Sunday morning, March 6th, 2022. Week number nine

The purpose of this website is to try and bring some common sense to a world that seems a bit insane. I believe this comes through literacy, exercising one’s right to vote their conscience and to remember that we cannot do anything alone and we cannot do anything as slaves. It’s about ecology and about the food we eat and how we relate to each other and the world. I think we have lost our way and the only way to fix it is by everybody making a contribution for the better of us all.

Good morning. It’s about 10 minutes after 7:00 here on Sunday morning and I am ambivalent about moving. I know I have a lot of work to do. I always have a lot of work to do. Maybe I always have the same feeling on Sunday morning. Saturdays are lovely and lazy. How easy it is to eat too much on Saturdays. Lots of bread and noodles.

I feel like I’m working in a construction zone this year. Last year, the structure was tight and defined and I would sometimes get creative pushing against the boundaries of the scaffold. This year, I didn’t want any unnecessary disciplines. This year the plan is more organic and because I knew I would be at least trying to set up and take care of a garden myself this year, I thought I would let the seasons carry me along. There are dates that mean something as far as planting goes and harvesting. There’s a lot of work to do to have a habitat put together that the plants will like and grow in. I thought that was way more important than demanding of myself to follow some abstract schedule. I’m not trying to please people anymore. I just want my plans to grow.

This may seem foolish to say on the internet. Plants don’t give a damn about what happens on the internet. They just worship God. It’s true. God is nature and nature is God and all they do is wait for the sun to appear and follow it across the sky. The energy from the Sun is what feeds them and dictates their life and this is all they care about.

אלוהים הוא הטבע והטבע הוא אלוהים

Elohime hu hateva vhateva hu elohime 

This is the Hebrew for God equals nature and nature equals God. When I googled it in Hebrew, I got back quite a few pages to this thought that center on the word Pantheism.

Pantheism is the doctrine that the universe conceived of as a whole is God and, conversely, that there is no God but the combined substance, forces, and laws that are manifested in the existing universe.

Pantheism also leads you to the philosophy of Spinoza.

Baruch (de) Spinoza (24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish origin. One of the foremost exponents of 17th-century Rationalism and one of the early and seminal thinkers of the Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism including modern conceptions of the self and the universe

Spinoza also had a teacher so we can also look up Descartes

René Descartes, 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650 was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist and lay Catholic who invented analytic geometry, linking the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra. 

And if I wanted to sum up everything that is going on right here first thing on Sunday morning we might come up with a concept called rationalism.

In philosophy, rationalism is the epistemological view that “regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge” or “any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification”. More formally, rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory “in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive”.

Or to say this even more succinctly, it is possible to understand things.

Why am I talking about this? The answer is that the internet and my American friends got tired of the war in Ukraine. They like talking about Putin’s motivation and asking themselves whether punishing the Russian and Belarusian population by devaluing their money is going to make a difference to a country that has already lost the value of its currency four times over the last 25 years. In fact, Donald Trump is playing blocker to his friend Putin and suddenly, there is a possibility of a criminal trial against him. Oh my, oh my, oh my, how very, very interesting this all is. Do you mean that Donald Trump had a connection to the Russians? Could he actually be a criminal in the United States?

So, so many interesting things to look at when you’re bored and flipping through pictures of cute puppies and kitties and really well executed photos of what your friends ate and how smiling and well-adjusted their children are.

Or in other words, this is ridiculous. This is empirically and rationally ridiculous.

When I went to the store last week to buy some cabbage and onions, I also decided to pick up some bread. I was a bit too lazy to make my own bread on Friday and decided that some cakey rye bread might not be so bad. Break all the diets. Be terrible to my diabetes. Inspire a bit of a food coma and then just sleep it off. Rational thinking for a day off without working. Over carb myself. Enjoy it.

As I said though, we have some soldiers camping out by the river crossing and when I was in the store, a small group of border patrol came in to buy cigarettes and chips and sweets. I guess the border patrol follows different dietary ideas than I do. But when I stopped to figure out how to carry some cardboard boxes back with me on my bicycle, I’m using this as a sunblock and growth inhibitor at the bottom of my garden boxes, basically to prevent the grass from growing, one of the soldiers paused near me and waited for something to happen. I was attractive to him, I guess.

