Monday, November 7th 2022

Seriously, of all of the videos that get produced in and around our relationship with the Russians or Eastern Europeans or the business, military or social ideas flying around, I think I like this guy the best. It’s the most straightforward and the most honest. Nothing here is staged, he doesn’t mind talking to old people or young people or drunks even. Whatever people have to say is whatever they have to say and he just leaves it in there. He doesn’t push his agenda and you do get what I feel is a genuine representation of how people are here.

In today’s video, you get exactly the genuine answer how people think. Everybody is different, all people are deserving of respect, nobody is higher or lower or should be. I like the one guy who comes out and says that the black people are better athletes than the Jewish people might be smarter. And then he counters by saying that the Russians are more emotional. Absolutely the truth and I don’t feel the slightest bit racist to understand this. People are different and people do have their own ways of doing business. 

The trick is not to immediately diminish others or to throw them away and certainly not to spit on them. The trick is to deal with your problems appropriately and be fair with the people you’re with. I don’t really understand any other way. I certainly have no love for bullies. That’s a different animal altogether.

A friend of mine from the Jewish community once told me his feelings about Israel. He told me his love for the land of Israel was complete in him. He would kiss the ground and feel it is like a mother to him. And perhaps it is in its way. But the politics and the politicians of Israel made him miserable. He had no love for Israeli politics.

I think you could take that texturally and slap it on top of this video and this thought and you would be quite okay. I have noticed this myself and I’ve heard it said that Israelis and Palestinians actually get along quite well. They consider themselves cousins. Exactly the same philosophy from this video. Everybody is different but everybody is basically the same. Nobody is higher or lower and if you treat people with respect and love, you get along well in the world.

For my own situation, and I feel like I’m explaining this or clarifying it for maybe the 100th time here, when I first arrived, what I liked was that I was treated as a person. This exact philosophy is how people greeted me. If I was different from them or from a different place and for the most part spoke a completely different language, at the end of the day I was just a person and they would relate to me in that way. Things that all people need seemed to be understood. I’m genuinely talking about having enough food to eat or someone to talk to. To get a little respect and attention now and again. That was all. It was all as simple as that. Nobody likes to be tortured or poked at. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This sort of thing was the rule when I first got here. It’s why I stayed.

But then came the Russians. And then the capitalism that got planted here started to grow like an invasive species that refuses to allow anything else any space to live. It was the exact polar opposite. People used to laugh and say that it would take several generations for it to take. They said 50 years. As you can hear from this interview, the residue of the generations who practiced “living together well” is still there. The common way of describing things, the common way of knowledge has not really left. People still speak and understand these concepts. The problem of course is that the economic system simply does not allow the existence of understanding. When we are obligated to compete and fight for resources, there is no time for all of this friendliness.

And this is where the misery of government comes in. Amazingly, there is no set price for human beings everywhere. Humans do not receive a stipend to live off of. We do not have the basics covered for all human beings. Literally, we do not allow food, clothing, shelter, basic medicine and practical education for all people. We include these things as commodities. These are exactly the same as luxury items in that they require value judgments to be made. Nothing is seen as normal and therefore everything is for sale including the politicians.

So we have people making rules and having the power to move groups of people like the police or armies who also require money. They are not above money, they are also capitalists and act this way. And just the way some Carpenter might use his building skills to make his living, a politician uses his power to make money. Forgive the pronoun use there, I probably should have said builders using their powers and politicians using people.

What we can do about this is both simple and apparently impossible. We can agree to economic parity. We could make the decision with the click of a button. One universal vote. Straight up, all you have to be is a person. Click the button that you agree with or click the button that you don’t. 

What would be the result of such a vote? 

First of all, the rich people would make sure that there was so much noise coming through the media about how wrong this would be, a huge percentage of the population would be moved simply because they heard the propaganda telling them that this would be wrong. 

