Monday, March 28th 2022

I’m in the kitchen with the door open. There is a small overhang of sheet metal for some reason guarding the top of the awning. Maybe it was supposed to replace flashing. My kitchen is technically a veranda. I don’t know if it was originally part of the house or built on to it. My guess is the latter because one wall of the kitchen still has the original wooden slat siding that clouds the house. I think I’m going to take off that awning because though perhaps it takes the sunshine out of your eyes in the morning, it is an east facing door and it is a wonderful place to watch the sunrise.

Yesterday was a pretty good day. Of sorts. I cannot give my complete Mark of approval to anything these days. It is hard for me to be conscious of a world this bent on self-destruction. All for the quim of a few Rich drug addicts.

I guess if we went back to the beginning of the beginning, we could blame writing. We figured out that business would be more accurate by drawing lines in the sand showing how many of something you should trade for something else. Counting and reading what is written is probably the beginning of all of the sciences and all of the knowledge of man. The Jews certainly worship the word. The Chinese have one of the deepest cultures because of the word and accounting.

Maybe it is that people fall in love with seeing themselves in print. These days, we don’t need the words anymore because we have Instagram or tiktok. We can very quickly show pictures of ourselves and smile at the world or look sexy. Here I am! Look at me! I’m in print!

I’m not saying this as a general thought but if we want to understand Putin, we have to understand that he sees himself in historical context. He is writing himself into the book. Actually, being somewhat familiar with the Russian press and laws against and about independent journalism, we could say that he is actually writing the book that he wants to see. And as Shakespeare said, perhaps that’s the rub.

But before we automatically say that one point of view is correct and the other is wrong, a thought that would completely negate the United States system of information dispensation, we have to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If we’re going to have so many people blindly and hysterically running after money that is truthfully never going to be enough, then we are going to have eight, nine or 10 billion points of view. Yes, you can control the media and the propaganda and convince huge blocks of people of some favorable point of view about what they are looking at, but you’re not going to get everybody.

Which of course makes everything a popularity contest. Who do you love more? I’m not whining at my lack of popularity. I actually cultivate non-popularity as much as anybody I’ve ever met. All I’m saying is that we seem to miss the point in all of this fighting for resources and points of view. All of those billions and billions of people have to breathe, eat, have some protection from the elements and will occasionally suffer injuries or disease. No matter who we vote for on Facebook, people actually have to do the job of existing on the planet.

Here is where this point of view business becomes sticky. We keep following the economy down the rabbit hole. The economy breeds economic answers. When everybody is enslaved by this fight for cash, you keep getting solutions to the problem that relate to spending cash.

“We are now investing billions in the search for a corporate answer to climate change.”

No we are not. We are just playing with billions of dollars and making sure that this money goes back to the people who have the money. We are dangling fish on hooks hoping to take irrepressible environmentalist unhappy with the shape of the world and turn them back into good money slaves. Whatever percentage of us can be coerced or bought is a plus and those who remain, perhaps like myself, simply become pariahs.

I myself have heard both sides of the argument. I turn people off because I am not commercial or corporate in my presentations. I have also been told that I turn people off because I ask for money. How can I be an environmentalist or a communist and ask for money? That just doesn’t make sense. Shouldn’t I simply starve to death as a way of proving them right?

I mean, I do have an answer. I have an answer for this Russian war and I have an answer for the ecological problem. I’ve been thinking about it for a really long time. The answer is to stop. Literally, the answer is to stop the economy and do something else. 

It doesn’t require a war. It doesn’t require one group of people demolishing another group of people or people demolishing people generally just to make sure that enough money is going to the people who create weapons and the hatred that fuels weapons sales. Or the oil that moves the cars that people need in order to deliver weapons and bullets into the bodies and heads of their enemies.

The answer to the question is to quit. Again and again, this is not new information. There were quite a few thinkers back in the great baby boom generation who thought the same thing. Tune in, turn on and drop out. Get off the grid. Get out of the system. Leave the rat race. Go home and close the door and turn the lights off.

It’s a funny thing about that in this neck of the woods. During the time of communism, they were completely aware of all of my arguments and people were taught to use less resources and to not make a fuss with each other. The idea was a smooth sea and a calm captain got everybody through all of the problems. And if you were the problem, the less money wasted on fighting it.

For the most part, they worked on kindness.