I often wonder why I am so attractive to people here. They just can’t stop staring at me. It could be a lot of things. Maybe I just don’t look right anymore. Maybe it’s my unusual accent. Or maybe they knew who I was by reputation. So he just stopped moving and waited for something to happen.

Maybe he thought his uniform would have an effect on me. Maybe I would get nervous and start to run. Maybe I would open up a conversation and he could stare at me as I spoke to him. Who the hell knows what was going on in his head or why he paused and waited.

I have a theory about this though. He eats animals. He is identifying as a carnivore the way that a transsexual might identify with the opposite sex then the one he or she was born with. I personally don’t believe human beings are omnivores, I believe we are perhaps scavengers and maybe something we could call omnivore by need, meaning that push comes to shove we can digest whatever we have to do to survive. But I do not believe that we are anything but herbivores and I use the rational evidence of our physiology to prove this. We do not have the reflexes, claws, fangs, speed or strength to effectively feed ourselves in our natural naked state on anything except food that does not move.

If we were actually omnivores or carnivores, we would not need KFC. We would just grab a chicken and start eating it, feathers, skin, bones and all. We would not laugh at her foolish it is to eat raw chicken because everyone knows that if you don’t cook chicken you will get very, very sick from it. We also would not really have problems I suppose chasing down the mice in our house, eating our pets or hanging out naked in the forest in most weather waiting for something to move.

This soldier was exhibiting traits of a carnivore. He was waiting for movement or fear so that he could pounce or do something. I did not speak to him or show him any fear or even pay attention to him other than recognizing that he was there so he did not have any reason to attack. If he did act independently and there was a problem, he would have to explain his actions. 

To me though, this is a really interesting thought. Right now the world is made up of a bunch of individual people attacking each other while starving for money. I got stolen from Big Time about a year ago but when I called the authorities and asked for official help, they really couldn’t be bothered. This was not an ethnic crime, there was no physical violence and it was really too much trouble to pick up the telephone and make a phone call for them. Also, there were problems with jurisdiction. Apparently it was unclear to them if they had the right to call somebody. It was better to stare at me and ask me to define myself better. It was all too difficult for them and they were too lazy to do anything.

Me? I couldn’t afford the fight. You don’t wage wars on foreign soil. You go broke waging wars on foreign soil, didn’t you know that? Didn’t anybody ever study history? I mean, wasn’t fighting a war in Afghanistan the thing that actually broke the Soviet Union’s back? Wasn’t it all of their money spent just to kill brown-skinned people?

I think the insanity of the war begins and ends with meat. I think meat is the bottom line drug on the planet right now and that it makes us insane. It makes us believe that we are aggressive carnivores instead of peaceful herbivores. And all of this aggression for us is basically insanity and relieves us of any ability to do any rational thinking. We are uncomfortable and always starving to death because we never eat the food we are meant to eat.

I watched two movies this weekend that to me were perhaps some of the best arguments for veganism I’ve ever seen. I don’t think they were intended as vegan arguments but it was really hard not to understand the rhetoric.

The first one was the movie Fresh. I really don’t want to be a spoiler about this so I’ll just give you the non-spoiler blurb:

The horrors of modern dating are seen through the eyes of a young woman who is battling to survive her new boyfriend’s unusual appetites.

This does not describe this movie. I want to talk about this but I think if anybody wants to call me privately after they’ve seen this movie, I would love the conversation. Needless to say, my favorite line in the movie comes when they go to a Chinese restaurant and the girl asks her new boyfriend to try some well-sauced ribs and he replies that he doesn’t eat animals and then smiles knowingly. And this was before the opening credits even rolled. I knew this was going to be a vegan movie and it really, really was.

Screw it, it’s about cannibalism.

Cannibalism is the act of consuming another individual of the same species as food. Cannibalism is a common ecological interaction in the animal kingdom and has been recorded in more than 1,500 species. Human cannibalism is well documented, both in ancient and in recent times.

