Quite a day today. I woke up very early but ready to roll on the journal. A lot got done. Then later but still pretty early in the morning, I got outside and took care of Wednesday business. Everything’s growing.

But when I took a walk into the forest, I found a birch tree lying dead across my path. She was full of leaves and full of life just a short time ago but for some reason decided to fall over. It wasn’t a sapling. It was a full-grown tree splintered down near the bottom and fell canopy and all.

I dragged her over to the woodpile. This is not my woodshed, this is a pile of dead trees that have been pulled out of the forest this year. It seems a bit redundant to continually talk about global warming, even in great detail and even to people who have heard this all before only to understand that I’m wasting my time and my breath. There’s nothing for them to change because they’ve never decided to do anything for themselves in their lives. My problem is that I have agreed to feel these things personally.

The mosquitoes chased me back inside and I went back to work on the journal. It didn’t help, the mosquitoes are everywhere.

And then Ghenna showed up. He was supposed to be here yesterday but he has an excuse so it doesn’t matter. The job today was to clean out the canal he dug on the top of the property. It’s not a great canal but it is a place for water to gather and it does create a disturbance where we want it. There’s supposed to be a lot of ivy and trees planted there. We should be doing it already but we never seem to get any ivy despite promises.

As an afterthought, I gave him my fireplace pan, a dustpan, a very long handled ash catcher to see if he could fix it. I don’t know if he has any welding equipment or if a neighbor has some but occasionally he comes up with some interesting tools like the hari hari trowel he sold me. The idea was to fix the damaged sides and to take the angle out of the tray. The firebox that’s full of ash is long and straight and a straight instrument is the only thing that’ll work.

I don’t know exactly who he’s with or how much vodka they need but that ashpan came back about an hour later. He was happy to get paid a little bit more money for his work today. He seemed to think it was important for me to come and greet him personally and give him a fist bump but I told him to just toss it over the fence. I could wire him the money and I couldn’t think of a single reason to go outside right now.

That birch tree hurt. That was a healthy tree as far as anyone could see. I guess it just didn’t want to live anymore. It didn’t want to live anymore because there wasn’t really enough water to drink. Everything living is going thirsty all the time these days. There’s just not enough water in the ground to drink.

Desertification sucks. Poverty sucks. The system sucks. Town people and car people and oil Business people suck horribly. Everything they touch dies.

It sucks living this life. It sucks knowing. It sucks feeling. It sucks having to knowledgeably experience the environment here and the people who have both created it and been created by it. What we have made and what we seem hell bent on continuing to make of our world just generally sucks.

On the other side of the coin, they can just get another bottle of vodka or go for a ride in their car to a supermarket and buy really interesting food from very far away and never feel a thing. I mean, popularly speaking, they are right and this is the way human beings are supposed to carry on. We are supposed to live up to our billing as the most disgusting form of cancer the Earth has ever known.