I am not saying that there was any perfect world. Most people like to scream at all of the negatives. And I agree, there are a million negatives. But the point of it is that we need to look through the lens of ecology as being our unified point of view. We have to stop looking at people as being divided by some intellectual idea that most people really don’t even understand and certainly don’t participate in.

For example, we have a constant blizzard in the middle United States and South about conservative ideas. But if you took a great look at almost all of these ideas, everything focuses on business and jobs and making money. People don’t want to listen to other people who think about any philosophical idea other than money and that people have the right to get some money. What is completely ironic about this is that the area that most loyally serves this idea is generally the poorest, least healthy, has the highest instance of crime, teenage pregnancies plus problems with abortions and basically speaking, the most hysterical starving people anywhere. And all of them fighting tooth and nail to prove that they are somehow on the road to prosperity. They are not. They are doing nothing but destroying their own environment and starving to death in the effort.

I genuinely do think the answer is easier. You just have to want less. You have to need less. You have to act on your whims a little less. Or, if you genuinely have a whim, make sure that it’s a really interesting thing and that something really interesting is for your friends in it.

This idea by the way only works if we are not chasing money. The problem is, it’s not that people can’t have original ideas, it’s that people really don’t want to dive in on these ideas unless it gives them money. If we were not on some kind of a money system, we could very easily be an absolute Paradise for art.

Well, we would have to get rid of corporate art. We would have to limit our perspective to the human level.

Are you a Shakespeare fan? I doubt it sincerely. Are you a theater fan in general? I also doubt it. Have you ever gone to a small theater, or a local theater just to watch the actors play? Have you ever given a thought of the difference between live theater and film? Truthfully, once you realize that light flickering on a screen does not hold a candle to live theater, you might just begin to see my point.

I discovered this when I lived in Vancouver, Canada. Vancouver is a beautiful city, perhaps the most beautiful city on the West Coast. Perhaps at one point I would have believed San Francisco to be number one but from what I hear and understand about what has happened in California, and especially with the ecological damage caused by global warming, I’m probably going to stay with Vancouver on this one.

Every fall, they have a series of socially sponsored art festivals. And I remember that they had something called The Fringe festival which was specifically for small, off the grid theater groups to perform plays. It was very inexpensive as I recall, usually $5 a ticket, and if you were into it you could see dozens of plays and dozens of actors doing their thing. It was remarkable.

They also have a film festival but putting them back to back like this, I realized how thin film is when placed next to live human actors. In fact, we may have noticed that if you’re not making a superhero film or looking at three or 400 murders, there isn’t much to film anymore. You either make the film experience so completely otherworldly outrageous or there’s really no reason to justify the popcorn. But at the same time, where is the theater?

At various times in my life, I have really wanted to write. When given a moment of freedom or at least the time where nothing was going on, the first thing that always came into my mind was that I wanted a writing project. I don’t know how people understand art or art writing or any kind of writing really but to me, it has always been a project. An art creation. 

But aren’t is like they say, 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. You can come up with any dream you want but in order to have that dream take shape, it takes quite a bit of work. You can see a vision in your head but it takes time to have that creation come to life.

I do not enjoy being on stage. I do not enjoy being the object of people’s attention. I don’t like people staring at my body. I don’t like people staring at me generally. I learned this when I was in university and studying music and realized that performing music was completely unpleasurable for me. I didn’t like gigs. I didn’t like the drunks, I didn’t like hauling the gear around and truthfully, I didn’t even really dig the show. I don’t like being a performer.

But writing is a different story. Writing does not have the budget of actually creating a set or a series of different sets like in a movie. Writing does not require anybody’s human effort but your own. Writing is ecologically clean. Almost no resources are wasted except for perhaps a little bit of electricity and the food you eat. Writing has endless possibilities. Writing can create more pictures than all the cameras in the world and it doesn’t cost a penny or a moment of anybody’s time except for the writer and the reader.

When I started writing, I started writing for theater. Why? Because I was in love with the idea of human beings making pictures for other human beings. I like dance and I like symphony music. I like live music but I much, much prefer acoustic music to electric. I am not opposed to poetry and I will tell you that I used to enjoy comedy quite a bit. But the common thread of all of this is the guy who writes this stuff down so that everybody can be at the same place at the same time during their performance. That was the job I wanted.