My point is that we are practicing cannibalism. My point is that any animal’s flesh is still flesh and not really all that different from humans. And if we place members of our society higher than others and one segment of society uses the other, this effectively is cannibalism. If we are not directly consuming each other’s flesh, we are consuming each other’s lives. We are stealing each other’s time and attention and energy and money of course and we are consuming each other everyday. Literally, this cop was practicing this. He has no job whatsoever except to attack and make use of human beings. Criminalization, objectification. Very carnivorous.

The other movie I saw was really interesting but perhaps not for a modern market. Personally, I thought the movie aged well. It was from 15 or 16 years ago. Unfortunately, I could see where this movie would make people very uncomfortable for quite a few reasons. The movie was Kevin Smith’s remake of Jersey Girl.

Jersey Girl is a 2004 American comedy-drama film written, co-edited and directed by Kevin Smith. It stars Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, George Carlin (in his final onscreen film appearance before his death), Stephen Root, Mike Starr and Raquel Castro. The film follows a man who must take care of his precocious daughter after her mother dies in childbirth.

Among the reasons for discomfort or that a lot of the jokes are very sexual. Liv Tyler’s banter to get Ollie’s attention, a lot of jokes revolving around Raquel Castro’s forgetting to flush the toilet and the fact that the movie was produced by Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein was perhaps the most instrumental person in the rise of Affleck and Matt Damon becoming Hollywood icons. Miramax actually produced quite a few very good films but unfortunately, Mr Weinstein became a social pariah for his desires to exploit women who wished to become Hollywood stars.

There’s enough cannibalism in this already but then they actually performed a bit of Sweeney Todd as a part of a school play including the barber cutting a patrons throat so that they can use the meat to make mince pies.

By the way, here is the Arabic for God is nature and nature is God.

الله الطبيعة والطبيعة هي الله

Alla altabieat waltabieat hi Alla

I think my point of all of this is that you find a different way of thinking when you stop consuming flesh. It definitely changes your sense of objectification and clears up your head from a lot of really unnecessary thoughts. True, you change as a person. Your reactions change. Your ability to be moved by bullshit changes. You stop chasing after things and start choosing calmer ways to go about your actions. I think you become less violent generally and for sure, you become a lot more rational. Rational thought starts coming through when the hysteria of reflex actions start to fade away.

Maybe all I’m trying to say is that I’m tired of people who live on reflex actions. I am really tired of people that follow things by their reflexes. I’m tired of trying to communicate rationally with people that need things resolved down to a finger snap. I’m tired of people breaking things because they didn’t have the common sense to be careful.

This year, I have taken up some of my space for garden boxes. I wanted to build garden boxes last year but people had it in their head not to listen to me. I was in a really bad way last year. I had a very bad foot and it really didn’t allow me to do very much of anything. But the reflex reaction from my neighbors was hate and cruelty. They have been trained to be brutal by Russian propaganda and the need for an ever-expanding economy based upon human action. 

Communism was too friendly. People were too relaxed and satisfied. You couldn’t sell people a lot of bullshit if they were happy and satisfied. But marijuana is illegal for exactly this reason. You just can’t sell people a lot of bullshit if they can just grow some marijuana and chill out. It’s bad business. We need people on a razor’s edge. We need people making snap purchase judgments. We need people willing to drive to the store and take home a bunch of plastic packaging that goes straight to the landfill by truck. We need the oil business deeply integrated into every single day and we need to make sure that nobody ever takes a break or thinks about things. We need to make sure that the economy moves and resting is just not in the picture.

Yeah, last year I got to know some of the native plants. I feel bad for taking away some of their natural growing spaces but they will have their chances to come back. I just want to grow my own beans and cabbages. I’m going to grow a few potatoes. I just don’t really want to do farm labor. I don’t want to work in the field. I want things nice and organized and human. Better to bring a chair and just reach in and clean things up by hand. Better to control the soil in a small tight place. Better to make a place to sit and rest in and watch the plants worship God.

