Sunday morning, April 10th, 2022. Week number 14

Good morning. It’s a little after 6:30 a.m. and I am in the kitchen watching a rather beautiful blue and yellow sunrise. The only thing that comes into my mind is the Ukrainian flag. It must have been inspired by a blue and yellow morning just like this.

I have a bit of a quandary as to what to do with myself today. I did not go to town at all last week and had a thought to come in today but now I’m not sure. The weather would be fine and there was a little bit of a frost last night so I’m sure between that and the recent rains the road will not be so bad. And I do have things I need that I guess are only available in town. But my needs are not that great and I will not die if I don’t make the trip today.

Breakfast today was very small. Only the last two cakes I made for my day off. I called him cakes but they are more like bread or buns. Russians would probably call them piroshki but there was nothing inside them. Whole wheat flour, oatmeal porridge, some chia seeds to hold it together, some sesame seeds for flavor and a touch of fat and a little bit of salt. The rising ingredient was baking soda activated with a little vinegar and I left the mix reasonably wet. If you want some bread, pull a dollop out with a spoon, drop it in a lightly oiled pan and in about 5 minutes you have something fresh. Tasty, filling and I’m sure reasonably healthy for you.

I don’t have any more left because my last act of my day off was to use it to make a buckwheat porridge but the star of the show was peanut hummus. Spicy peanut hummus with some mixed peppercorns, one very hot pepper, dry chickpeas and raw peanuts. The trick is to let it sit for an hour and then it is outrageous.

After that, there’s nothing really interesting to talk about. I just ate enough food to destroy me on Friday night, had leftovers yesterday except for the buckwheat and now I’m feeling calm and interestingly enough, full of energy.

The reason for my energy might be springtime. There was a lot of springtime in me yesterday. But I did some walking yesterday. I didn’t go anywhere, I stayed on my property and just walked around but it was a noticeable event. It has been years since I’ve had the urge to just walk around.

For years, the choice of getting up on my feet was one that was balanced against potential infection and pain. I did do a lot of things and I tried to be as active as I could. But if I was going out, it was a bicycle ride and if I had to walk, it was rolling the dice as to whether or not I would end up in the hospital. This went on for years. And yes, this was going on during the period when all of this ex-girlfriend stuff was reality.

But yesterday was different. Yesterday was not just a matter of agreeing to go against my fear, yesterday was just being tired of sleeping and having too much food in my belly. I needed to move around a little bit. I had no intention of working. I have enough physical labor to do these days and I was grateful for the day off. But I did want to get up on my feet and walk around and let me tell you, it was glorious.

Sometimes people take for granted what others struggle to achieve. Mel Brooks said something in his remarkable 2,000-year-old man record from a million years ago: “we mock the things we are to be”.

When you are in your twenties, you can’t imagine life not being exciting. You certainly can’t imagine sex not being the most important thing on the platform. You’d never imagine that you need to be careful or that something you do might be an accident. You can party all night and wake up in the morning and just go do what you need to do. If it hurts a little, you’re a tough guy and you’ll get through it.

We mock the things we are to be.

I’m sure there is a compromise. One thing that old people and young people can do together is talk. There are reasonable agreements that can be made.

I am being accused of being pedantic these days. I am a single voice and this little act of trying to work through complex thoughts has people believing that I am a know it all. I know a lot. I probably know more than you. But though I am probably a qualified professor on many, many levels, this is my blog and my choice is to blog about my thoughts. You can put the word pedantic on me and it fits but this is my blog and this is me going through my thoughts. It does not immediately qualify my entire being or character, it’s just that you’re reading one person going through his thoughts. Pedantic? How else would you expect one person to go through their thoughts out loud in writing on the internet?

There I was walking around enjoying the day. It was a little cold but I didn’t care. I wasn’t working but I was thinking about things to do.