Yesterday was a pretty good day. Yesterday had its mixed moments. I am not going to go into grave detail and I’m not going to open myself for accusations of misogyny, but my ex partner is a Slavic lady and she has her Slavic ways. Nobody’s going to say yes and nobody’s going to say no and I am as grateful as anything for this relationship and for the several years we have been hanging out together in one form or another.

The only problem with yesterday was that I wrote the scenario for the Bean field. The inspiration for it came from the ex-partner herself. Being a Slavic woman, about the only thing that is important to her is to make a man work for her. If she can find a way to get masculine energy into play, she will do it one way or another.

My plan for the place was perennials. My feeling was that growing my own food was not particularly worth the effort because we have plenty of people who sell food. Now of course, there is a good possibility that all public systems will be shut down and this will be especially true if Belarus enters the war and gets rockets shot at it by Ukraine or NATO or anti-lucashanka people. The town that I recently left could just as easily turn into the same sort of mass of gentrifying rubble that you see in the pro war media in Ukraine. There are about 130,000 people there but that number can be lowered pretty good with a few well-placed rockets.

If that happens, food is at a premium. Starvation and disease is what happens during war. Human suffering at its highest. For those people who really want more, for those fans of hyper violence and superhero and gangster films where the body count piles up for the sake of box office, war is amazing copy. And for sure, there is a great business for photographers and writers trying to make names for themselves by staying as close to flying bullets as possible. Matador writers facing death for the hope of a really cool byline, a reputation and then hopefully, a steady paycheck.

But she said the right combination of words. We have a field, I was pretty much ready to let it go to Nature but she mentioned that we could probably reinvigorate the land a little bit by planting legumes. They are natural nitrogen fixers and add fertility to the soil. It rang a bell with me.

Also, this is my first year trying to get back some semblance of physical health. I have been dealing with great physical problems for about 10 years and last year was my sickest year on record. Maybe a little farming was not a bad idea. Sure, I’d prefer to sit back and admire nature’s beauty. As far as the world is concerned, this would be the best hobby we could ever fall in love with as a species. We could really create a bit of a paradise around the concept of the enjoyment of watching nature do its thing.

But a project is a project and once a writer always a writer. So I wrote the scenario for the Bean field. I saw the picture in my head just like I do for everything I’ve ever put on paper. I got the idea straight, I looked at my canvas and I decided what I wanted to see. Of course, I didn’t create something completely out of my head and demand that nature adhere to my vision. I worked with the natural terrain and with what limited resources I have. I made a reasonable decision on how to go about this and in the end, I’m not creating any ecological destruction whatsoever. After a few years, everything that I have done simply goes back to Nature without a whisper.

But when she was here, we had the problem of her demanding to improvise based on her own moods. She is an independent person and has been so her whole life. God love her for it and this is probably the main reason we are still friends. I respect her independence and as much as I might have ever wanted her around all the time, she, like almost everybody else around here, keeps it going the way she keeps it going. She is a cog in the wheel. She is a papered and documented slave of note. She is not going to walk away from her company or her paycheck because they directly allow her the Independence that she lives for.

Briefly said, yesterday wasn’t perfectly romantic. There were a few moments where I had to make some loud noises to get her to listen to what I was saying. There was a plan. The plan made sense. The plan was there to limit problems in the future. The plan was there to limit the amount of work necessary to maintain the beans. The plan was there so that people knew what to do about the beans in the future. If we followed the plan, we would be okay.

And it was a good plan and truthfully, we both admired what we had done by the end of the day. We did indeed make a beautiful picture and the day was a success. The only problem was, she did not want to listen to the sound of my voice. She wanted to listen to her own voice.

There was one moment yesterday where I let loose with the full volume of my voice. I am not a giant. I don’t know if I’m experiencing old age shrinking yet but I am no mountain of a man. When I was younger, I could create some thunder and in direct confrontations with people I didn’t like very much, I have a pretty good record. But I have a voice and it was only when I let one particular word go full throttle and my ex partner could hear the echo coming off the mountains that she stopped making me crazy.

Maybe it was suddenly that everyone in the village understood that I was angry at her. Maybe this is all my ex neighbor needed to know. I already have a woman in my life trying to make me insane. Sorry chicken, I have never needed your help. Who knows? But she got the point. I simply am not a young man and I cannot give up so much energy because it’s going to lead to injury and pain. I cannot be taxed beyond my limits because I am limited in my mobility. You can’t fuck with me like I am an able-bodied person.

