Monday, April 18th 2022

Zelinsky on CNN

Why do we continue to buy Russian oil?

Reuters has put together a pretty good list of the countries who are deeply invested in Russian oil. Basically, Germany has a company that is 50% owned by rosneft, India with its well-known hyper conservative government is deeply invested and China is continuing to do business with them. I don’t know this for a fact, but according to zelinsky, a billion dollars a day is going to Russia from the oil business. 

This is and has always been an oil War. As such, we can also look to the US as still providing funds to Russia and listening to the conservatives and their pro-russian rhetoric, we know who is in bed with who.

I am an ecologist. I am on the side of the planet Earth and everyone who lives on it. I am not interested in wars for resources that cause ecological and human damage. I am on the side of sanity and I think the way to stop this war is to stop supporting the oil business period. 

***

Good morning. It’s 7:30 and I’m in the kitchen and have just finished a rather nice breakfast. It was basically buckwheat with raw peanuts and some vegetables, a little bit of spice and I ate it with matzah. Oh yeah, I thickened it with whole wheat and had breakfast with coffee. Very simple, very tasty, very filling but without breaking your brain too much.

The matzah has me a little crazy. I don’t doubt that it is kosher or that kosher has some genuine meaning of cleanliness. The ingredients are wheat and water, same as spaghetti. It’s just that unless you can see, there is nothing in it. It is not a highly nutritious thing to eat. I understand it has religious significance and we eat this to remember some kind of horrible moment when we were forced to leave our home and didn’t have time to bake bread. I get the traditions and the history. I’m not arguing with any of that. I’m just saying that it plays havoc with my system when I eat this stuff.

This is not to say that it’s not tasty. I like crackers very much. I like very much a style of eating where you use bread to carry the food to your mouth. I also admire the Asian habit of using lettuce or cabbage as a carrier for whatever your food is. Of course I like chopsticks very much, much more than forks. There are many ways to eat but crackers to make little bite-sized hors d’oeuvres out of your food. It’s lovely. And that’s what I did with today’s very saucy and tasty business. And there is a slightly burnt quality to the matzah that has a very specific and enjoyable taste. I’m just saying that it doesn’t go through you very well.

This morning I feel emotionally terrible. I can’t seem to spend time with my ex partner without having my emotions ripped up. You could say that this is what women do or perhaps we could say that Slovak women do this better than most. You could probably say I’m getting what I paid for by hanging out with a shiksha. You could say anything but basically life just gets harder every time it’s supposed to be getting easier.

You know, I’m not gay and I’m not a drug addict. I am not Young and I am not jumping out of my skin to make children. My hormones are not enraged and it truly helps that I do not eat meat. This is not to say that meat is good because we want great glandular activity. I do not think we want great glandular activity because we live in a civilization where we depend on each other and we do not live out on the Savannah where God creates everything. Human beings are the chosen people after all and this means selective breeding really should be a part of our thinking

Last year, I wrote some literature, what I called utopian literature, about a civilization somewhere in the future that was getting along just fine with each other. They had come to an understanding that making children was a village affair. Kind of similar to Hillary Clinton’s book but more like you had to make a case before the entire town that you were going to have children and the town had to agree that this could be. Literally, all of the people needed to agree and understand that there would be a child and that everyone held legitimate responsibility to make sure that this child was okay and healthy.

I didn’t go very deeply into the sexual mores of this community. I’ve thought about it a lot and my best thinking is that people designate themselves into breeders or non-breeders. I understand that there are some hipsters in this world who have had this thought as well but it all really has to do with whether or not we are willing to take the responsibility of being parents. Some people really want this but not all people should have this. There are a lot of people who would like to have children but their psychology and their makeup and their understanding of what children are simply is not going to lead to a decent life for the child. Ownership, possession and property need to be fully realized within a person before they are given an opportunity of stewardship over a young person. Equally, we cannot say that only women understand child rearing and that men do not have these instincts.

As you can see from this last paragraph, it’s already a pretty sticky deal. And it is a pretty sticky deal if you start adding in economics and what kind of future the child has. In our modern class based society where the vast majority of people are left in hunger every day of their lives, the opportunity for people falling out of the system is great. The opportunity to create miscreants and parasites and thieves is even greater. When you create a world where the acquisition of money is the only thing that anyone ever thinks of, you are raising a criminal society and unless you are truly in love with criminals, this is what you’re going to look at in your child.