Last year I really enjoyed sitting in my weedy Garden. I really enjoyed the symphony of life that God gave me to hang out with. It was incredibly peaceful and polite and I was the most violent and horrible thing in the lives of the plants. But I had many intimate moments with them, moments I will remember my entire life. And in fact, I don’t remember anything bad happening to me in my garden except for my neighbors. By comparison, they were pure cancer. They were poisonous. They were absolutely horrible.

I’m not the only person who sees this. There are many Russians in fact who make the snap reflex judgment to say that we should just blow ourselves up once and for all and be done with the human race. They acknowledge how detrimental to ecology man is and how brutal and horrible our man-made world is. But like I say, they like making non-rational judgments. They like making reflex decisions that bring even more misery and take away the opportunity for life from others. They think like carnivores who don’t recognize that tomorrow exists. Or could if they would be kind enough to let it.

No, I go in a different direction. I believe we can teach people. I believe we can simply remove management from their jobs and replace them with people who simply run the necessary infrastructure and leave us all alone. I don’t really think we need to have that many rules in order to get along and I believe we could probably talk about things. I also believe that we could eat very well without being cannibals and driving ourselves crazy with how hungry we are all the time.

Seriously, the bottle of sunflower oil by the current exchange rate was a little more than $1. The loaf of bread I think was about 50 cents. I ate a whole package of noodles over several meals and this was maybe $2. And I bought some cabbage and onions. This was the main basis of my carb fest. I basically ate five really tasty meals for about $5. I use some tomato paste in a couple of passes through the kitchen so let’s say $6.

I don’t know, it was quite a feast. It tasted good and I was quite satisfied being lazy. I dozed and slept all day, watched a couple of movies and let the world go by. I did not check out the national news from Ukraine just like my American friends. I found better things to pay attention to on the internet. And then I ate something and went back to sleep.

***

Hi Adam, I certainly hope this finds you well man. Put a halt to this thing will you. Stay well Adam

This is from an American Facebook friend. I also got an emoji reaction from another. I guess they were responding to news of the war. I always feel so good getting those sorts of things. It’s all very meaningful, I’m sure.

I want to talk a little bit more about reflexes but first, here is a woman that you can fall in love with. And if you don’t fall in love with her, we simply have nothing to talk about.

Yeah, this is in answer to the protein argument Maybe. But I just had something like her pancakes. Actually, I had my pancakes which are the same basic idea as her pancakes because we basically believe the same thing about this protein business. No, I didn’t decorate mine with fruit. I am absolutely horrible at plating because I’m not trying to please anybody but myself. But if you can’t listen to me, maybe you can listen to this unbelievably beautiful woman.

Sometimes the local animal population likes to call me gay because I’m old and I live alone. Maybe you could collectively stop bitching at me and find me one of these to hang out with and all arguments will be solved.

So I have two stories that I want to tell about reflexes. One is kind of a combination story and the other is just one moment.

I have good reflexes. I was a ball player and I played third base which is the reflex position. I often dreamed of being an outfielder and being able to run but this was not really meant to be. But I liked the Hot corner quite a bit and I wasn’t bad at picking.

I say this because one day when I was with my young daughter near my apartment, we were on the playing field near the apartments, this is not an organized ball field but just a grassy field that the children would play on. Everybody was four five six seven years old at this time and the boys were playing football, soccer.

My daughter and I would play with a football sometimes in the apartment. We would use our feet to try and take the ball away from each other. And after a while, I sent her out to see if she could play with the boys. They didn’t particularly like having a girl play but they were gentlemen about it and she basically played full back and made it her job to disturb boys trying to score a goal. I think I even played goalie for a little bit of this. She was hit and miss as a fullback but I remember that she took the ball away one or two times and that this made her very happy and proud. Me too.

A little while later, we were sitting on a bench and talking quietly when one of the boys kicked the ball in our direction. There is a well seen YouTube video of a major leaguer catching a ball that would have hit an interviewer. It was exactly this same situation.

Really, it was exactly like this and I saw the ball coming stuck out my hand and knocked it away. It would have hit her in the head and probably been bad one way or the other.

These are good reflexes. And very often lately, I’ve used what’s left of my reflexes to save me from falling or getting injured. I’m not Spider-Man or something like that but these are good reflexes used for good purposes.

