Friday, March 25th 2002

Zelinski speaking truth to power.

***

I am in the very warm kitchen of my ex-partner’s apartment and I’m having some garlicky pickles, black bread toast, some spinach and we are waiting for the cardamom coffee.

Yesterday was brutal. It was just a lot of physical work and a lot of pain. That seems to be what life is about these days. Pain.

When I had the idea of doing some gardening, I decided to go with raised beds and no dig methods. My mind was leaning towards less work, work smarter, not harder and not ending up being a field slave everyday of my life. But either because my ex partner is from Russian culture or because I actually kind of like gardening, I’ve ended up making almost 100 m of garden beds in addition to the raised garden. And before I’m done, there will be even other boxes for flowers and climbing ivy and other such beautifiers.

Logically, I also understand that the building year is the biggest year for physical labor. And logically, I also knew that I am not in prime physical shape to do this work right now. There is more romance and logic to any of this. The result is a lot of pain. And even yesterday, though I could feel that I am in much better shape than I’ve been in a long time and got twice as much work in town as I have been capable of lately, the result is that was ridiculously excruciating pain. By the end of the day, movement was out of the question. I didn’t even want to stand up. I just didn’t want to experience any more pain.

But yet here I am in the morning, the coffee is poured, a nice plate of buckwheat kasha with champignon mushrooms are sitting next to my half-eaten toast and I understand that I am going back into it again. Today is Friday. Tomorrow is my day off. This means that today is the day I have to clean up the house and make sure everything is in order so I can have a day without any work. And yes, I absolutely need this day off.

We have been talking about the work that needs to be done ahead. These garden boxes are going to need a lot of material to fill them up. My ex partner believes that we should ask the local guys to not only bring us some manure but also a cart of land. Neither one of us knows for sure if this is possible but she thinks this would be a better road. She also thinks we should have them fill the boxes with the dirt.

Half of me thinks this is a wonderful idea. The work will get done in one day, the work will be done and we can go on to bigger and better things. But half of me thinks that it’s my work to do no matter how difficult it is and that giving away this work to someone else seems to break everything. Another half of me believes that we might have a higher quality of land if we go with what is locally and commercially available. But then another half of me says that I completely control the quality, shovelful by shovelful, if I do it myself. Half of me says it would be a lot less painless to pay a few rubles for some help. Half of me says to keep my money in my pocket and do the labor myself.

It’s a quandary.

Yesterday, I talked to Zhenya about putting gutters on the bar and roof. At one glance, he saw what I saw at my first glance in that what was probably needed was metal triangles. He knows somebody who can do the fabrication, we can build them exactly to size, he doesn’t know the cost but asked me to make the exact measurements for him on a diagram and he can send this over to his friend. Maybe he’ll do it himself, I don’t know.

I was thinking of doing this job myself with wood. I have an entire wood pile of garbage pine and on monday, I’ll have a square to get the angle correct. I could cut as many triangles as I need in a couple of hours and then all I would need to do is afix them to the soffit and hang my gutters and straps. True, wood goes rotten faster. But can I get 10 years? I think I can get 10 years.

Of course that project isn’t finished until we actually have the plumbing that takes the water from the roof and sends it into a water tank which is going to be housed next to the barn. Depending on what is available, I would go with either a giant water tank or barrels. 

For the big water tank, I would need to build a bit of a platform to get it off the ground and we could attach a hose to the bottom and use the water pressure to water the plants. If we fall into rain barrels, I can still use a pump to get the water to a hose but I could also just fill water buckets and do everything by hand.

All of these choices are money and the amount of work necessary to make these things work.

One other tiny bit of nuisance about this particular part of the job is that I have a tiny dream in my head of converting the barn to a greenhouse/living space. Maybe a guest house with a greenhouse in it. This would go along with replacing the windows in my house to something more modern and more energy efficient. We could use the old windows and mount them on the south-facing wall of the barn, add some insulation and electric heating and voila, we have a lovely greenhouse that would also be a nice place to put a guest.

That thought though is too expensive for me as of the moment. As of the moment, I managed to get through the winter without suffering with the old windows and if we take out the cost of the electric heaters, the electric bill was not bad at all. In fact, my system for living there in the winter seems to work exactly fine and I have been very comfortable during the time that I am up at my house.

But it’s true, you can’t help but think of a life with a little bit more beauty in it. I don’t know that I dream of comfort so much. Comfort is fleeting and I don’t know how to stay comfortable for a long period of time except when healing and even then, I’m upset by sitting still. I like to move. I prefer moving without pain, but I like to move.

But I do dream of beauty.