I also want to add that as a teacher and as someone who has spent a great deal of time over the last decade with developing teenagers, the access of electronic information has changed our planet incredibly. This is not only concerning children, it is all of us and all of our brains have been completely damaged with this electronic heroin that we engage in every day. We need to remember that when bringing more people into this world because these people are not going to be available for lessons like in the old days. They are going to learn what they are going to learn on their whims and from their own algorithm and I promise you, most of what they see will be for profit. This is not going to make them the kings of capitalism, it’s going to make them psychotic problem makers.

Maybe what I’m really trying to say is that our world is not very kosher right now. I don’t mean kosher as Jewish or having anything to do with biblical morality, I mean it’s not clean. Learning the lessons that adults are dirty and that your childhood was false it’s probably the worst piece of education we can give anybody. It means not only that we wake up to the fact that there’s no Santa Claus, it means that everyone and everything is a liar and manipulation of resources is all there is. Add guns to this mix and video games explicitly allowing people to get their violence well practiced and you can pretty much understand where all of these Mass shooters are coming from. I am talking about the guys who climb into hotel rooms to spray people at concerts and who go to visit schools to kill children. I’m also talking about the Russians who have been doing the same for almost 2 months now.

In my story, the society is basically agrarian and people pitch in to do the manual labor of making their own food. I don’t know that I explicitly explained this but most probably it is a meatless society. There was some beer drinking but I don’t remember considering that there were any depressed alcoholics. When I was imagining this society, and people noticed this, the people in it were very healthy. They spent a lot of time in the fresh air, they got plenty of exercise and even participated in sports after work and did their best to get along with each other. Even my one most difficult character was at his heart simply a man expressing his love for his community and his fellow man. He was a pain in the ass but you could trust that he was not a bully or an advantage taker and just a man born with a little bit more energy than anybody else.

To build such societies, functional rather than dysfunctional societies, requires peace and communication between people. It means expressly the surrender of violence as an answer to problems. It means explicitly the power over others is not a goal to aspire to. We need to establish goals where we all try with all of our hearts to be the best citizens and friends to each other that we can. The currency should be in how much we help and not how much power or ability to cause others harm.

Sitting here in the middle of the world as I am, I can’t really help thinking of how unbelievably stupid everyday of my life is. From the chickens who live next door burning resources to drive back and forth to town, I don’t understand why they don’t just go to town and stay there next to their business. If the woman needs some kind of money making thing to keep herself occupied, a simple look at The ledger and some creative thinking might find another way to replace this money. I of course just want to be free of their fucking automobile. This goes without saying. But what I am saying is that this thing that they do everyday, whether or not it is comfortable to them, is not the only answer and it is certainly not the best ecological answer.

I have been thinking about this a lot by the way. More stupidity. And I can also think about what the taxi driver said to me about everybody having black lungs now. He told me that before, the doctors could tell who the smokers were by the quality of their lungs. Now, the air quality is so bad that you can’t tell the difference.

Several years ago I had a student who was driving me crazy for being completely out of his head. I found myself getting angrier and angrier at him and wanting to start yelling at him for being so crazy. In fact, when I talked to him when he was at work, I could hear that the people around him were screaming at him as well and it got me thinking. I asked myself why I was getting violent towards him and I asked myself why he was lacking in simple human function for retaining information. And this was when the Sherlock Holmes came over me and I started thinking about his health.

I recommended that he go to a doctor and have his blood checked and sure enough, he had some massive amount of lead poisoning above the acceptable level. He was working at a lead acid battery factory and despite any promises about safety precautions, most probably he and everyone else working there had already been deeply poisoned. The whole place was going insane and the owner had long ago left the city for better health.

I am not fond of these people and often think horrible thoughts about tragedies on the road that stop my experience with being poisoned everyday. But I would bet dollars to donuts that if they were to go to the doctor and have their blood checked, we would find out that they have been well poisoned by their lives. Certainly driving around in this miserable car and sucking Auto fumes all day is going to do something to your brain.

