an imperfect human being trying to make sense of a very imperfect world where something is much bigger than me and I’m not really allowed to understand it.
No, I’m not talking about human inspired human misery. I’m just speaking for my beleaguered mother Nature who is very sick right now because of all of this human insanity. She is the only one I deeply care about, the only one I worry about and the only one I have prayers for. Everything else is bloodlust and bullshit.
Maybe that should have been the title of this journal. Bloodlust and bullshit: dealing with a group of degenerates that have nothing better to do than destroy the whole world.
Then of course we have the American elections which might mean something. For all of the problems I have here because of my American passport, people here don’t get it that officially speaking, America is half stupid too. Having all the money in the world doesn’t make them better people. We have the same problems everyone has here. We also get harassed by the police, we also have drug and alcohol problems, we are also a nation with extensive numbers of poor people. We also have an oligarch class and we also have political corruption and imperialism and a lot of blood on our hands.
No, I do not believe that there will be any kind of voting revelation. Nothing has happened to change the situation. Once you get your algorithm set up, the internet feeds you what you want to see. I’ve been sharing the results of my algorithm and subscriptions and interests all year. My internet has all of this information for me. But I also know like knowledge that if you truly want a Christian world, your internet, except for the porn, is pure Jesus. I’m sure if you believe in the Republican argument, you have all of the hate and racism you could possibly want day after day. If you genuinely believe that gibberish is the correct language for our politicians, you will get it until it spills out your nose.
The only thing that I know to be absolutely true is that there is something in people that believe that propaganda and rhetoric are the answer to the problems rather than doing the work needed to solve the problems. This is one revelation for me.
I told you I watched that TV series called hunters about Jewish Nazi hunters in the 1970s. I learned a lot about how the United States government invited Nazi scientists to the states after the war and how they became an integral part of NASA. These jokes are now all over the internet and Operation paperclip has become a part of common knowledge. I didn’t know about it before now.
The one trick though about the Nazis is that they are an idealist group. They believe that they have the right to do what they want. They believe they do not have to serve any other Master but their own whims. This is the philosophy that allowed the Germans to cross borders.
The thing is, this is the same philosophy that the conservatives have. They have the right to do what they want. They have the right to make decisions and you don’t. They have the right to make laws for other people that they themselves don’t have to live by. They have the right to change the constitutions and the living situations and they have a right to take care of themselves. Straight up, the state must live.
But mostly, they keep everything going with lies. They just use words as a tool to confuse. This was one point that was made really clear in that hunters show. It seems that all of the Nazis they found immediately started talking shit to get out of their problems. The women were horrible ball breakers, the men were ridiculous racists. And no matter what happened or how indignant someone would be at their behavior, they would just resort to threats. If the cheap bullshit words didn’t work, it would be violence.
Well, this is the world I live in right now because this is Russia. Russia is absolutely tied to the oil business and the oil business is absolutely tied to the conservative party. The Republicans are all about business and money and that means the oil business. If you don’t believe they’re bullshit, they threaten you with violence. If you don’t do what they want no matter how stupid what they want is or how morally repugnant the entire situation is, they just practice violence to subdue you.
You know my chicken neighbors kept talking long after this started. Honestly and truly and it is documented here as a physical record and I have it on film how all of this started. I just went over to my neighbor’s house to ask them to do something about their cars because the way they enter and exit their house everyday throws auto emissions into my kitchen. They have old stinky horrible cars and all I did was ask them if they could do something to cut me some slack. I was here for the fresh air in the quiet. Perhaps they could park differently or maybe just move their driveway to the other side of their property where it wouldn’t bother anyone ever again.
The first time I went and I spoke to the husband he answered with gibberish. Literally, he told me his brain was too locked up to make decisions. So, I took him at his word and decided that the woman was the brains of the operation and I went to speak to her. She told me that she was in the popular correctness and that all the world was like this and she smiled at me obsequiously and told me I had no merit to her as a human being. She was high and I was low and she was a winner and I could go kill myself anytime I wanted. The second time I went to talk to her she called the cops on me and told them that I was assaulting her. This is what I have a film of. The cop decided to believe it because he wanted to believe it and threatened me with a gun and screamed at me for an hour before it started dawning on him that he was somehow wasting his time. He continued to threaten me until I basically convinced him that it might be wiser to quit being such an asshole. All bullies are cowards and the last thing he needs is to lose his bullshit job.