Actually, I dream of writing meaningful things. I dream of writing plays again. That’s all I wanted to do when I started writing. I didn’t want to be a journalist and I certainly never had any thoughts of being a blogger. Even when I was making my newspaper 20 years ago, the thought never came into my head that I needed to write editorials. It seemed to be enough work just to assemble the newspaper without adding my thoughts. And yet look at Me now. Now the entire thing is editorial and we’re lucky to get any news items.

Looking back, it seems as though all of my plays we’re about looking for a moment of beauty. I dreamed about finding something beautiful that could just remain beautiful.

Perhaps this was even a theme that ran through all of my plays. We live in a world that fights for resources. It’s in my plays in many places. Fleeting beauty. I could do the trouble of looking up the exact quotes but that seems to be my main qualm. Why is it that nothing beautiful is allowed to survive? Why is it that everything must be consumed even before it’s time?

Yeah, that is the thread that runs through all of my plays and screenplays. The desire for something beautiful.

In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I wonder if all of this work I have done on my field has been nothing but destroying something that would have been beautiful by not touching it at all. Maybe it would have been better to just make a place to sit down and put my feet up and just let God do my gardening and landscaping for me.

I have left some wild spaces. There are places that will do exactly what they are going to do and other than where we are growing food, I have no intention of cutting weeds. Let the grass grow. Let the wildflowers come. Let nature do what it wants to do without any help from me.

But I will be bringing a lot of my own plants in. We will have a lot of imported things growing. I want a lot of ivy to cover some very ugly things. I’m going to build some trellis structures to allow grapes to do what they are going to do. All of this will be purposeful also for bringing more water to certain places. Water is the problem for anything I do. The only thing water is not a problem for is God. God/nature does what it does without any help from us whatsoever.

Well that’s not exactly true. We can do things to catch the water. We can dig trenches and swells to have a place to slow water down and keep it on the place. We can build structures to catch the water and funnel it into a place where we can save it and use it when we want it. But all of this is only for places that we make ourselves.

And I can always go back to doing nothing next year or the year after. One of the main reasons for this bean field is to put more nitrogen into the land. The plants add fertility and after the beans have been harvested, I can allow them to lie on the land and then in the spring bring leaves to cover everything and chop everything into the land for even more fertility. And whether I use this fertility to grow something or just as a gift to Nature and let the weeds take over and let the forest come, it’s a good contribution.

If I look forward into the future, there are plenty of beautiful pictures. But then if I think practically, the odds of those pictures not getting smashed are very small. My chicken neighbors will ruin every moment they are a part of. They have been ruining every moment of their time on the planet and every time I hear them, my time gets ruined.

They by the way grow nothing. They do not have flowers, they do not have nature and they do not see or hear anything but themselves. Their house is just a pig farm or a chicken coop. It’s a death camp. All of my loud drunken neighbors have death camps.

And me? I go the other direction. And I have optimism. Maybe we’ll have electric cars soon. Or maybe they’ll just crash theirs and allow me some quiet.

By the way, this is the 20th anniversary of my play Pod Kablukom and I am planning a volume of the original play in three languages, an English translation and possibly its sequel play Nadezhda/Hope. I think that would make a nice book to have. I wonder if Jeff Bezos would like to help me out with that too.

***

Okay it’s about 10:00 and I am ready to go back home. My ex partner is at work, all of my things have been gathered and yes, I have called a taxi. In a perfect world, I would be taking my bike home. There is nothing perfect about this world so I’m not even going to try.

I am loaded down with seeds, some clean clothes and the food I bought at the market yesterday. It’ll cost a few dollars to take an internal combustion engine car, but I will live with this expense for now. It’s an emergency, it’s public transportation, yada yada yada, I have work to do.

My legs have come back a little bit this morning. They were on fire yesterday but now I am up and moving a little better. I need this little bit of time for recovery. And today I have a lot to do. Tomorrow I will be a lazy bum. A philosophically aware lazy bum perhaps, but a completely non-working human being all the same. A free man. A non-slave.

I called a friend in Minsk who does fixie parts and I ordered a 19 tooth rear COG. I tried to buy two but they only had one. It is not the highest quality instrument but it will be 20% easier to pedal, 20% slower but 20% better for riding on beaches. Fuck the agricultural system. Fuck desertification. Fuck war. And fuck the world that doesn’t understand bicycling.

http://citybikes.by/catalog/komponenty/zvezdy-i-lokringi/zvezda-rezbovaya-dicta-19-zubev

That’ll be available for pickup by me or perhaps it’s possible for my ex partner to go over there. The pickup location is at a supermarket and she loves shopping at supermarkets so maybe it’ll work out for everybody.

And what else? Nothing else. Turn off the lights, pick up my stuff and go downstairs to the car.