And then we settled into a rhythm. He decided I was right. She understood that it was pointless to fight me on every single point. It wasn’t going to make a better field, it wasn’t going to make the work any easier and if this was what was in her head, it wasn’t going to make me quit and put her in the captain’s chair. She doesn’t have Captaincy on my property. She does not have full agency to run the decision-making process. She is not the author of the scenario. 

At the end of the day, there was no particular party or celebration. This was Sunday and it was already after 5:00. Work starts the next morning and she was already into her tunnel vision. She was already noodling around putting things together because work comes tomorrow and free time has ended. Tick tock tick tock this is how the slave lives.

I recommended that we call a cab to take her home. I would pay for the cab. I would happily consider this a thank you for the help and the time. She wouldn’t let me call a cab. The bus had come and gone. The only way for her to get back to town was to walk the seven kilometers to the train station. Don’t do it. Let me call a cab for you. No, she would rather walk.

Hug and a kiss, love you, love you too, call me when you get home, okay. I turned on the stove and put some veggies on there and tossed in some macaroni and said that this was dinner time.

I was right in the middle of seconds when I got the hysterical phone call. She had missed the train. She had finally come unglued.

I called the cab company, told them to come to my house to get the money and then I told them where to find her along the service road, they picked her up and took her home and now she’s at work. I am not at work because I did not go to work on Monday morning. On Monday morning, I have toast and some lovely homemade bread with some veggies and I stare out the window at the remarkable morning starting in front of me. I do not lead a slave’s life and I have not let a slave’s life in more than two decades. I went independent a long time ago. I became an artist and a writer a long time ago. I prefer to write my own scenarios, thank you very much.

So where are we now? I have some gardening to do this year which is going to be okay. It’s going to be some physical labor and I’m going to have some physical obligations to get water to my plants and make sure that their habitat is beneficial to their growth. My job is to facilitate their life cycles in such a way that they are happy to live with me.

I guess I’m also going to keep this going and somehow, I’m going to make a catalog of all of my writing and perhaps publish a few volumes of things I have put down on paper in the hope that maybe people who like reading might like to read me. You never know.

What do I want for all of this work?

Well, if I had some money, I could do some really interesting projects. I could do some public projects and give some people jobs in the green sector or even use this entire thing as sort of a theater project inspiring other green sector jobs. I could be author scenario of something that is very good for the planet.

Or perhaps I might need a few people who are like-minded and perhaps we would have friendships that would be fun. Perhaps I could replace my current human landscape alcoholics, sycophants and brutal racists with some artists, free thinkers and ecologically minded utopianists.

Or maybe I’ll just have a few nice moments watching the plants grow and the trees wave in the breeze. Maybe aside from all of these words, I’ll just have a quiet year. Maybe it’ll be a year of peace and quiet and mostly fresh air. Maybe for me personally, it’ll be a year without war or fear. 

Maybe I’ll get lucky and the chickens will have a moment of Revelation. No, that’s bullshit, they are as crazy as my ex partner. They are never going to wake up. God have mercy on my soul and let her crash that fucking car.

That’s it. That’s what I wanted to say. I really hope we don’t go to war. I really hope that we wake up. I really hope that reason falls into the minds of the most insane generation in the history of mankind. I really hope there is a moment of logic that somehow falls upon the stupidest generation in the history of History. Who knows, maybe somebody will read one of my books and catch a clue.

***

It’s about 12:30 and I’m taking a break on the bench in front of my house. I’ve managed to put a layer of dirt on one of my raised boxes and have even made a trip to the forest to pick up a load of firewood. I think I’ve probably got two evenings here in my wheelbarrow and we will see if this is a good way to keep the house warm. I don’t really have access to lifetime wood by this method but every little bit helps.

I got a comment from someone I have not heard from in a million years. There was a period of my life where I lived in Oregon. It is debatable what I was doing at that time but to keep it simple, I hung out with hippies a lot. A lot of this was not by my choice and I was a bit of a troublemaker to be sure. This does not mean I would go to bars and get drunk and cause fights. I was a straight arrow. What it meant was that I was not willing to be in the drug business and ended up getting in a lot of fights with those guys. Quite a few things that are now legal or illegal at the time if that means anything to you.