I could not be more serious about this. If you proposed the idea that there was a unilateral law for human protection in that all people born as homo sapiens have the right to eat, to have appropriate clothing, to have a place to live and shelter from the elements, cradle to grave social insurance for practical medicine and available education for whatever they needed, there would be people who would vote against it. Why would they vote no? They would do so because the propaganda would tell them that it’s economically unfeasible. These are the same politicians who themselves are very rich and yet make rules for people who are poor and especially people who are idiosyncratically different somehow in terms of skin color or psychological understanding of their genders and other such nuances. Maybe they’ll just be women.

Those people making the laws have per diems when they travel and expenses to travel for free. They are allowed to afford very nice clothing and never have to buy second hand. They have remarkable health insurance allowing themselves direct connection to doctors as needed. They are privileged to have any information they need and of course they all eat at whatever bloody restaurants they feel like. They also get tickets to the best shows and live in big houses and have people take care of them all on their payroll. Oh yeah, and their children are never asked to go to the front to die in a war and they themselves have personal security people to protect their own bodies from all the people who want to kill them.

My only question is why we don’t simply have our basic functional “economy” based around this idea. I really don’t know why the basic foundation of most jobs are not socially oriented. We would have a basic payment. All humans get their basic payment. This is enough money to barter for your basic caloric needs. The diet I eat would probably be in this because I really do not spend a lot of money on specialty foods. I’m okay with what I eat and I certainly feel healthy enough most of the time. Certainly my head seems clear enough. The same would be true for a reasonable place to live. Keep it clean. A little garden spot or at least access to Nature.

The point is that instead of having a vast tapestry where everything costs money and we do nothing but sit around looking for market niches that make money, we should also have a side that provides services but that make no money. It’s not that we need a Democratic and Republican side, we need an effective non-commercial side. And I’m not talking about cheap leftover shit, I’m talking about quality of life basics that everyone needs being taken off the commodity market. We can keep a luxury sector, we can have a marketplace for taste but people would be free to make these choices uncoerced and unburdened. If we took the hunger and the money making addictions we invest in now out, we would end up without most of the social problems we have now. The stuff that makes money is garbage. Built-in obsolescence, cheap materials, anything that has a high profit margin. Drugs basically. If we must have it, keep that stuff segregated but have the basics available to all human beings allowed to live and breathe for those who do not wish the excitement.

Because there is no difference between basic living necessities and luxuries, because everything is equal in that everything costs money, everybody must make value judgments or they become psychotic about needing bundles and bundles of money just to handle the amount of things they want or believe they need. Intuitive living in this case leading to absolute panic about money.

The politicians live for this Hysteria. They absolutely know that the people they are living with are starving to death for money. They want all of the drugs that are possible. They want relief from their pain. They are going crazy trying to find a cure for their craziness and the world just keeps them as stirred up as possible.

And now we have a new obvious lesson. Violence is the answer. That’s what the Russian government is telling us and this is what all of Europe and the United States are in complete agreement in. When you don’t like someone, when you believe that you are better than them, you can say whatever you want about them and then go to work exterminating them. This is the correct way to handle problems.

I found this video about the Russian occupation yesterday which probably deserves a place exactly right here.

I mean, you just practice genocide as a way to acquire more economic resources. You just destroy people. You murder them, you break them down, you beat them, rape them, humiliate them. You walk into their houses and steal what they have. Pregnant women need to get killed because you’re exterminating them anyway. Children getting blasted. Old men and women getting blasted. People sitting in their cars getting shot in the head. This is what you do to solve problems.

I don’t know how many years now the United States has been suffering from the effects of available guns to the population. The lessons in life are very clear. The United States government has been involving itself in foreign military actions since the beginning of time. There is no sense of benevolence in the United States. It’s an economic entity in which people are obliged to make money and pay for everything. There are levels of those who are rich and who are not and amazingly, in a world where simply killing your neighbor is the answer to the problem, they want to fight women about whether they are free not to carry babies they don’t want to. And exactly the same world where there are dozens of incidents every year where people take their guns into schools to kill children, we refuse to allow women to carry children they just don’t want, cannot afford or were given against their wills.