***

It’s about 11:00 a.m. and I am back home again. I am on the bench in the shade overlooking my garden. Moments after I arrived, my henpecked neighbor left his house, backing up and throwing Auto fumes on me of course. They are pigs to the core and they will never listen to anyone or anything. Which is maybe to say that the policeman decided to do a little ass licking for them and placating for me. Such is the stupid fucking war world that we live in. Some people will never learn. Some people have never learned. Some people just don’t want to learn.

What I’m noticing though is this shoulder falling thing. Everything in town is just so fast. There’s always things to do, there’s always a clock ticking above you and even if you are done, that clock is still telling you how much time you have even to recover

Maybe some of this is my relationship to my ex partner. Maybe she makes me nervous. I don’t want to talk about personal things between us but there is love. You can’t not understand that there is love. But you can also not fail to see that she is as locked into her slavery as humanly possible. Her slavery touches her so deeply inside of her that I cannot even hope to compete.

I’ve been thinking a lot about whether men have an inherent misogyny, a feeling of hatred or even fear towards women or whether we just have incredibly rude women. I have a daughter who doesn’t even want to speak to me because of this issue. She of course counts herself as a woman and therefore above any argument. I’m not worried about her rationale. That’s as easy to understand as any natural occurrence. Or Slavic occurrence. But I wonder whether this is a natural issue or simply a political issue.

My point being, do you have women picking at you to make them happy as a natural thing or is this just related to an economic system that leaves everybody in perpetual poverty and never allows anybody to leave the system for any reason.

And let’s be fair about this. The world is set up for people to be dependent on the corporations now. The idea of all of that amazing leisure Time and all of the things you could buy if you had enough money it’s pretty much the only thing that’s in anybody’s face. We are all being educated almost universally by electronic media and electronic media has a hierarchy that says high professionalism and corporate production values are the only things worth looking at.

I’m guilty of this. I will tune into Instagram for a moment in the mornings and my eyes go to professional productions. When I talked to some web developers last year, they immediately started talking about my dimproduction values and how nobody would be interested in me unless I seemed more professional. And of course, my ex partner cannot think of anything except whether my clothes are clean or how miserable she is looking at my face with a full beard.

It’s even possible that my decision to let my hair grow was the thing that turned my chicken neighbor off in the first place.

But that doesn’t mean that I need to change my life to please anybody. It just means that we have a woman who feels completely free tormenting someone because of her own displeasure.

And this is the argument I’m trying to make. Is there hatred of women amongst men? Of course it exists. But perhaps we need to ask ourselves why.

I am not in favor of creating a subservient culture for women. There is an argument that the history of mankind has been beating women into subservience simply because males have a larger musculature. Sweep the floor, no, BAM! I am not advocating using violence at all against anybody. I don’t want violence in Ukraine, I don’t want violence in Africa, I don’t want violence on our planet and I don’t want violence towards women.

But at the same time, I also don’t want this perpetual fight for status that goes hand in hand with the fight for money. Status is the argument of my chicken neighbor. I learned this even from my mother. I had it seconded to me last year when there was another flood of Jews in Penske because the pandemic disallowed them from making their pilgrimage to Ukraine. In conversation with those guys, the first thing they said was that there are levels in the world.

This may be true that this exists but my point is that it doesn’t have to. I don’t need to know that anyone is higher than me. I would like them to prove why they are higher than me but I would like them to prove it in some sort of rational conversation more than their ability to hire people to beat me down or to physically beat me down themselves.

And as far as this argument goes, it is very possible that a million years of servitude has women with more kinetic energy than men. They are absolutely more locked in to the moment and obviously this is some darwinistic trait about caring for children. Nobody’s arguing about this.

I am arguing however that there are corrupt women just as there are corrupt men. And because women have this ability to lock in on the subtleties of their world, the perpetual poverty pretty much has all of them insane.

between my ex partner and I is a conversation that has more than a little bit of sarcasm in it these days. When I make sarcastic jokes, it gets a laugh. Again, I know there is love there. Nobody’s arguing about this. But at the same time, you can’t take her off her schedule. You can’t get her to think anything but to keep doing exactly the same thing over and over again.

Is this the same thing as the state disregarding global warming and not doing anything to rethink their planting schedule? Yes. Is this the same thing as my neighbor refusing to change their parking scheme just to allow me a moment of freedom from their poisonous Auto fumes? Yes.

We live in a hypocritical system. We have allowed there to be people who have no other job than to give us their opinions. And because we allow them to stand above us and piss on our heads, in order to feel like one has any power, the only thing you can physically do to feel that is to piss downhill yourself. This explains my neighbor, my ex partner, my daughter, my daughter’s mother, the thieves in my family and all of the ex-girlfriends. They are all women trying to make a point of their own status and not wanting to listen to any arguments to the contrary.