But I am not talking about either good or bad times. And that particular period of my life was very rich in both positives and negatives.

My friend said to me that he didn’t know that I was a dirter. A dirter I guess is some kind of hippie slang for someone who does their own gardening. If you dig in the dirt, you are a dirter. 

It’s ironic really. And I guess it’s been a lot of years of sitting on my ass and talking philosophy to ESL people who eventually just want money. It’s hard to say whether this is my true calling or not.

Right now, it feels a bit like West Texas during the time of the depression and the dust bowl. The wind is howling pretty badly right now and it’s very dry. I noticed where I trimmed off a layer of dirt from the path between where I planted my beans that it’s pretty necessary to lay down a layer of mulch. I don’t have the water right now to just keep it wet and I have severe doubts as to how much water we’re going to get from the sky.

Part of the plan is to make you serve the roofing I have and to save rainwater as much as possible. The idea is to take the strain off the groundwater which for sure, is going to drop this year. You just can’t count on the rain anymore.

That was one of the first things I noticed when I started caring about this land. The weather report, using information from many years of statistics, kept telling us it was going to rain the next day but it never did. In fact, if you count how many times they said it was going to rain and how many times it actually rained, I could probably make a fortune betting against them.

You would think amidst this glorious information age that we are living in right now, we’re a guy like me who can talk freely about everything he knows to as many people as might want to listen to him that people might take note of some of the more interesting ideas of modern agriculture that are out there. Of course that would entail believing in global warming and actually doing something about it. I guess that would have to be some kind of a religious change on the part of our agricultural system here. They believe in not believing what they read and blame everything on fake news. This entitles them to do exactly the same thing that got us in this problem in the first place. And of course it keeps our nose as firmly implanted in Russia’s ass. God forbid we should live without Russian oil.

But I am very worried about water right now. With the wind up like this, I’m watching a whole bunch of topsoils sail off the field and head elsewhere. I’m also looking at a plastic bag, modern tumbleweed, coming down the street trying to snag itself on twigs along the way.

If I had an entire country at my disposal to make decisions for and if I had any kind of an agricultural background, you would think they would take note of how much wind blows through this place. We don’t have any big mountain ranges disturbing the flow of air. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why this place is not windmill heaven. Why, if we just invested in harvesting the energy from wind, we might cut The living daylights out of our need for imported oil.

Oh, I’m sorry, did someone just slap me on the back of the head and tell them to get back to pleasuring them with more enthusiasm?

Seriously, I feel like a cheap horse sometimes. Why am I not allowed to think practically. If we could produce electricity sustainably just by making a bit of an investment in windmills, why on Earth would this have to be a bad thing? Okay, I understand that big brother wants us all to die for our country. He’s got a whole bunch of junk in the garage that he never makes use of like missiles and bombs and tanks. And yes, he can put a 40 mile convoy together, all of it running on gasoline just to show off how wonderful internal combustion engines can be. But why do we have to be so lame and stupid? Why do we have to sit around and rely on other people to tell us what to do? Why can’t we just put up a couple of God damn windmills to run our laptops and our e-bikes and our golf carts?

Anyway, this break is going to come to an end in a little while because I’m expecting a delivery today. I’ve got to go open up the fence and I sincerely hope that they are going to help me with this. We ordered some planting soil. About 230 kilos is on the way, I guess that’s about a half a ton, and I would prefer not to have to move all of that myself.

Of course, if the local alcoholics decide to actually show up with some dirt or fertilizer, I won’t turn it down. I’m not made of money this year and it would be stupid to start breaking deeply into my spending with a war starting and restrictions all over the place as to how much access I actually have over my own funds. But this is a building year and if we’re going to work with raised boxes, it’ll be nice to have them as rich as possible right from the outside.

And actually, I had a thought earlier on today but I really should be mulching my pathways through the being field. The world is not supposed to be uncovered. Maybe there’s some connection to Jews needing to keep their heads covered all the time and the idea that we’re not really supposed to have Bare exposed land. One of the prime elements of desertification is when the wind takes the topsoil away and sends it elsewhere. This is also one of the prime reasons I can’t ride my bicycle in this town. The sand is so deep along the broken roads, it’s like riding a beach without an ocean.