My friend would kiss the land but would not shake the hand of the leadership.

I’ve been writing for a long time. I’ve been writing daily for 3 years now. I’ve been thinking and thinking and putting things into words and trying to explain in such a way that it’s understandable what I see and what I understand. I asked for help from the press one time and was told that my story was about me and not universal. I was told by this prize-winning journalist that talking to Americans required a lot more blood. It’s a conservative newspaper of course. It’s a very big conservative newspaper that fights for the resources available to them. In this case, it’s the attention of the people whose minds they crave. They are professional gossip spreaders. The news they give has a particular texture and creates a particular mindset and they have absolutely no desire whatsoever to lose their market share, their profits or their flock of Christians who they fleece regularly.

I’ve never forgotten that bit of honesty. At the end of our time together, The interviewer, who was hungover from drinking by the way, lifted up her cat to show me. This was a Skype call. I had no idea why on the face of this planet this woman needed to show me her cat. She had just finished telling me that she was not going to lift a finger to help, this interview was doing a favor for a friend, if I genuinely wanted attention I needed to pay my pound of flesh or it would not be palatable to her readers and then she thought I would find it cute to look at her pet.

The American elections are one day away and my diagnosis is that we are insane. We suffer from every mental illness in the book all at the same time. We are practicing giving each other PTSD or CTSD which is constant traumatic stress syndrome and we are breeding our people to participate in this practice. Literally, we are not practicing intelligent and sustainable breeding practices, educational practices and societal practices, we are practicing Insanity for the purposes of spreading insanity and remaining as insane as possible. The only thing we do not want is people quietly making good sustainable decisions about how to live well on the planet Earth. The only thing that we genuinely need to do is the only thing we don’t do.

As for me, I slept really well last night. My guest never showed up but that’s okay. There was no way they were going to do that. That would have required an alleviation of stress and to allow the pressure out. They do not understand any other way to get by other than by trying with all of their heart to acquire power that they will never have. They have no other way of understanding the world other than fishing for fools who might actually believe their story. They are going to spend their entire lives relying on the kindness of strangers without ever paying back the debt or paying it forward.

However, wanting the place to look tidy for a potential guest led me to some incredibly intelligent thinking. Just a few brief moments tidying up the warm room led me to some ideas that are not only intelligent but make me feel absolutely stupid for not recognizing it before.

One thing I did was to stop using the space above the fireplace to store clothing and I moved them under the bed. The immediate effect, and again, I feel like an idiot for never having recognized this before, is that the heat from the fireplace was now free to flow and the clothing boxes now as another block keeping the cold air out of the room. The temperature in this place went up several degrees and I never did light a fire last night. As a result, I slept like a baby for a long, long time.

I’m only saying this because for myself, I’m not worried about anything. It does not cost me a ton of money to keep my house going and I’m not really worried about food. As far as medicinal help goes, I might need to check into a doctor when I’m finished writing here. Perhaps there’s more to this after all. At the end of the day yesterday, I really did find it painful to walk around. That brief moment of respite was nice but I don’t feel genuinely confident about things. The wounds are now completely healed or very close to it. I don’t feel in any danger. It’s just really uncomfortable to walk.

Socially, I feel pretty good. My relationship with my ex partner is fine. She is welcome here and I am welcome there. I think she understands me well enough and I understand her. We are comfortable. Locally, I have enough people who are willing to provide help for extremely reasonable payments of day labor. I have a few neighbors with whom I have a friendly relationship. I don’t really get bothered by people other than that. Of course, I still get my daily poisonings from the asshole chicken people next door. I don’t count them as decent people. I don’t count them as being worth my effort though I think I would love to write a paper against them once and for all for all of the misery they’ve caused me. The only reason I don’t is that it’s not worth my effort to connect to them. They are the evil of the world. They are fascists. They are parasites. They are not good people.