One interesting point here. Both Alexander lukashenko and Vladimir Putin both serve their countries without too much attention being paid to any first lady. Putin is married and has a family but he keeps his family well, well, well out of the spotlight. Lukashinka has a son that he probably plans to put on the throne someday but he is not from his legal wife but an attractive blonde doctor Who was in his Entourage for a while.

The slavs make a point of telling us that it’s a man’s world. But logically speaking, these guys are absolute sons of bitches.

***

It’s about 20 minutes to 2:00 and I’m having a break from my house clean up. I found the tool I need to replace the gear on my bike. For some reason, quite a few things got lost in the move. Perhaps I was foolish to throw some things away or perhaps I just made a mistake and forgot what was garbage and what was to be kept. But for the most part, I have all of the usable bike tools to do the job.

It’s going to be a bit of a rebuild. Right now, my bike is kind of set up to be a town fixing. I pulled off the carbon fork and changed the wheels but the gearing and the stem is still there for some speed and power with lighter Wheels.

So I’m going to change it over to one of my shorter stems, it’ll take a little bit of pressure off the front end and I’m also going to change the seat. Basically I’m moving the bike to a more upright position. The thought is to take the weight off of the front wheel in the hopes that it digs into the sand a little less. And also the seat is more compatible with sitting upright then the one I have on it now. Basically, it’s not going to be a racing bike, it’ll be more of a tractor. I’m still going to rock the fixed gear. I like the feel of a fixed bike. I just need to go lighter and more centered and be less into a racing posture. Hopefully this will work out.

I need some cabbage. I don’t have any. Well, I have a little but not really enough for tonight and tomorrow. This means I have to go to the store. However, I don’t want to ride my bike to the store. I don’t want to ride my bike at all right now. I am tired of getting beat up in the sand pit. This will entail a 2-mile walk with the second mile with some weight on my back but I guess you have to do what you have to do.

The alternative plan is that I simply live with the lack of vegetation and use my legs to do an hour in the garden further cultivating our Bean boxes. I don’t know which one is correct. 

I guess I could flip a coin. Maybe we say that heads equal I go for the cabbage and tails equal I work in the garden. Of course I cannot flip a coin and do both of those or neither of them.

I really do have a lot to do. And for some reason, though I know that if I just keep pushing quietly and easily, I will get to where I want to go. If I just take a deep breath and relax and do the work I need to do, it will get done in its own time.

I just can’t get this nagging out of my shoulders. There is this constant pressure that I don’t like. I don’t like pressure from my neighbors and I don’t like pressure from my ex partner and I don’t like pressure from my family and I don’t like pressure from the government. I am tired of people putting pressure on me. I am tired of people who like pressure. I am tired of it. I’m tired of these people and I’m tired of the effect of having these people in my life.

I know what the problem is. I look like easy pussy. I prefer kindness. People think I’m crazy for preferring kindness. I don’t see the logic in doing it otherwise though. I understand that the world is cruel and you have to be ready etc etc etc. I understand all about the negative side and the need for defense and the knowledge of how to kill someone with your elbow. But let me ask you, would you prefer some warm toast and tea or a loaded gun pointed at your face? Which would make you happier?

Universally, the people who love this pressure business feel well insulated. They are people who feel they cannot be touched either because of status or money or whatever reason they believe they have. It’s like this DH rule in baseball. The pitcher can hit you in the back with a fastball but there will never be an opportunity to throw a ball at his head to get even. It’s just not the way the game is supposed to be played.

When I spent time on facebook, I got to understand all about internet trolls. People who have no status in life whatsoever but under an anonymous name on the Internet, they just fire bullets at the world and don’t care who falls. Or they were just ridiculously rich alcoholics who had nothing better to do than be assholes online.

I remember two movies from the ’70s with Maniacs like this who lived for the opportunity of creating a pressure game. One was the warriors:

A gang called ‘The Warriors’ are framed for killing a gang leader trying to unite all the gangs in the area. With other gangs gunning for them they must get back alive to the home turf of Coney Island.

And the other one was Dirty Harry:

A tenacious SFPD inspector teams up with an inexperienced officer to track down a sniper who has been killing innocent people. When due process gets in the way, he takes matters into his own hands.

I know this is kind of random to pick out these two films but what both of these have in common are really stupid obnoxious trolls driving the heroes into action. Literally, annoying people pushing our heroes to create a more normal and calm situation.

These are movies though and at the end of the movie, when the credits roll, there is calm and the people can leave the theater,  throw away their popcorn boxes and go back to their houses feeling satisfied. They paid their money, sat down in the theater, took a ride and felt satisfied at the end. All very sexual I’m sure.