The other side of this reflex business comes from visiting Florida. Basically, I got an idea in my head to take my father to see a Boston Red Sox game. This was in 2016. As part of this trip we went to visit a cousin of mine. This is the guy who stole the money by the way. And we had a different sort of reflex moment.

We arrived at his house and got something of a tour and then my cousin put us on the couches and talked at us for about an hour. He had a lot of things on his mind that needed to be explained. Maybe we have this talking business in common. Why not? But during the conversation he mentioned that his adopted son was being a bit of a problem. He had sexual identity issues and was into drugs. This story was told from the point of the hero who was there to save him from this nefarious future. To

After about an hour, he got tired of talking and with a break in the tour, I went out to my dad’s car to get my telephone. I’m not exactly sure of this detail but I did have some deals and some business going on in Belarus. I was an English teacher and I had a pretty good looking girlfriend at the time, and I was interested to see if somebody had sent me any messages.

On the way out to the car, I passed the adopted son who was in the garage doing something. I said hello and introduced myself and he sort of stared at me. I said a few banal things that you say to someone you’re meeting for the first time and he still, really didn’t want to talk to me. I remember him staring at me with this obsequious smile on his face, very judgmental, and I got the feeling that I was talking to a teenage girl. No offense but I was and am an English teacher and my specialty was teenagers just coming into their time of responsibility and this is what it seems like to me. The only thought that came into my head was that this boy did not want to talk to me and so I said something to him that I thought would be useful. I mean, if we were never going to talk again because he wouldn’t talk to me, I might as well say something useful. 

“Well, you should try to stay away from drugs because it aggravates your father.”

You could say that this remark was a reflex. I have done this many times in situations where I realize I’m not going to speak to someone again. It’s like wishing someone a happy birthday when you don’t really have a relationship with this person. You make your birthday wishes and you say something nice and then you hope that this leaves them thinking good thoughts about you and you walk away.

The sun however also had a reflex reaction and he ran to his mother and started screaming hysterically at her about something. I don’t know exactly what he said, but he said it hysterically and in an equally reflexive manner, his mother started screaming at me about what I could and could not do with her children.

She was not screaming at me not to give advice. She was not screaming at me about anything that had just happened. I don’t remember screaming it at the boy and I don’t remember being aggressive towards him. I just remember seeing him, opening a conversation and continuing on my way when he didn’t want to have a conversation. Simple enough. But now I was being screamed at. Her eyes were popping out of her head and she was completely hysterical at me. What had I done to her? What had I done to anybody?

My next reaction was not a reflex. I did not start screaming at her. I didn’t even particularly offer a fight. I just left. My decision was that I really did not want to be involved with this family. They have a lot of problems, these problems would probably take up a lot of my time and energy and there would be absolutely no positive gain from any of it. I had my own life to live and my own problems to contend with and this guy was not a major player in my life nor had I ever even met his family before. I was good, I thanked him for the hospitality and we left.

6 years later, he stole all the money. Probably South justified and most incredibly possibly, his family Hysteria was caused by his planning on stealing all the money the entire time. I say this because the boy started screaming at me over Facebook just after this and then a few years later, sent me an email telling me that I was evil and was going to hell as equally as my father was good and going to heaven or something similar to that.

Lunacy? Lunacy.

I understand a year has passed since my father has gone and there is some kind of statute of limitations that says that this is no longer a crime. The police department, the prosecutor’s office, the sheriff’s department and the press all decided to do absolutely nothing about my complaint. In fact, my vote in the election wasn’t really counted because some bureaucrat down in Florida decided to question my write in vote. 

All reflex actions. And just two more things to add to this. Number one, Trump lives in Florida. And number two, this video from one of my favorite professional eaters getting conned down in Florida…

It’s like this down there.

And just one more thing I want to say if for no other reason than in the hope that will make me feel better to say this. When my dad was going under, I had no problem calling the airline and finding a flight so I could be there at the end. You don’t have to believe what I’m saying right now but I really wanted to be there with my father at the end and help take care of him if need be. I offered many times but was prevented from coming by this same cousin. Whatever reasons he had in his head and whatever shit he put in my father’s ear or the ear of whoever else he talked to, they just said that I should not come.