I could probably also ask my ex partner to do the exact same thing and perhaps the negativity that she brings with herself every day has to do not only with alcohol consumption but her perpetual proximity to the fact that she works at.

So this industrial gasoline-based world, this Auto fumes for money business that we all engage in is obviously not good for us. The Revelation that I really just don’t want to be in town anymore had nothing to do with the people per se, but in fact it did. I got tired of being around sick people. I got very tired of being around sick, violent, selfish, brutal people.

I can’t even really blame this on Slavic culture. As much as I would like to point fingers, this is absolutely true in the United States of America as well. I also cannot only place the blame on an unfair economic system that puts undue pressure on people who are not born with a silver spoon in their mouth or to be in the family of some parasitic, slimy suit politician, we are looking at the result of poisoning ourselves.

When we ask the scientists about global warming, they say we’re fucked. When we ask them about the cause of global warming, they say it is human activity. This does not mean human activity as in gosh I need to stretch my muscles today I better go for a run. It means that you spend your time chasing money by driving your car and shopping in supermarkets and bringing home your factory food in plastics and, for the love of God, that you keep the poison going throughout the world by including meat in your diet.

You may think that you need this aggressiveness. You don’t. You may think you need this edge to compete in the world. You don’t. We don’t need anymore psychotics in the world. We don’t need any more killers. We don’t need any more prostitutes. We don’t need this psychotic behavior.

Yeah, I called my story utopian literature. I called it utopian literature because it was the story of a human civilization that functioned. It not only functioned amongst itself, it also functioned as a part of nature. The settlement was mostly agrarian, the electricity was produced in a sustainable way, people were asked to participate in the growing of their own food and even the production of their own electricity and their own amusement and they had a very true and clever way about dealing with the perpetuation of the species. They did not take childbirth lightly and they understood that their capacity to reason was the thing that would help life on planet Earth survive.

So what about the sex thing? Well, the best I could understand, there was plenty of sex and warmth and comfort to be had. Nobody was saying you shouldn’t have sex or that you should be crazy or that sex should be used to make you crazy. I just said that we had to be careful about making babies and that doing so was a very serious decision. I guess we could also assume that venereal disease was well under control. If it existed in this world, let’s say people were honestly willing to segregate themselves to others of their kind and didn’t work very hard to stretch its propagation. Let’s say and Utopia, we don’t share the misery.

***

I have to take a little bit of a break. I’m moving Earth again and I’m going to try to make the last 16 trips to finish this layer on the garden boxes. These will not be my last trips because I have some other gardens that also need some reasonable fertility. But these will be the last 16 for my boxes.

I am sort of breathing hard. Is a good cardiovascular exercise and good for strength as well. But the reason I’m stopping is because my neighbors have decided to burn briquettes for warmth. I can’t blame them for trying to be warm. It’s a cold day today. But they are using briquettes instead of wood to heat their house.

The difference is that when you burn wood, the residual is reasonably biodegradable. The smoke is not destructive to the atmosphere or two People’s health. And the ash can be used as very good fertilizer and as a pH stabilizer. Wood ash is a fantastic fertilizer.

But if you use briquettes which are mildly less expensive, you get an acrid unbreathable smoke which causes something akin to miners black lung disease and the waste product is simply garbage for the landfill. You cannot put it back into the land because it has no value as a fertilizer. It is just something you do when all you do is think of money and you do not care about the results of your actions.

So I’m standing out in the field on a reasonably cold day working up a little bit of a sweat from shoveling and pushing the wheelbarrow and suddenly my air is gone. Again. Again, my air is gone.

It is exactly the same as when they run their car. It’s exactly the same as when they run their car and will not even worry about how they Park so as to spare me the auto fumes in my kitchen. It is exactly the same pollution that they spread every single day of their lives without rest. These are the exact same people who are killing themselves and killing everyone around them from sheer lack of consciousness.

You know, I truly wish I could say something good about my neighbors. I truly, truly wish I could find some love in my heart for these rather despicable human beings. And it’s not even like I’m looking for things to dislike about them and picking and choosing what’s in front of my face. The problem is that I never see anything good from them. I never see anything socially redeeming, I never see anything other than parasitism and pollution and I can’t even see where they have the capacity for human warmth. I don’t see anything good in these people.