And then of course we have the war. We are murdering each other. With the untrained troops showing up and mass along the front lines, the Russians have inspired a standstill. They are not allowing the ukrainians back on to their territories. The death toll these days is about a thousand men a day on the Russian side and possibly as much on the Ukrainian side. It’s a similar situation to the American Civil War. It’s just a meat grinder and a line where people stand and kill each other for no apparent reason whatsoever other than the pleasure of Vladimir Putin.

The American civil War by the way was decided by Ulysses s Grant who is known as being a tremendous alcoholic. He simply said that he didn’t care how many people died as long as he reached his goals. He didn’t care how much misery was caused, he just had to win his War.

And now war is all we will ever know here. It’ll be a part of everyone’s life forever. For the amount of people that actually live in this region, the amount of lives that have been changed forever has been imprinted on the collective consciousness like a tattoo that can never be removed. No one is ever going to be able to forget that this happened. Oh, when they finally stop shooting the guns, we will attempt to drink ourselves into forgetting. We will eat ourselves into forgetting. We will party ourselves and drug ourselves and run as fast as we can to try and forget it. We will all spend the rest of our lives running away from the pain that we have caused ourselves.

Meanwhile, it’s Monday morning. I think it’s some kind of a holiday today. But I don’t have to go to work. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. And frankly, it’s amazingly warm in this little room I’ve made for myself. Very comfortable and very warm.

The only thing I’m really lacking is open access to the voting site. I don’t have a place to go where I can read the resumes of the candidates, learn about their financial situations and see the statistics of what they have voted for and against. I don’t have a good solid list of their affiliations or knowledge of the people on their teams. I don’t have genuine access to the basic information and statistics of the people who are asking for votes.

I also am not asked to vote on legal propositions. I am not given the basic information and a few basic arguments pro and con without any additional flavors added. I don’t have a place where there are simply the basic facts at hand including the reasons why certain laws need to be enacted.

I’m not running for office myself but if I was simply a voter like everyone else, if my vote counted as much as everyone else’s, I would vote green across the board. I would vote against anything that had pure economic value but that encroached upon nature in any way. I would vote basics across the board. I would not vote to give big corporations any advantage to sell us more garbage and I would not do anything for the fossil fuel business whatsoever except ask them to leave. I would invest in sustainable manners of energy production and the sanest and easiest possible basic manner of life for all people. 

I would vote for peace unilaterally. I would vote against conflict of any kind. I would vote for food. I would simply vote for food and proper Land Management and ecological cleanliness of our environment so that we could continue our food supply. I would vote for public sanity as far as reproduction goes. I would require some sort of communal agreement about making babies because I don’t want to overwhelm the planet with our numbers. I would allow people any alternative comforts they desire for those who do not wish to make more children or for people who can’t. I would allow people to do anything so long as they are not a danger to others or the planet. And yes, I would vote to let people check out if they feel they are ready to go.

I would vote for food and sanity. I would vote for sustainable life on the planet Earth. I would vote against causing harm to animals or to the environment or to other people. I would vote out anyone who tried to bully others. I vote against charlatans and powermongers. I vote against drug dealers. I vote against liars and thieves and abusive power.

One last thought here today and I understand that this morning thought is a bit everywhere. I am aware that I am in my last few days of writing this journal and I am both happy and sad that it’s going away. I’ve done this enough times that it’s almost meaningless to me but at the same time, it’s a thing I do. It’s very much like those last few outs of the last game of the World series in this way.

But the last thing I want to add here is that two of the three teams I pay attention to in American football won yesterday. My vegan friend Tom Brady is not at the top of his game anymore at age 45 but he managed to pull out a win. And the New York Jets actually have a team this year. They’ve got a defense. They have a defense and a running game and they took down the Buffalo  Bills. Amazing.

