Tuesday, April 5th 2022

Processed meat is a schedule one carcinogen. Bacon causes cancer. Pepperoni on your pizza causes two types of cancer. Sausage causes cancer. Meat generally is a greatly suspected carcinogen but processed meat causes cancer. Welcome to reality.

***

Good morning. It’s 8:00 a.m. and I have not been doing very much of anything for several hours.

It snowed again last night and this morning the sky is completely White. This is not a day for traveling and this is not a day for digging. It probably should be a day for putting up gutters and I feel like an ass for missing out on all of this water.

Probably today we are going to order some water tanks. We found a place in Minsk that will deliver both some IBC cubes and some barrels. This is going to be a bit of an expense but at a thousand liters a cube and perhaps 240 L per barrel, we should be able to find a way to both store about 3,000 l of rain water as well as be able to redistribute it to our gardens. I’d like to go bigger but I just don’t have the money to do more than this right now. And with sanctions, I might just have to live with this exactly as it is.

I have the apparatus exactly right now in three places to catch water but I really do need to do something about getting gutters on the barn.

If I haven’t made it clear, the problem with putting gutters on the barn is that there is a large overhang and there is no direct way to attach gutter straps to the soffit. I also don’t believe I can attach them directly to the roof because it is an old asbestos concrete panel roof and it’s simply too fragile to hold weight. So I need to build up the soffit some way or to put brackets in and this is the work that needs to be done. 

Unfortunately, I am not built up for doing this work and I don’t know of any particular experts who are available. Ghenna started on this project last year but I never believed even one moment that he knew what he was doing. I tried speaking to him many times to explain how he was planning on hanging those gutters but no matter what I did, he never showed me anything real or told me anything real and frankly, I don’t need an old alcoholic falling off a ladder or smashing roof panels. I just didn’t believe in his competency or ability to do the job.

I probably Believe In My own but again, I don’t really have the tools to do this job. I don’t have the correct screws to go through the flashing on the soffit to attach any brackets, I don’t really have wood of the correct strength to make decent brackets, I don’t have a grinder to perhaps cut off the overhang and bring it closer to the soffit and I don’t have decent screws to ensure adequate strength. Everything is from scratch and nothing is readily available.

I hate this situation and it’s made worse because of all this water that I am not capturing. I could be filling up my tanks right now. Yesterday, when I was bolstering my boxes and doing a little digging in my final gardens, I felt sick every time I watched all of that water coming off the barn roof and doing nothing but making a dent in the ground below. 

We live in a Time of annual drought. It’s been going on globally for more than a decade and as no government seems to be interested in doing anything that will slow the economy (and free the slaves and their own ability to become rich by the work of others), they will not do anything to change the general timbre of life on Earth. They don’t care about the ecology, they only care about the economy and they will do nothing to deprive people of their drugs. Anything to keep people skirting around like chickens with their heads cut off is what’s going to be.

You know, I would rather get on my knees and pray to God in the time of natural drought. I would rather dance and pray to the skies for rain. I would rather accept a natural fate than the one I’m living with right now. To know that none of this was a natural occurrence and all of it is caused by the greed and brutality of a few powerful men makes me sick to my soul.

Adding the cancer statistics and the diabetes statistics and the amount of people who will come to their ends also because of man-made tragedies, you can see why I don’t open my gate anymore. Adding the war going on next door and the news of war crimes and the ambivalence of other countries to help stop the violence, you can see why I don’t have much of a sense of humor.

But let’s make our order today. I have places right now for a pair of cubes to catch water and another place to set up a barrel or two. Depending on the price, I will do everything I can to get roof gutters on the barn by next week and if the numbers work out, we will have a third cube or a series of barrels over there.

I guess I also need some pallets. You have to elevate the cubes a little bit in order to have access to the built-in plumbing. This is all going to be a lot of work.

***

It’s a little before 9:30 and I’m in the kitchen diligently typing away. I am a couple of days without oil or maybe just a couple of meals without oil and I’m starting to feel the difference. It’s a sharpness. This is the best way to explain it. It is an acute mental sharpness.

There is a negative side to this. I think it’s true for any dietary changes. When you stop something, good or bad for you, your body immediately becomes violently hungry for the thing that’s no longer there. This is drug DTs. Detoxification. You end up overeating or in my case, over carbing looking for that thing that used to be there. In the case of cheap cooking oil, let’s say any cooking oil to be clear, it’s a high. Your body starts freaking out. Where is it? Give it to me!

But then again, I know I’m doing the right thing because of this sharpness. I like mental acuity. I like a bit of physical strength. I like feeling strong. I prefer life without taking the dive.