But the moment my dad was gone and a trip to Florida would be to play with this cousin, it was no longer worth the money. For him or for the money, it wasn’t worth the risk. A waste of money more than anything one way or the other. For my father, I would have gone. That’s about life. That’s honoring your mother and father. About this Florida con man cousin, not worth a penny.

They just steal the money down there, don’t they? I mean, really, Trump is from there. They just steal the money, don’t they?

***

Well that certainly feels better.

I’ve been clearing out one more area for raised beds. I think that will definitely be enough for what I need. I’m not really looking to do anything exotic this year. This is really more of a setup year and I am really much more interested in perennials than annual human Frankenstein gardening. Maybe that’s a stupid name but this is what I call this hybrid group of vegetables that are normal for us to consume from the grocery store. There is nothing about cabbages or carrots or onions that resemble what they were in their native form. They have been bred and rebred into what we have now. I’m not arguing this and this is the food I have learned to eat. Nevertheless, it requires quite a bit of human effort to raise these things and so I am going to limit how much I bother with to my own needs. I am no commercial farmer now and probably never will be.

What I’m doing right now is simply cutting down last year’s grass. I guess I’m going to practice hugelkultur, or some kind of variant of it.

Hügelkultur is a horticultural technique where a mound constructed from decaying wood debris and other compostable biomass plant materials is later planted as a raised bed. 

I’m not doing exactly this but I am going to use all of this grass as part of my compost bins. This is one way to avoid factory fertilizers or even animal fertilizers which I suppose I could get if I started being nice to my neighbors. Cow shit I suppose is good but if I can get by on simple Green manure as a fertilizer, I think I might be even happier.

But I also can use this grass as my ground cover for no dig potato gardening. I know I’m doing a lot of physical labor this year and talking about the joys of actually being able to do it. All of this is as true as anything. But what is more the truth is that I am still an incredibly lazy person and would prefer to do as little as humanly possible. Okay, this does not automatically mean working in a job next to a computer and then just buying my nuts and veggies from the marketplace. I’m not opposed to that either but I think there is a certain amount of physical activity that we need and this is way better than going to a gym.

Seriously, you would be impressed at my bicep muscles right now. And I don’t even have any chicken skin underneath anymore and this is all thanks to cutting my own wood by hand. Buwah!

Okay, that’s nonsense. It’s true but it’s not sense because it’s not really important to anybody for anything. All I’m saying is that I don’t mind doing this work because I don’t mind being able to do this work. I’m not talking about going back to work and getting hired to do idiot labor for some cackling chicken. I am not thinking of being more helpful to my neighbors for their amusement. I’m just saying for my own peace of mind and what it feels like living in my own skin, I am grateful for the opportunity to be able to stand on my own feet and do some work. It has been years since I have been able to do this and I am grateful for this place and this time that I have and this work that I’m doing. It makes me feel alive and a part of the world to take a shot at growing my own food. I think it might be one of the most useful feelings I’ve ever experienced.

However, aside from the actual grow beds, I still have to construct a couple of compost bins and do what I can to fill up these boxes. I have a bunch of cardboard lying around from whatever reason I have cardboard from and I will continue to go to the store and take home their boxes. But after that, I can collect as many leaves and twigs and rotted tree remains as possible as a bottom layer and follow that with some local soil that I can take up by digging a little bit of a swale. 

I have heard that any kind of a hole or trench that you dig is beneficial and most of the trees that are growing in the forest that is connected to my land have been fed by a trench that was dug a long time ago. Certainly the trench allows water to be collected and the roots of the trees then feed off of that.

All of this is a part of everything I’ve learned from permaculture. I wrote quite a bit about this subject last year when I put together the green2021 website. That domain name is currently bureaucratically tied up by my previous web host. They are not very open to helping me out and I currently Host this blog with another hosting spot.

