Wednesday, March 30th 2022
According to Zelinsky, the Russians have announced they will diminish attacks on Kiev and other cities. He also mentioned that the war is not over but that the possibility of negotiations might be meaningful. He’s also made deals with countries such as Denmark for the Reconstruction of the cities that have been destroyed.
It’s starting to look like a real estate deal. Forced gentrification and reconstruction. Get ready for the future. It’s coming for all of us.
***
Speak to the entire community of Israel, saying, “On the tenth of this month, let each one take a lamb for each parental home, a lamb for each household.
But if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his neighbor who is nearest to his house shall take [one] according to the number of people, each one according to one’s ability to eat, shall you be counted for the lamb.
Exodus 12, 3-4
Technically, I’m a day late for this week’s tour study but better late than never. This week’s study is called Tazria, and it’s kind of the translation for the word conceive or give birth. It has this name because we are getting ready for Passover which is in the middle of April this year. It is springtime reading and it’s about being clean / kosher.
Most of the reading is about what people must do when they have lesions or non healing wounds on their skin. They have to go and speak to the cohen, the priest, and they will either be declared unclean and made to live away from the camp or they are quarantined for a bit until the wounds heal. My guess is this is mostly about leprosy but it could also include many illnesses. You’re clean or you are not clean.
In that portion I took out, I just noticed a bit of socialism in it and thought to mention it. There are those who have in those who don’t and if I’m not going to be charged with plagiarism:
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (German: Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen) is a slogan popularised by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme. The principle refers to free access to and distribution of goods, capital and services.
Marx was Jewish. Go figure.
There is also a maftir, an extended bit of reading that sort of makes sense of the Jewish lunar calendar. You always want the Torah readings to line up seasonally and it is in this extended section that they talk about preparing unleavened bread and remembering the flight from Egypt.
You have to make a decision sometimes about whether you want to keep something or Let It go. Sometimes we have emotional attachments to things and even though they become a genuine problem, it’s hard to cut them loose.
Drugs are kind of a difficult thing to deal with. Most people have a hard time wrapping their heads around the concept of drugs. The word drug is generally conceived of as being bad even though whatever the percentage of the population is that requires some form of chemical therapy to bring the person to health or normalcy or even function is probably the majority.
In fact, if we include stimulants in the deal, we are easily the majority of every human living on the planet. And if we include sensory blockers, anti-stimulants or depressants, alcohol being the number one of these, we are even close to a perfect vote.
I’m not saying that this very complicated subject is so easy to diagnose but if we are talking about young people getting involved with drugs, we are talking about people who do not have particular rights and therefore feel deprived and restrained or even imprisoned. This does not end up being the case for every young person. I’m sure a tremendous number of people who get seriously into drinking or drugs in their formative years do so simply because it is what is done. Perhaps they learned from their parents or from their friends.
I had an opportunity to be wise one time when I was in my twenties. A friend of mine told me that he was extremely worried about his son who was at the time 15. He himself was a serious alcoholic and he did not want these habits getting passed on to his son and he was extremely worried about him.
What I told him was something that I still believe is the truth to this day and it’s a matter of having a life that is meaningful versus a life that is meaningless. I thought of this at the time as a matter of velocity.
Maybe I’ll draw some simple pictures to help illustrate my point.
In the first picture, the Red Dot in the center is our young person who is surrounded by invitations that serve no particular positive influence over them. We could just say that it is other bored people looking for partners in their boredom. I’m certainly surrounded by such people now. In the second picture however, the surrounding boredom still exists but in this model, the person has a direction, a goal, some velocity and try hey are heading in this direction. Because he or she is in movement, though the invitations exist and they might from time to time wish to partake, they cannot sit and wallow in relief because they have something to do.
I guess it would be easy to point fingers here. If we stop screaming about how evil marijuana is and agree to consider alcohol at least equally nefarious a drug, this would explain the alcoholism problem. If no one has rights to advance, if no one even has rights to truly vote, if the government’s job seems to be to unilaterally suppress people from rising in the world, everyone stands still and we have picture number one for everybody. It would seem to be the only answer.
Of course if I say these words, the answer will be to go to America. But America does not mean automatic rising. Perhaps there is opportunity to do more but this is an illusion. You can have a car and a home and the family and be equally as trapped. There are as many functional alcoholics or more as there are non functional alcoholics. And the town I live in is an equal example of this. We have functioning alcoholics all around me. These people are equally as addicted to their drugs as anyone else. They just seem a bit cleaner than the dysfunctional street drunks. It’s a shame that we allow People’s clothing and appearance to dictate their status. In my experience, they are equally addicted and equally unclean.
