Monday, March 21st 2022

This is a video for the Midwest of the United States. That’s the Bible belt. Home of the stroke, heart attack and cancer. All that rich good food served right off the farm and all making use of dead animals or their excretions.

If I haven’t said this before, I am a confirmed vegan. I used to consider myself a confirmed lifetime bicyclist. I’m pretty sure this is still true. But I believe in veganism and if you are vegan curious or perhaps sitting on the fence or perhaps an accident of Nature has happened and you have had a moment of clarity, this is a good video to check out. I watched this last night and though I can’t really speak to the filmmaking as being the best, the point that gets made and the science is there. Actually, I think it’s perfect for Midwest tastes.

If you do watch this video on youtube, there will probably be more vegan films available in the algorithm. In case you’re just watching this on my website, https://green2022.org, here is a second one free of charge.

To go along with this theme, one of the saddest bits of blowback from the war in Ukraine is that KFC has stopped doing business in Russia but is still in business in Belarus. I don’t know why Russia should be treated to better heart health and cleaner arteries but Belarus should remain addicted to the grease, fat and sugar. We are not even the aggressor Nation. We are just the hapless sidekicks. A much better idea would be to double down and put as many KFCs as possible in Russia. Then you would be fighting a war and causing harm to the enemy.

And speaking of the war in Ukraine, I have been talking a lot about freedom of speech and how Russia does not allow such a thing. Actually, freedom of speech and anti-corruption has been my thing for roughly 20 years. English teaching and speaking in English about corruption is what I do. But here is a really good story from my friends at the Barents Observer about what Russian pro war propaganda actually looks like.

https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/security/2022/03/wave-warmongering-gushing-over-russian-youth

Good morning.

It’s about 10:00. A little bit before. The weather says we are slightly below zero but I am just getting started. I’m not afraid of the cold. In fact, I have become very comfortable in the cold weather. But I have been very reticent to get up this morning. I did a lot of work yesterday and then I ate a gigantic dinner and my body has shown no inclination about getting started again today.

If I was young and feisty, I probably should go over and see Zhenya. He is my mechanic friend in town and I have two pieces of work that require his expertise. And this is the third Monday in a row I have not gone to town. Why? There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, I thought I had a 22 three year COG on hand but I don’t. I mean, I have one but several of the teeth are broken and I have not bought a new one. I have a 42 tooth front ring but it is a complete piece of garbage and a holdover from the first bike rebuild four or five years ago. So, I’m just not ready to go over.

But also, I am either horrible at Mondays or excellent at them depending on your point of view. If Monday is the day that the world goes back to work, I like to say that I’m number one with my middle finger held high. I am so proud of the fact that I do not have to go back to work on Monday, you cannot believe it. My ex partner has a massive personality change every Sunday at 5:00 p.m. when the reality that her weekend is over turns to full HD. I used to take this personally and feel pain at her sudden disappearance. Now, I don’t even bother thinking of psychological diagnosis. I just waved goodbye and let her go back to her misery. I have better things to do then be miserable in my perpetual slavery.

The giant dinner was not supposed to be a giant dinner but it worked out that way. It was just some veggies and potatoes and I wanted to make a sauce for it out of peas and lentils and some extra hot peppers. And I did but then for some reason I added some spaghetti in there and by the time I finished cleaning the blender, you put more water in there to get the last of the residual from the bottom, I had a full meal for maybe three people. Probably four. And then about 40 minutes later, there was none left. It was too tasty, I was too tired to get up and I just kept going until I was catatonic. Now you know why I am so slow getting up this morning.

But I can see through the window that we have another blue sky. Yesterday was absolutely gorgeous weather. I worked in a t-shirt all day. It was my first day without sweaters or hoodies or overclothes of any kind and it felt good. When the fatigue hit me though at the end of the day, I sat down on a bench near a bucket of rainwater and pulled off the shirt to wash myself. That ice cold water reminded me of what the temperature really was and it sort of shocked me back to reality. 