Most probably, and I’m thinking of my neighbor right now, her plan was to stress me out and then offer kindness that would release the tension and let everything be okay. Kind of a cheap trick that asks me to ignore things like her character and the actual necessity of her friendship in my life.

I don’t mean to rain on anybody’s parade but I wish she would have started off with “hi, I’m your neighbor, is there something I can do to be nice to you?”. What she did was go straight to the stress and relief game. She wanted to establish the right to have this power of stressing me in her hands. She had to have that high status and I needed to know that she owned me.

Fuck that.

You tell me, if you truly took stock of your own life and all of your responsibilities and all of your friends and everything you need to do to get by or to work or to make money or any of that, do you actually have the need for a lunatic chicken to check into your life just to make things more difficult for you? Do you really think that you could not live another day without having a sociopath path running around deciding on whims when to create problems?

(Quick note: a friend of mine just asked me by text if I meant living with women in general)

The answer is no. I mean, I get that there is this cultural and societal thing around here where women are free to be lunatics because we agree to this hypersexualization of humanity. Women are complete lunatics and men are hyper-strong defenders. There’s no middle ground, there’s no sense of being people and of course, there is no sense of common sense because I think that’s actually illegal in the Republic of Belarus.

Let me remind you that they hate private business, the president hates entrepreneurs and the culture itself is designed to keep original thoughts from appearing on the territory in general.

I have even one more quandary. Technically, if I am going to even try to live a righteous life, if I am even going to consider believing in the ten commandments, I really shouldn’t have anything to do with my neighbor’s wife. Technically, it would be nice if my neighbor’s wife had it in her head that she was not supposed to play with me and should stay with her husband where she belongs.

Again, I don’t claim to be an expert on Uzbek culture. I don’t claim to know the nuances of marriage in the Republic of Belarus or in Slavic countries in general. It has come into my mind that getting married in the former Soviet Union is simply the right to fuck. It isn’t that a man and woman become a partnership and however they go about their lives, they do it as a team. It might be just that if a woman is wearing a ring, she has agreed to have dicks in her and therefore she’s available to anyone who has a spare 20 bucks or whatever the fee is.

I don’t know this as a fact. I have had this thought from time to time that prostitution is actually not a profession in this country but it is well practiced as an established form of making money. I don’t know this for a fact but I kind of get the feeling that this is true from time to time.

But would it hurt these people to get it that I don’t want to play? Would it truly boggle their minds if I wasn’t sent into complete Insanity at the nearest whiff of their feminine beauty? Would it be completely ego destroying if I did not become a maniac in the presence of their female sexuality? Would be heartbreaking to know that I do not think of them or have any plans to make any connections with any of the wives anywhere in this town or in this country?

I mean, if she was really attractive, she might have an argument.

I’m sorry I said that.

Look, I have had a relationship with a married woman and I just didn’t like it. The way it all turned out, and later on, she told me about her thought process, she decided that she wanted me as her lover for whatever reason she wanted it and one day, she saw her opening and made her play and effectively got my attention. I’m going to leave out the details because I don’t want you thinking about them. Needless to say, we had a moment, this moment turned very sexual and we had a relationship that lasted a couple of years.

The thing of it was that her husband was always very enthusiastic to meet me. When we saw each other in various places including the hospital, it drove me crazy how enthusiastic he was to shake my hand and how happy he was to see me. He really was a very nice guy. And a musician. But I never actually had any kind of a moment where I felt I could ask him if he was aware of his wife’s hobbies. I mean, maybe he’s perfectly happy to have some shared income. If sex equals money and that ring is a license to be professional, maybe he was happy to see me as a client. I don’t know. I really never knew what was going on with these two except that his wife liked to sleep with me and seemed very enthusiastic to keep the connection.

This relationship is over and it’s been over for a long time and it’s not going to resurface again. Before I moved out to the country, I would see her around from time to time and the urge to be with her existed for a moment or two. But we never did get back together again. If I even gave it half a thought, it was bad food. There was no future and no happiness in this relationship.

My father told me never to shit in my own backyard. Maybe he told me not to shit where I eat. I don’t remember exactly what that truism was but I remember the point of it. Then again, my father traveled a lot. That would be true too.

Look, all I’m trying to say is I’m trying to lead a clean life. I don’t want people sniffing around my life looking for things they can take home. I don’t really need economically deprived people attempting to have power over my life. I don’t need sad non-thinking gentiles feeling that they have some status over me. I generally don’t want greedy people near me at all. I don’t want any opportunists to come near me unless they have a legitimate business plan and are willing to make a formal invitation and meet on a neutral site.

I don’t remember ever starting a teaching relationship without a meeting. Some people quit the process the minute I asked for a meeting, interestingly enough. They were surprised that they didn’t automatically get written into the class and start. Why did we need to have a meeting?