There have been benefits by the way. My legs are much better right now. There were a couple of facts that went into this but be that as it’s me, I’m walking a lot better and with a lot less pain. It’s not perfect. It may never be perfect again but it’s better.

The real issue though is what to do with this mental acuity. Some people just don’t really want it because they are well aware of their genuine reality and would prefer not to think about it very hard at all costs.

I would say that this is incredibly reasonable. If your life truly is monotonous, boring and horrible. If you don’t have enough money to live. If you are in constant pain, physically or mentally, I can see where getting away from this would be greatly beneficial.

These instances though are in places where you only worry about yourself. The flaw is if you are somehow responsible, truly responsible, for others. In these cases, you really don’t have the right to check out especially on their time. This would be true for teachers for example. Although it’s very comfortable to take a few shots during teacher time off, smoke a cigarette, smoke a joint, basically do something to alter your body chemistry so as not to feel quite the pain might mean that they are cheating their students. If you are a teacher of young children, regardless of exactly how horrible they are these days, you still need to be responsible for your half of the class. They can kill themselves as they like, you have to show up for class.

It’s also pretty good to connect this with mothers and fathers who have direct responsibility for their children. Sure, mom and dad need a day off and that’s why God invented babysitters. But you need to settle up with your escape mechanisms and have what we might call as your basic setting ready to go.

I’m talking a lot about my ex-girlfriend because she has a date coming up that is worth remembering. We have been apart almost as long as we were together and I’m sure that there are still quite a bit of residual issues on both sides. But when I think of why the relationship failed, it boiled down to two exact moments, both of which were failures.

The first moment came a short time after the first moment I realized that the relationship was not making me happy. I will not be specific about the situation because I don’t want to share that publicly. There was a moment however and I asked for a conversation. I was told no. There was no need for a conversation. That sort of sent me one step further down that slippery slope that would eventually end us. I absolutely knew that this was the beginning of the end when she wouldn’t talk to me about the situation.

The second one was the failure to comprehend that they’re probably needed to be what could be called “our basic situation”. This was mostly about house cleaning but it also had to do with who was doing the house cleaning, what kind of food would be in the refrigerator, what our schedules look like and what our responsibilities were to maintain our basic situation.

I’ve spoken of this to other people and the usual response is laughter. Being with this girl was my own fault, I should have known better from the beginning and you can’t ask a bear to do your accounting for you. The Russians have a word for that by the way, медвежьи услуги. This basically translates to the bear’s service but what it really means is that you can’t ask a bear not to be a bear. You may be able to get this creature of nature to do tricks for you but you’re not going to stop it from being a bear. Ask Siegfried and Roy about this and I’m sure they would agree with me.

This also brings up another thought about alcohol and Russians. The town that I used to live in and now I live near has also changed quite a bit since 2014. The Russians going into Ukraine the first time caused the Giant ripple in the fabric of our communities. Suddenly, it was obligatory to be subservient and accepting of Russians and Russian culture and of course Russian propaganda. Of course this changed everything.

The example I’m thinking about came from a restaurant that I used to go to quite often. There was a time after I switched to veganism when I decided that beer was vegan and it would be okay to drink some beer at the end of the day. One or two beers turned into six or seven of course but that’s not what I’m writing about.

I went there to get a vegan pizza or a falafel sandwich and I asked if they had any beer available to enjoy with my meal. I have a civilized mind and I was drinking at the time and of course, most alcoholics believe that they are quite elegant and sophisticated. Non-drinkers find this hard to see but this is the internal feeling of someone well lubricated.

I was told, smilingly of course, that this might exist in America or in another first world country but it did not go in Belarus. Literally, this was one of these “you don’t know our people” moments and according to the owner, there was a very real reason that alcohol or hard alcohol was not sold. Nobody in this Russian town could drink a beer with a pizza simply because it enhances the experience. Two would become seven seven would become 15 and then there would be no furniture left or glass in the windows.

The ex-girlfriend by the way was firmly with the Russians. Even before we moved in together, she made a point of smilingly telling me that the Russians had the right idea. She even thought it amusing to objectify me and move a little bit away from me and tell me that my arguments against Moscow simply don’t make sense. The Russians were the way to go, everybody knew that and I was just a foolish American.

This was before we all started killing each other on the social networks and you know, I liked her so it wasn’t much of a red flag. Maybe a few years later that would have been enough to have me walk away and probably, that would have been the best solution for everybody. I would have missed a pretty interesting portion of my life but perhaps I would have been the better for it. You never know but that was part of it.