One film comes to mind. I don’t remember the name of this but maybe my description will bring up an image. It was about some futurist society where they began raising human beings to be organ donors. From birth and throughout their childhood, these people were given very privileged but healthy surroundings but the entire thrust of their lives was to undergo several organ transplants until they couldn’t stand living anymore in which case they were simply dismantled for their usable body parts.

At one point, one of the children sought to find a loophole in the system. He found that he was truly in love with one of his compatriots in the system. He made his case to his keepers that if there was such a loophole that if a person was truly in love they could be allowed out of the system. He was of course denied. It was just a head game that they played with their farm animals. Eventually he gave up his will to live and was mined for his organs.

I see my neighbors as being of the keeper class. I see them as being the same sorts of people as the ones who kept these human animals. Without any sense of irony, my neighbors do not Garden. They are money people. They are not people of beauty and they are not people of human effort. They keep chickens. The one time I talked to the woman, she cried that there was a time when she even had two cows. I suppose I was supposed to feel sympathy for her lack of money that now she only manages chickens.

Without empathy. People without empathy. People who do not care what harm they cause.

Probably I should go check in with the war. I should find out what other crimes the Russians are committing these days. Or I can just go with what I see with my eyes and smell with my nose. I have plenty of Russian criminals right here next to me. 

***

It’s a little bit before 12:00 and I am taking a break. I made 11 trips and have seven more to go to finish this layer in the boxes. And I’ve been putting together a bit of the water system.

I understand that probably this would be easier if I put a gutter on one of my roofs but I noticed that I might be able to create a water catching system directly on top of the new water tanks.

The idea came to me when I was thinking about where to keep these tanks. Any type of plastic needs to be out of the Sun and I realized that the back part of this one roof hardly ever gets any direct sunlight and that the height of the tanks is actually pretty close to the roof overhang.

I had a fence that I took down recently to make a road for a horse to go through. There has not been a horse coming through but this was the idea. This fence is not in wonderful shape but it is strong enough to hold the tanks. Mostly this is true because the bulk of the weight will be on the strips that hold the fence together and not the thinner fencing material itself. This also saved me from having to level the ground by hand.

Then I took some gutter material that has been laying around waiting to be used and simply laid it on top of the bottles. I used some more flashing to steady it and give a nice fat water catching area and now I can just let it sit there.

The trick is that we don’t really have enough groundwater to just throw in a pump and start watering the field. Again, I don’t know how quickly this well replenishes itself but I will soon but the obviousness is that we are in a drought and we just cannot expect that much free water. Truthfully, the rain might not help us either but if I work with diligence and keep up on the project, I can keep the tanks filled, rainwater will help when it comes and hopefully we will have the ability to regularly water our plants.

I don’t know that this is going to help but I hope it’s going to help.

I also started doing a very small scale version of something I want to do on a larger scale. I took a couple of pieces of roofing material and propped it up on a pony wall made from some sticks I had lying around. The idea is that when it rains, the roofing material will catch at least another couple of meters of water and I can direct them directly to the roots underneath a plum tree that I have. If I have my watering system up and running, I can give a minute or two of water to the plant pretty easily. But every little bit helps.

***

We’re at 1:30 right now and I’m taking a break because it’s snowing. I’m in the warm room and warming up right now. I don’t think I really want to catch a cold and I’m drinking some tea and eating some warm oatmeal. I’m not so sure how kosher oatmeal is right now but it’s a very good thing to have when it’s cold and snowing.

I’m not quite finished getting this water tank business put together but I’m not very far from having something there that will work. I need to think about it a little bit more and the distances between the tanks could be better. In all truth, I think I’d even be happier with just a line of tanks exactly there catching whatever water we can and then using them as storage for well water. It’s just not perfect but it’s out there. It just needs to get tweaked a little bit.

I’m also still a little bit depressed about fighting with my ex partner. I have several issues with women that I’m contending with right now. I understand that they are practicing feminine fascism on me. If they don’t get their way, they become emotional bullies and as they were brought up here, they basically cannot wait to have an opportunity to be a bully. It’s a power trip and power is all anybody wants so, you use what you have and keep the pressure on.