But after this, you know they just kept talking. They just kept telling people who I was around town. They just kept building on the rhetoric about how terrifying I was. They built this all up into a great bit of politics in which they were the good guys and I was the bad guys. Anti-semitism. Anti-semitism and that I was the violent American coming to steal their property.
You like this? This is the truth. This is what Nazis are. This is what fascism is. It’s just repugnant bullying and damage causing. It’s just people who believe that their shit doesn’t stink and that they have the right to harm anyone and anything.
The idea that drove the German Nazis was a concept called Lebensraum.
Meaning “living space,” it was a basic principle of Nazi foreign policy. Hitler believed that eastern Europe had to be conquered to create a vast German empire for more physical space, a greater population, and new territory to supply food and raw materials.
It is the territory which a group, state, or nation believes is needed for its natural development.
In other words, it is the rhetoric that justifies murdering, raping and stealing from your neighbors. It is the rhetoric that says you are more important than anyone else. It is anti-democracy. It is the polar opposite of democracy. It is the mortal enemy of democracy. And truly, for all of these people who like the old days when the world was enslaved by feudal Lords, it is something that most of us had at least hoped we had grown out of. Quite a few people have spent their lives praying that we could perhaps be more intelligent than this.
This is the big revelation. It is not the use of words to solve problems, it is the use of words to create problems, to confuse, to use as a weapon. It is the use of words as a drug, an escape from reality. And really, how is this not Russia?
Yeah, 5,000 pages of words asking people to think for themselves, have some common sense and have a care about how they walk on the planet. 4 million words asking people to be good humans and to understand that that means treating the world with some respect and deference. 3 years of my life asking people simply to make healthy decent choices for a change.
What’s another month? Maybe something good will happen in the war but I doubt it. Maybe they will wise up and back off for the sake of peace and global hunger and global warming. Maybe we’ll make some common sense thoughts come true and we will suddenly quit this fascism for money game that we play. You never know. It could happen. I understand that Christianity tells us that we have to learn to adapt to the evil that is the world. But maybe there are people like me who think that simply not being evil in the world is the way to go.
Or maybe there will be something decisive in the American elections. Maybe America will finally come through despite all of the propaganda fed to them in the Midwest and the Christian South. More words down there. Lots and lots of words coming from a central location teaching a central theme of conservatism to the poor unfortunate bastards, literally poor unfortunate bastards who have no other choice but to listen and follow like sheep to the slaughter. Literally lemmings. Literally slugs voting for salt. Literally voting away their own rights every time.
You never know. I mean, Sinclair media chose the president. They picked the guy who would keep things going. They told all the young people with genuine ideas that they weren’t relevant and needed to be absorbed by the corrupt system before they had the right to do their jobs. They chose the old guy for us just so things would pretty much stay the same. But you never know. Something good could happen.
So this is kind of my thinking here this morning. My ex partner is coming up today but I think she’s going to spend most of the day in the forest with Ria collecting mushrooms. As far as work goes, there’s not really so much to do around here. I guess I should empty the rain barrels and move them into the barn. I also have to put some extensions on the gutters themselves so that water starts to flow where it’s supposed to flow to. I might be better off waiting for spring for that job or maybe it’s better just to get it done. I’ve been using my well exclusively lately for everything so perhaps it’s time to bring in the pump for the winter as well. It’s pretty early but I have plenty of water without it.
That’s really about it. It’s just another Sunday. Just another day to come out of my warm little hole. Yesterday was okay. I ate a lot. I ate a lot of really good food.
By the way, I made a mistake on the bread and put too much water in. It doesn’t really matter. I just used a spoon to transfer the batter to the pot and made something like savory pancakes. The Russians have a word for this. I didn’t make blinis, I made pirozhok. It’s all the same thing. It was wonderful and so was everything else.
***
Here are some links from the last few days:
So Russia is attacking the electric infrastructure so that there is no heat and they are attacking Ukraine’s ability to send food abroad. That’s about what they do.
But wait, there is more. Here is another map reader telling us exactly what to expect should the Russians blow the dam and simply flood Kherson as another gift from the Nazi regime. They never do stop making the mafia here, do they?
Another 1420 Street interview from Moscow: what if we lose the war?
I’m very sad if civilians die but…
Back at the front, criminal conscripts tell their stories. Is this propaganda or do you believe they are telling the truth?