Last year, I was quite content to sit back and let the weeds grow. I was enjoying the observation. Nature is a beautiful lady and I learned a lot by letting her do her thing. But this year I am expressing my own physicality and I like this too. I am enjoying the process of building and I am really enjoying a day off that I get to see some results from all of this labor. It’s not corporate but it looks okay. And when everything starts to grow, I have Great hopes that it will be a beautiful thing to look at.

Maybe also there will be some food out there that I will enjoy eating.

This is a great part of why I am ambivalent about heading to town.

The sun is just up in the East and blasting me directly in the face. A couple of years ago, while attempting to make sense of the concept of god/nature, of the origins of the Jewish religion or its relationship to Christianity or freedom, I decided that we could go ahead and make the Sun the governor of life. We either do or do not understand the concept of an infinite universe or a god of infiniteness that we can never know. But this demand of not knowing can be tempered a little bit if we just agree that this delightfully bright lady blinding me right now with her beauty is okay for us. Follow the sun’s directions, we eat and we live well. Learning her tendencies, we get along just fine.

Perhaps there is someone higher than the Sun. Perhaps he / she / it is truly beyond our comprehension. But as a mere animal amongst many other animals and life forms held together in place by the gravity of this beautiful lady, it’s enough to worship her.

This was one of the main things I learned by being an observer last year. All of the wildflowers growing on my field, all of the so-called weeds that nobody thought were important but me all spent their day worshiping the Sun and following her across the sky. They waited for her to bring the rain and they waited for her to bring the food. That’s all the plants do, they pray to the son and give thanks for their lives. Be fruitful and multiply. Live your life and enjoy your day.

My main opposition to the oil business and the fascism that it breathes is that it seems to want us to die early and horrible and expensive and debilitating deaths. The oil business seems to want us to die under the sword or by a gun or from cancer or diabetes from factory foods. It wants us to live a life of slavery That never ends and to be made insane to the point of unreal expectations. It convinces us to turn against our fellow man, against everything in the world and creates an awesome belief that we are higher or better than other things. No agreements, no fairness, just a constant push to betray and steal and acquire. Parasitism as a religion, death as a result.

I’m okay with the sun. They say we get another 4 billion years. I say we make the most of that. I say we make a contract of agreement not to ruin the Earth with our presence. I say we make a compromise in our genius. I say we learn to live with a neutral carbon footprint, to keep our numbers reasonable and our lives beautiful and to live in harmony with all of the other living things.

Look at all this poetry.

I have two more book ideas that seem to agree with these thoughts. These are my thoughts and these have been my thoughts and I’m not making something up because I’m paid for it. This is what I think is the truth and this has been what I believe the truth is for many years. Of course, that could be why I don’t get paid. When you don’t lick corporate ass, they don’t really know what you’re saying. You can’t sell ecology because there’s no money or oil in it and it doesn’t make enough garbage.

The two books are a collection of three Belarusian plays with the interesting working title of “Three Belarusian Plays” and the screenplay for Paradise. I have decided that I am quite proud of the plays Pod Kablukom, Nadezhda/Hope and Happiness. I think these three plays well enough represent some clear ideas about life here in the beautiful and interesting Republic of. But the play Paradise is something special and can be a standalone.

So this has got to be on the bill this week for sure. I definitely need to create a page on the website for it and start tying all of my web stuff in together. That’s online stuff but it needs to get done.

Here in reality, I am feeling boxes and raising the quality of my planting soil.

I had a discussion with the ex partner last night. She was a bit upset that I seem to be moving forward and not sitting around on my ass waiting for animal shit to come.

It’s a difficult thing to explain to anyone but it’s an incredibly difficult thing to explain to a Slavic woman. It’s just not interesting to do this thing that she’s talking about for me. I don’t like it on many levels and I also don’t like being pushed from moscow. But she didn’t like when I used this metaphor but it’s true. At best, she’s one day a week up here and I’m here all the time. No matter what Moscow’s arguments are about Americans influencing territory thousands of miles away, Moscow itself is about a thousand miles away from Ukraine and more from Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan etc, etc.