I am not the first person to come up with this idea and there are a few countries in the world who have taken the police out of the drug business. Legalization has led to a much different idea of how society functions and the understanding that very often it is the quality of a person’s life that is the root cause of getting lost in self medication.
I myself would love access to weed. It is not alcohol and I’m not looking to escape or numb the misery of life. I’m just trying to make friends with my legs and my garden. I’m looking for the involvement not the escape. I’m looking for some peace from the misery, not numbness.
Before I get out of this and head over to the kitchen for my daily cup of coffee, easily an addiction of mine, let’s take a moment and consider automobiles drugs. Let’s remember tobacco is a drug. To be honest with you, cooking oil is probably a drug. Sugar in my opinion is one of the most nefarious drugs ever created and that we so freely give it to children is exactly the identical act of coercion that starts drug addiction in the first place. Basically, anything that you put inside yourself other than for the continuation of life is a drug. And yes, protein powders, supermarket foods and of course the worst drug ever invented for our current culture, meat.
You know, in our original natural form, we are neurotic apes who have discovered reason, mathematics and writing. We are not starving on The plains of the Serengeti. We live in artificially constructed homes and trade in money and if we took a genuine look at ourselves and accepted our humanity is universal despite the color of our skin, we would not have war and we definitely would not need to kill anything. Not each other and not animals.
Slaves are drugs. Power is a drug. Money is a drug. Guns are drugs. Even terrorism is a drug.
***
Private automobiles are drugs. Oil is perhaps the biggest drug of all.
Breakfast today was very simple. Fried black bread served with napa cabbage and some coffee. Truthfully, you need the greens. Humans cannot really digest food without the addition of greens and in my opinion, napa cabbage or Peking style cabbage is perhaps the greatest food ever invented. It lasts forever without refrigeration. It has the softness of lettuce and is therefore very digestible and palatable raw, it has the structure of firmer cabbage and is equally tasty cooked. In my opinion, napa cabbage is the king of human vegetables and having that with greasy bread is a salvation.
I’m going to do some more digging today. I am carving out roads through my gardens and using the top soil to be one of the layers in my garden boxes. The more I have to hassle with the locals about animal fertilizer, the more I’m leaning to leaves and grass as being my natural soil enrichment.
I think the natural definition goes along with what we call cover crops. But outside of this, any organic material that gets placed back into the land becomes food for fertility.
The more I think about it, the happier I will be if I just don’t make use of animals.
I have had some thoughts on this. One of the best green dreams I have had would be to start a horse cart taxi service for the village I live in. In my case, I would happily take a slow clip clop over to the train and if we worked it out and knew our people were coming, we would have a cart waiting for them.
This is horse exploitation and very, very old fashioned. But one thing about horses is that we generally don’t eat them. And if we don’t overload them or beat them too much, letting them eat the grass and using their shit for fertilizer is an interesting relationship.
I’ve also had the thought in my mind to keep chickens in particular areas. They will of course take out all of everything wherever they live but their shit will act as wonderful fertilizer for the next year. If you rotated a small group of chickens from place to place, they would be feeding fertility back into the land that way.
But I don’t want to eat eggs or chicken anymore and truthfully, it’s an awful lot of work to feed them and clean up after them and keep them orderly. My neighbors are chicken people. I don’t know how they tolerate the noise or the smell. And the chickens are obnoxious too.
One of my answers to this was that I would keep the chickens until maturity and then open the gate and let them go free in the forest. Whatever good work they would do for me, they would do for the forest. That is until they get taken out by predators which wouldn’t take very long. This would include hungry people who know when my chicken release date comes up.
I had a couple of goats who have already lived out their lives and been eaten and shit by people. I thought of them for keeping the grass short. But then I understand that I really didn’t want the grass kept short. I like letting the grass grow and I like wild flowers appearing. They bring bees and butterflies and all kinds of natural life all of which adds fertility to the soil.
I’m also noticing that as I scrape past the dead top layer, the ground is still pretty black. It’ll just be more work every year feeding the boxes and the land but I guess that would be my job.
The only other question that exists is why I’m even trying to do this without a car. This was the argument a long time ago when we had a small dacha. We tried to run the thing while actually living in town without a car and it was a ton of misery. We didn’t have a lot of money and we didn’t have a lot of transportation so it was just a ridiculous amount of work.
I just have two thoughts about that that I think are significant. Firstly, I live here now. Well, until the soldiers come. But I live here and my trips to the town are not homecomings, they are day trips. Sure, I love hanging out with my ex partner and I still need, kind of, to go to the markets for food. And this week, I have a little bit of bureaucracy to take care of and I’m going to need to rebuild my bike. All of this is Town stuff.