I don’t know why I felt so good. Maybe your body just adapts to cold weather. A friend told me something about that one time. He literally said something like “you are from the village, you’re not afraid of the cold”. And I actually think that is the truth. At best, I only light one fire a day in the morning and I am extremely close to putting the space heaters in the closet. In fact, when I do visit my ex partner’s apartment, I find it a bit suffocating there. It’s too warm for me. It’s like being in a greenhouse.

Then again, I may have put on some weight. When I went into the hospital and just after I came out, I was about as thin as I have been in my life. But then I got kind of hooked on my ex partner’s food. She is a supermarket shopper and I always get mad crazy hungry when I eat her food. Actually, I get mad crazy which probably explains a lot. When I eat my own food, mega meals aside, I really only eat twice a day and I’m generally never hungry. I’m not really hungry right now and I’m not sure I was hungry last night. I guess that’s the thing about whole foods, they don’t make you crazy.

But I do have to get up and I am going to get up. I’m going to make some coffee and something small to eat with it. And then I’m going to pay some more attention to getting the bean field ready. If we’re going to plant this coming Sunday, I need to have all three rows in order.

Well, there’s actually a little bit more but the plan for the garden is now centering around the bean field. Perhaps I could have measured differently and we’re going to lose a little bit of the field where a willow tree overhangs it. But I think this is a good development. I think I’m going to use the area around that willow tree to plant four or five more fruit trees and then I have a little bit of land available for some north-south garden beds. 

I still won’t be done. There’s still some land left and I have another section of land that I’m going to plant some trees in. And of course, I have to finish filling the garden boxes which is the hardest work I’m doing right now. I knew this was coming and I knew it was going to be difficult but it’s going to happen. What I am counting on is that after tomorrow, it will become a very normal thing. This is the three day rule. It takes about 3 days to get used to anything, even toting wheelbarrows of dirt that you dig yourself.

And what else? Nothing else really. A friend of mine posted some news from Germany that the town is filled with Jewish refugees. I don’t know that this is exactly true or not. I have not been in touch with the Jewish community since last I spoke to them. The number they gave me was that about a hundred people were making use of the beds at the girls’ school. I suppose I could call and find out but truthfully, they were against any journalism on my part. I don’t blame them and I respect their privacy. But yes, there are some Ukrainian immigrants staying here in Pinsk and probably a lot of other towns in Belarus. 

Perhaps a few prayers from all of us would be helpful.

***

It’s 11:11 and I am breakfasted and coffeed and I am in the midst of procrastinating. It is another absolutely beautiful day. Another shirt sleeve day for sure. I have got a ton of work to do but on the other hand, I can’t help thinking of other work that perhaps I should be doing.

I have been ignoring the hell out of my website. It seems that I never take the trouble to finish it. I don’t know why I am so reticent to do this computer work. Well, that’s not exactly true. I know a couple of really good reasons why I do not want to sit in front of a computer for hours and hours and hours. There is nothing to make the act of sitting in front of a computer nice or fun and I would much rather be up and about and in the weather.

For the last 10 or 11 years, I have been talking and working over the internet. It didn’t start out exactly 11 years ago but when I turned all of my attention towards teaching students, the evolution of going online sort of came to me naturally. It paid and it allowed me a wider spectrum of people. In fact, I got so used to it, when I moved back to Pinsk four or five years ago, people were very put off that I did not want to work with them as a teacher. 

There were two main reasons for this. The first was that it is much easier to work over the Internet with someone who is a long distance away. Nobody is questioning the situation and the only thing you really worry about is the quality of the internet connection. Nobody is interested in sharing body temperature with you or staring into your face or at your body with their own eyes. Technically, there is less me and more class.

The other reason was that I really did not want to have too many disappointed people around me in town. This is not to say that my method doesn’t work, it does, but it only works for people who are willing to actually try and do it. If you have people who are going to quit and spend most of the lesson explaining to you why they can’t do it instead of trying, you end up staring at a big L on their forehead. My father taught me not to shit where I live and this was a prime example of that.

But being the dramadamas that they are, this was enough of a reason to go ape shit. They had a zoo animal and they wanted to pet it. The zoo animal did not want to be petted and it did not want to be pitied and it did not want to be explored and it was not interested in being given responsibility for people’s lives. I just wanted students who wanted to learn to speak English and I did not want people looking to have an intimate relationship with a foreigner.

