Wednesday, March 16th 2022

I am in my ex partner’s kitchen where of course it is very warm. I just finished breakfast of some homemade toast, some napa cabbage and tea. There was no coffee today.

Before I go back home, I have one new bit of bureaucracy to take care of at the local polyclinic. There is a document that somehow did not get made when it was supposed to get made or was made strangely. This is among the joys of socialized medicine. There is a lot of waiting and a lot of document gathering. I’m glad I have a bicycle, I can do my bureaucracy by bike and I don’t put too much weight on the local ecology.

After that, I have some serious banking to do. We are at war, the currency is crashing, everybody is panicked about money and I am one of them. I am not panicked but we need to be very, very careful. My advice is to spend as little money as possible and when you do spend money, you should only spend it on absolute necessities. No matter how much you wish to be frivolous and no matter how much you wish to be good to yourself, you can’t. You have to be dry, dead sober and as miserable as humanly possible. This philosophy comes from my ex partner. She is a woman. Women love suffering more than anything in the world. Christian women are worse.

However, amazingly enough, we have come up with an actual good idea from a business meeting between us. My partner came up with the idea of planting my lower field, the one that we grew potatoes in last year, with lentils and chickpeas. This was an amazingly good idea. Before I came to town, I had started cleaning up that field and was wondering exactly what to do with it. These lagoons are a genuine staple in my diet, the plants are excellent ground cover and nitrogen fixers and I think we have the perfect growing situation.

What is also excellent about this is that we are free to use store-bought lentils as seeds. This makes them much, much cheaper than buying seeds specifically for agriculture. I agree that the quality might be less but maybe we can make up for a lack of quality with volume. And even if we are not successful on the food side, again, these are nitrogen fixers and excellent for the soil, very good ground cover and they become really good green fertilizer. Basically it was an excellent idea.

This is more work. I am aware of exactly how much work I have to do but I’m also becoming aware that I’m getting used to it. This is the same lesson learned again and again that your body takes about 3 days to get used to almost anything. If you ask your body to do something, it might not like it but it will get used to it. This is unfortunate knowledge for colonizers to understand. But it’s the truth.

I am already noticing the effect in that my body simply does physical jobs without waiting that I used to rethink and perhaps let go. You just get used to standing up and doing. The work becomes natural and I suppose perhaps even addictive.

I’ll say this again that I’m not really looking for endless work to do. Eventually, I want 90% of what I have to be perennial. I don’t want to make slave gardening the center of every season. But for right now and with getting used to being able to move again being the most important thing to me, I guess I’m happy to have this work. 

Maybe my tool will change in the future. Maybe I will look forward to the work the way I have gotten used to doing these daily writings. Maybe it’ll be a chore of the exact same quality. I know I have to put some things down on paper, electronic paper but paper, and if I do this every day something good happens. Actually, nothing good ever happens from this and it seems more bad things happen than anything. The world doesn’t want you being smart seems to be the lesson. I’m just saying it might end up to be the same thing.

Also, I quite like being tired at night physically. There is a big difference between being mentally tired and physically tired. I find I sleep really well at night when I’m physically tired. And at the end of the day when I don’t want to be outside anymore, I find myself very comfortable in the warm room on the floor having a cup of tea and maybe some nuts and raisins. This is a very good time of the day when you are tired physically. When you’ve done your job, it’s very easy to say that you can rest.

So, I have a lot of things to do this morning and I’ve got to get my bags ready. I’m going to make two or three stops in town as quickly as the bureaucracy will let me and then I’m going to get one more taxi cab to go home. They are delivering gas today and today I will make sure that I meet the truck that takes our garbage away. I have accumulated an entire bag of plastic. These plastic bags are the only garbage I have that needs to be carried away.