When I was building, there was a big argument about both the decisions made on the ground, this was our word for people exactly on the place where the work was going on, and from distance. Everybody understands that plans may have been drawn up by engineers and architects and it was our job to fulfill these plans but the problem solving usually needed to be with us. If we went elsewhere, this would be time and money and this was one lesson that was made very clear to me by a particular boss who, though you can call him pedantic, literally stopped the day and asked us all like a professor “who should we call about this problem?”

The first thing that came into my mind at that moment was to call the boss and tell them what was going on. But I was new in this crew and everyone else knew the answer, “nobody”. The answer was we fixed the problem.

If it matters, the problem we were talking about was that we had a center beam made of laminated 2x4s that was cut to the wrong size. Our decision was to alter the plan slightly and make use of the different size and simply fix the building. It was a good lesson and that beam was several tons. We could make it work and the building would be straight and to code but it would cost a lot of money to send it back or cancel the crane or any of the other things that would happen if we didn’t just deal with it as we had it.

In my project, I like to build around objects that are already here. I have a little place for a fire outside that I was debating if I needed anymore. It has a genuine purpose or it could have a genuine purpose. If this purpose could be changed and there are many other ways to go about it, I’m talking about heating water to wash clothes on an open fire. I have an alternative to that which might work as well and the place of this firebox is not really very interesting. It’s right near the street at the front of the house and there are much more beautiful places to build a fire circle.

Nevertheless, if I keep it, there is a garden that could go near it and building around that fire pit made for a really interesting bit of architecture. I liked thinking through the problem of leaving the fire pit there and working around it much more than obliterating it, believing it didn’t exist and just demanding that what I want there should be there. I like to work around nature rather than bullying it.

You might not believe that by looking at the bean field. The bean field is a series of straight lines. But maybe that’s a different story. Where there is Garden space, there is Garden space and where you walk is a road. If the roads are straight, it’s okay because this was already the growing space before and had no particular features except as a growing space. All I did was make it a little orderly. But working in the forest, I go with what we have. I don’t disturb the forest when I go in there. I just take what she gives me and say thank you.

So I’m not really sure if I want to go to town today. I am of course waiting for someone to say something and this is always a miserable thing when you have to wait for someone to do something. It’s a waste of your time. So probably, I really don’t want to go to town today and it would be better to make my trip during the week.

On a positive note, my ex partner has actually managed to come up with two 260 L barrels for a very good price and possibly 1,000 L cube, also for the correct price. As far as putting gutters on the barn, I have two variants that will work quite well and right now it’s just a matter of getting the hardware and slapping everything together. If I get help, this is great and if I don’t, I’m prepared to do this myself. I went up on the ladder a few days ago and took a look at the situation. I got this.

So what else? Nothing really. Nothing to it but to do it and to be honest, I’m about ready to start doing wheelbarrow runs for a couple of hours. I can’t call my ex partner and invite her to come up and help today because, of course, she has to wait for the guy with the barrels. You see how that works?

The Sun is up and so am I. It’s brisk this morning and the grass is a little crunchy from the frost. I am fed and rested. It’s time to go back to work.

***

Yeah well, that was all pretty crazy. It’s about 10 minutes to noon and I’m taking a break from this morning’s work. I also just noticed that I made a mistake with the material that I wrote this morning and put it in the wrong place. Amateur mistake. I must have been really relaxed from my day off. I think I have everything squared away now.

I’ve already filled my quota of work but I have a bit more energy than I thought so I’m going to keep going. I have a place in the forest that I shaved a few centimeters of topsoil from and through them in my boxes. It’ll work okay as a planting medium or at least to help the planting medium along. I think we can do this vegan and be okay.

My new worker friend has just left. He made a very strange appearance about an hour ago and I don’t really know what to expect from this relationship but he did make an appearance. Oddly enough, he called me from the store and told me that he had two sacks of really good planting soil for me. Two sacks?