They were all so very hurt when I left. I was let no this in no uncertain terms. People were upset that I decided to leave. They were not upset enough to ask me my reasons for leaving. They were not interested in hearing that the town is a cesspool, that the air in town is ludicrously poisonous now, that I am absolutely sick of catching covid-based diseases and the economic crisis that is perpetually there makes everybody scared rabbits trying to get their mouth on my carrot. Not fun, not interesting and not healthy.

In Russian they say that there is only one step between Love and hate and I got to experience that about a thousand times as well. If they were not free to throw peanuts at the bear in the zoo, they would throw rocks at the bear until he moved. This was my problem with my chicken neighbors, my drunk neighbors and my subservient hunchback neighbor. This is the triumvirate of hate that surrounds my property. This does not include the skeletal alcoholics but they were used to getting cold shouldered so when I didn’t want them coming around either, I just simply became one of “them”. 

I’m saying this because I got a message from a female friend who told me that in her estimation, the main reason for my distance was misogyny. Apparently, I don’t like women and this is the reason for living single.

Misogyny is a very interesting subject to discuss these days. We can start here:

Misogyny (/mɪˈsɒdʒɪni/) is hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women. It is a form of sexism that keeps women at a lower social status than men, thus maintaining the societal roles of patriarchy. 

The question of whether this explains me must come from somewhere. I’m not sure exactly where people would think this except to say that not accepting a woman’s role as practiced in Russian culture might be the culprit. As far as I can see, women placed themselves as the head of All families. Any woman has the right to be above any man. Well, above or below depending on their status as being someone who pays them money. If a man is paying money, he is above them, if a man is not paying them money, they must be quickly enslaved and ordered to do whatever manual labor is necessary on the whim of the woman.

Did I explain that well? I think I did.

I do not remember anytime in the last few years where women, when asking for my attention, do not immediately take a look to see how much energy I am putting out on their behalf. Because they are women, I am supposed to burst into energetic excitement and immediately find something purposeful for myself to do.

Last year, I saw a perfect example of this on a Saturday. It was a sunny afternoon and I was sabbathing on the grass near the front of my house and a neighbor who doesn’t actually live here anymore commanded the hunchback neighbor to cut her grass with a gasoline powered weed wacker. Why she needed this done was not clear. However, it seems as though what she was most interested in was for me to come to her to introduce myself as her neighbor. I say this because I remember her standing in her doorway smiling at me. This smile had full knowledge that because she was a woman and I was a man, it was my job to get up on my sick, septic legs and walk over to her regardless of whether that would endanger my health.

The hunchback could not help himself but be in violent action. He is in love with his gasoline-powered tools. It aids his sense of virility I suppose. He also has a remarkable hacking cough from cigarette smoking. He is married, I’m not sure if he works but I have the sense that should his wife leave him in a fit of reason, he would be camping with the local alcoholics within a week.

The exact identical situation happened in the house across the street. Absolutely abandoned as far as anyone can tell, one day brought two retirees. The man immediately picked up his gasoline powered weed wacker because his wife was demanding that he do some work. Both of them by the way we’re deaf as doorknobs. This is probably from the abundance of weed whacking or from the fact that they had been screaming at each other probably from the time of their nuptials. Or rather, she would scream and he would try and stay as far away from her as possible.

When she made her way over to my house, ostensibly to use my well, when I did not do the trouble of drawing the water for her, she was completely put off. How strange to make a woman do her own physical labor.

A third instance that I can name on this subject was from my chicken neighbor and her henpecked husband. This was one of the very few conversations that I have attempted to have with them. I was in front of their house and he was insisting on talking gibberish to me when his wife returned home in their evil pollution machine. She exited the car screaming and you could see the effect running through his nervous system. It was like an electric shock immediately severing any minor connection between his testicles and his body. He immediately ran out into the backyard to tend his long suffering bees. They are also fans of weed whackers and insist on cutting all of their grass so that no wild flowers could ever provide anything to eat for his beloved bees.