But we did need to get to know each other. We did need to understand each other’s rules. We needed to understand how we would relate to each other and what we both expected of each other. And in the case of these business relationships, we needed to know that there were time limits and how we would deal with these time limits.

Maybe I am jaded or maybe I’m just too old and I don’t care anymore about this nonsense but I don’t want any unlimited relationships starting in my life. I don’t like people coming to the door telling me they have a right to meddle in my business. I don’t like people who feel free to have access to my property or my body. I don’t like being touched by people I don’t know and you have not been invited and with whom I have no business. I just don’t like it because inevitably, I don’t want anything from them. And if they cannot say upfront what they want from me or if they just want to shoot the shit, the answer is no. 

I don’t want any more high school friends. I’m not lonely, I’d be open to propositions that make people money, I would probably be open to meeting a reasonable and attractive single woman but I’m not interested in any fishing hooks coming over my fence. I am absolutely opposed to anyone who thinks in terms of objectification to come to me because I am some thing that creates interest in them. I am not a bear in the zoo, I am not a free public attraction, I am not the solution to your problems, I am not your daddy and I am not your paycheck.

I don’t know. I think they are completely illiterate but I really wish they would read me even out of curiosity about what I say about them. But basically, I wish this henpecked son of a bitch would put his wife on a leash and put me out of my misery because I can’t stand either of them anymore.

***

It’s a little bit before 4:00 and I just got back from the store. The hike took about 90 minutes.

The walk itself was not so tough and I’m glad I went. I don’t think it was perfectly healthy for me but I’m glad I took the trouble to do it.

The road by the way is ridiculous. It’s even ridiculous for walking in unless you enjoy walking in the Sahara desert. I genuinely thought this was supposed to be a wet country in the Northern latitude. How these people have managed to turn it into a desert is beyond me. When the forest next to my house goes up like a matchstick, well, let’s just say I told you it was going to happen.

Along the way I met the guy who said he was supposed to bring me some shit but he seemed to be on a different planet. He was doing another job and told me some bullshit that didn’t mean anything. Theoretically, he will come by again sometime but I doubt it. I think if a Belarusian tells you that something will happen in the future, you can pretty much assure that it means fuck you.

But then I ran into Ghenna shoveling a load of cow shit onto his girlfriend’s property. I asked him about bringing me a load and he gave me a price of 35 rubles. Not so much money really and except for the compromise to my veganism, it will definitely help get us some decent vegetables. The problem was that he wanted the money up front and I don’t trust anybody with upfront money anymore. We left the conversation at that.

His girlfriend’s house is just around the corner from the store and she followed me on bicycle, why she needed a bicycle to go 100 m is beyond me, but she cut in front of me and then made a point of reading a notice on the wall next to the store to me. The notice read that there was some massive State fine for people who burned their weeds.

I don’t know why she needed to make a point of reading this to me. Everything that happens to me here I ascribe to anti-Semitism already. I tried to say something about it being really good fertilizer but she was more interested in teaching than talking and as her health is the most miserable I have ever encountered outside of Cancer Ward, I left it at that.

If I want to add Ash to my garden, I will add Ash to my garden. I’m not burning weeds away exactly like the state has done in the field along the service road to the train station. We’re not talking about that kind of hypocrisy. I just burn weeds so that Ash goes on the land where I plan to plant. Basically, like them.

At the store, I bought a grapefruit and a couple of bananas, a couple of packages of salty peanuts, two half loaves of bread, ahead of cabbage and some negligent tomato sauce. Again, it was only six bucks.

But as I was walking up to the checkout, I saw that bottle of vodka calling my name. There were two types of vodka there that I used to drink regularly because neither was completely terrible. One vodka, синеокой, has been my go-to choice since I wrote the play Pod Kablukom. It was named as a local vodka from the Brest region and therefore a part of local patriotism for decades. The other was named after a local town. Neither of them is completely hideous.

Suddenly I realized how depressed I am. I immediately thought that I could bring home a bottle which was only $3. I could make myself exactly the dinner I was planning to make except that I would enjoy it with shots of vodka. By the time the food was finished, I would be deeply in a mist and craving sleep. Technically, it would be a combination of the alcohol and what it does to my blood sugar. It would be a pass out opportunity and I would wake up tomorrow morning and have all day to deal with it. And yes, the thought of having another bottle or even two bottles ready for tomorrow to drink away my entire day off also came into my mind.

I had the money in my pocket. I could afford it. I could afford it and not even feel it if all we were talking about is money. And it would have fucked me up enough to go to sleep and most probably, I wouldn’t have died. It probably would have monovisioned me for doing work on Sunday. Alcohol is very good for turning people myopic. The world likes alcoholic slaves. Alcoholic slaves are easy to control.