But the other part of it is the significance of the automobile. Right now at this moment, there’s nothing but birds. It’s spring time and therefore mating season for all of the birds and I’ve been outside working everyday and I cannot even imagine how many different types of calls and bird sounds I’ve heard. The one that brings me the most happiness is from the stork that lives just to the north. Amongst its sexual habits are a lot of beak banging, a clack clack clack to call the attention of its potential mate. Storks live together by the way.
Automobiles, aside from being very dirty, really need to be seen as drugs. I’m talking about private automobiles here. Human beings are not that powerful and they don’t really have the ability to travel so far. And setting up one’s life, like my neighbors for example, in which you are constantly coming and going from your house, chasing dollars or just dealing with your nervous nature, costs an awful lot of money and creates a tremendous burden on the ecosystem. Auto emissions are poisonous and they are not easily swept away just because the breeze takes them away from you.
I was thinking of that movie, 300 I think it was called, about the Spartans and their war against Persia. What I remember is that the Persian leader, amazingly decorated, was brought to the field on a giant platform that required several hundred people to drag it along. The inference there is that the boss is carried but the people do the work. Perhaps this is the greatest mistake of mankind in trying to convince 8 billion people that they are all the heads of countries even though none of them actually are or even should be.
One other sound that I heard when I was out there was my neighbor using a grinder or a wood saw. I don’t think any of my neighbors, at least the male neighbors, do any work whatsoever that doesn’t come along with gasoline. I do all my wood cutting by hand and other than my drill, I don’t have any power tools here. I’m not using any kind of a tractor for my digging or hauling and I run my wheelbarrow by hand as well.
To me, this is remaining a human level. Certainly, I’m going much slower. Certainly, my productivity is less. Possibly, I might even be late. But who cares? I’m working at a human pace. Actually, I’m not even working at a human pace, I’m working at my own pace. And because I’m doing all my work by hand, I not only feel a personal connection to everything I’m doing but I’m also aware that I’m not causing any stress whatsoever on the local ecosystem.
Okay, I didn’t just let my field grow like last year. Last year I couldn’t walk at all and this year I can. Maybe that’s the reason for this great gardening honeymoon. And maybe I would be better off taking the train to town to buy my food every week instead of trying to grow at least a decent percentage of my own.
But I enjoy the fact that I’m not causing any harm. I enjoy the fact that I’m getting a lot of fresh air and exercise. I’m really enjoying that the amount of work that I can do gets better every day as the work becomes normal. I’m really enjoying how the instruments are becoming part of me with the practice like my guitar for example. I am enjoying my participation in life very much. I am also very much enjoying some good workmanship and a clean workplace.
I’m not perfect. I can’t do 100% myself. Perhaps someday I will. Perhaps someday when the garden is mature, if I’m still around, I will just rejoin the trees and use this amazing original culture that I have available to me here to keep everything going. But in the meantime, and I apologize to local dealers, being able to have someone else drive up and drop a ton of soil on me is a very good thing. Not having to travel to get the things I need is wonderful. And I don’t feel the slightest bit bad about not having a car to satisfy my wins or neuroses. You might even say, I’ve come to have a lot less neurosis by not having a car.
***
It’s about 11:15 and I have to take a break. I’m not having a tremendously productive morning. I guess I am pretty tired. But that’s not why I’m stopping. Across the street, the hunchback is involved in some kind of work that requires a tractor. And this tractor is belching smoke into the air and suddenly the entire world is filled with poison.
I’m not sure I made it clear before but if we are tired of Mr Putin, and I am most certainly am, the way to get rid of him and get him out of your life is to quit feeding him. Like any pest that you don’t want on your property, if you don’t give it any food or any reason to be there, it goes away.
How could we possibly do that? Go green. It is as simple as that. A collective decision to go green. A collective decision about what to do with our public funds. Go green. A collective decision to step away from an economic system that demands use of the oil business to the point that it creates such monsters as we are looking at right now. Go green.
I’m sure the hunchback is just a normal sub human. I do not think he is guilty of having a full portion of brains. Perhaps he was busy doing something else when those were being dealt or perhaps he has just demanded of himself to be as stupid as possible by habit and philosophy. I don’t hold him responsible for a lack of intelligence or individual thought.
But in his ignorant diligence to try to find some necessary money, he leans almost entirely on the oil business for money. I don’t ever remember him doing anything that people would call work that did not come completely connected to a motor of some kind. His wife may wander out on the field and push a rake around, but work to him means creating an obnoxious noise and ruining the atmosphere.
The hunchback by the way is the guy I have described with the hacking cough. He’s also a chain smoker so poisoning himself is the same as breathing. I’m sure he considers himself a real man by being able to handle the filth. That would be culturally normal.
But what if we were tired of such people. I know I certainly am. What if we were tired of people who do not ever pull their own weight and yet believe they are.
