Tuesday, April 19th 2022
So Zelinsky is already looking forward to the future. He is already looking forward to Big industries growing and profit-making enterprises driving the country forward. He’s looking forward to European investment to help rebuild the infrastructure and the buildings. He has fully accepted the economics of European intervention and is looking forward to economic sanctions pushing Russia to a bankruptcy they don’t really care about.
When The War is over and the Russians withdraw, all that will happen is the oil will start to flow again. Nothing will change. Nothing will get better and the only thing we’re going to see is more and more pollution, more and more cancer cases, more and more diabetes, more and more homeless people, more and more fascism and more and more global ecological crises.
I have been feeling this for a while. I feel a bit like I did towards the end of the American elections, during the Russian elections and subsequent BS Revolution and now in this rather bloodthirsty war. There are no sides to pick. We just keep killing ourselves as a species. We just keep everything going exactly as it is. We just hate life.
***
Good morning. It’s about 8:50 and I’m in the kitchen waiting for something that I am baking. This is kind of a Passover thought in that there is no baking powder or yeast in this concoction. I threw some chickpeas, sunflower seeds and a little vinegar in the blender and then added water as was necessary to get a nice hummus. And then this became the wet ingredients for some whole wheat flour and chia seeds. It’s a wet mix and I just spread it on some parchment paper and tossed it in the oven at what looks like a serious item setting. Now I’m waiting for the coffee and when the coffee is ready, I’ll take a look and see what kind of a mess I’ve created.
It might rise a little bit. It won’t rise from the chickpeas or anything else but we might get some gas from the whole wheat flour. If we do, I’m sorry. If it’s not miserable enough, I’m sorry.
I believe you really have to put beans into your bread like concoctions. You have to put beans into your life. Beans or protein. Beans have amazing protein. Protein are those eight essential amino acids that we need to keep moving and have some energy in life. Contrary to what a lot of people think, empty carbs and working on sugar is not sustainable. And for me, it makes me miserable.
I could go into why beans are better protein than meat. I could talk about the cancer protein that you get from red meat and why it is considered carcinogenic. I could tell you about my friend Mike and how he was advised to stay away from this particular amino acid while he had cancer for exactly the same reasons. I could go blah blah blah about medical research but really, incorporate beans into your vegan diet and you’ll be okay.
The reason I’m getting such a late start is that the last two days really tore me up. I did a little bit more legwork then I should have and ended up tearing up my leg pretty badly. I had a thought in my head about even taking an entire day off but Nature calls and you have to get up anyway.
I also feel like my body wanted to catch a cold yesterday. I felt some symptoms from being out in the snow and trying to keep my water system together. It wasn’t a blizzard and maybe I am a bit oblivious to the temperature these days because I live up here all the time. But the cold didn’t set and I didn’t get stuffy or lose my ability to function. I never feel that way anymore.
So I’m up and around and making some coffee and I decided to make use of my oven. I have been avoiding this for a while. I usually do all my cooking on the stove top. My ex partner likes to bake, I like flatbreads. But today I felt like a change. I wanted something like crackers. If not crackers, just a thin strong bread to go with the coffee. I’ll gnaw on some raw cabbage along with this. I have to go get some onions and probably some more cabbage.
I have some responsibilities to take care of. Aside from the last seven Forest runs to bring some living material for my garden, I am going to order some wood from the local government office. There is also some kind of inspection that has been waiting for a long time that needs to get organized and eventually paid for. I’m also going to change my banking a little bit and move it from physically having to be in town to my mobile device. I already have this on some of my banking but not my bill paying section. Today I’m going to change that.
The coffee’s ready but the bread needs another 10 minutes. It’s tasty though.
After this, this week is really just about moving forward at an easy pace. I see absolutely no reason for panic. The war has moved away from us. This is not indicative of my side politically, I’ve already made myself clear that I’m on the side of peace and generally against Russian imperialism. But moving the war back to damas and the Russians trying to establish a corridor to you Crimea to ensure their ability to defend their oil rights to the Black Sea, fuck you very much, means that Belarus has less involvement in the war. I haven’t noticed any more helicopter flyovers and there has been no particular tensions around me. Everybody wants to take a breath.