In fact, this siding with the Russians was the beginning of the end of all truly interactive conversation between us. I could put a lot of words on this but basically this was the fact. Siding with the Russians for her was her freedom. By agreeing to identify as Russian, she was able to take on this Wagnerian self-belief. She was an Uber person. She was a Nietzschian ideal and she was free from the foolishness of morality and free to conquer what territories she would. And she hasn’t stopped since.

What happens though when you take this ideal to heart that you are somehow Superior, racially or ethnically, and this would include any type of activity you imagined. Sexual freedom, freedom to drink or take drugs as you like, freedom to party, freedom to express yourself in any way that suits you. Freedom of violence. Freedom of torture.

There was another evening very soon after I broke up with my ex when I went on a date with a girl I liked very much. Looking back, I got it that there were drugs involved in this. She had also invited the Russians into her life. She was different I would say and a bit more difficult but felt she had every right to be so. And then in one moment in our evening, she just flipped out. It was embarrassing because this was in public when it happened. I couldn’t calm her down or get her to talk straight. She stayed at my house that night but I didn’t sleep with her and even when she came to me at about 5:00 a.m. wanting some comfort, I told her to go back to where she was sleeping on the couch.

I tried to talk to her several times about what had happened. I was determined to find out the reason. They’re certainly must be some kind of thought process behind this sort of thing. Basically, she had attacked me and caused me an unbelievable amount of pain. I just wanted to know what she was thinking.

She would not answer the question for a long time. In fact, I don’t speak to her at all anymore because I eventually got it through my head that I didn’t want this relationship at all. Believe it or not, this started rather beautifully which was probably why the masochism went on as long as it did.

One day though, she decided to answer my question. I don’t know why she decided that this was the moment. Maybe it was sarcasm or maybe it was something else. But she did tell me what it was and to this day, I absolutely believe it is the truth.

She said that she took pleasure from causing me pain.

You know, you can take this apart and put it back together in many different ways. You could just chalk this up to talking to women if you’re looking for an easy way to dismiss this. You could also say that she was just saying what she wanted to and it didn’t have any genuine relation to the truth. You could cut it up in a lot of ways. But I believe to this day that she was telling the truth. And this is why I stopped talking to her.

By the way, if you want to talk about the sort of mental toughness required to quit an addiction, you could include this case as being a part of things. The trick is to recognize that this thing that you want to stop doing is bad for you. It may be pleasurable, it may be part of your life and you may be able to say how normal it is or how delicious it is or anything you want. But if you decide that the absolute truth is that this thing you don’t want in your life should not be there because it is bad for you, you simply have to pull the plug and Let It go.

“I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to stop calling you.”

“Do whatever you want.”

I think there have been a few happy birthdays on the social networks and I think she ended up on the mailing list for my website. But that was the last time I called her.

It might seem a pretty big stretch to notice that there is some sharpness to your life because you stopped using cooking oil and war atrocities in Ukraine committed by Russian soldiers. You might think that these two ideas don’t go together but I think that they do.

I agree that I understand what was happening when I quit drinking but it came about as a result of a single profound moment. It was an epiphany. I don’t want to drink. It is not good for me. And I stopped.

In moments like these days when I am physically very tired and my life is unbelievably horrific, I still will not buy a bottle of vodka. I had a few sips of wine with my ex partner because she has never made any of these decisions. The only decision she has made is to be my friend and she does that but she does not believe in what I believe.

So what else is there? I can’t really speak to very young people. When I was a young man, I was also driven by my body chemistry and my friends into quick reactions. I lived on junk food for many, many years. Even as late as a few years ago while living with my ex-girlfriend, we would have a party every night. We had to go to the store and buy what we needed. There wasn’t a second thought about it. There wasn’t a single thought in any of it.

I do still talk to her from time to time but there’s not much left between us. I think there were holdover emotions on both sides and I think both of us have dreamed from time to time about getting back together. Practically speaking, I could certainly use the help but also practically thinking, I doubt she would be into the commitment. And there is no possible way I would let her near me and allow her to do her lifestyle as she liked. That would not happen because I would not be able to contain my anger for very long.

I am not angry at her now. Like I’ve said to many, many people, I wish her only good luck on her road. She is free to fly as high and as far as she can and to use whatever means necessary to get where she needs to go so long as she doesn’t touch me anymore. She’s not allowed to touch me anymore.

Neither is alcohol. Neither is meat. Neither are quite a few relatives. Neither are any of my ex-girlfriends.

There are quite a few things that I just don’t want in my life anymore and the only grief that I have are the people who I really wish would not have any rights to touch me. My neighbors and their god-awful car, the Russians in general and all of the pro Russian government people who just simply believe they have the right to take pleasure in causing others pain.

***