So this is a cultural thing that women feel they are the directors and movers of men. Men are lazy alcoholic slobs who given the opportunity would do absolutely nothing. Like me for example last year. Weather or not the little wet dots I would leave on the floor every time I stood up to walk meant anything to anybody, I needed to be spatulad out of my largesse and made to be in motion for their pleasure.

Can you see a pattern emerging here?

So I am living alone in my lovely house and doing exactly the gardening I wanted to do last year before all my neighbors put their nose into it. I’m still dealing with their uselessness and undependability but I’m used to it now and there is a lock on the gate as well.

The question is whether or not I hate women is not as true as the fact that I am fighting a status deal. 

I am a communist. I prefer living in equality with my neighbors. I do not care what preconceived notions you have concerning this word and I am not using it for effect to excite you. I am a communist because I believe we are supposed to be living together in relative equality. I believe we are supposed to be sharing the load and sharing the wealth and helping each other to get by. Mutual respect, fairness and justice and everybody does their part for the community. 

Two points of order to consider. Number one, this does not immediately bring rise to the argument of a woman’s role in a healthy society. People are going to do what is natural for them to do. If a woman wants to clean the house, let her clean it. If a woman wants everyone around her to be wearing clean clothes, off to the laundry with you. But at the same time, if a man wishes to have free time where he’s not being yelled at or told to get up, he is free to be lazy.

Just a minute, I can see you getting your pitchforks and tiki torches. I didn’t say that men are always lazy. We all have our jobs to do. We all have our help to pitch in and everybody should be expected to do their job. What I am talking about is when we are not at our job.

I talked to a female friend of mine briefly yesterday and I showed her what I was doing and she said that it was impressive. I was not looking for a compliment, not really, but I thought she might be interested because she knows me and knows what I have been going through for the last while. Truthfully, I am impressed with how much I have managed to do in the last month and the place is really starting to come together.

But let’s get one thing completely clear. It’ll be noon before I actually get out of this house. My breakfast was a bit greasy and salty and I had a little bit more than two helpings. I was in bed all morning because I couldn’t think of the damn reason to get out of it. And now I’m up and dressed but honestly, I would rather procrastinate and put some words into this blog then haul dirt from the lower field to the upper field to fill up my boxes.

I am going to do this. I am going to do this probably 10 times today. I might do it more than 10 times today. I might also stop and do some other jobs that need to get done today. But at the same time, there are some really comfortable places where I have not done any landscaping where the grass is soft and I might just sit down or even lie down in the middle of the day and take a snooze. Seriously. I might not keep up the neurotic hysterics of personal movement if I feel I don’t want it. I will not have anyone tell me to get up because there’s no one here to scream at me to get up. There is no one here reminding me about my diet. There is no one telling me they are dissatisfied with me as a person or with my performance in any way. I don’t have anyone talking to me and telling me how deeply I affect their emotions. In fact, I don’t have any emotionally damaged person around me looking to me for anything.

Is this hatred of women? I don’t think so. I think we could call this practical application.

I’m old, you see? I’m not 20. I am not so easily moved by my dick or my male hormones. I have been told that I am a very aggressive man and I have seen by my own behavior that it is true that vegans have generally more testosterone than their meat eating compatriots. I have my maleness intact. 

But what also remains intact are my memory and my common sense. Vegans think clearer because we don’t have so much fat clogging our veins and arteries. We are also not bothered by any unnecessary carnivorous activity. I am not particularly attached to people anymore. Or in other words, it’s just not a good deal anymore.

I’m not saying anything bad about my ex partner. I gave it a try. Perhaps we both gave it a try but really, she was not prepared to give up her independence. She is who she is and she has lived the life that she has lived and she likes her job and her apartment and her freedom to do what she likes. Good for her. Seriously, good for her.

Now, we are great friends. She has no problem with my visiting her, I keep the shower cleaner than she does and I do not bother her for even one penny of her money. I tend to ask her to be some help buying things and making phone calls for me. I do this because when she makes the phone call, people will talk to her normally and when I make the phone call, it will be an epic moment in their lives, the drama of this, I want no part of. Basically, she’s my beard.