The thought however is how fun it is to watch non-lethal combat. American football is about ground acquisition. Metaphorically, football seems amazingly like the war in Ukraine. Both sides push against each other and try to bully their way towards the opposing goals. It’s a little bit different from soccer related sports like basketball or hockey. It’s not a fast transition for a single shot from side to side, it’s a grind and a slow push. American football has its own texture as a war game and I kind of like it.

But I can’t help thinking that whatever the genuine difference is inside Vladimir Putin’s head, whatever has led him to make the imperial decisions he has, I can’t help thinking how much better the planet would be if they were settling these issues over sport competitions instead of just murdering each other. If there was something other than a power madness, and absolute insanity to have control over another, if it weren’t for this absolutely psychotic desire to manipulate, I can’t help think how cool those games would be.

They could gamble for resources. I don’t know what Russia actually thinks they need. I don’t know why they can’t just trade for what Ukraine has. I also don’t know why they can’t just find other ways to live without it. 

But if they absolutely cannot figure out a sustainable way to do business together where everybody is happy, wouldn’t it be nice if this was just a year of playing sports together? They could have started out in February when it was cold with a series of basketball games. They could have transitioned to track and field during the summer months. There could have been some epic football matches towards the fall and if they really couldn’t ever figure it out, they could put up the boards and put on the pads and pick up the sticks and play hockey for it all in the winter.

They could just play these games, play as hard as they possibly can, drive the populations of both countries and anybody else who wanted to watch insane with the ferocity of the contest. And then at the end, they could shake hands and go get some beers.

***

Everybody’s phone has a GPS in it. Mark Zuckerberg was called into Congress to talk about the power that Facebook had to know so much about people. There are those who are completely paranoid about having their data collected. I get a little freaked out by the stretch that the algorithm has to find out about me. Of course, I do my writing on Google docs so all of the 4 million or so words that I’ve contributed are all available. I am sure I am quite understandable to the powers that be.

But they have this thing that they send you to tell you how far you’ve traveled. Of course, the common and popular belief that you are supposed to move around and do as much activity as possible is why they sell these apps. Things like my ex partners step collection for every day are supposed to be a selling point why people should buy more mobile phones. We want to inspire people for more human activity for some reason.

I personally think that this is a great mistake. I think we are supposed to be as quiet as possible. I do not think we are supposed to be traveling around the world and bothering other people. I really don’t think we are supposed to be spending our money in foreign places. I think we are supposed to be living as quietly and gently as possible. I think we are supposed to be enjoying our homes and our neighbors. I think we are supposed to be choosing things that don’t cost a lot of money and don’t require all of one’s life and one’s vitality be spent on garbage. I’m actually quite proud of this. I don’t particularly feel bad about this at all. I think I’ll give myself a high five and a hearty congratulations. Good job Adam. You took it easy. Well done.

***

Zelinski looks tired. Not too many leaders have to go through this. Not too many leaders go through this and take the trouble to do social media posts every day. Sorry, I like him.

So much waste. So much garbage. And even more human life wasted needlessly. 

https://youtu.be/4Y3s17ipvmo

But greed is greed and once you get started, addictive personalities simply cannot stop. Aparently, there are no rules about conscription. They just want more people and they really do not care who they are.

Denys Davydov has a long range perspective from inside Ukraine. Negotiations for the end of the war, new balistic missiles and a warning of the beginning of World War III. Propaganda? The truth? They are not going to stop. The do not have the capacity. They are going to go on as long as there is money to be made.

***

It’s 2:00 in the afternoon and I am in the office. It’s amazing. If you were to tell me that I would still be in the office after the first week in November I would have said you were crazy or I had won the lottery.

I am still here because I am still using my amazing homemade dehydrator. Over the last week or so of mushroom season I have become an expert. My current rendition has my powerful semi-professional heater sitting under my dehydrator table with a blanket slung over two chairs creating a very warm dehydration chamber. This is doing an excellent job of both sucking life out of the mushrooms and keeping this warm absolutely toasty. 

