I’m out in the garden right now basically grazing. I know I’m supposed to be doing something, I’m just not sure what. It’s been raining and cold for the last few days and this has allowed me some well needed time off. At the same time however, Lefty seems to be showing up for work these days. The opportunity to fail is always with us and we are aware that he is fragile. But currently he doesn’t really need to go inside except when he’s tired which is not such a bad situation to deal with.

My friend Mrs Salt Bush is making his appearance. If you are a fan of perennial edibles, Mrs Salt Bush is your friend. She’s tasty right out of the ground, you can munch a few leaves as if they were part of the skewer and when you’re done, there’s a clean taste in your mouth and a freshness that goes right through your system like nothing but living food can do for you.

Fertile, fertile, fertile little plants, those Salt Bushes. In a pinch, you can call her food as I understand they did back during Stalin’s Purge and attempted genocide in Ukraine.

The problem is that I love to eat. Eating, especially when I’m nervous, is a habit I picked up from my mother. For the purposes of clear contextual understanding, my mother was of Ukrainian descent and shared with Ukrainians a propensity for insanity. If I were to take everything I know about the world right now and plug everything I know about my mother into it, I would diagnose it as Perpetual Traumatic Stress Disorder, a DNA residual from 2,000 years of systemic antisemitism. The last European rapist on their way to the Americas were the Russians and apparently, they are still very good at driving us crazy.

I suppose we could get into the history of Christianity in the region. What you would find is that the spread of Christianity here was pretty much the same as the spread of Christianity everywhere. It was a flag that was flown by some extremely harmful and soulless people who wished to suck the blood out of the regions and send it and everything else they could get their hands on on a direct line to their boss, the church. You join or you suffer torture. And because it was a deal made by the church, why must it be holy, right? It’s the mafia, right? Exactamundo.

So I’m walking through my garden and I’m looking at some plants that are disagreeable to me. They are not part of my planned enterprise and they are not friendly, like my friend Mrs. SaltBush. And here there is a conflict in my soul.

I can look the other way and say that life is life but I know that in the end, these wild plants will eat the life out of my food plants and therefore give me less food. I can argue its physical beauty or its contribution as a flower. I could even study more to find out if there are medicinal benefits. I could also just try it, and I do, taking a bite to find out if there is something in it that I might need. The answer is almost always yes if you want to go this deep into things.

I was pondering the urge to kill. I had justifications in my mind to simply pull him up. I went ahead and pulled a few weeds. Took them right out of the ground and out of their lives and put them in piles here or there. They become mulch. Their lives were a little shorter than they had planned and they died young but they are useful. All organic matter is useful eventually.

I start thinking about why I’m fixating on this killing. The only job I absolutely have to do at this moment is to find out how hot it’s going to be today in order to decide whether I need to turn the water back on. It’s been dry for several days on my side because God was allowed to take care of things somewhere and the residual happened to lap up on my shore.

Maybe it was that I was physically bored and wanted to do something. Whenever my leg is good enough to use, I find it impossible to stay down. Well, it’s impossible until I find that I’ve worn myself out and have to sit down or the leg breaks. I like the first variation better but it doesn’t have the finality of the snap or the crackle or the pop. At least you know you’re on the couch when it breaks. You’re always wondering when you have to get up again when Lefty is working.

Or maybe it’s just the nervousness of living with murderers. Maybe it’s the nervousness of living with murderers who believe themselves to be beautiful by some lunatic stretch of the imagination. I mean, I don’t believe either one of them would look naked in the mirror and clap their hands and slap their knees with joy that they had done it! Their bodybuilding regimen has paid off and the two of them are golden gods and by golly, he’s actually got an erection for a change and just looks at the two of them in the mirror because they are truly beautiful human beings. That’s not going to fucking happen.

No, the truth is they believe that my neighbors believe that they are beautiful because they are riding a wave of cruelty that is in favor of the state. Their guts are telling them that as long as they continue to participate as members in good standings of the Empire of Cruelty, they have the rights to name themselves good people by virtue of their status. You have to work really hard to achieve status in the Empire of Cruelty. You have to be very, very cruel for a very, very long time.

I just happened to have the manual. I guess you didn’t understand that there was a rule book. When you talk to people and everyone tells you about the rules it’s because they are written down and anyone can see them. The official rules are pretty interesting. Nothing is open to debate. It’s a bureaucratic movement that if any of the “new laws” are broken, this satisfies them that they have the right to dish out punishment. In fact, to their glee, they are free to dish out whatever cruel punishments feel good to them and they can feel good about themselves for having made themselves useful to their community. Cruelty pays well.

My neighbors absolutely smell like ranking members. I just can’t understand why they don’t live closer to their kind.