A friend of mine, the American of Ukrainian parents, loves to send me seriously deranged humor. I’m going to give you this link but if you are not a Russian speaker, it might not make any sense to you. But if you are Russian and reading this either to improve your English or via the translator, this is a Ukrainian prankster who is calling the parents of Russian soldiers just to make them crazy.
And yeah, this is really how Russians talk.
I like when the father screams at him for using matni slov and then goes on a matni rant for 8 minutes pidar blyat kondoon blyat. He has some other ones where the mothers start crying. If a man picks up it usually winds up in a verbal confrontation where every other word is a curse.
It might not be the most essential knowledge for people to understand but ukrainians speak Russian. There are those like the president who out of a sense of nationalism prefer to speak in the Ukrainian language. There is a Belarusian language as well. I’m not very good at it but I understand it when people speak it. I also basically understand all Slavic languages when listening to them and for the most part when reading. I’m not perfect and I haven’t tried to make myself a Slavic language master but the point is that the Russians demanded that Russian be the language in these regions. Or in other words, this war is between people who all speak the same language and share the same culture and for the most part, the same heritage.
Ukraine is also very well aware of the historic abuse from Moscow that they have been made to endure for centuries. Zelinsky himself as a Jew is even more aware of the history between the two regions.
What is going on here is very strange. The more that this thing carries on, the more I am bewildered. Yes I understand that perhaps most people in the world believe that war is something that is and should be expected. But then there are people like myself who cannot understand why it is necessary
Last night I went into the history of my experience with my neighbors. That is a microcosm of everything I’m speaking about. At what point in human interaction do these people deviate from me? At what point in social interaction and understanding do they simply believe that it is their god-given right to be abusers?
I saw an interesting video about veganism last night. This is another Earthling Ed video and in this one, he is visiting Stanford University talking to a rather pedantic and mechanical sounding young man who believes it’s his inalienable right as a libertarian to place human beings above animals.
I hope you can forgive me for what I’m about to say but I thought it was very interesting that this particular student was black and yet identified fully with the idea of social striations. Basically, Ed is arguing that animals have a right to exist despite the fact that they do not participate verbally in human society and the black man, seemingly devoid of recognition of the social pressures placed on people specifically because of the color of their skin, seems very happy to identify as, I don’t know, a white European? Maybe studying at Stanford has something to do with this.
What is interesting to me in this argument is the acceptance of social striations, of levels of being as being the way it is and of course, the only possible way of living. I’m quoting my neighbor here. The only possible way. He’s Russian by the way.
Of course it is not the only possible way. There’s more than one way to eat breakfast, there’s more than one way to use this stove, there’s more than one way to manipulate the ingredients and there is more than one way to start my day. I’m not obligated to do a damn thing and I don’t intend on changing my situation anytime soon. Of course there are many ways.
Unless of course you are enslaved by a psychopath.
If we are led by psychopathic methanthropic power abusers, we do not have multiple options. If people have power, literally put a gun to your head type power, to demand that you act in a certain way despite any logic or even danger to your health for the health of your community, we are talking about something completely different.
During the time of Trump’s presidency, I always found it amazing when I would tune in to the absolutely hateful rhetoric in conservative media. I could not understand the justification for actually listening to Donald Trump speak. He was obviously uninformed and devoid of any connection to reality. He understood things that pleased himself and moved towards these things much like you can convince an animal to be your friend by giving it food. But he was in no possible way a statesman or even worse, interested in helping out people who were at least theoretically in his constituency.
He talks like a crazy Street person. Have you ever noticed that? He talks like a homeless lunatic.
But then so do all of the conservative politicians. So do all of the conservative leaders all over the world. So do all of the public faces that are sponsored or influenced or flat-out bought and paid for by the oil business. There is no common sense in rhetoric about economics unless it leads to a peaceful healthy life for human beings. Screaming that the solution to economic paranoia is some farcical panacea from a few percentage points of more oil money coming in is lunacy. The destruction of our planet so that we can keep slavery going is insane.