He said he had come up by bus. I didn’t understand what he could possibly be talking about. I thought for sure he’s going to come with a horse and a cart and we could just shovel it into my boxes. The volume of work necessary is not even close to anything you can do bag by bag and certainly, if I knew he was bringing me bags of dirt by bus, I never would have let him start.

I took a look at the dirt by the way and I agree that it’s rich and black and clumps together well while still being light. I appreciate the gesture but my project is just a little bit bigger and a little bit more on the bulk side.

I don’t really know what to say about this. I already feel his covid working up into my sinus cavity. He says that he’s working a lot these days which is a little different than his first idea. But we talked a lot about what it feels like to be the object of people’s love and scorn. We actually talked about a lot of things.

He says he’s very religious. He says I should trust in his word. He says that this dirt is a gift and that I should forget about it and never even think of paying him back. Like I said, he says a lot of things.

I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know if I need this cold every time I talk to the guy. I showed him the work that needs to be done on the barn, no problem, he has the tools, it’s a one-day job. But of course we have to wait. He’ll be busy until after pascha, Easter, the same thing that my roofing friend had to say. Who knows? Who knows anything?

My trip to town has been moved to Tuesday and I’m okay with that. That gives me today and tomorrow to make a serious dent in these boxes. I have land already in all the boxes and I probably can completely finish with this particular layer of the lasagna in about an hour.

If I keep going, I don’t think I could finish the job in one day but if this is my pace and how much work I can actually do, I think everything is going to be absolutely perfect when planting day comes.

I feel really good. My legs feel really good. Not perfect. Not normal. But good. Solid enough to do the job. I like it.

***

It’s about 1:00 and the last hour has been very interesting. My ex partner called me and told me she had found someone selling 260 L barrels for 50 rubles each. This is about the advertised cost and she already has two of them sitting in her apartment. They are food grade and from the guy’s story and from the smell, they were originally for carrying pickles.

We own two and I think we are buying a third and sometime today, my ex partner will be coming up with the guy and three of these barrels. Excellent. They are black so we’re not going to have too much of a problem with algae. They may warm up the water a bit more than we like but I can live with that. I’m still not at my goal but we have about 750 liters of water retention and that’s a definite plus.

There was a bunch of crazy talk about this deal. My ex partner is very worried about money and so am I. We have sanctions against us. It is possible that my ex partner is KGB but it’s also possible that she is exactly who she says she is, a mid-level bureaucrat for a local company, and she is suffering along with the rest of us.

This was one of the points of conversation in my pity party with my new worker friend. Neither of us can understand the point of putting sanctions on the people of Belarus. We didn’t really vote for the guy in charge. You can say that we did but I don’t think anyone truly believes it was a legitimate vote. And we have absolutely no say about this war business. Everybody, everybody is against this war here.

But this doesn’t mean that propaganda hasn’t had an effect. We have hate here. It seems that all I get to write about is hate and myopic objectivism. And maybe in some oddly related irony, they deserve to be punished. But there is no direct connection between the people of this country and the war. We get to lose all of our money again and again and again and again but it is not the fault of the people who live here. Our government makes these decisions and we really don’t have any rights to change them or the government itself. You may have noticed that they’ve been here for more than two decades. Do you think we wanted that?

I’m going to get into this a bit later. I have some links that I picked up. But not right now. I just had a little bit of lunch and I’m a bit tired. I think I’m going to take a short break and maybe close my eyes for a while and then I’ll go back down and do another hour’s work with the wheelbarrow, scoop shovel and motiga bochi gata.

***

Just 7:00 in the evening and I’m going to try and wrap this up. I have a bunch of links to get to but maybe I should talk about this day. Today was actually kind of amazing. This is a personal assessment only. It says nothing to do with any great luck or any freakish occurrence. I don’t have an amazing picture to post on Instagram and I didn’t become rich or meet with beautiful or influential people. There was nothing of corporate interest that happened today at all. And maybe that was why it was good.