I’m not sure about any of this pressure except on a few practical levels. I have a whole bunch of material things tied in with my ex partner. I would be happier if this is all just straight business but it doesn’t work that way.

I understand this is life and we all get what we get but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. It also means that I don’t really want to have to take this town shit. Town seems to be all about money and town people are only money. I’m just no longer really attracted to people that stand around and torture each other. I like where I am out in the country much better because I seem to spend my time physically doing things as opposed to bullshitting and lying for money.

This isn’t to say that I don’t understand how the economy works or that food costs money. I’m just saying that I’m getting older, I’m not practicing agriculture for money and I don’t really care very much about selling anything. My ex partner needs to keep up her appearances, she needs to be a particular person in order to continue to get paid. I don’t. I don’t even care about this and I don’t feel I need to do anything or be anyone for anyone. On my side, this is the most of it.

I don’t know what’s going to come of this. I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing. I’m enjoying putting this Garden together and I’m enjoying figuring out the physical problems of how to make this place work. I still have to bring my tools in but I might take the rest of the afternoon and do some computer work. Well, if I don’t fall asleep sitting in this place I might.

There’s just a lot to do. There’s just a lot of things to do. I’m not really making any money these days and truthfully, I’m not really in a situation where I can afford to fully retire. I’m just really happy to have most of my time without pressure on me. Like I’ve said many times, you take my chicken neighbors out of this place and I’m in heaven. Well, global warming and a drought and the war but you know what I mean.

***

It’s about 20 minutes after 5:00 and I have brought everything in already. I’m done. We kind of got rained out.

But it’s okay because I got to take a look at my caveman water system. My original thought was to use wood planks but late in the afternoon, I noticed that I have several broken pieces of roofing tile. I measured them up and amazingly, they are the same meter 120 as the gutter pipes that I have. The wavy lines are perfect for holding the gutters in place between the tanks and there is no greater feeling than having junk work for you perfectly.

I can’t say what would happen in a strong wind. I’m sure I could figure out something to make this more permanent but truthfully, I don’t really care. The water is falling off the roof and landing in the gutters or directly in the tanks and the gutters lead to the tanks. We are collecting water from at least one roof. Actually, two roofs because I have another barrel out in front catching off the front of the house.

I could use more of these. And I still have the barn roof to account for. But as of the moment, the rain is helping me to fill 1,500 l of holding tanks. I’m going to need about that much to water the garden one time all the way through but of course I can break this up and make sure everything gets some water over the course of the week at least two or three times.

Also, the roofing tile I propped up to water the plum tree is still standing there and you can see a puddle right at the base where the rain fell and stopped. It stopped right there in front of the tree where the roots could get the water.

Last year, when I said what I wanted to do, my neighbors just bullied past me. They weren’t listening to my thoughts, they didn’t even seem to want to hear my voice. Obviously I was stupid and a foreigner. Obviously these rather nefarious people would have an opportunity to use me as if I was a child. Obviously they would be able to use me for some money because of my American passport. And obviously, all of this would be easy money.

Bullies. Psychotic, selfish, parasitic bullies. Endlessly bullies.

If you’ve heard it said that all bullies are cowards, you would be right. But all cowardly bullies also like to talk in people’s ears and spread gossip and rumors. I mean, you knew that was going to happen, right?

Well this year I have the capacity to move around. This year, and don’t think this is without pain, I have managed to build myself a pretty interesting looking Garden. I would almost call it smart. Of course there are rough edges but when things start to grow and everything turns green, it might just be lovely.

I’ve also learned a lot. Last year, I was just observational. I didn’t really have much else I could do and every time I got up and tried to work, I almost killed myself from foot infections.

This year I am a bit better and more mobile. If mobile is not the correct word, I am a little more self-sufficient. I can handle more things myself. It’s a bit tiring and sure, it would be glorious if I actually had some trustworthy help on any front. But that’s just not the way things work here. In fact, I bet that things don’t work well even if you do have money to pay people.