But when we are together for a while, you know what happens. You know what she starts doing and you know it happens from the moment she comes in the door. Whatever frustration she has with her, the world has to stop because a woman is in the room. And I respect this. I respect this to death. And when I was living in her house after my stay in the hospital, I would turn off anything that was on my computer or put down my guitar or stop my workout so that I could pay attention to her. When she saw that this is what I was doing, she of course didn’t like it. But being negative is what all of this is about so you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.

So… I… live… here… happily. 

I have been told by several women that they don’t like my house because it doesn’t have so many modern amenities.

Good.

I have heard that people are complaining that I have not modernized and spent my money to bring this house up to snuff.

Good.

I have been told that I am gay and therefore the lowest form of life on Earth. I am to be hated and reviled and people could even think of killing me in a righteous Christian fit.

Not so good but good.

I believe in American English the phrase I’m looking for is fuck you. Seriously, fuck you. It’s none of your damn business what I do or how I do it or how I live my life. Nobody is inviting your bloody useless opinions. Nobody has invited you to have a leadership role in my life. You serve no purpose to me whatsoever except taking up space and making my life more difficult. Go away. Mind your own business. Stop pretending you’re a carnivore, you miserable psychotic idiots and pay attention to your own business.

That was fun. Let me say it again. Fuck you. Mind your own business.

You see how that works? I can even say fuck you in my own blog if I want to because I don’t have anyone here screaming at me to watch my language.

Just one more quick procrastinating story here.

Many years ago, I attempted to turn my teaching method into a school. It was a money move and I was rather flooded with students at the time and I thought it would be a good opportunity to improve my life and my income stream and provide jobs for other people. And of course, some good quality English education for the students.

So we had a bit of a seminar for potential teachers and I got to the point where I needed to explain to them about doing homework. The problem with the method is that it is a bit work intensive. If people say “okay, I understand the concept, let’s move on to the next point”, they are never going to pass the class or even participate in a decent conversation. Blowing off the work or believing that they are in the middle of a lecture is exactly what we don’t want. We want participation and we want people to get used to sentence making and language creation because if they are not becoming better talkers and listeners, they are in some other class. We are not something to know, we are something to do and to practice.

I brought this point to a head with my favorite slogan.

Do your fucking homework!

I told this group of men and women who wanted to teach for my company that they needed to practice and learn this phrase and to repeat it to the students who did not do their homework.

We had several women who refused to say this. There were reasons for this. In the middle of this sentence, there is a bad word. They were too delicate to say this bad word and were offended that I was asking them to say it

Ah ladies, we have two failures here that need to be noted. First of all, there are no bad words. There are only words. Perhaps these types of vulgarities are there to express emotions and in some understanding of perfect language, we need to be above that. But in the case of Practical English, we are in the business of making words and sometimes it is a very good idea to use such words for their emotional effect. Even if it specifically means that you’re going to put someone off or offend them, sometimes this is exactly what you want to do.

They still wouldn’t say it.

Another way to look at this is that what we need is a visceral connection to this idea of doing their homework. This is not their choice. We are not asking anyone if they are comfortable. We are telling them that in order to build serious language skills, serious work is to be done. 

As a guitar player, I will tell you that there is no way to work your way around a guitar unless you spend time doing your exercises. No one just picks up a guitar cold and starts playing something beautiful. Hours and hours of mindless finger work is necessary for the agility and hours and hours of understanding what’s going on inside of the tune are necessary before any beauty could possibly come out. It is not an emotional activity, it is not artistic inspiration, it is cold hard work. Do the work you have fingers. Don’t do the work and you have something decorative you bought that now sits in the corner of your room.

They still would not say the phrase.

Please, if you think this is misogyny, tell me now but the last argument I gave them worked. This is my company. This is my school. We are not here to make people comfortable. We are here to teach people to be better English speakers. We want people who speak to them to understand that they are intelligent people, their eyes and opinions can be trusted and that they are real and clear in their ability to talk about any situation. We either create real people or this business does not work. 

And if you’re not ready to get in a student’s face and tell them to get to work in an absolutely genuine and even animal way, you need to go to work for another company.

And do you know what she said?

That’s right. The money works every time.