I have been thinking about what to do with all of the material from last year and while I’ve been waiting for that domain to reopen, I thought about simply collecting everything I wrote for that site as another book. I don’t know exactly how much material is in there but I’m pretty sure there’s enough in there to keep people occupied for a little while. There are also a couple of short stories that I posted under utopian literature, several children’s books and possibly even some original artwork to go along with the children’s books. All of this is also part of my project of collecting my catalog.

I have just been too lazy to do it. It’s just not enjoyable truthfully. Most of the time, I get bogged down with not understanding the point of why I’m doing it. You can write a book, you can mean every word that you say and take the experience extremely seriously. I mean, I think I put 1.6 million words into last year’s blog. I don’t care who you are or what you think it takes to do writing but 1.6 million words is not a joke. And that goes along with the three quarters of a million words that went into the upcoming elections books in 2020. 

Yeah, I really should just do this and have it be done so I don’t have to think about it anymore. That’s the worst part of it. This thinking about things that you need to do but never do. That hurts worse than anything sometimes.

Anyway, I guess I’m going to get back to the gardening.

***

Wow, big writing day today. More than usual. Maybe this is good or maybe this is bad. It’s about 20 minutes after 5:00 and I am shutting it down. I just had a nice dinner and I am pretty full, full enough that I started getting cold sitting in the kitchen. There’s a difference though between homemade bread and especially homemade bread with some protein in there and store-bought sugar laced factory bread. The feeling after you eat is different.

I just finished building a fire. This habit of cutting the logs in half is working really well. Whereas it probably takes a good five or six logs to seriously warm up the room, by cutting the pieces in half I actually cut the amount of wood in half. I just stack six pieces one on top of another and lay them on top of kindling which is on top of one sheet of newspaper or wood cuttings and one match is usually enough to get it going. I have that small square of steel mesh in there to make sure everything is well ventilated and the fire climbs upward and builds really intense heat. It’s definitely intense enough to take the chill out of the room and it leaves the bricks well charged. I find I can go to sleep with only a t-shirt and it’s still very comfortable all night long.

I don’t really know if I would absolutely recommend this lifestyle. It’s pretty rustic out here and I don’t think it’s for everybody. My ex partner definitely doesn’t want to stay out here. She very much likes living in her apartment in town and she doesn’t like to be bothered too much. I, on the other hand, am a great fan of this. I like not paying a lot of money for energy or heating. I like that I have to physically participate in keeping my world going. I don’t mind the extra few steps or the extra cold and I don’t mind wearing extra clothes. Truthfully, I don’t even mind what you have to do to wash up now and again. In fact I like it better this way.

Perhaps there are some negatives. Perhaps soup really was easier living in an apartment. Back then, the only things I had to deal with were the first two weeks in October and the last 2 weeks in April. This is when they turn the heat on and off and those were frighteningly cold days. And then there would be 2 weeks every year where they would turn off the hot water and you had to deal with cold showers. At the time, this seemed like climbing Everest or attempting to reach the North Pole.

Now, those things seem like ridiculous luxuries. Seriously, for years I really thought that these little inconveniences were a sign of a backward society. In America, you would never have these periods of time unless they were rebuilding the entire building. Here, it was every single year. But I don’t really miss these things. I definitely don’t miss the auto fumes. Perhaps I had better neighbors there. I don’t really remember getting into any fights with my neighbors and everybody sort of left each other alone. I certainly never had pushy chickens like I have now.

There was no space in the apartment though. I guess if you live in an apartment you don’t really notice it. I would lift weights a little and I would get out and ride my bike everyday. Here, I could do landscaping all day if I wanted to or if I could. I could go out and dig as much as I want and get as much fresh air and do as much labor as I needed. Space certainly means something.

I’ve been wearing gloves and I have not torn up my hands like I did on the first day. I also find that I’ve already adapted a bit to the work. Today was difficult because of my day off yesterday but generally I’m a lot stronger. It didn’t take very long to adapt. It was about 3 days from “this is amazing” to “this is just what I’ve done today”. That’s definitely the way it’s supposed to be.

And now the fire is absolutely glowing and the heat is flowing out the opening and warming my face. Today was a good day because I got a lot done. Tomorrow I’m going to start building my last batch of boxes and then it’s going to be time to fill them. After that, we plant.