You know, sometimes I dream. Sometimes I look at a situation and I see a better situation that can be created from the one that’s in front of me. I’m a natural socialist and eventually I see really well functioning communities of people that get along very well and help each other. I see healthy communities with healthy people living in reasonable harmony with nature. This is not the reality we live in and our reality is rather dirty and right now, we are murderers and we are simply destroying each other so that people can make money off of the suffering.

But one of the dreams I have is that the town takes over the store. We have one little store in our town and generally all it sells is alcohol and cigarettes and trash quality meats and basic home necessities. There are a few things that I buy there but if I am at my most healthy thinking, there is almost nothing I need from them.

I have the dream though that the community takes over this store and we stock the shelves with our own produce. It becomes a community meeting place and people can make a few pennies selling what they grow. It would be wonderful if it was a place to go when you need some fresh vegetables but you don’t have them. In my own case, it would be wonderful if I did not have to come all the way to town to pick up decent vegetation. Maybe This Year I’ll be successful and I will have my own.

I also see a horse cart taxi service. There are a lot of old people who can’t walk and the road is ridiculous to ride a bike in because of the depth of the sand. If it hasn’t rained, it’s like trying to ride on a beach and this is every single meter of the unpaved service road. And the road near my house is almost always unrideable.

But we have some men who have nothing particularly to do and for just a few dollars, we could outlaw cars generally in town and arrange a horse cart taxi service to get people from the main road to their houses. It wouldn’t take very much money. We could do it as a subscription service really. And if we’re talking about transporting goods, horse carts worked really well for hundreds and hundreds of years. No pollution, noisy internal combustion engines breaking the silence, just a quiet clip clop clip clop and a gentle wave to your neighbors as you go by.

***

It’s about 10 minutes after 11:00 and I am back at home. The last half hour has been a bit crazy. I was definitely not expecting that but it seems that everything that’s happening is for the good.

To start with, there was a giant cardboard box near my ex partner’s door that was available for taking. This was the last piece of the puzzle I needed to put a bottom on one of my two last raised beds. It was the perfect size and fit and will do a remarkable job of blocking out the Sun and prohibiting the grass from growing.

I sat down in the kitchen and out of curiosity turned on the stove and miraculously, there was gas. I don’t know why there was no gas the day before. It’s not like it was turned off and there is a lock on the box that was untouched. Also, it had been a lot colder and there is no particular reason for the gas pipe to freeze. But for some reason, today we have gas so I was able to have some toast and coffee which is exactly what I wanted. I’m still getting gas today and for sure there’s probably not much left in that tank but the toast and coffee was perfect. 

Then I got a phone call. It was from the local hospital. This last little element of bureaucracy is now happening. One doctor did not quite understand the situation and called to find out what I knew. I guess I said the right things and she said that everything is going to be under control. When I go to town next week I can pick up my necessary documents and then I must mail it back to Minsk and everything is in order. I’m still going to have to wait for a while for further treatments because the war has damaged our International relationships. But everything is as in order as it needs to be on that front.

During that call however, Lena started screaming at me from my gate. I tried to ignore her for a second but she kept screaming. By the time I managed to get to the front door though, she was gone and so whatever she wanted went with her.

Then I got another phone call from my old friend Nina, the downstairs neighbor from my daughter’s mother’s apartment. She called to suggest that there is an organization that could provide me with a woman to help me clean up around the house, bring water and wood and go to the store for me even twice or three times a week. It was very important for her to tell me that this service exists, it really wouldn’t cost me very much money and all I had to do was write a paper to the state and they would take care of everything.

Last year I tried to find people to help clean my floors but it was never easy. Last year I had a very serious foot condition and was septic most of the Year to one extent or another and the floor was constantly covered with wet spots that needed to get cleaned up. I thought it would be pretty easy to find someone to come by two or three times a week and mop up and do exactly the sorts of things that Nina was suggesting but it never happened. The world just doesn’t work that way and although it’s a cliche, you just can’t find good help anymore.