In my opinion, the idea of democracy means that people have a voice. But you cannot have a voice unless people have a vested interest in their lives. At some point earlier there was the idea of whether or not uneducated people or people that do not own property should be allowed to vote. Probably a logical argument and even though it’s never mentioned, part of the capitalism plus anything equals shit mathematics. Of course you cannot have democracy in a society in which people are not equal.
But the idea of democracy is still the one we are supposed to be using because it is the only thing that allows individuals the right to take vested interest in their lives. Everybody wants to eat, everybody wants to have a reasonable life but you’re not going to have these things if you’re going to sit there parasitically and be told what to say and what to think and what you’re going to get in exchange for all of your hours of servitude. That’s not democracy, that’s slavery.
Listening to Zelinsky’s argument for economic hope for the Ukrainian people today, I understood that he believes that oil dollars will be the salvation for everything. Slugs for salt. People voting against themselves and their own land in the hope of some money coming in.
When the Soviet Union quit, people here said it would take 50 years to convince people that communism was wrong. It seems that this is the argument that’s being played out. And of course, if none of us can speak pragmatically anymore or say what we think clearly, hysteria wins and the planet loses.
A local person last night spoke about me that they didn’t understand why I couldn’t just accept things the way they are. Their point was that it’s so much easier to just go along with things and be happy.
But when my neighbor’s wife stood out on the street when the garbage vehicle came to take away my small bag of plastics and everybody else’s giant amount of waste material, she smiled at me and turned her face to the Sun so that I would see the beauty of her skin in perfect light.
A flirt? Seriously? She wanted my dick to play with? She wanted to be loved? Are you out of your Goddamn cocksucking mind?
And I’m not really supposed to talk about this but my problem currently with my ex partner is that she will not speak with me. She does. She does things. She does things based on some instinct and emotional interest. But she does not talk. I’m not included in her plans. I’m just obligated to clean up the messes after she’s gone.
I am a man but there is more than one way to live one’s life with women. I understand that I feel emotions for her and more than a little gratitude for being there when I needed her but there are more than one way to be kind to someone.
Fascism is slavery. Fascism is abuse. Abuse of power is slavery. Slavery is not freedom and slavery is not happiness.
And finally, I got blamed by a reporter who refused to tell my story because they said that I was the hero of the story and that it was not universal. This was just chatter and an excuse being made. It was a conservative newspaper so of course they speak gibberish and words have no particular meaning except in terms of revenue to the paper. This would be advertising and envelopes from people who wish to be shown in a positive light. I was also told that there was not enough blood in my story to keep people going.
I say this is very universal because I say what I’m going through is what everybody is going through. When you get shit on daily, sometimes the only relief you believe available to you is to find someone that you can shit on. When you yourself are discriminated against and suppressed, you yearn for the opportunity to discriminate against and suppress someone else.
My dark-skinned neighbor identifies and lionizes her abusers. It is the story of her life. Our black Stanford student identifies with the ideology of those who have oppressed dark-skinned people for centuries. It is the story of his life. My ex partner identifies and lionizes the people who keep the money flowing to her fueling her independence but at the same time, she cannot allow any democracy to exist in the regions she feels are below her. It is the story of her life. Even my ex-girlfriend chimes in now and again and waits for me to come crawling. Crawling is the story of her life and all she waits for is the opportunity to let the shit flow downhill.
I disagree with Mr Zelinsky today. I disagree that agreements with Europe are the answer to cleaning up the wreckage caused by the Russian invasion. I cannot disagree on a local level that having weapons to fight the Russians off is a necessary thing but this also means that Ukraine is going to be full of guns when all of this is over. Slugs for salt. From the frying pan into the fire. From one form of slavery to another and nothing, nothing at all for the land, air or water that make Ukraine a bit of a paradise.
Two bread cuttings. That was all they ever had that was worth anything to anybody. And now they know that there’s oil to be taken from the Black Sea and 10 million people have to lose their lives.
It is not the only way.
***
The breakfast cake, if that’s what we want to call it, is very tasty. It feels a bit like a pie crust or perhaps a savory cookie. There’s no sugar in it and it’s not meant to be a sweet treat. It’s just very substantive and calorically very dense. The fats from the sunflower seeds and the protein from the chickpeas and the toasty flavor of the whole wheat flour go well together. It’s rough and very rustic and I’ve had about half and I certainly feel as though I have eaten something real. I’m even putting up a little more coffee to keep going. Maybe I do have things to do physically today after all.