According to the weather report, it’s more than 10 which would account for my personal comfort. But outside it is gray and overcast and feels very rainy. It is not a happy day but yet inside what is usually the coldest room in my house, I am warm and toasty. It’s amazing. I definitely cannot afford to do this all the time but if it is possible to hang out in here, that definitely changes things and I will be happy to use this from time to time just for the change of pace.

I can’t really say that this is completely the truth but the difference seems to be where I place the heater. Last year, when I wanted to be warm, I would drag the heater all the way across to the space next to me at the desk and let it blow hot air. For some reason, no matter what I did it was just never enough to make this room warm enough to be livable. I tried sitting here in several coats on a number of occasions but it was just absolutely painful so I quit doing it. Now I have the heater all the way on the other side of the room and I am letting it blow into a covered location. Yet, it is just beautiful and toasty.

I said before that I cannot do this all the time. This machine is ridiculously expensive in terms of electricity. When we broke down the electrical costs of using this thing as a dehydrator, the money spent kind of made the whole thing at least thought provoking. If you were to go and buy these mushrooms at a supermarket, there is a good chance that I’m still cheap. But, if you consider the actual costs of how much it takes without balancing it out against anything else, it’s a lot of money going away.

This is actually why I’m sitting in the office. I could be anywhere else. I could be doing a lot of things I guess. But if this room is going to be this warm, maybe it’s a good opportunity to be here and clean things up. And that’s exactly what I’m doing. I am cleaning up the computer and putting things in order. I’ve got my catalog up and I’m making places both on my hard drive and in the cloud for all of my collected works. I’m still not sure exactly what I’m going to do with all of this. (although it would be nice to actually get paid for some of this stuff -ed.) But still, it gives a sense of relevance to at least have it seem as though I care about this stuff. Even a computer hard drive can look a little bit like a trailer trash junkyard.

Speaking of that, I have noticed that the grounds of my property are a little trashy. There is a lot of stuff laying around that could be somewhat beautified. I have a taste for natural things in their natural state doing natural things. I don’t really mind weeds so much especially in the portions that I’m specifically leaving wild. My ex partner and people who walk around out here don’t seem to see what I see and never have the respect for things that my other gardener, nature/god, seize fit to put down. To natural fascist Russians, simply destroying what is natural and in front of your face seems to be some kind of a mark saying how wonderful you are as a person. Dumbasses.

This thinking shows itself in the neighbors on either side of me. The chicken people use one gardening instrument to knock down all the grass. My other neighbors paid some local alcoholics to cut down all of their trees. Quite a few of them were at least growing on our border and were appreciated for allowing privacy. Now it’s up to me to plant more trees on my side to close up the gap between the houses. Even if they don’t live here, I have no predilection for looking it down and I absolutely prefer them not paying a damn bit of attention to me.

This has us looking at decorative trees. I would not say that it has been a particularly professional conversation but I am looking at very fast growing trees and hedges. I would like things that hold on to their leaves and or grow flowers. These are privacy hedges as much as anything. I’m also thinking it would be nice instead of getting one particular variety of trees, several for some interesting diversity and perhaps a nice habitat for birds and such. I know my neighbors don’t care about this stuff, but I believe in the power of trees.

Anyway, I am officially out of the mushroom business which is good because the mushroom season is pretty much closed. I would say that I did very well and if I count my ex partner’s haul, we are mushroom fat. Unfortunately though, I got even another call from my neighbor Tanya today who asked me if I would take just one more load. I believe I am buying cigarettes if that means anything. Either that or she’s getting used to me and likes coming for visits (because I’m pretty good at giving money for cigarettes.)

Today however, she brought up another proposition. She has a daughter looking for English lessons. The way she broached the idea, I immediately cringed with the thought of not only one professional scandal maker but with her Mini-Me variant using the same tactics. Tanya is a handful and I can only imagine what her teenage daughter is like.