There is a feeling though. You get a feeling of accomplishment when you execute a plan really well. When you look at a map or a landscape and you suddenly understand how you fit into that and what you can do with it, executing that plan is a remarkable feeling.

When you figure things out on paper like an engineer, I’m sure there is great pride when you show your drawing to the company or a client and they approve. I’m sure a builder likes to take a step back and see what they’ve done when construction is finished or even a particularly difficult part gets finished. But try the feeling that you get from doing both. Try out what it feels like when you’re both the designer and the builder. Take a look at how you feel when you make a plan, especially your plan that goes against public opinion and against the norm and then execute it and see that it works.

What I am trying to say is I felt pretty good watching the water drip into my water tanks. Like I said, it’ll probably be a mess in a strong wind. It’s not tied down in any way and until there’s a decent amount of water in the tanks themselves, it’s a pretty fragile situation. But I am getting additional water from the rain to compensate for my low groundwater. I haven’t finished yet but I have taken a step in the correct direction.

If I want to be successful, I have to take advantage of every single nuance. I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but that’s the way it is.

One other positive today is that I noticed that I have managed to slice off 40% from my electric bill. My ex partner simply cannot understand why I’m not flying through my wood supply. When she sees that wood, she just wants to start burning and burning and burning so that she feels exactly as warm as she does in her Town apartment.

This woman just does not understand nature.

I have been extra frugal. I have taken the trouble to cut all my logs in half so that I can make seriously bright fires using less wood. The trick is that it’s not decorative and it’s not really even for instant heating. There is heat from a fire for sure but the real trick is that I’m heating The masonry. They call it charging it. When the bricks take the heat, sometime well after the fire dies, they start to release that heat into the room. Nature’s heating system.

In A beautiful World, maybe I would like to tear out the system I have and rebuild it into a more efficient situation. Right now, the heated air and smoke just travels around the corner and up the flu. In a perfect world, we would send that heated air through a bench all along the wall and back again before heading out of the room. This would charge up a larger percentage of space and distribute the heat better throughout the room. In fact, exactly where I have my bed right now could very easily be sitting on top of a bench like this and that would be plenty toasty on even the coldest nights.

But this is time and money. Maybe I have time but money I don’t, so I’m going to live with what I have.

By the way, it takes about an hour to saw all that firewood in half by hand. The time while you are sawing and probably a half hour afterwards, you are pretty warm. Just an ancillary benefit that I’ve learned about while living in a place where my main job is to keep warm as inexpensively as I possibly can.

I am not hungry at all but I’m thinking of making some soup. I don’t want to do any more work but I still have that oatmeal in my belly. I guess I could drink some more tea but I don’t really feel like it. I feel like having some soup. Soup is always good when you’re cold and today is a very cold rainy day.

***

Well, this is me checking out for the day. I have had enough and I had to make a genuine deal with myself to stand up and leave the kitchen. I didn’t make soup. I made some noodles and vegetables and used whole wheat flour to make a sauce. I think I had one Forest mushroom in there and maybe there were some peanuts. Very simple and very tasty and if you’re a noodle fan, it was fun to eat. But when I was done, I was done. I did not want to do anything else.

The thing about living rustically though is that there is always something to do. No matter what small detail of life, you are going to have to do some work to make it work out. I don’t claim to be an expert on village Life but I am an advocate of it. It’s good for your health and it’s good for your heart. It’s also extremely satisfying when you start getting the hang of things.
When I lived in town, I spent a lot of time in my head. There was a time where I attempted to be a part of Cafe society, such that it was, but I really did not get much out of it. I would sit and talk to whoever wanted to talk to me or keep notes in a book or something like that. I wasn’t necessarily hunting. I wasn’t looking for money and I really wasn’t looking for girls. I didn’t say no if a pretty girl wanted to talk to me but basically the girls were waiting to be talked to and I was not much into approaching them. My approach was not as a hunter, I was more of a fisherman. Just put your pole in the water and see what you catch.

The problem was that I just never met anybody I really liked until I ran into my ex partner at the market. By the time I met her, I was already out of the coffee shops. Mostly, I was into the University of Google and did research about heart health, veganism, some musical theory and some ideas of a utopian society.