***
It’s about 10:45 right now. I’ve just come back inside from having a bit of a walk around. The water system works. I need to tweak it a little bit and put some screens over the top of the barrels but other than that, everything is in place and the rain last night has put a few centimeters of water in the tank. In my other tank standing near the front of my house, I’ve already got what is probably about 80 L of water. That’s from just standing there for 2 weeks.
I understand that when it gets warm and we’re not going to get much rain, it’s going to be a constant push to be pulling water out of the well and sending it to the tanks. That’s going to be a daily endeavor and I’m going to have to pay close attention to how long it takes for the water in the well to come back. For sure, it’s not going to be 17 l a minute so there’s going to be some genuine lag and some real math and science involved.
But that one roofing panel I put near the tree definitely did its job. You can’t really tell whether or not the tree is enjoying it but you can see that I have turned a few drops of water into a little bit of a rush of water and hopefully, that will help bring up some fruit.
Taking a look at my fruit and nut trees, there are a few of them that will get serviced by my neighbor’s roof. That roof overhang dropping rainwater down onto my property is about the only decent thing this family does for me. But away from that roof, I’m going to at least be setting up my broken and used roofing panels until such time as I can build a better structure. I have a guy who wants to help with this but I’m just not sure I want to spend the money on it right now. The country has sanctions against it and I have my own personal problems getting access to even my own money. I’m not talking about family money,
I’m talking about teaching English money from 20 years of a career of trying to help the young people of this country be free thinkers. This is the money I’m generally cut off from these days.
So it is possible that major construction will have to wait. But I am interested in investing in some more water tanks. The more water I can save, the more water I have to keep my plants going.
It’s all going to be a compromise. I am aware of this and I understand that this is the situation. But all I can do is the best I can so that all of the things that are living on my little piece of property here have the best chance of growing strong. This is both the food that I will eat and the food that the bees and the butterflies and all the other living things that inhabit my little Paradise need as well.
I need them and they need me and they have a right to be just like I do.
I don’t feel so bad today. My leg feels okay this morning. I can feel where I am probably a little under the weather but I don’t feel bad enough not to do my thing.
I counted and I believe I need 20 more trips to the forest to finish both my boxes and my other gardens. The lower gardens will just get mixed with what’s in there and the boxes are going to get one more light layer of basically sand just to keep everything from blowing away in the wind. What I am calling sand is the land that has been used for planting for however long people have been plowing and planting here. It’s basically sand because it’s been raped and ruined for so many years, there is absolutely no life left in it. Desert sand. Desertification. The effect of desertification.
While I was out there I noticed my neighbors talking together. They were walking around the field with their hands in their pockets and my next door neighbor was explaining to the hunchback what he needed to do to continue his servitude. I guess it’s time for everybody to go to work. My neighbor has to go back into blind nervous system servitude to his chicken wife, I have to start making my last digging and hauling runs with hand tools and the hunchback started a diesel motor. This is what we all call working.
Okay and if I have to be a scientist about this and understand the pecking order, the chicken woman is at the top of the food chain because she is too hysterical to be managed by anybody. Next in line is her hen-pecked husband who receives masculine validation by using the hunchback across the street as an emotional crutch. The hunchback doesn’t seem to have any brains whatsoever and is just trying to get by by finding a benefactor to give him some money. He has a wife who I have never heard a sound from and who, as far as I can tell, does nothing but quietly keep things running.
Utter and complete desolation.
I kind of feel bad for actually having said that. But I said it. Live with it.
***
It’s about 1:30 and I’m back in the kitchen again. I’m not eating anything but I’m burning a little gas to warm up the room. I think I did get a little sick yesterday. I’m feeling it now. I don’t think it’s anything to die from but I don’t feel very good at all.
I did finish the job though I’m filling the boxes. I’m not exactly done with this wheelbarrow business. I have more to do but as far as gathering humus from the forest for the boxes, I am finished. The boxes themselves just need one more top layer of Sandy planting soil, the stuff that has been out there for a hundred years, and then we are ready to plant. I’m probably going to put some leaves over the top of everything for mulch but I don’t need any more organic material for those boxes.