I didn’t buy it. But I would so happily get high.

The other night, I found this on YouTube:

I agree that it’s a stupid show except that it’s completely understandable if you are a fan of marijuana. I am a fan of marijuana.

I’ve said this about a hundred times but I drank a lot of alcohol to deal with a lot of depression for a long time. And then I went and visited some friends and they offered me some weed and in one inhale, I was off vodka for good.

There is a giant difference and there is a sense of self that comes with the sensitivity of the moment. There’s also a gigantic difference between a factory sugar product and a plant that grows naturally in nature. There’s a difference in how much damage it causes to your body when you ingest it and there is a difference to what it does to your mind.

In the cab on the way back to the village this morning, I got into it with the driver. He knows that I’m a vegan and he baited me by telling me that he liked Salo. I’m not going to Google search that for you because it’s disgusting but basically it’s either smoked or salted pig fat. It is one of the great joys of local culture for some reason that I will never understand in my life. Probably it started with anti-semitism or perhaps it started when they decided to make the culture as stupid as humanly possible.

So I went on about Darwin and evolution and how we are actually only neurotic apes. I went back 10,000 years to the beginning of agriculture and maybe five or 6,000 years to the beginning of paper writing and science. I talked about the difference between agrarian culture and eating plants versus what happens when you eat animals. I suggested cannibalism to him and even suggested that if the war actually comes to Belarus, he might consider losing some weight himself. He might turn out to look pretty tasty to people in desperate need of some meat.

All of this was in good humor and then I brought up a really interesting point about marijuana. Most people don’t like to smoke it because it makes them paranoid. One interesting thing that I have noticed about it is that I do not have this happen to me. I used to think it had to do with whether it was indica or sativa, as suggested in the above film, but now I know it’s something else.

I don’t eat meat so I do not have the inherent paranoia felt by factory farmed animals or even wild animals filled with adrenaline running away from human predators. I do not feel a lifetime of panic and sensory assault.

I mentioned that if you consider the life of plants, basically all they do is follow the Sun across the sky and carry water down to the roots. It’s their entire job in life. And if God is nature and nature is God, they are without sin because they bother no one and simply take the gifts from the universe in order to live.

I don’t get excited and I don’t really like to be with hysterical people. Maybe this is from something else. Maybe I’ve just lived a type of life and have been through enough brutality and warlike moments that I don’t really feel panic anymore. I’ve been through a few street fights in my time, I’ve lost people I love, I’ve had my heart ripped away from me any number of times and after a while, you don’t really feel pain anymore.

I could also say the same thing about trying to live a reasonably normal life in my current situation. There is pain every day and in every decision to move. That could be it too.

Nevertheless, he liked my argument and asked me if I had any marijuana. I shook my head. I tried to sell the guy veganism and I ended up selling the guy marijuana.

Unfortunately I don’t have any and there won’t be any in the near future as long as I live in this wonderful country. Here is another bit of news posted for people’s understanding (with a Google translation):

https://vk.com/wall-55693644_412287

A court in Pinsk sentenced a man to 7 years in prison for drug traffickingThe Pinsk inter-district prosecutor’s office supported in court the state prosecution in a criminal case against two 25-year-old local residents, BelTA informs with reference to the information service of the prosecutor’s office of the Brest region.

The men last year in a wasteland in the Pinsk region grew hemp, from which they received at least 8 kg of marijuana. The drugs were kept for themselves. At the same time, one of the defendants provided his apartment to acquaintances for drug use. He also transported marijuana weighing at least 1.33 g in a car and hid it in a cache, and then sold it.

Both men pleaded guilty. The court of the Pinsk district and the city of Pinsk sentenced one of them under part 1 and part 3 of article 328 (drug trafficking), part 2 of article 329 (illegal sowing of plants containing narcotic substances), part 2 of article 332 ( provision of premises for a drug den) of the Criminal Code to seven years in prison in a penal colony. They will have to pay 100 basic fines. He also had his car and mobile phone confiscated as a means of committing a crime. The second defendant under Parts 1 and 3 of Article 328, Part 2 of Article 329 of the Criminal Code was sentenced to five years of restriction of freedom without being sent to an open correctional institution.

The man, who was given the real term by the court in Pinsk, filed an appeal. His judicial collegium for criminal cases of the Brest Regional Court said it left her unsatisfied.

The verdict came into force.

Nice, yeah?

So no, we are not getting high here tonight. People do not get high and listen to music on Friday nights here. People do not get together and have quiet conversations. People also do not get relief from cancer, glaucoma, arthritis, back pain, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, all kinds of mental illness or even as a substitute for alcohol or drug addiction. Nobody is allowed to mellow out in the Republic of Belarus. Nobody is allowed to be relieved of their suffering in the Republic of Belarus. In the Republic of Belarus, they suffer or cause suffering and they think this is the correct way to live.

