Monday, October 24th 2022

Ukraine is signing a security agreement. Life is so complex.

Truthfully, I genuinely think that if they had such an award, Zelinsky would for sure be MVP amongst the president class. The guys working harder than James Brown these Days. Give credit where credit is due. By comparison, Putin is just a sick deranged old man who doesn’t have any thrill of life anymore and needs more blood to justify his existence. Zelinsky’s holding it together and going that extra mile. No matter what happens, Ukraine should remember that they had someone with this much energy doing everything he could  during a time of specific crisis.

Here are some words from him as well.

More honest propaganda about Russian conscripts

And even more propaganda but this is specifically aimed at Belarus’s involvement in the war. It’s hard to say what can be believed or not believed. The president of Belarus is “clever” in that he is trying to be as non-aggressive as possible with the situation. He cannot say no to Russia but he is not interested in Belarus being a playground for missile swapping. However, they are also doing this 50/50 act while conscripting potential soldiers for all out War. You have to kind of read between the lines here but again, none of this is good at all.

Really, why can’t they ever just leave us alone. Why can’t they go get a normal job like everyone else? Or if they’re rich enough, just go buy a place in the country and make a garden. Seriously, I’m tired of watching videos of parasites eating away at everything they possibly can and destroying the world with their garbage. I am tired of looking at the wastefulness and destruction of this Hysteria.

***

It’s 5:00 a.m. and this has been a relatively sleepless night. It’s been a comfortable evening. I basically watched sports from Pirate broadcasts and snoozed. The room was cozy and warm and I was pretty tired from yesterday’s activities. Everything’s fine.

Usually on Mondays, I get to play this game where I purposely as lazy as possible simply as a thumb to the nose of working slaves everywhere. Monday morning is of course the highest stress day. You’ve just managed to find yourself just a touch of comfort and freedom and then it gets ripped away from you and you’re back to the grind again. In my ex partner, the Revelation that the world is pulling her back into its gravity hits at about 5:00 on Sunday afternoon. I have seen this change many times and it is always a sad and empty moment. You are with a friend and suddenly it’s like instant Alzheimer’s and the day, no matter how nice it was, is simply over.

I am aware of this schizophrenic shift from a previous relationship I had. We would have remarkable honeymoons, the warmest possible time together. But then they would be something like a finger snap and she would violently have to go back to her responsibilities. Whatever sweetness was in her personality before, whatever enjoyment of the moment of freedom, she would snap into her second personality type. The fascist would reappear.

I can put a third example here. Last year when I first attempted to speak to my neighbors about doing something about their filthy cars spilling auto emissions into my kitchen, I ran into the henpecked husband’s fascist schizophrenia. For most of the conversation, he was an oblivious but easy going conversation partner. Like most conservative Russians, he fights facts by saying everything is arguable or fake and that he never needed to take any genuine action for anything, the conversation was about ecology and environment by the way, because nothing is known. Pretty typical for all Russians and American conservatives to speak like this. But then his wife came home and the sound of her voice caused some kind of a snap electrical reaction to go through his spine and he burst into immediate action. He simply needed to make himself busy. Using his own words, there was no other option.

I guess if I were to take all of these examples and put them together, the easiest thing to say is that I was witnessing the effects of fascism. If we take all potential freedoms out of social interactions, at least official dealings such as business or education, you have a fear based reaction that gets into your DNA. Literally one world will simply stop as harshly as possible and you are forced to return to the other. To my observation, it was as if I had been spending time with an alter ego, I was visiting a life that someone would dream about living but was so far away from their frightening reality has to seem inconsequential.

I could say more about this and about some other people I know but I think what I’d rather say is that this exists in the United States as well. I had a relationship with a girl in Wisconsin and she had the same duality. In America however, it’s about money. The fear is not necessarily in official reprimand. They don’t have fear of imminent physical hostilities or being bureaucratically raped like they do here. In America, you have this illusion of being free but in fact the money holds you in such a complete grip that fear of loss of money supersedes any other possible interaction.