And now, there is even a mutiny.
Unfortunately though, the mobilization has stabilized the Russian lines and the Ukrainian counter offensive has been slowed to a stop. Another look at Belarus is in this and also, some American troops have now been deployed nearby. Things are getting nasty.
Like I said, it doesn’t look good. The brutality is not good. The amount of human suffering that Putin is demanding of the world is not good. Having to deal with Nazis and fascists again is the most incredibly disappointing and depressing thought. To have to deal with all of this nonsense instead of taking the scientific warnings that global warming is real is insanity. Instead of bonding as a group, humanity is instead being asked to bond in mutual hatred towards the Russians who have no problem being the bad guy in this epic wrestling match.
It is all just selfish bullshit instead of working together to save ourselves and our world. We are all agreeing that we are too insane and violent to be left alone. We are all a bunch of spineless slugs agreeing that salt is the cure for our problems.
***
Are there any Jewish prayers for smoking pot?
I found this: Judaism and Marijuana by Elliot N. Dorff
The Torah demands that Jews become “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” The Jewish tradition uses wine to sanctify holidays and marriages; it does not use marijuana for those purposes. Still, Judaism allows Jews to ingest many things that are not intrinsically holy as part of the effort to fulfill the responsibility to maintain a healthy body, mind and soul, and furthermore, as part of enjoying God’s bounty, even when not directly related to matters of health. It further demands that one obey God’s commandments, take responsibility for one’s actions, and work to create a better world. Whether using marijuana recreationally fits into that Jewish description of the nature and purpose of life depends on what its effects turn out to be. If it decreases pain in dying patients, then one not only may, but must, work to make it legally available to them. Thus, in sum, marijuana in and of itself is not inherently bad or good; it must be judged in terms of its effects in creating a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
Amen.
***
Good grief. It is getting worse.
***
It’s raining today. I’m sitting in the kitchen and waiting for my breakfast to cook. Absolutely nothing special. Buckwheat and red lentils with some veggies. And I have some more tea brewing. I’ve been drinking a lot of tea.
It’s definitely cold now. The weather report says that this is pretty much what we are looking at all week. Cold and rainy.
I’m sorry, I can’t think of anything else to say. The war is escalating and it’s escalating here as well. The winter is coming and it seems that nobody just wants to have a winter. We have to make it as miserable as possible.
Blyad.
***
Vice covers the story pretty well. They are in Russia talking with the conscripts and those who are trying not to be conscripts.
The girl says that they threatened to glue her lips together and her boy was raped while in custody. This is known as patriotism in Russia I guess.
***
It’s 5:00 and I am in my newly rebuilt kitchen. Today was some kind of a day.
My ex partner never really showed up. She went straight to Ria’s house and the two of them set off on their mission. Ria is on one of her fasts. She goes anywhere from 3 to 6 weeks without eating anything but drinking water. She believes in this both physically and spiritually and claims it is the reason for her health and vitality. She had serious leg problems at one time and simply going weeks at a time without eating once or twice a year seems to keep her Sharp. My ex partner was amazed at her energy in the forest. She collected a ton of mushrooms.
I didn’t see how many my ex partner found but apparently it’s a lot. She brought me a package, thank you very much, and at the same time she was unloading her mushrooms, my neighbor Tanya showed up with yet another group of mushrooms. It’s mushroom season.
I am not a mushroomer. I guess that would be logical enough. Even when I was healthy, I never really enjoyed mushrooming. Russians have a great enthusiasm for it and I don’t know whether this is the propaganda or the mythology of this particularly Russian thing to do but my ex partner came back as if she had seen Jesus himself. To her, it was one of the best days she has had in a long time. Being out in the forest in the fresh air, all of the excitement of finding food. She loves it and Ria swears by it. I just buy them and I’m quite happy to do so.
Just as it does and how it has been lately, I really thought I was not going to be doing much of anything today. I ate a decent enough breakfast and then ate some more. I have too much food lying around and when I get hungry, I get hungry.
But then it hit me and I got up on my feet and started walking around. There were things to be done. There’s no reason to just talk about things and never do them. If I’m able to do my job, I should do my job and waiting around is not going to help anybody.
The first thing I did was to pick up the hose, drain it and find a place for it in the barn. I then unplugged and drained the water pump and brought it inside for the winter as well. Nobody is going to be doing any watering and the well has come back sufficiently to provide me with as much water as I need. I still haven’t let the water out of the rain barrels but I will for sure this week.