However, I am not opposed to the idea. We may not be the same person and we certainly have different habits but I like her. Sometimes that’s enough.

So, when she contacts me, I will have a meeting with the daughter and we will see what the story is with her English, her general studying abilities, what this “difficult personality” is that Tanya mentioned to me and whether or not we have any chance to do anything together. Yes, I did warn her that I myself can be difficult especially for people who try to be clever with me. I will go to the ends of the Earth for someone who will genuinely work for me. I won’t get out of bed for people just trying to figure out how to steal from me or how to get through lessons because they just don’t like it. If she’s willing to try, I’m willing to try. It’ll be a perfect barter that way.

As far as if I actually want to make a comeback and teach regularly, the answer is basically no. I do not believe I have the tolerance for this new generation. Their attention is too divided and they have life almost without any of the effort I honed my teaching skills with. True, my first entry into the teaching profession was with Polish children who took pride in being able to steal and cheat. That was one of my first lessons. But once I got here, there were enough kids with heart to keep me in the chair 60 hours a week. As long as they were people doing their job, I was the greatest teacher in the world.

So this is basically the story. It’s too bloody warm but I need to let this thing run a little while longer to get the last of the water out of this last group of mushrooms. This is going to be a spending month because of these mushrooms but I guess it’s a reasonable price to pay. Next year, I might do things a bit differently. But no matter what, you just have to understand that this is part of the game. Mushrooms come at a time when it’s very wet and cold. You can’t put them out under the sun because there’s not enough sun to do the work. That means it’s energy intensive no matter what you do. If you want mushrooms, that’s the cost of admission.

***

Well, I guess this is the end of a rather unproductive day. Yeah, the cost of mushrooms.

I don’t know why I did it because I didn’t need them. But Tanya called up this morning and said she had mushrooms for me if I wanted them. I told her that I was pretty much at my limit for mushrooms but she said it would probably be the last and that I could have them for lunch or dinner. I don’t know why I agree to that because I don’t really eat mushrooms as a main dish. I know people do. I don’t. I know there are vegetarians who create things that look like hamburgers or steaks or imitation chicken patties or God only knows what out of mushrooms. But I don’t do any of this. I agree I like mushrooms but I like them mostly for the umami flavor they bring to dishes. I use them as a flavoring element. I use them as something to bring that certain tasty deliciousness to soups and things like that. The last thing I needed was more mushrooms.

Well she came and the thing of it was that she was hoping I would work with her daughter. I don’t know what the big excitement was because I had already agreed I would do what I could. The daughter never called anyway and Tanya says that she has a difficult personality. I ended up having another day with a ridiculously warm office because there’s no way I could have eaten all of those mushrooms.

I made an extremely tasty cream of mushroom soup for lunch. It needed bread or potatoes but I didn’t take the trouble to do either. It was okay. It was a very relaxing meal and very filling. A little later in the day I ate another meal, this time getting rid of a few plump mushrooms that just wouldn’t dry out quick enough. It had the same effect. It was tasty enough but I definitely didn’t need to eat it. Mushrooms are weird. They have a weird effect on you.

Tomorrow there is going to be some activity. Today, about the only thing I did besides those mushrooms was to put silicone caulking on my windows. There were places that definitely needed to be sealed up. Maybe I am imagining things but it was amazing how just a little bit of window caulking can make the place warmer. You wouldn’t think it would make that much of a difference but it really did. Just a little bit of caulk and suddenly the house felt 5 or 10° warmer.

Tomorrow Lena is going to come by and I think she’s going to do some wash and maybe make a run to the market for me. On wednesday, I should be able to fix my bike and maybe I can add to my 2 mi total of bicycle riding. I could do some serious work on my bike and start putting in some serious writing for health. I don’t think it’ll make a great deal of difference on my legs in terms of pain. I don’t think pedaling will be any kind of a problem and in fact it’s usually good for everything else if I do that. With global warming being what it is and as long as the snow doesn’t get too deep, I could probably keep riding my bike all the way into January.