Imagine a politician sitting at a desk. Not for any particular reason but let’s say it somewhere in rural Alabama. Fat mama’s boy occupies his chair and with the sheer force of his diaphragm and a vocabulary bought and paid for with Daddy’s money, he pontificates about the moral ideas and the physical restrictions he has the right to put on people for a living. This is his job. When he puts on his shiny suit and heads out to his office for a day of envelope collecting, for all intents and purposes it looks like he’s going to work today.
But what the hell is he doing? And let’s also consider that tar and feathers is no longer part of the lexicon in Alabama. Being a white man, 99% sure this would be the case, they are not even going to lynch him for stealing the public funds. And even if he does get caught with his hands in the cookie jar AS these types often do, the odds are absolutely nothing’s going to happen to him because the justice system is just not set up for white collar crime. The justice system is there to keep the coloreds in line and the poor people in their place.
That tractor has ceased its noise and the hunchback has gotten on his bike to ride away. I put down my tools and walked to my front fence to see what the noise was. I knew what it was from the direction and the smell but I wanted to go and have a look at the fence. I didn’t say anything but I stood there and when the hunchback turned and saw me staring at him, I showed him a backwards black power salute with one finger sticking up out of the middle of it. I think the thought was clear.
I am told that I have a bad reputation with my neighbors. Let it be known that my neighbors have a bad reputation with me. They may consider me a bad person because of my nationality or ethnicity, but I consider them scandalously horrible people for taking away my clean air and making unnecessary noise to ruin my day.
May I recommend my particular brand of digging instrument. It’s a little easier to use than a spade and digs twice as fast. And if you use it enough and get your muscles used to it, it is one of the best weeding instruments you will ever meet. Breaks up grass as if it wasn’t even there. And there ain’t no horrible noise coming from it and there ain’t no horrible smoke coming from it and nobody has to get cancer when I decided to do something that looked like work. You should try it sometime. It might do your soul some good.
***
It’s 6:30 in the evening and it’s starting to get a little cool. It’s been a bit chilly all day. Nice outside working weather. I don’t like doing labor when it’s too hot. I don’t like doing anything when it’s really hot.
They say it’s going to rain tonight. I hope this is true. You always need rain when you’re planting things and as a bicyclist, I would really love it if we had some rain to make my ride to town tomorrow a little bit easier.
Tomorrow will be a bike rebuild and before I go, I have to make sure I have everything I need to swap the bike over. I’m going to not only change the rear gear but I’m going to get a new chain, put a different seat on it and shorten the stem a bit. All of this is going to change how the bike rides and hopefully make it a little bit easier to go through sand.
I got a notification for a particular bike that was for sale today and the ad and the picture made me think of getting it. This sexy right here looks about the right size for me and as you can see the frame is kind of interesting and super stiff. The frame is called a special order custom and it was made by the Kharkovski bicycle factory.
You’ve heard about the town of Kharkov. That’s the town that pretty much doesn’t exist anymore because the Russians decided to bomb it and bomb it and bomb it and bomb it. A town of about a million people wiped off the map.
It really is quite surreal these days. People are going through their days and going to work as if nothing’s going on. Checking out the social networks, there are all kinds of humor on the Russian Facebook. There is the usual humor and the usual collection of girls in bikinis. There are the Playboy magazine like dreams of fast cars and lots of cash. Nobody seems to notice anything strange is going on.
I just finished talking to my ex partner. We are looking forward to the first of May as planting day. That’ll be on a Sunday. My ex partner is in kind of a mood right now. She’s kind of in this mood every year at this time to be honest but to talk to her about it just ends up with the decision that it’s a mood.
I got a lot done today. I filled up three boxes and dug a couple of roads and started and broke the ground on the last three gardens that I’m going to build this year. I might make another box or two a little closer to the house specifically for salads. I still have the material for all of this and though I am really tired, I generally have the juice to do a little more. Why not? I’ve been waiting an awful long time for the ability to do work like this. I know a lot of people might think that setting up a garden is not that big of a deal but it is to me. I’m very pleased to have the possibility to get outside in the sun, work with my hands and even be creative with the planning and the planting.
But at the same time, I’m also feeling a little bit like I’m in the Twilight zone. The numbers from the war in Ukraine are staggering. News is saying something like the Russians are slowing down but it doesn’t really add up. So many people dying and being displaced, so many lives getting uprooted and yet it seems indigestible to everybody including me. It’s like none of us know what to do anymore. Or maybe it’s like none of us can feel anything anymore.
Tomorrow I’m going to town. I’ve got a couple of ideas what to do there and I’m going to rebuild my bike. But then again, it’s just a normal thing that I do here all the time.
Leave a Reply