This year I’m doing it all myself and I’m happy to be doing it all myself. I like the responsibility, I like having the free time to do such things at my own pace and I don’t really believe that somebody wonderful will come into my life as a result of writing a paper to the government offices. She said she was just worried about me and wanted to know how I was. Nice.

Then I had another visitor at my gate. I don’t know this guy’s name but he is attached to the local collective farm and I guess Lena had told him that I’m looking for some fertilizer. He said he would not be able to bring it until tomorrow and he said that the cost of bringing a load of either cow or pig shit would be about 15 rubles. Yes, this is the cost of a bottle of vodka I think. It might even be the cost of two bottles of vodka or three bottles of wine. There are a lot of issues about the currency these days but this is I am sure what the thought process is.

We did this last year and there are no documents to sign so I don’t think he has any obligation to do this. Also, I was giving it a lot of thought about not using animal manure. Exploitation of animals etc etc. But what are you going to do? It’s really good fertilizer and it doesn’t cost much except for the effort of putting it where it needs to go.

So sometime today, I’m going to move the remaining boards that I cut for the raised beds into the barn and I will use this place for a staging area. I have a secondary plan where I take down a section of fence and the horse can just travel through to the other side and we can drop the fertilizer there. It’s difficult for me to make this decision.

What this guy wants to do is go out on the field where I would make a plow and he would just spread the manure there and then bring in a horse and a plow and bury it in the land that way. And if I wanted to go one particular direction, this might not be a bad idea. I’m thinking if I can get them to fertilize the area that we are planning to use for a bean field and then plow us individual rows instead of plowing up the entire field to a crown. This would save me a lot of human labor and would basically set us up for this Bean field deal. 

I will think about it and talk to him about it when he comes tomorrow. This load is going to be for the raised beds and for any other trees that we plant this year.

And then it was quiet again.

The moment after the taxi drove away, I realized how high I was carrying my shoulders. I tend to hunch up my shoulders as a way of protecting my ears from the constant bombardment of noise. The moment the taxi noise stopped and I could hear the birds singing, I realized how tight my body was from avoiding the noise.

I first noticed this phenomenon many years ago when we had a small parcel of land in another village. At that time it took me several days for my shoulders to drop and for me to relax from the noise from town. Even this need for toast and coffee probably comes from the hysteria of trying to block out the noise.

I really don’t think people understand this. People don’t understand how much damage is caused by noise pollution. There’s probably a Google question about this.

Is noise pollution harmful to human beings?

Noise pollution impacts millions of people on a daily basis. The most common health problem it causes is Noise Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL). Exposure to loud noise can also cause high blood pressure, heart disease, sleep disturbances, and stress. These health problems can affect all age groups, especially children.

A lot of people ask me why I left town but they don’t really want to understand my answer. I guess there are a lot of things that you could say that just wouldn’t make sense to people. Maybe they don’t understand it or maybe they don’t want to hear it. Or maybe they just can’t hear it. Maybe this is another type of deafness. There’s a type of hearing loss where you can hear the sounds but you just refuse to acknowledge the meaning of what you’re hearing. I think there’s a lot of that in climate deniers. There’s a lot of deafness in the world and I guess it’s not hard to figure out where it comes from.

As I’m sitting here and thinking about this, I feel a vibration inside of me. It’s a bit like when you strike a tuning fork and the tone rings with the vibration of the metal. It’s like I have been revved up to a fever pace and suddenly the plug has been pulled and I’m just sitting here feeling the residual of it all.

Last night when my ex partner finally got back to her apartment, I was on the floor and almost completely inert. I didn’t want to move and maybe I couldn’t move. I was just there on the floor like a bag or a book or something like that. There wasn’t a single muscle in my body that wanted to do anything.

At the time, I thought that it was really about pain. I just didn’t want to feel any more pain in my legs. But now I’m thinking that it was the sensory overload. It was two days of being assaulted by cars and traffic. A visit to the capital is not a thing of excitement, it’s a misery, it’s torture.