Right in the middle of this debate of right and wrong, they drove their cars and all the fresh air was gone. I realized that this is a part of my food. They’re taking me to hell with them. They’re poisoning my food and won’t even look up from what they’re doing for a moment to acknowledge it.

You see, the way it works is that they have status. They have learned the Ways of Cruelty as needed to be learned in order to participate in the economy of the Empire of Cruelty.

Now, one amazing fact about this particular species of invasive life, the life that they live is not actually the life that they should be living physically. In fact, the life that they are living poisons them 10 times as much, 20 times as much, a thousand times as much as it poisons me. They just cannot understand the sadness because they have agreed to cut that off in service to the Empire of Cruelty. They did it themselves just to be accepted and to have status.

Just like my mom.

Yeah, my mom was a smoker and my neighbor chews gum like a classic OCD. She only knows to keep that fire going and that this is the way she must live because if she stops and thinks even for a moment, there is the possibility of understanding how much pain she has caused to so many people. And now I am stuck with a case of PTSD from having to live with them. Oh well, at least this explains my nervousness.

Ok, whatever psycho shit I can think of to say, the problem is the cars. Right in the middle of my moment of acridity, I just said the truth as loud as I could. No, not as loud as I could, just in a good solid loud voice that is intended to be heard at a distance that I hated living with them.

Я ненавижу жить с вами.

A thought popped into my head. What if this trip was just to get rid of the car? What if they had talked it out amongst themselves and come to the conclusion that I should win this game? What if they decided that this great rope-a-dope game of mine is too much for them and they don’t have the heart to continue hating me? I’ve seen this before. Belarus comes and goes like a Salt Bush. What if they are ready to fold?

The deal would be that if they got rid of the cars, would I agree to be friendly with them. Does this work? Do we get to be friends?

It’s an interesting question. If they quit the cars and all of their benzo toys, what do they actually think life would be like with me? Probably, it would be exactly like Ghenna. Sergey would just shout my name over the fence when he wanted something and if I was outside doing something, I would answer him in a human voice the best I could. I would probably turn down invitations to visit his house for lack of desire to see how he lives or to taste the food he puts in his mouth. I’m not really interested in conversation with his wife for various reasons that come to mind. I suppose if he had some kind of a problem and asked me for a legitimate opinion, I would give him the time at least once if I believed it was real and I could trust him.

But then we run into a real problem. These guys are really good about sucking my dick. They can’t look past my body. What they are proposing is a relationship that will have a honeymoon, that when it dies, we’ll have absolutely no reason for a connection to remain between us. Their entire idea is based on a picture of me that gives them happiness like the Dali fucking Llama. Who as you can see is a climate advocate of course.

The problem is, they have this image of me in their head but they don’t read me. I mean, before they called the police on me to tell them how I had done all of this lunatic assaulting, maybe they should have read Being Had, which is the first time I ran into a bunch of Eastern Europeans who thought they could make some money by telling lies about some barbarian American. Or maybe they just never read Pod Kablukom, a story that recounts the drama of a romance between people who have absolutely no way to communicate with each other because the woman in question has never had a day of freedom in her entire life and doesn’t know what she’s supposed to say. What are they going to talk about together?

What happens when I am not to the satisfaction that they believed I should be? What happens when I am not cradle to grave work and a promise of enough food and a place to live? What if I do not magically pull from my pants the magical wallet of the Americas that directly connects to the United States Treasury and that allows me to write unilateral checks for so much money that even the cheapest tick in the world will have enough blood to suck to be happy?

The answer is that like all psychotics, they will venture back to their drugs as soon as they’re lust for her mine fades away. These people are not going to become ecologists. The possibility exists that they could but the pure layers of shit that have been placed there by the Empire of Cruelty has ensured that there is no possibility of human reason enough to sustain a cathartic moment. They exist to destroy. They do not produce anything for anyone. They are here to take what they can get and then scurry back into their hole and they don’t care who died along the way.

Anyway, it’s a funny thing about nature. Sometimes the mosquitoes tell you it’s time to go inside and close the windows. I know it sounds kind of funny but those mosquitoes never really bother you on days you’re supposed to be out there doing anything. On the days you’re supposed to leave everything alone, those mosquitoes tell you to get off.

I have a secondary thing to pay attention to here. The neighbor across the street, as illiterate a Quasimodo as one can find, has decided to rev a gasoline-powered instrument. He stares at it mournfully wondering how he could possibly kill faster. There’s way too much nature lying around and man’s paycheck comes from destroying as quickly as possible. All machines are actually kind of fun once you get a taste in your mouth for fucking things up and get used to the poison. And he coughs his hacking cough just for emphasis, or emphysema.

Yeah, the sun’s kind of coming out today. I have to think about watering. If I don’t water, this place doesn’t exist.