I don’t hate women. I don’t hate people. I don’t hate Russians really. I’m a bit annoyed by them and I wish they would go home and mind their own business but I don’t hate them. Okay, maybe I hate Putin. Maybe I hate Putin the way I hate Donald Trump. I hate people who have the power to ask human beings to sacrifice their lives for their whims and to know that their motives are entirely selfish. If they were truly world leaders, they would not wish even one of their people to die unnecessarily.

So no, I don’t hate women. I’m not gay and I’m just not in need anymore. I’ve learned my lessons. I studied. I improved my own judgment and cleared my own head without any help from anybody. And when I have turned to women to ask for help, they are generally not available. 

They are available to do their own thing. They are perfectly happy to place themselves in the middle of a situation and start doing whatever they feel like. But sometimes, this is not what’s needed and what you get is a bigger mess than if you just did it yourself.

When I first came back to Pinsk from the capital, quite unhappy at the end of a relationship, I asked people for three things. I told them I would help with language, I was looking for a girlfriend and I could really use some marijuana. What I found out was that these are the three most problematic things in the Slovak world. Now, I am more happy to be absent all three.

***

By the way, I hope you see my point. I spent one hour writing out that last section instead of going outside and digging in my field. Why? Because there was nobody here to tell me to shut up and get off my fat lazy ass. I call that freedom.

***

Well it’s 4:20 but all this means is that I am taking a break and I’m doing so without marijuana. I don’t have any, I wish I did, if I did I would use it but I don’t so I don’t and that’s the end. I would love to tell you the story but there’s really no story to tell. This is life in the Republic of Belarus, we are kind of sort of kind of at war and all I can do is all I can do to grow my own food and that’s all.

That is not the reason for me to sit down and do some typing.

I am pretty tired. I have done two sessions today. The first was not very consistent and the second was very good.

There’s not much to explain about the first session except that I went to work without a particular plan. I knew I generally wanted to do things but I relied on improvisation and ended up making a lot of herky-jerky motions.

I did do what I wanted to do. I did open up the third 15 m row for beans. I opened it and I even did a burn on it so as to spread some ash as fertilizer. But I didn’t do a good job, I didn’t even do the burn very accurately and it was very frustrating. I think I fell four or five times and became really miserable at my lack of balance. I was even more miserable about having to do extra work because of my lack of accuracy. I was watching the day go by and nothing I was doing looked beautiful.

One part of the problem is that the place that we’re going to put our last Bean bed has a lot of very hard compacted land. It was too hard to do anything with actually and all I was thinking was that I really needed that Japanese digging tool. That thing would have been perfect for breaking through the land and breaking up the big chunks. I ended up relying on my homemade heavy hoe and at best all I could do was turn the thing around and whack the giant dirt clods 10 or 15 times to break them up. It was tiring and tedious work and mix that with the problems with balance and it was a complete shit first session.

Probably the best thing I did was to decide to take a break.

I walked off the field and I sat on my favorite bench. I started to think through this problem actually for the first time in the day. The problem is that my mind was full of crap, I was empty improvising and relying on some skill that I truly don’t have to do the job. I don’t know why I had allowed my egotism to take over. I am not a master landscaper, I’m just an old man with bad legs trying to build himself a garden. Sometimes you have to step back and take a reality break.

The first thing that came to my mind is that I did not have an adequate format under which to work. What I’m speaking of is that I am a musician and I had not set for myself genuine time limits for how long I should work.

If you take a look at music in its simplest form, it has been explained to me that it is nothing but organized noise. As an abstract, I completely agree with this. But more specifically, I think it is organized noise for a period of time and with a specific tempo. True, you can change tempos and rhythms in the middle of songs. We’re not talking about that, we are talking about the fact that there are beats going by dividing the bars or the time so that the group of players can stay together. If you are looking at an orchestra, the conductor is counting for you and you can watch the time go by via his gestures.

A few days ago, I mentioned a very good relationship tool that I thought of to be kind to my ex partner. I wanted to give her a massage but the problem is that sometimes, you get caught up in how long you’re supposed to be giving a massage and how much work you want to do. Sometimes people avoid intimacy simply because they don’t want to fail at it. They don’t want to try to do something nice for their partner and end up having it be so much work, they would rather quit and walk away.