I made my ex partner laugh telling her about what it’s like to do business at the clinic. Everyone screams at me there. Every problem they have, they just scream at me as if I’m supposed to know the answer. And this is everybody from the people in the administration to the workers and the text who do the actual work. They just scream and create drama in every nuance. At the end, somebody told me that I had just experienced a Russian hunt, like from that movie. I had experienced a drunken helpless non-functional romp and at the end I got some tiny satisfaction from having been through the experience. But maybe they’re all just deaf. Maybe living in the center of town has just broken them.

Now that I’m thinking about this, I noticed how tired my shoulders are. I have been holding them up for days. I’ve been walking around with full body protection for days just to keep the pollution off of me. Just to keep the covid, the noise pollution, the air pollution and the hysteria off of me. It’s like you have to fight a war just to live here. And I doubt anybody is aware of this and even if they were, they would just shrug their shoulders and tell me about how their people are and how I just don’t understand things.

I guess I should get going. I don’t really want to move around a lot but I have a ridiculous amount of work to do. I have two more boxes still to feel with leaves from the forest but now I have to move those boards into the barn so I have a place to drop the fertilizer. And then I have even more work transporting that wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow into my boxes.

I won’t put it straight in. I’m going to put a layer of my own land first to cover the leaves and twigs from the forest. And then I’m going to put the shit on top of that and then finally I’m going to top off the boxes with whatever planting soil we finally get to. I think I’m going to borrow it from the forest. Better to use the topsoil from the forest than to buy it. Maybe it’s more work but it will save money. And I am really worried about money these days.

***

Well, that was madness. I had no idea I had that much work in me. And none of that was easy.

My original idea was to remove a section of fence right near where my raised bed garden is and to use this as a staging area for the fertilizer. But the moment I pulled the fence down and managed to tuck it away in a nice place, I saw that it made a beautiful road for a horse cart. And then suddenly I just wanted to rethink the entire thing.

I called up my ex partner and she assured me that the idea of planting lentils and other legumes means that you don’t particularly have to put fertilizer down first. It is a nitrogen fixer all by itself. But we did give a thought of whether we want it to plow the field or not so I will have a talk with my guy when he comes tomorrow. In the meantime, I have a much better place for a pile of fertilizer and now we have wonderful access.

But there was a lot more to that job than just removing the fence. There was basically a tree that had been brought in years ago but had never been cut up that had to be moved. I needed to cut back the grass because I didn’t actually know what the land looked like underneath. And then I had to move that pile of boards that I had built the boxes from all so that there could be easy access.

To top all that off, I managed to fix my favorite saw. And even that was a lot of work because I didn’t really have the tools to do the job in 5 minutes and I had to Belarus it a little bit. 

That’s not really a verb but I learned this many years ago when the country was in complete poverty and I hung out with the bicycle team. They had exactly zero budget and were cannibalizing their collection of road bikes just to keep a team of 10 kids on the road. Every flat had to be fixed by hand, nothing was ever thrown away, spokes were rethreaded even. 

Actually I learned quite a bit about mechanics back in the early days. Self-sufficiency was not the rule, it was a fact and necessity of life. My friend Zhenya still lives by this and we’ve been keeping my bike running old school since I met him. I wouldn’t have it any other way. And he is absolutely the best wheel builder I have ever met.

I’m very fond of creamy soups. The trick is to use just a little bit of newt (chickpeas) and some sunflower seeds and a few spices. Not too much. Really, mostly water. And it will thicken up beautifully and add some protein and that beautiful creamy taste. Seriously, we don’t need milk.

Yes, I am ready to eat something right now. I will get down to the bottom of the page a little bit later. I’m in quite a bit of pain right now and this has been a lot of work. It’s been a bit of pain and a lot of work but everything got done. We are on time and under budget and it seems we are working well together. God willing, we’re going to have a good year this year.

***

It’s a quarter to 10:00 and I’m about finished. I finally made it back to the warm room and sat down and enjoyed the lack of pain. It was a fight today. I was enthusiastic about the fight and I was pleased with the results.