The moment I was thinking of was when I took her on kind of a long bike ride. She was enjoying an easy pedal and it was a beautiful day to be out and exercising. Suddenly, she realized that she had forgotten about a work shift. The thought hit her like a bullet and her fear of losing the job turned her into an absolute tornado. We were quite a distance from her workplace but her legs were turning like an egg beater to get back on time. She was in an absolute state of fury. Seriously, she could have probably qualified for the tour de France if she could have somehow managed to harness this.

Basically, my entire family has this disease. This absolute bloodlust for money is everywhere.

In all fairness, I have this disease myself. I am scared to death of money and I am genuinely happy to be on an absolute minimalist budget. Literally, I will not spend money for pleasure because the act of spending money is perhaps the least pleasurable thing in my life. In fact, I am so sure of this that anything that needs to be purchased that is not an absolute essential of life is physical torture for me. I hate money more than anything else in this world except perhaps money mad fascists and Nazis and what this world breeds instead of making good humans.

What I am saying is that we live in a fascist world. Maybe we live in a Christian fascist world. Maybe it is exactly this constant fear that is so completely exploited in the propaganda and rhetoric of the politicians and even the product advertising. We are mined for our fear. Our fear is kept alive at all times and our paranoia of making a mistake that allows us to be attacked pervades everyone everywhere. No one is allowed to live their lives unafraid.

This explains why the Russians are so in love with playing with their children. Maybe all parents love playing with their children but the Russian world is so harsh and brutal that people just use the innocence of their children like drugs. We don’t raise children here. We don’t raise good people. We raise imbeciles that we use for just a moment of Innocence. Children are a commodity, a drug and perhaps this is the first thing that all children come to understand when they wake up one day and understand that they have grown up but are still considered children.

That’s not just me taking poetic license. It’s literally a part of the language for people in their late teens to use the word children for themselves. People long past understanding of responsibility and that the adult world is waiting for them still refer to themselves as children.

So yeah, on Mondays I usually find laziness to be much more interesting than getting out. I kind of wanted to get up a while ago but I didn’t. I’m still not hungry. Apparently yesterday’s breakfast was enough. Even when the football games started and all of the commercials were for fast foods, I was not inspired. Maybe it’s that it is still dark. 52° north latitude means that when the light goes away, it really stays dark for a long time. Only a month or two ago, being awake at 5:00 in the morning would be participating in daylight. We are not going to see the light for another 2 or 3 hours this morning. There is no reason whatsoever to get up.

As for this week, I would say my odds of going to Minsk have shrunk considerably. Tomorrow, I will make a call to the medical establishment in the “for sure to be in vain” attempt to find out if they are ever going to give me my promised medical Care. No, I’m not going to call the blackmailer without a lawyer present but you never know. Maybe something good happened. I doubt it though. And because I doubt it and because the only other reason I would have for going to Minsk also looks like a complete dead end, I’m thinking that this trip doesn’t need to happen. Even my ex partner agreed that going along with her just to keep her company would probably be miserable for me.

Just for the record, I’m not agoraphobic. I just prefer to avoid situations that will cause me injury. Being obligated to both sit in a vehicle for 8 hours and to have to do whatever movements are required of me to get medical care is not worth the risk. If they are not prepared to help, I cannot rely on getting any help from them at all. They will never do anything for me unless they are bureaucratically prepared to do their job. So because of the war and because one of the head bureaucrats decided to be a blackmailer, like I said, it would be in vain.

What is left to do? Well, my ex partner has this duality to her. Even though our time together yesterday was very minimal, there is still this Sunday visit energy. She is violently on the schedule and so she shares this with me once a week. Truly, the only thing to do is to allow myself to fall back into my own pace again. I think I’ve said this before but this doesn’t mean boredom, it means relearning to accept freedom.