Honestly, I feel like a sharecropper looking at a bad lease and an inability to make my payments on time. Talk about suffering. And you can’t even get into how the lord giveth and the lord taketh away. These are not acts of God. These are acts of man, Acts of war, Acts of aggression and endless Acts of perpetual stupidity again and again and again causing this mess. And they will never learn. They will never, ever stop the noise and think about what they’re doing even for a minute.

Truly, I hate criminals and drug addicts. I don’t know who I hate worse. I hate criminals, drug addicts and smart asses who think they know what they’re doing when they don’t. And I hate them most when their misanthropy ends up on me. Exploitative misanthropy, there’s no other way to say it.

***

What are the most sustainable global energy storage systems?

Pumped hydro storage (PHS) remains the most used means for storing clean energy worldwide (over 94% of global energy storage capacity is PHS). Pumped hydro is also often the most cost-effective and readily available means of storage for large-scale energy storage projects. Green City times

I took a look at this article and the basic gist is that it uses stored water that gets pumped up to an upper reservoir and released over turbines to create electricity. If a dam creates energy by allowing running water to turn the turbines, this relies on pumping water to an upper level which then falls over a lower level. I guess the question is where the energy comes from to pump the water. 

The articles also talk about lithium ion batteries as being more efficient and ecologically friendly than lead acid batteries. But perhaps this is indeed the place to put our intelligence. The thing about fossil fuels is, you can burn them when you want to. This would also apply to burning gas. Biofuels is an interesting thought but I guess what the genuine problem is is how to store renewable energy so it can be used when needed.

One can imagine a world where on a day like today where the wind is blowing notoriously, we would all run to our computers and run our washing machines and charge all of our vehicles. The idea here is that each of these items has a storage cell and that the most important thing is to go ahead and charge that.

I am in no way an expert on this field but the first thing that comes to my mind is that the idea of energy security does not lie on creating energy from a central location. It is with deep apologies that I say to the state that perhaps they should not be thinking of making money off of energy creation or limiting people from making their own energy.

Last year I had a picture in my head of the town just filled with windmills on the top of buildings. This would be in conjunction with solar panels of course and I guess if we were clever enough, we could do the winter heating system as a gravity feeding turbine Turner as well. But what this would mean is simply that we accept the fact that energy is persnickety and we’re not supposed to have 24-hour on demand electricity. 

I mean, it’s nice but if you can’t afford it and it doesn’t work, you can’t do it.

I go back to the conversation I had with my buddy at the market last week. He was talking about the cost of heating during the winter and complained that he had five rooms that needed heating. The bill was a disaster and therefore he wanted to go over to the grid and get off his current methods. I told him I only heated one room and my bill was pretty reasonable All things considered. He told me that didn’t work because that one room would lose heat. Conceptually, he might be correct and I might not be at the absolute limit of engineering, but I still wasn’t spending a lot of money to stay warm and I was staying comfortably warm the entire time. 

The trick here is agreeing to live with less.

Here I am talking shit again. The current goal and way of thinking in the world is that all 9 billion people have to believe in their heart that they are rich people even though poverty is a common thread running through every country. Maybe we are supposed to set for ourselves less lofty goals and be a little bit more humble for the sake of sustainable ecology. 

I mean, it’s nice having a computer. I enjoy my computers a lot. But if I had to and I had the means to do so, I could see peddling my bike for an hour or so a day to keep the thing running. I wouldn’t consider that self a crime against me. In fact, if I knew that this was the general culture and our means of keeping computers running, I’d say it’s a great idea for public health as well.

And yes, you can very easily generate enough energy to run a computer with a stationary bicycle. Easy peasy lemon squeezy and it would probably put a big dent in the heart disease problem that we are having as well.

***

I just got a call that my delivery is on the way so I better head over to the street so I can direct where they are going to dump my material. Do you think anybody is going to agree to carry it into the barn for me? Would you like to bet on that? I’m betting against it but if you want to give me some money to help pay for this, that would be cool.

***

Well, I lost my bed. Guys were not only on time but a touch early and when I tried to carry one of the bags of topsoil myself, they told me not to for fear that I would hurt my back. Is this modern business practices? Good job! Thank you so much. A little bit of professionalism is like a breath of fresh air.