What I noticed was that when I was practicing the guitar, picking the thing up and saying okay let’s play for a while ended up in misery for exactly the same reason. I would get tired and or bored and that would be it. The playing session just ended in fatigue and failure. Nobody wants to be a musician if every single practice session ends up in fatigue and failure, right?

My answer was to start using a metronome to make sure that I was playing in tempo and also an interval timer, a boxing timer if you will, to let me know how long I should play. You can play songs within this format but what I would do would be to improvise for 5 minutes or 3 minutes or however long the timer was set for. I would choose a key and a rhythm or a set of changes and I would play as if it were a song. Technically, they were songs because they were organized.

This led to much more productive and much happier guitar practice sessions. And because I was happy practicing, I ended up getting some of my chops back and I was extremely happy to be able to play a lot of music on My guitar. It’s self amusement, I agree, but I’ve also been able to send off presents to friends and things like that. I write a song or play somebody else’s song and send it along. Guitar players are charming by Nature and so are guitar songs. Here, here is a charming present.

But then the idea came to me that if I wanted to give a massage to my ex partner, I could probably follow the same protocol. And that’s exactly what I did. I started a metronome so I understood my pace and I set up a boxing timer for MMA rules of three 5 minute rounds. Hey baby, come here. Tell me all about work.

And it worked. It was an outstanding 15 minutes. When my turn came around, I will agree that the last 30 seconds of round three were a bit disappointing. The attention was about to end but fair was fair and both of us felt very relaxed and very nice being with each other. We had given each other pleasure and some therapy and both of us were better for having done it and received it.

During my break I decided to take my phone with me and I set up a 10 round 5 minute interval workout plan. I gave myself one minute to rest in between rounds so this worked out to be about an hour and 5 minutes. I clicked the button and we started round one.

With the metronome clicking at 75 beats a minute, not 60 seconds which is pure time and a little slow and not 90 which would be kind of a professional bicyclist’s tempo, I grabbed the wheelbarrow and my new favorite tool, a long handled two prong bent pitchfork. This is an amazing tool for picking up hay bales and it is also a remarkable cultivator for taking out grass.

I decided my goal was to execute two more Burns on the proposed Bean beds. We are 99% not going to use animal waste as fertilizer and so burning grass creates potassium Ash and of course, this is one of the best fertilizers in the world. And what I found was that with a positive plan, the metronome giving me a rhythm and the work to be done directly in front of me, in exactly 1 hour I was able to move my grass piles onto the beds, spread them out evenly, start a burn that took all of them down to Ash and then used the cultivator tool to comb the ash into the two beds. The most successful hour of the day.

So with this hour’s work done, I came to have a sit-down in the house. I also returned one of the tools I’m not going to use anymore and the gas cans and torch that I used to start the fire. I think I’m going back for one or two more hours this evening but I feel excellent right now.

One thing that I’m thinking of is to use some of these boards I have as borders for the Bean Garden. One of the things that I genuinely hate is walking in the area that the plants live in. I personally think we are not supposed to do anything to compact the Earth at all. Water is going to do that and natural settling, but I don’t really think plants need a footfall near them.

I used a string to line up the garden straight but I’m thinking I can afford to waste a few boards. The gardens are 15 m each and the boards I have are 4 m long. I have enough to give myself some borders and I think they will make the garden look neat and also give me absolute borders on what is mine for agriculture and what is wild.

I know this is a ton of extra work by local standards and culture and that what I’m doing is going to remove the ability of a horse walking out on the field and plowing in some horse or pig shit. But I’m thinking that perhaps I can figure out how to do this vegan and organic without any animal help. I might agree to take a load of manure if the guy actually ever shows up but I don’t think I’m going to look for him or worry about it if he doesn’t. I have a ton of grass and organic material lying around and Ash is an equal fertilizer to animal shit any day.