After this it occurred to me that there was no time like the present to build some shelves. It’s exactly the same thing. Why should you just sit around and dream things when today was a perfectly good day to go about it.
Now, it could very well be that my days off make me too lazy. It is also possible that regardless of all of this high thinking that I do, I do sometimes make decisions based upon how I feel. If I feel like my brain is too slow to do some kind of work or that my body doesn’t have enough energy to do it, I tend to put it off. But this kind of thinking usually happens when I’m lying down. I have a much different mentality when I’m up on My feet. That’s what all of my enthusiasm for this moment is from. When I’m up and on my feet, I am me. I’m alive. I am like experiencing something I haven’t felt in years. Lena says movement is life. There’s probably a lot of Truth to that.
I went out to the woodshed. I actually did two things out there. First, I cut a bunch of kindling because I was running low. I also picked up a few branches that I thought would be beautiful to support some shelves. It’s just a basic triangle that you can put boards on top of. I thought it would look cool if I used natural uncut wood for the support. I guess it’s possible to build the entire thing out of sticks but I just wanted something with some strength. I wasn’t looking to become an artist today.
I brought everything I needed to the bench in front of my house and took a look at the sticks I had and decided about how much shelf I could put together. It worked out to be enough for two of my boards so I was pretty happy about this. Cutting 45s on Wildwood though is kind of interesting. On pre-cut lumber you always know where your square sides are. On a tree branch, you have to try very hard to find the center line before you make your cut. Even then it didn’t work out and I spent a lot of time whittling and worrying the sticks into decent 45s. I got there though.
My original plan was to put it in the warm room. I need a place to put a lamp. You have to have a lamp and currently my lamps are not inconvenient places. That place is my comfort spot. It really should be perfect. But I didn’t like how this particular set looked in the place I would put it on the wall. I decided that I could probably use them in the kitchen because I need shelves in there too. Needed shelves. They look absolutely wonderful right where they are. It says if the place was made for it and I’ve been waiting patiently for them to arrive.
That was about as far as I got when I got a call from my ex partner saying that the mushroom journey was over and that she would be stopping by my place pretty soon. I got some beautiful pictures of mushrooms in the forest and the path they were taking to the magical spot. She really was unbelievably happy from her mushrooming day.
And that’s where we started this story. Everybody showed up at about the same time. My cutting board was filled with mushrooms. Everybody was in a good mood. I don’t know what Tanya’s story is or what her relationship is with her husband. She was just straight up kind today in front of my ex partner. No flirtiness. Jealousy from my ex partner but no flirtiness from Tanya.
After this, everybody went home. My ex partner got on the bus and Tony went wherever it is she’s staying these days. She wasn’t on the bus. So I guess she has worked things out with her husband. I guess he has more tolerance and endurance for drunken drama than I do. Good for him and good for her.
After they left, I needed to rebuild my drying table a little. The netting had started to sag and I needed to do something to pull everything tight. I also took all of the walnuts off the table and put them in three different places. I don’t know how many kilos of walnuts we have but we definitely have walnuts for quite some time.
And that was it. I didn’t die from the work and I didn’t really overtax myself. I guess that’s really what people need is some alone time to do some things that they want to do. My ex partner told me that she needed some meditation. I guess that’s what all of this was. Just a little physical meditations. I’m happy to have them again. It has been a long time.
About dinner, I really don’t know. I’m not hungry at all. I guess there’s a big difference between when you’re just laying around and when you’re moving around. When you have to be tight, you really notice when you’ve got a big food bag hanging from your skeleton. I think I’ve eaten enough and I’m going to go without dinner tonight. No, I’m not going to go 3 weeks without eating. If I were younger, I might try it for the challenge but I have no interest in adding pain to my life. I like eating and I have every intention of doing a little eating everyday. Maybe if I was a meat eater, I would need some time to clean out those intestines. I don’t know how many times I’ve mentioned this but we’re not really built for meat eating. If you are a meat eater, maybe you should do some serious fasting to get that stuff out of your system.
But that was Sunday and tomorrow is Monday. I have no obligation to get up and no plans except to do more of the same. Honestly, this retirement business is not boring. It’s different. You have to call it by its correct name. It’s not boredom, it’s freedom. I’m not going crazy for a lack of responsibility. I’m enjoying the texture of the package as it is.
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