Having freedom to take your time is very nice. I recommend it to everybody and in fact, with the exception of the necessities of the agricultural clock, I don’t think human beings should be forced to do anything else ever. Not animals, not the Earth and not humans.

Fuck fascism. Seriously, fuck the Nazis and fuck fascism generally.

You can tell anybody you want that I said that.

***

I do want to add one small thought to my last statement. When I first came here, it wasn’t like this. When I first came here, it was absolutely beautiful to be with people. They were the most gentle and polite people I had ever met. There wasn’t a moment where I had any fear of violence. The children were ludicrously respectful and people absolutely understood good manners. I’ve never felt more welcome in a place anywhere in the world than I was here. It gave me unbelievable pride to feel that I was from here and that somehow I was a part of these people.

But then I went away. It was actually painful to leave but I was very afraid of the money that was available. They were horribly poor at the end of the Soviet Union, something that has never changed by the way. But when I came back 5 years later, I was warned that people were no longer like that. The place had changed. The Russian bank had failed and everybody lost all of their idealism along with all of their money for a second time. Now, there were drunks and the place had collapsed into complete disrepair.

The difference between that first and second trip was the idealism of the people who lived here. They believed in their heart that the socialism they had been brought up with was the true way to live and given the opportunity to practice this as individuals had them on fire. It was a beautiful world put together by people absolutely focused on living together well.

The second trip however was the one where they were forced to believe that there wasn’t enough money and that everyone had to fight for every penny they could find. Where before, there was a place for everybody despite idiosyncrasies and nuances, nobody would ever be forgotten. The perennially hysterical woman by the way was formed from this earlier time. It was probably quite lovely to have a lunatic in the house to keep things from becoming too boring. It was a chance to practice your good manners. Now however, the old ladies no longer had their normal sources of added income and people were already starting to reject the villages in favor of making more money in the capital or in Moscow.

They went from a system of economic parity, everybody got their 100 rubles and made do, to capitalism and corruption and immediately the entire fabric of society got ripped open and everyone was allowed to bleed out.

When I tell you that there is no difference between American fascism and Nazism and what we have here, it is because it is the truth. Russians are by Nature more obtuse and brutal. They don’t have faux woke political correct manners. This is not there because Putin put it there, it’s just a fact of life that people are more naturally objectifying and racist. It’s a homogeneous society. It’s a homogeneous White society. What more do you need to know? But under the flag of capitalism, social divisions are all you could ever possibly get. And once you start to divide everybody out, we all end up violent, jealous, hysterical for human warmth and of course paranoid to the highest possible degree at all times.

Like I said, I have lots of time to think of these things because I don’t have to get up and go to work today. Read them and weep.

***

I must post this. It seems that the most civilized man in the world actually resides in Moscow. Who could have possibly known?

***

This photo has nothing to do with anything. It’s just an Instagram post from an old friend from California who is visiting Brussels right now. I don’t need to say this again and again. Belarus for some idea known only to the oil business has firmly decided that pain must accompany all use of marijuana. There was a time when they didn’t know and care. Apparently people use it. I know this is a fact but it’s very illegal here just like anything else you might ever enjoy in your life.

However, this particular piece of writing is starting at about a quarter after 4:00 and I have had another good day. I feel I have done a lot but I’ve done it in a way that was very comfortable and healthy for myself. I did a lot but felt no particular obligation for any of it. I just let my body tell me what I needed to do and how fast it worked and how much to work and now I am here trying to figure out what just happened.

I pretty much started today the same way that I did yesterday. I had a really big breakfast. The basic culprits were chickpeas and cornmeal. This was the basic starch and protein and it sat on top of vegetables that included the outer leaves of one of my cabbages. I have a habit of eating everything even remotely edible and I don’t really throw that much away. If it is obviously scarred or ill in some way, I will cut it off and throw it out and throw it in the compost pile. But even if it’s an old weather-worn outer leaf, I find that they are pretty good eating. They hold their texture and whether or not they are better for health is a matter of an internet search that I’ve never done. I just don’t waste food.