I have my “bachi gata” now also. I’m so happy. The first thing I did was go up to where I had laid some Mama zucchini on some ground that was too hard to break through even with a spade one week ago. Today, this beauty went through and dug and filled holes for all four mamas in less than 10 minutes. Wish I had had this possibility before the rats got to most of the babies. I don’t know what the zucchini story is going to be but I’m not too worried about it. Zucchini is the least of our worries.

It’s about 2:30 right now and I think it’s a little early to quit for the day but to be honest with you, I feel like I’ve had enough. I don’t really feel like eating anything but maybe I should take an hour and just put my feet up for a while. I guess I could do some computer work. It seems as though  most of my time is running away from jobs I don’t want to do. I mean, I make myself useful during these times but I’ve got to get it in my head to do what I need to do.

You know, this gardening tool makes a guy feel powerful. It’s just too strong. And it digs deep. With a tool like that, you don’t need a horse. No exploitation. Nice.

***

No, it didn’t happen. I had this drive to keep on working and I noticed I had this drive and I understood I had this drive and I really wanted to make use of this drive but I didn’t drive and I let myself fall to my incompetence. It was the bread.

I wasn’t even hungry. I didn’t even need to eat. True, the sun was out and I had done a lot of Labor over the course of the day. True, my legs were killing me and I wanted to sit down for a minute. True, I tried to be a man of self-control. Kind of. It’s not my reputation but it’s true. Kind of.

But then I cut off just a little piece of my ex partner’s bread. Just a taste really. I noticed that I dropped a few crumbs on The cutting board. This is the problem when she brings me bread. I do absolutely nothing to feed the mice and this is my way of not needing a cat. If you never, ever leave food behind that the mice love, the mice don’t like you very much and go elsewhere to find food. Food number one on the list of loves is factory bread. Mice love bread crumbs. If you live in the country and you leave your bread out or eat so that there are bread crumbs, you have mice. 

Or you have a cat and then you don’t care. I had a cat but I couldn’t stand the son of a bitch and when I went to the hospital, I gave it to a friend and then when I got out of the hospital, I didn’t ask for it back. The cat pretended it didn’t know me for 90% of my trip to their house. But then when I left and didn’t want to take him with me he looked at me in a strange sort of way. I don’t really know what was going on in that cat’s head but if I were to put subtitles under that look, he would probably say something nasty in kind language.

I left him behind. I also left the goats behind. The goats are gone now. They were eating. I don’t know much about meat eaters these days. Maybe the next time I go there, the cat will be gone too.

All right, I’m getting crazy.

The new stove comes tomorrow. I got a call today saying that I should expect them at about 1:00 and that’s pretty cool. Tomorrow morning I will clean this thing up and make space for the new one to come in and the old one to go out easy enough.

When we first came to this house, it appeared that the stove did not work. When I first tried to open it up, nothing happened. But then the next time I came, and it was pretty cold, as if by some miracle the stove lit up and then just kept working. We were sure that there was no gas in the tank but amazingly, it worked.

I don’t know how old this stove is. It’s in pretty bad shape. The grill is pretty much fried and a couple of the bars that support pots have been cooked enough that there’s almost nothing left of the steel. The oven generally doesn’t work and it’s held together by a piece of thread. It ain’t pretty, my guess is that it’s 30 years old but I have been cooking on it since I got here. That makes it cool.

But they wouldn’t give me any more gas unless I got a new stove so I went to the gas company’s store and bought a new gas stove and oven for what amounted to about 100 bucks. This was exactly the time when the cost of the ruble was dropping like a Stone. It’s gotten better since then but I bought this at exactly the right moment and saved about 40%. Nice.

But I eventually made dinner on this stove. It will be one of the last two meals that I will make on it. The last one will be tomorrow morning. Probably the last of my ex partner’s bread and some coffee to start the day.

I am worthless as a style Maven and truthfully, I would be cool with just keeping this old girl around. I kind of like how dilapidated she is but yet provides gas well enough to cook on. I’m not saying that there’s any genuine character. There is no touch whatsoever in the dials and it does take a while for the coffee to heat up. But I’m a foodie and this has been my stove and so I’m a little Misty.

So tomorrow morning I guess I’ll clean up in the kitchen a bit before I go out and do what I can about filling up another box. I’ve got my bachi gata which I guess will make quick work of the path that I’m cutting my dirt from. It’s that plus a scoop shovel and my wheelbarrow. High technology. And then, if I still have any energy, I’ll go back out to the woods and see if I can get another couple of days of firewood old school. I did that today and though it’s very warm and probably will be warm enough not to have a fire tonight, everything I will use comes from my trip to the forest today. Also nice.