I was still teaching then. The hours I would spend with students were diminishing but I was still doing classes. Mostly though, I would just keep to myself and I’m using myself studying or lifting weights or going for bike rides. I went for a lot of bike rides.

Meeting my ex partner changed things for a little while. Honeymoons will do that. But eventually we fell into something resembling our current situation. She is going to stay independent and I am going to keep going in much the same way except for when we spend time together. It was basically being alone but with dates on holidays.

Then some nefarious dealings went on in America. My dad took a turn for the worse and a cousin of mine started putting his face in the picture. Eventually my dad passed and though I am a grown man, I didn’t lose a friend. I talked to my dad at least once a week. You can say whatever you want about the relationship but I did speak to him about once a week and our conversations could go on for as much as an hour. And then life happened and those conversations ended and got replaced by something incredibly shitty.

It was at this moment that I decided to get out of town, get away from auto emissions and noise pollution and the endless bullshit from the people there and find a quiet place with some fresh air out in the country. The moment I found this place, I fell in love with it. The positives were exactly the sort of thing I wanted. There were enough buildings to be of use for many things, the house was very simple and we are parked right next to a forest.

I didn’t understand the neighbor situation at the beginning. In fact, when I needed help, I felt I could talk to some of my neighbors and they were right there to join in. Some of them were a little pushy. I had a neighbor invite her cell phone to my property on Saturday so she could sell me wood. I really didn’t need the sound of her voice in my ear on Saturday but I tried to be polite. I tried to be polite to everybody really and for a minute, it seemed that we would all understand each other. And then that all turned to shit.

It started with a simple conversation about my neighbor’s incredibly obnoxious car. Every time they leave their house, they back up around the corner, aim the back part of the car at me and it fills my kitchen with carbon monoxide.

I went to have a conversation with my neighbor about this. I thought we could at least have a human conversation and I tried to ask him if he could somehow find it within himself to change his parking practices. I would be happy to be a friend to the family in any way I could if you would just be so kind as to accommodate me. I didn’t want to break his back but life would be really nice if it wasn’t for the auto fumes coming into my kitchen. When he responded with sarcasm and bullshit conservative game playing, I was surprised. It was a note I hadn’t expected but I still held hope in my heart that perhaps we could just talk about things and have them work out.

I tried a second conversation and not only was he uninterested in making any accommodation for me, he bombasted that the only answer to the question was to buy yet another car, the second one is worse than the first, and then when his wife showed up during the conversation, I realized that there was absolutely nothing lucid going on in that house. She had him so henpecked that his nervous system would pop the moment she would show up.

A little while later, I attempted to speak with her. She seemed to be the one who ran the house and maybe she was the person who could make such decisions. But what she said amounted to basically populism. What I was asking for was complete nonsense because everybody drove cars. She gestured with her hand at the general expanse of something, there was no one else in the picture and there’s only two neighbors in the general direction she was pointing. But her point was that she had no reason to listen to anything I had to say. I was some kind of a lowly being, beneath her level most probably and I was completely wasting my time asking her for anything. She was a dictator, not the benevolent kind and she didn’t give a flying shit about anything I had to say.

It was about this time that I ran into probably my greatest illness. My foot infection hit me like a brick and had me on the floor of the kitchen for several hours until I came out of whatever it was that had come over me. For several weeks I couldn’t even walk and had to crawl around on the floor. It was a brutal time for sure but even more brutal because every time they decided to leave their house with their car, and this is every single day, the smell in the house was ridiculously bad.

Time passed and I healed enough to be able to walk around a little bit wearing socks. One such morning I genuinely felt as if I was even capable of walking. On that morning I formulated a plan that might actually work for my neighbors. They didn’t have to park their car anywhere else or do anything special, all they had to do was reverse the order of how they came and went to their house. Instead of driving directly into their house when they came home, they should back in and leave straight out. This would take the stress off of me because it would eliminate this business of spewing Auto fumes into my house. I didn’t think it was too much to ask because they already backed out of their house every time so driving backwards would never be an issue.