I talked a little bit with my ex partner about decorative trees again. There were some interesting thoughts that are available for not too much money. We were talking about cherry trees or magnolias. I thought maybe some bamboo would be pretty cool. We looked at all different types of hedge materials. None of this is really so expensive and would probably go a long way towards making the place rather beautiful.

Actually, with the windows sealed a bit better and the obvious increase in insulation, this opens up some interesting possibilities for early spring greenhousing. If we can keep the temperature up without wasting too much money, and this mushroom dehydration experiment has taught me that we can, we might be able to do some really interesting things next year.

You know, this is absolutely not a perfect place to live. We have politics that believe human beings are only to be used. We are disposable now as illustrated by the Russian army. A lot of Russians take a look at other people who are suffering and they take pride in it. I’ve heard people say that it’s not Stockholm syndrome, people here have not decided to take the side of their captors. They say it’s just pure egotism. It feels good to conquer. They enjoy the bloodlust of victory.

I’ve never been a hunter. There was a time when I bought a gun and went out into the desert thinking I might shoot something. I shot at a rabbit but I didn’t hit it. After a while, I lost interest in the gun and gave it to someone for its value in some service or other. I never bought another one. I also went to a shooting range one time and took out a .45. I wasted a few dollars in bullets and then gave the gun back. I remember telling him that it shot a little bit to the right and he said that he didn’t care.

I’ve been dabbling in vegetarianism since my early twenties. From the time I got out of my parent’s house, I started thinking about what sorts of things were right for me. I always felt better as a vegetarian but would go out of it because I didn’t really have an academic background for it. I wasn’t a nutrition expert and was just trying something I believed were called diets. I never specifically was very good at being disciplined in my eating and these diets sort of faded away after a while in favor of intuitive eating. That means feeding your addictions basically. I have been addicted to fat and salt and sugar just like everyone else my entire life.

I don’t do this anymore. I don’t do it anymore purposely. I now have a very solid foundation of knowledge, not of diet but rather of what kinds of foods I should be eating. I’ve lost my addictions because of this. I’ve also lost my bloodlust. I feel I’ve become a better person because of this. I know I have. I’m just no longer crazy.

The problem is that there are many definitions of the word crazy. I think the pop psychology variation is that it is doing the same things over and over again but yet expecting a different result works pretty well. This seems to represent our voting history well enough. It also kind of represents the entire history of civilization if you want to get pragmatic about it. It definitely connects with anyone looking for something called a diet to help them in their life or eating disorders which are basically the same thing.

There are other people who believe insanity is simply the act of hurting oneself over and over again. There are millions of justifications for this but it’s really hard to stop people from doing this once they get into it. It actually doesn’t matter the motivation, it’s the actions that mean something and some people just never stop killing themselves.

When I was in high school however, I learned a great definition for the word crazy. They said it was simply someone who goes against societal norms. What the population does popularly is correct and for those who do not go along with the majority, they are just seen as crazy. Oddballs, Wing nuts – there are all kinds of words that people have for people that go their own way and take those roads less traveled. I personally have never understood people who just go along with the crowd. I keep thinking that all those changes of direction would make you crazy. Even the act of giving other people the right to tell you what to do has always seemed crazy to me. 

But look at all we have built while living in exactly such a system. Look at how many people have surrendered themselves to Jesus. Look at how many people have sold their voting rights for a handful of promises that things will be better. Look at how many people took that official notice that they were being called to duty by their country and actually believed it was their duty to go wherever they were sent and do what they were told to do. About a thousand people a day are dying from that particular variation of insanity. I hope they are pleased with the quality of the burial and I hope their families are happy with the payment if it ever comes.

I believe that our whole world is crazy most of the time. Almost everything everywhere seems crazy to me. It’s crazy because it’s unsustainable, repetitive, unimaginative, cruel and self-destructive and everybody is miserable. It’s crazy because to live like this is insane.