I have an interesting relationship not only with my ex partner but with civilization in general. I feel like I’m living in a Time Warp. I’ve gone back to a simpler time when modernity was something that existed only for other people or on television but yet no one was particularly jealous.

I am not impressed when people show me things that they have bought. I am unimpressed by ostentatious displays of wealth. I never really thought of it before in this light but I just don’t care how much money you have. I remember when I was working with our local oligarch. It would be a good name for him truthfully but I never thought of him in this way. I guess one of the things he liked about me is that I did not particularly see him as an extraordinary person because of his money. I am quite sure that he spent his day getting his ass kissed and was quite used to this. But I’m no good at it. All I knew is that he called me and wanted me to work with him on his English and I said yes and so this was our relationship.

He studied with me I think on three separate occasions and I remember that at the time, he was one of the worst students I’d ever had. But really I can’t blame him. He wasn’t really interested in working on his English. He was always interested in something else, something that was not part of my lessons. To this day it was an unspoken thing. Perhaps I’m a bit more used to this sort of elephant in the room that no one can see business. Or I could just say everything was about power. But I never took the hook. I just took it as it came and said thank you when it was time to go.

After a while though, I got used to the fact that it wasn’t really going to be a class. I knew he wanted something from me but he never actually told me what it was. Most likely, he was waiting for me to give him a business offer. This is what most people do with him. He has money so he sits and waits for people to come up with business ideas. I never did though. I never really came up with an idea to make money because I was already making money teaching English. I just wasn’t interested in flipping anymore.

During our last sessions, all I did was sell him ecology. At the time, he wanted to build a new battery factory in Brest but was having an incredibly hard time with protesters who didn’t want the pollution. I remember talking to him about this and being quite clear that I was on the side of the protesters. He really wasn’t interested in this line of conversation and eventually things went a bit bad for him. He got investigated and spent time in jail. But then friends of the president bought the factory, kept him on as an advisor and now you don’t really hear much about protests. There’s a difference between when the president runs a company or his friends do and when a private citizen does.

But in all the time we were together, it never occurred to me to give a damn about how much money he had. It was just a conversation or a class situation. He was just a guy I knew.

I’m sure quite a few people think that I’m crazy for thinking this way. Most probably my ex partner would be much happier with me if I lived and died with wealth accumulation. I guess it’s hard to explain it. I guess it’s hard to explain to people that I am not impressed by wealth nor by the things money can buy. I’m not interested in anything but the basic function of a thing. All of this style, all of this parading, all of this begging for attention just makes me sick. I don’t care what other people have. I just want to know how all this works.

I think the entire war in Ukraine is about money. I think that the oil business is making money every time one of the war vehicles moves. All of the war machines run on gasoline. They also make money every time they shoot a gun for a missile or drop a bomb. Every time someone gets injured or killed, there’s money to be made.

And of course it’s about the rights to black Sea oil. Everything always was dependent on their ability to drill for oil in the Black Sea. But that’s not the entire apparatus for making money.

Gentrification is the process whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses, often displacing current inhabitants in the process.

“an area undergoing rapid gentrification”

This is what the war in Ukraine is really about. It’s forced gentrification. I didn’t really see it before I talked to the cab driver today. When I told him about the other cab driver and how he said there was no business, my guy was dismissive. The other guy was a complainer, a coffee drinker and he didn’t want to work. If you want to work, there’s money. I’ve driven a cab before and I can see his point of view. It is very much true that if you put in your time, you’ll make your money.

But he also had a very dismissive idea of the war. We talked a bit about Kharkov and he seems to be looking at this from a different point of view. To him, it was just a military attack on a military zone. There were hardly any civilian casualties. I understood that he was watching the national news and I was watching the European reports. Locally, hardly any private citizens get hurt and abroad, there’s no such thing as a military Target and they are just bombarding the citizens.