***

I guess I will button this up for the day. I just have a couple of things I want to say before I close up shop. Firstly, this has nothing particularly to do with food or politics or ecology except that I prefer acoustic music to electric and I would say that this is a pretty legitimate acoustic trio:

When I stopped to allow myself to think a little bit today, I made a couple of other decisions. Perhaps this is spring cleaning and everybody has exactly the same thought at this time of the year but I noticed that the house is a little dirty. I just have not given myself a chance to clean up. I would not say that I’m under pressure for time but it certainly seems as though there is a sense of rushing to get things done. 

Maybe this is natural again because of the seasons. If you’re going to grow your own food, you have to understand planting dates and how long your plants will need to grow to get to maturity. You need to have a habitat for them that is conducive to growing and you need to have all of this in place. Yes, of course there are people who are much better at this than I am. The ladies at the market have been doing this forever and this cycle is very much a part of their lives. And they not only produce their food, they also figure out how to get it to the market everyday. It’s an amazing job and I’m truly not so sure that they make all that much money.

That moment of gathering my wits did make a difference though. I just said stop, I agreed that something was wrong and I tried to come up with a reasonable solution to help myself get through the end of the day. And I am happy with the result. Yes, that rather intense hour under the metronome was a lot of physical exercise, probably equal to all the rest of the work I did today. When I stopped after that to talk a bit here, that was pretty much all I had in me. I did manage to run that two-pronged fork through the third Bean bed. It looks nice. It’s not perfect yet but it has some ash on it and most of the hard pieces have been broken down. A few more passes of cultivation and it’ll be a very forgiving place.

I absolutely decided to put borders on these gardens. Again, this is not the way people here do it and I understand that they would tell me how foolish I am for using space that I could use for growing something else. 

I just like the idea of a tidy Garden. I like the idea of knowing where my roads are and where my growing areas are. I like seeing the beginning and the end of these territories and I don’t really like combining the two. It’s not just about weed control or keeping the grass from growing. I have seen how my neighbors set up their beds and they are very clear where they’re walking paths are without putting barriers up. But I have this wood, it’s not very expensive at all, I have enough if I genuinely want to make some shelves and I think it’ll make a very nice border. It’ll make the place look smart.

I also noticed another place actually at the entrance to the forest that would be a delightful place for a table and some chairs. Of course there will be some flying things but I think the air is very nice there and it’s well away from the street. I think that’ll be a really nice spot to kick back and put my feet up a bit and let the world go by.

My plan is to put those borders up first thing in the morning. I have two ways to do this. The first would be to screw a stake into the ends of the boards and then pound them into the ground that way. I think that would take two stakes for each board. The second plan calls for four, two on the outside and two on the inside and the board can be taken out freely if need be. I’m not sure which one I want but I will make the steaks out of garbage boards that have already been cut. I’ll cut off 30 cm pieces and then split each board into four pieces.

I count that I will need 24 boards to put sides on the garden. It’ll probably be about 2 or 3 hours of work to set everything up. Again, this work is not particularly necessary and it’s 90% aesthetic. But I like the thought of segregating the land with a nice border. I will know exactly where I need to go to cultivate and I will also be free to take as much dirt as I want from the paths in between for the raised beds.

And just one more thing. I put my bottle of cooking oil away in the closet. The meal I just had with John Luke ponte, Al di meola and Stanley Clarke was a no oil meal. This is going back to my normal diet. I have been a little dirty for the last while. I can see it in my thinking and I can see it in my house. Spring cleaning? Perhaps. But if you’re going to do something, do it right.

***

I guess that’s about it for the day. I am pretty tired. Today was a lot of work and I guess when all is said and done, there was even some emotions and drama at the end of it. I doubt any real meaningfulness out of this. The world isn’t like that really. People do not go out of their way to do things for you. They go out of their way to be horrible I have noticed. This is not a good development.

But I am on the road to where I am going. The lower field looks nice and the middle part of the field will be much the same. I have more time for that. The weather is a little warmer than the weather reports or the almanac think. Global warming is real and I noticed how hard the sun was on me today. It has become a very hard sun. This project has a lot more to it and unfortunately, I’m going to need some money for some of it or to at least spend more than I thought. But I’ll do the best I can. We will get a nice harvest because we are going to plant a lot and take care of what we plant. Or I will plant a lot. Sorry, sometimes I forget how many people are here.