Other than that, I don’t really have anything else I want to say. I just saw a video of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars. I don’t know what this means. I don’t know what it means when you have a show being watched by like a hundred million people and the man feels free enough to stand up and whack another guy in the face. Everybody laughed at the move and if Will Smith hadn’t screamed at the man afterwards, it probably would have been taken as a joke. Chris Rock declined to press charges. I don’t know what any of this means. I don’t know what’s really going on in the world.

And I didn’t talk about it or even look today but in ukraine, NPR has the following:

Russian forces attacked the western Ukrainian city of Lviv on Saturday evening local time, just one day after its military announced it would refocus its strategy on the eastern part of Ukraine. Lviv officials say there were three powerful explosions.

President Biden met with Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, and its foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, in Warsaw, Poland, as the U.S. continues to show support for the besieged nation one month after Russia’s invasion. The meeting happened before Biden gave a major speech in Warsaw.

President Biden also spent part of his visit to Poland meeting with Ukrainian refugees who have been displaced in the last month by the invasion.

Russian forces are being met with Ukrainian protesters in the cities they invade. Across the border in Poland, protestors also gathered in the streets to protest in support of Ukraine.

If we’re talking about Lviv, that means the Russians are all the way in the western part of the country. Lviv is known as a party town really and to be honest, they are known for their sexual kinkiness. I’m not making this up and this is their reputation for people who travel there. Sort of the Ukrainian Amsterdam or something like that. I guess it’s hard to be happy go lucky when they start bombing you.

I also don’t really know what it means when the army comes in and there are protesters in the street. I don’t know what to think about that. I mean, people go out in the street and protest the way we used to go to Street parties. Actually, I think protests these days are Street parties. With covid, it might even be the only justification for people to meet. And in Russia and Belarus, it is illegal to protest the war.

But what does it mean when you go out to participate in an anti-war protest for the occupying army? That’s a weird kind of parade. They are coming in with loaded weapons and tanks and they are blowing up your buildings and you’re fighting them by waving signs in their face and chanting. That’s a surreal image. It’s also pretty brave. Ukrainians are going to be known for their bravery in years to come. They might also be known for the futility of trying to be a progressive Nation.

I’m also not very fond of America’s response to this war. Sending weapons might be helping the war effort but it does also seem to be adding fuel to the fire. And I have never liked Biden’s connection to the Ukrainian oil Business. I cannot get his son’s high salary in Ukrainian oil Business out of my head. I also can’t get it out of my head that all this happened while Biden was vice president under Barack Obama. I mean, we all love Barack Obama but there does seem to be more than a touch of corruption going on. Not that anybody talks about that but I see those connections as being serious. I saw them as being a lot more serious when Biden was force fed us by the Midwest Christian Media.

What is Belarus’s position in the Ukrainian war?

I guess the truth is well written in this article from open democracy. I’m editing it down.

While initially outspoken in support of the invasion, Lukashenka’s tone has in recent days been uncharacteristically less forceful. In the month leading up to the invasion, the Belarusian president spoke about the war in virtually every speech he made. But with the invasion under way, Lukashenka has been spending his time visiting hospitals and going skiing, while calling for an end to the conflict. He also offered to host peace talks. Of course, Lukashenka still blames the Ukrainian leadership for starting the war, he has tried to present himself as a dove who wants to prevent slaughter. 

I agree with the point of view of this article. I think the boss is scared shitless right now. I think he’s scared of losing his country, his country’s respect and even the respect of all of his tough guy buddies that he surrounds himself with. They’ve been getting by on image and shiny suits and lots of found and left-handed pocket money but now they’re shooting real guns with real bullets and the chance that they could start shooting in Minsk is getting more and more real all the time.

I do not think anyone in Belarus wants to have war here and even the hardcore conservative money people change their tune the moment they started shooting in Ukraine. People think of themselves as big shots when they are on the president’s side, but just like the man with the mustache, they kind of Tuck their heads under the shell when the thought of watching approaching rockets comes into their head. It’s a crazy country with a crazy leader and this is a crazy time. I just wish they would have listened to me. I wish somebody would have listened to me. I’ve been telling you about the Russians for years but nobody ever listens.