I hobbled over to their house with my great idea but instead of talking to me, the woman called the police and told her that I was a drug dealer and that I was attacking her. Some 7 hours later, the police showed up and screamed and yelled at me and even threatened me with his gun for attacking the neighbor. The whole time that this was going on, she was smiling and enjoying this great power she had over me. I have no idea who she thinks I am or who she thinks she is, but she was obviously enjoying the brutality.

Eventually the cop left, he refused to take my statement and officially, nobody heard that all I had done was go there to ask them to be more careful with parking their car. After this, nothing. The cop thought he had the right to abuse me every time he saw me. He decided I was his bitch for some reason and so did my neighbors. They took pleasure in taunting me and my neighbor even took the trouble to start speaking to me in German including a heil Hitler and his speech to me.

Anti-semitism?

Who knows and who cares. A year has gone by, I had surgery on my foot. Now I’m up and around and a bit more self-sufficient and the last time the cop showed up, he even decided to show me some respect. In fact, that he was showing me respect led me to send him over to talk to my neighbors about parking their car. We would not be friends but at least they would get the message. He told them what was up and they just laughed. There is absolutely no reason in their consciousness that they should be gracious to anyone or even believe, as my mom used to say that their shit stinks.

Well, they stink as people. Being forced to look at, listen to and smell this group of idiots has been boggling my mind for more than a year. Knowing full well that I write about them and that I have how to speak about them with people from at least eight countries. Everyone who has ever read my blog asks me if they are really as bad as I make them out to be.

Yes. They really, really, really are as bad as I make them out to be. And if I can say just one more thing to make my point, he’s Russian and she left her Homeland for a Russian Foreigner. If we know anything about the world, about women from underprivileged countries from the former Soviet Union and about what Russians are like, I think everyone is starting to get the picture.

These days, there is an interesting effect taking place. I put a lock on my gate disallowing people from entering without my permission. If they do try to find my way on to my property, I have the right to beat them. Nobody comes on my property.

At first, they tried to high school me for my choice. They showed me that they didn’t like having my gate locked and they were offended by this. It wasn’t their way and I should adjust my behavior for them. The gate stayed locked.

After this people started to say some really terrible things about me. The guest at what could possibly be going on in my house. They opined about my lack of a wife and said things about my sexuality. I heard from some people that my neighbors thought I was crazy. The gate stayed locked.

The one thing that’s changed this year is that I have been active enough to build myself a garden. I’m not just talking about beating the ground a little bit or ordering shit, I’m guilty of landscaping my entire property into a series of paths and raised beds each made with precision. The water system I am installing right now has been viewed by my neighbors and the work that I have done has for the most part put everyone to shame.

It seems I am intelligent and that I know what I’m doing. It also seems that somebody figured out that I write internationally.

But the gate stays locked and no one comes on my property without invitation. That means you contact me by phone or by email so I know when you’re coming. If I don’t know when you’re coming, you are not invited and you’re not getting through the gate. And if you try coming on the property without invitation, it’s an invasion and I will beat you.

This is a very severe way to live. I don’t really recommend this and it’s much better to feel you are surrounded by friends. The thing is though that there has to be respect. Your friends need to respect you and you have to have friends that you actually respect. If you don’t have this or if you are with people who are not only incapable of respecting others but find even the thought of this too uncomfortable to engage in, you have something else. And this is the problem because this is what I have.

Why don’t I leave? Firstly, it’s my house and I love my house. I love the work it takes to keep my house up. I love this warm room very much and I love my kitchen. And I love my office in the summertime and the couch between the two big windows that is perhaps the coolest place on a hot day you can possibly imagine. And I like this Garden I am building and I like being able to build it. I like these projects I get to engage in and I’m very happy to have this wonderful labor to do. I’m not looking for anyone to give me a job, I’m happy to be moving at my own pace on my own plans.

Anyway, I don’t know why I had to get into all this. Maybe I’m just frustrated or maybe I’m just physically tired. Or maybe I am in more than a little pain and I wish I wasn’t. I wish I didn’t have to live next to the people I live next to. I wish I didn’t live next to people who believe they have the right to parasite off of others. I wish I didn’t have to live next to people who believed in their inalienable right to steal people’s time and money and attention. I wish I didn’t have to live with people who don’t understand respect. It’s a shame.