On the way back from the store, I called Ghenna from the street and asked him if he had access to some planting soil. He of course mentioned that it would cost some money and that it came from a different place but that it was possible. We of course would have the same problem of needing to pay up front but it is possible for him to bring both some land and some fertilizer for the boxes.

I noted that I understood his words and he said he would be by on Sunday. As of the moment, I’m thinking of offering him a really nice price for the entire job under the circumstances that he makes the deliveries and help with the work and let me pay him at the conclusion of the job. I’ve lived through his neediness and his money begging before. Also as a worker, he is addicted to both alcohol and cigarettes and really can’t work more than about 5 minutes before he needs to take a break. I will happily nail the money to the wall so he knows he has it but I really don’t want to pay him until the job is done.

Then I went home pretty much unmolested. I made myself a little walking stick the other day and it helps really. It doesn’t really distribute any weight but it’s something to hold on to and kind of stabilizes everything. I like it. Maybe next week when I’m back in town I will go to the shop that sells such things and maybe I’ll buy a real one. Or maybe the one I made was real enough.

So I guess I’m having a nice dinner tonight and tomorrow I won’t do any work at all. The house is a lot cleaner, especially the kitchen. All the jobs are underway and Sunday will have some planting and even the possibility to get some materials to help us grow some vegetables. I might get some help for this and maybe that would be nice. Maybe it’ll be just a beautiful year here in the beautiful and interesting Republic of Belarus.

***

Okay, let’s get down to the end of the page and get out of here for the week.

I checked the word count and this week’s writing seems a lot like last year’s. A bit above 40,000 words. That’s a lot. I guess I had a lot to say. 

Right now on the stove, I have some red lentils, and some cabbage and onions cooking. I’m adding spaghetti to that in a minute and then on a different burner, I have some black bread cooking in oil. Yep, I’m going to have some oil on the toast tonight. In a couple of minutes I will say a brucha, a prayer to welcome my day off, and then I will turn everything off and eat a big meal and then go crash in the war room and let the day go by.

Sometimes I’m not exactly sure what the point of this writing is. Sometimes I think I’m trying to help people. Sometimes I think I’m just satisfying my own need to make sense of things. Maybe this is personal therapy. Maybe it’s therapy for other people.

Maybe I’m voting. Maybe I’m just stating my political position the way politicians state their political positions. I just saw John Kennedy stand up and start a speech by saying this is who I am and this is what I believe. Maybe it’s appropriate for a man of my age to take up politics.

Maybe I’m just justifying my existence. Maybe I’m saying all this to make use of my knowledge and experience and at least put it out in the world. Or maybe I’m trying to make a buck as a writer and I’m hoping somebody picks up on me and decides I’m worth listening to.

Or maybe I’m just a teacher and I really like teaching and writing this blog is my opportunity to teach whatever subjects and ideas come to my mind as being helpful to people. I’m trying to be a good person and I’m trying to teach the elements of what it is to be a good person. Not only to be a good person, but to be a good citizen. This is a beautiful concept. Maybe we are not supposed to be here to rape and pillage and take whatever we can for ourselves. Maybe the point of life is to be the best citizen you could possibly be and give as much help as you can to your community. Maybe that’s all I’m doing. Maybe this is my contribution to my community.

I don’t really know. I don’t know why I’m doing this at all. I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t know why I’m doing it except that I do it everyday and I don’t seem to ever want to stop.

Or maybe I’m a doctor. I’m not qualified as a Doctor by any medical institution but maybe on the doctor by birthright. Maybe my father’s father, who was a qualified doctor, gave me something when I was a boy and told me to come here. He pointed to a place on a globe we had bought that just happened to have the word Pinsk written on it. It’s not the capital and in all the world how they manage to bring home a globe that had the name of this town written on it is insane. But it did and my grandfather said that we are from here.

I did not come here for love of fascism or dictatorships. I did not come here because the United States sent me to be a spy. I did not come here to be a traitor to anyone or to betray any countries. I didn’t come here for any political reason whatsoever. I came here because my grandfather said I was from here and the first time I came here I met one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen in my life. I was sold in a minute. I’m at the people, I met that girl, I met that girl’s family and I was sold. Why did I like them? Because they were simple, kind, open and polite. They were just nice people. And I was welcome. And I stayed.

Now of course everything has changed. I can blame the Russians but I could also blame the oil business. It just doesn’t matter who’s to blame, it’s just not nice anymore and this is my whole problem. I just wanted to live somewhere nice. That was all I wanted was to lose somewhere nice.