Perhaps the star of the show was this giant white Forest mushroom that really was very soft and wet when it came in. It didn’t smell bad but it was very moist and very soft and had almost no structure to it. Most of the mushrooms that I eat are normally pretty healthy figures that have some crunch to them if you eat them raw. I generally don’t eat them raw but this gives you an idea of the texture. I was not really sure if I should eat this thing or not. It smelled good and when my ex partner, Tanya and I were all together in the kitchen and I saw this giant late career Elvis of a mushroom, I said that I would have it for dinner. It wasn’t for fear of this mushroom that I didn’t eat last night but I did cut it up and toss it in my breakfast malange. 

I’ve been waiting all day for signs of illness but none came. I was really full after two bowls of this followed by a couple of apples and some peanuts. My belly was definitely full, actually to the point of a bit of discomfort and basically I had to get moving just so how full I was might stop. I am not suggesting this form of eating epic meals followed by physical labor as a steady diet. But, if you are on your own clock and living in your own time zone, whatever the motivation is, that’s what you work with.

The first idea came to me that I really should do something with these Walnut leaves. My walnut tree is pretty huge, I don’t know how many kilos we’ve gotten this year but the living room and kitchen table is now full of them. The tree also sheds at least 50 kilos of leaves. Probably more when they are wet. I had raked up a small stack of them while looking for walnuts but had just left the pile there and frankly hadn’t done a very good job of cleaning up. I’m still not going to stand by my cleaning job but I did manage to get seven huge wheelbarrow loads down to the lower Garden.

The trick is that Walnut leaves have this chemical that prohibits growth of other plants. This is why you don’t plant tomatoes near walnut trees. The stuff is called juglone and though I have heard that this material dissipates from being dead and out in the weather after a few weeks, I have not really wanted to use it as a mulch or an addition to my compost. I’ve read both sides of the argument and I always go for more safe than sorry.

The trick that came into my mind though is that it would probably be an excellent mulch and sunblock for the paths between the gardens. I have quite a bit of unwanted grass growing in our new orchard, formerly lower bean Garden, and I was thinking that perhaps transferring these fallen Walnut leaves and depositing them on top of the grass would serve several functions. Firstly, it’s probably as good as anything to kill the grass. Secondly, if the juglone does go away after a while, like any mulch that you put on Garden paths, we can always dig it up and toss it in the plants a little bit later. Organic gardening rocks, doesn’t it? You’d be surprised at the amount of cool things you can do with it.

I saw though that the action of walking around my property and pushing a wheelbarrow is going to be perhaps the greatest part of my future life. Moving materials from one place to another is all I did in the early part of the spring when I was building up the garden. Now at the end, if I am able to walk, I can see making trips out to the forest to gather more leaves to make up for the lack of pay that we have. We are almost out. I told them to go easy but you know what Russians are like when they have some money to spend.

Being a little ambitious, I also made use of my return trip by stopping off in the woodshed and picking up a couple of loads of firewood for deposit in front of my house. I have plenty of wood in the warm room and truthfully I didn’t need it but when you’re being productive, be productive.

In the midst of this, Tanya came by again. She wanted to talk to me. There is nothing in this world like village drama to make you wonder why you don’t live in town anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I am not angry. I just wish to keep things level and do not wish to cause any problems with my neighbors. You don’t play with other men’s wives even when they enjoy playing with you. Of course, let’s all agree that there is hypocrisy to all of this. My chicken neighbor also wanted to play with me in her own way but I had absolutely zero interest in her aesthetically. It took one look for her to hate me and one noticing of who she was to let me know that there would never be anything pleasurable coming from their house. This I knew at a glance. You would too, Sherlock.