The easiest thing we could do would be to think that the truth is probably somewhere in between both of these views. Everybody has an agenda and everybody likes to play up the drama in the media. This would be the drama that says there is no drama and everything is fine or the drama that says that everyone is hysterical and the world is coming to an end.

That’s someone else who makes money on people’s misery. The press continues to do business by writing and showing us these incredible images.

And I can see that nobody really cares about 1.5 million displaced people. When The war is over, it doesn’t really matter who won or who lost. There’s going to be a lot of money to be made in the rebuilding.

I remember traveling in the late 90s and meeting people in and around Croatia. The war was going on in the Mediterranean at that time and I remember very specifically something someone said. They asked me my profession and I told them that I worked with stone and they told me that there were a lot of British stone masons working all along the coast. I remember being a bit frightened of even being in Croatia at the time but to a lot of people, it was opportunism. 

With people dying, the value of the real estate drops perceptibly. Even down to nothing and people with money can swoop in and pick things up dirt cheap. During a time of war when even the bare necessities of life are not available, work is cheap. You can find people to do almost anything for the money when there’s a war going on.

I have a bunch of very calm optimistic people I know and someone today told me that we are winning. I didn’t actually know what he meant. I didn’t know who we were. If you want to say that our people are winning, if this is what he was saying, I don’t believe in this our people business anymore. I think the moment that they started shooting rockets at Ukraine there were no longer any our people.

Unless he was talking about businessmen. If he was talking about folks who were making money, I don’t really think I’m in that group. I’m not into exploitation. I’m not into flipping. I’m not into war or fighting for resources. I’m not playing the game because I think the game is disgusting.

If I haven’t said this enough, I completely understand that people will just roll their eyes and dismiss me for being a fool. I know this like knowledge because I’ve heard it a thousand times. But this is just not what I see. I see human misery. I see pain and death and people getting ruined. I don’t see it as an opportunity to make a buck. I see it as the lowest form of humanity being practiced openly. And if it’s even possible to be worse, once you get the idea that this is the exact reason why they’re shooting rockets and bombs and sending troops, it just completely makes you sick. It just completely puts you off money.

I am not saying I’m a better person than anybody. I’m not saying that I am the righteous one and my ideas are sacrosanct. I’m not saying that I’m right and you’re wrong. But what I am saying is that we have great ecological problems right now because of everybody trying so hard to make a dollar. We have an economic system where you have to pay for your life. We have to pay for every single aspect of our lives everyday. I mean, if they could charge you for the air, they would do it. All for money. All for greed.

The problem is that I don’t want the things money can buy. I don’t care about things. I don’t care about stuff. I agree that having a little money in the bank is a definite plus. It’s better to have a few dollars lying around than not. Without question.

But I don’t want money to show people that I have money. I’m not looking to impress anybody because I myself am not impressed at all by people who show me their wealth. I don’t know what they want from me. Truthfully, I don’t know what they want from me.

I have a Facebook friend, several really, who seem to have more money than God. And I get these cryptic hellos from them. Call me sometime. I just can’t figure out why. I can never figure out why I’m supposed to call them.

Anyway, today I did some building. Well, I didn’t really do any building, I just made a little room so a horse car can bring some fertilizer for me. And I managed to move that big pile of boards we bought. And I took care of some bureaucracy around town and ate a really good dinner. And for the last couple of hours, I’ve been hanging out with a TV show and enjoying the warmth of a pretty good fire.

I just didn’t want to be on my feet anymore truthfully. I’m really tired and my legs are killing me most of the day. I did not enjoy sitting all day after day on the bus and I guess I had a little bit too much pent up energy.

I just want there to be less pollution. I just want there to be less human suffering. I just want people to have what they need and to be left alone to amuse themselves as they like. I’m just in favor of letting people take care of themselves already. I’m just in favor of living in a clean, quiet world. I’m just not interested in money I guess. I don’t like money.