I just worked today. I worked until my body said that I probably could stop working. I worked until I was mildly catatonic. Not genuine physiological catatonia. I could have stopped at any time. I was just at the bottom of my energy and willingness to move around. I was completely lucid. My mind was available and I was even telling myself to do more. My body simply refused to react and just stayed inert. No muscles required movement.

Just before this, I noticed there were some motor skills that were going awry from fatigue. Whereas in the morning I could just move along with a Grace that I simply don’t have anymore, after I hit the wall, I was arguing with myself about every step. I just didn’t feel it anymore and whatever I had in the morning just wasn’t.

I’m talking a lot about the negative aspects of it but when I look at the work that I did today, I’m a bit proud of myself. I broke some personal records for this year for physical labor accomplished. The word for what I’m doing is not menial labor. It’s manual labor. There’s a difference. According to Collins dictionary:

Menial work is very boring, and the people who do it have a low status and are usually badly paid.

…low-paid menial jobs, such as cleaning and domestic work. 

Synonyms: low-status, degrading, lowly, unskilled

Manual labour (in British English, manual labor in American English) or manual work is physical work done by humans, in contrast to labour by machines and working animals. – Wikipedia

The work I did was simply an extension of my personal will. If I account for the hours that I put in and think of some potential payment for it, well, nobody’s getting rich. But you have to look at it a certain way. For one thing, I am extremely pleased to be able to do this without fear of harming myself for ending up in the hospital because I did too much. I’ve been living with that for years and I feel like I’ve been let out of prison. But then there is also the exercise of will. I had an idea of what I wanted to accomplish in my mind and there was nobody but me to do this work. And I made a dent in it. I did okay. Not amazing, not professional level and certainly not corporate. But I took a chunk out of it

Then there was the day spent in the Sun in absolutely beautiful weather for physical labor. The sun was very pleasant but not so hot as to beat you to death. There was no problem with overheating or needing water or food. It was idyllic really.

Perhaps the biggest thing about this though is a sense of pride. I’m creating landscaping on my own land. I’m creating some sense of function in terms of self-sustainability on my own piece of property. There was a tremendous sense of freedom. This is mine. There was no one to tell me I was wrong or to push me or pull me in any way. It was my material to play with and I did it with my own two hands.

That was the most important thing but there was one more tiny element that was a bit unexpected. I don’t know where this comes from though. A friend of mine simply smiled and told me it was from being with nature. Later in the day taking a break and feeling that catatonic State creeping over me I suddenly realized I had an amazing erection.

I had this last spring too and I remember it being rather surprising then as well. It was pure sexual energy going through me. It was like virgin excitement. Genuine sexual energy flowing through me and I went with it like surfing a giant wave. For at least a little while, I was a young man again. Excited. Wildly excited.

My friend simply said the word природа. He said there’s no English and probably from personal experience. Nature. I spent the day with nature and she turned me on.

I’ve had people tell me that they believed I was crazy or something from reading some of my work from last year. They tell me that I am more understandable this year and more direct. Perhaps this is so. Perhaps I tried to be too creative last year or enjoyed following my creative whims a little too much. This year it was more pragmatic and direct.

Physically however, it’s the same. Clean air, quiet, springtime Sun shining down on me, my heart wide open and pumping however much blood I needed to do the work. Life. Being alive.

Then my ex partner called and we resolved the issues and within about 30 minutes a blue truck pulled up in front of my place and now I have 750 L of water holding capacity. I will position them tomorrow and put them to work. I’m still looking for more. We don’t have the sort of situation available to us where you just go and buy something. This situation exists but you know, I’ve got to be frugal and I am offended by overpaying for things. But, 750 L is a good start.

So today was a good day. Today was a very good day. And in a little while, if I can tolerate it, I even have a baseball double header to look at. I get to watch both the Mets and the Giants tonight for game three for both of them.

You know, maybe I’ll get into the links tomorrow morning. I don’t really feel like being ironic or snide. I think I’m just going to chill out and relax for a while. It was a good day.