Tanya has her bad points as well but she’s a sweetie. And she flirts with the desire to not  to cause me too much pain. I could probably say a few more things why I like her. I think maybe it goes back to the first moment I saw her. I had just bought the place and was at the local store to buy some food and I saw her going by on her bicycle. That’s what I said. Pretty lady on a bicycle. I didn’t know she had a terrible husband and I didn’t know that she and her group were horrible drunks. I’m not speaking out of school here or saying anything that isn’t understandable. But she reacted to those words. You could see it. It was probably the first kind words she had heard in a long time. That’s how this all started. Kind words.

The deal today is that she wanted to give me more mushrooms but also needed for me to put some money on her telephone. I was at the other side of my property when I heard my name called. Luckily I was finished with what I was doing and had to make the trip back up with the wheelbarrow anyway. Truly, I was not in the mood.

So we met at the fence and talked about this, that and the other thing. I told her that I didn’t really like people coming to me for money. I also told her that I don’t like people flirting with me for money and that my life is so full of blackmailers, sometimes I can’t see any color but black. I’m not rich, I don’t have the key to the United States mint and I’m really not into buying my friends. Everyone else who does day labor for me or has done day labor for me this year eventually learns the rules. I’m not really into fist bumping anymore and I am genuinely not Pod Kablukom. This means under the heel but is the way to say henpecked in Russian. I know I’ve said this before, especially concerning the chicken lady’s husband who is a poster boy for the thought.

However, I’m also a sucker for a lady who flirts with me. I think I stood my ground well enough. It’s just that I couldn’t think of any reason in the world not to give her what she wanted. I gave her a hard enough time that she will think twice about it in the future. You’ve got to be respected. But in the end, I put some money on her phone, a little bit more than she asked me for and she called me to express great gratitude. I guess she was not expecting kindness. Probably, she never expects kindness. Kindness comes from a different drug. Actually, it’s not a drug. Alcohol is a horrific drug. I wish people would learn this already. I wish they would quit drinking everyone to death.

Right when I started writing this particular section, she showed up and put a giant bag of mushrooms on my kitchen cutting board. She wanted to give me more but she also wanted me to give her some money. More money? I thought we had this all figured out. Well, there’s no such thing as a drama dama without a story. In the end, I gave her a hard time though I have absolutely no expectations of any respect. Women don’t respect men in this part of the world. Women have declared themselves bosses over men and men worthless alcoholic sleeves. They are quite right about this but still objectification doesn’t do anybody any good.

In the end, what can I tell you? I’m not gay. Actually, I seem to be especially not gay on days where I actually get to walk around and do physical labor. You’d be surprised what a combination of a vegan diet and some good old fashioned physical work will do even to an old man. I’m not bragging. I’m just saying that these things are noticeable.

So now she is very happy. She says she wants to drop by tomorrow with even more mushrooms. I suppose the ones that I got in the first group are dry enough to transfer to a glass jar. The rest of the table is completely stuffed. It looks like an archaeological dig site with the mushrooms looking like artifacts. I guess if you stare at them long enough, you might be able to read the hieroglyphics. Or maybe, if you believe that the Earth is actually made from mushrooms, you get a sense I’m returning to the center of our planet, our mother’s womb and the place that we all truly come from.

She also gave me her cold. Everybody wants to give me their God damn covid. I never remember this. I always forget. I don’t know what’s worth, the people are the cats. Maybe I’m just allergic to Belarus.

For what it’s worth, that cat did not come visit me today. Maybe it did but I was not in the house when it came. I didn’t put any food down for it. Perhaps I should have but it never really crossed my mind. I really was doing a lot of other things.

Actually the last thing I did was change the latch on my front gate. I’m calling it a latch but really all It ever was was a piece of electrical cord that was slung over the side post to hold the door in place. When I first came here, that was the only thing I had and people were free to just walk in whenever they wanted. I learned my lesson about that and put a lock on the gate. Today however, I replaced the electrical cable with something a little smarter. It’s still the same system, it’s just a little cleaner now. Actually, the whole place really looks like somebody lives here. I’m not into image, I’m just saying.