I still have about 11 trips to go for my lower gardens. Those need to have something inside them. But after that and some rather easy leaf collection, I’m done with this business until fall.
I’m taking this material from canals that were dug many years ago. At some time I suppose all of this land was farmed but as people got tired of living here, they started giving away the farmland to the forest and the natural rise and fall of the plowed fields and now it is only a garden for trees.
Anything that humans do to remove material from a forest is theoretically damaging. But what I am taking is a natural place for water to congregate and cleaning this canal out actually will allow the forest to breathe a little bit. We can even change the terminology and say that I’m digging swales to help water retention.
I was thinking about my mother today. By way of introduction, my mother’s side of the family were Ukrainian and thoroughly brutal stiffnecked people if you can imagine.
What I was thinking of though is that my mother used to scream at me about making something of myself and the example she would use is that if I didn’t get serious, I would end up being a ditch digger. Ditch diggers were to her the lowest form of human labor and something I should avoid at all costs. But as I was sitting out in my Forest, digging swales and building garden boxes for myself I wanted to tell her that I finally got there but that she was wrong about the profession.
If we are looking at global drought due to global warming and especially if we ever come to our senses about overusing machinery and especially heavy machinery that runs on petroleum products and pollutes the world and destroys the land, ditch diggers might be the greatest friends we’ve ever had on this planet. The people who go in there and dig trenches, not to fight stupid worthless fucking wars but to slow water down from The watershed and help support the groundwater and the fertility of our land need to be recognized as the true heroes. The folks that physically do something to give back to the world instead of simply stealing from it should get credit for their effort.
Sorry Mom, you missed the bus on your argument once again.
***
I want to add a few more details to the picture I tried to draw from early this morning. Well both my neighbor and I were standing out in our fields and thinking about land management, I suppose. I’m assuming we were thinking about Land Management because we both have some land and theoretically we both manage it.
My Land Management project is a little more complex than my neighbor’s though. I am building a series of beds with paths that double as drainage diches and places for water retention and he has a big flat field with six or seven beehives on it. Managing bees is his thing. When he’s not doing whatever he does for money, he plays with bees so he doesn’t have to be next to his wife.
When I look at my garden, I can see how much work I’m going to have to do. The fertility of the gardens are going to need to be amended. I’m going to need to continue moving organic material around. Also, this water system I’m working on has to be functional and it’s also going to require some steady maintenance. Possibly in the future I might upgrade this and make it a little simpler to move water around. But in the meantime, I have to worry about this if I want to get some fruit, vegetables, nuts and beans out of my property.
He will do some small amount of beekeeping but probably has something to do with pouring sugar into the hive or something like that. Then, once or twice during the year, he will wander around the field with a weed wacker making sure that no wild flowers grow to feed his bees or any kind of fertility remains in his field. He doesn’t grow anything on that field, he doesn’t plant trees, he just has a big open expansive field with a few bee boxes and he kills everything around the bee boxes so that his bees have nothing to eat.
I don’t really understand much about beekeeping and possibly he knows what he’s doing. But at a glance, it seems as though his idea of agriculture is simply killing and exploitation. Keep killing and creating some sort of strange unnatural aesthetic, never allow nature to do what it needs to do and then take everything you possibly can with as little effort as possible. He told me one time that he makes a few pennies from his honey.
The first time I met him, he smiled at me and offered me some machines to help plant my potatoes. I was planting by hand and I told him I would be okay. I also told him that I would be helping him this year. I was going to be growing fruit trees and this would help feed his precious bees.
He smirked at me. I don’t know why what I was saying was so foolish. I don’t think what I was saying was foolish at all. But he works on some sort of animal instinct in almost all of his choices and has a mentality very similar to a high school student. His wife rules him on a spastic reflex level and I doubt his thinking goes very much further than that.
My problem was that I didn’t understand that I was lower than them. How stupid I am to have missed that. I really wasn’t thinking clearly or according to his hierarchy. Bad on me.
I don’t know if this really adds clarity or not but that was the first picture I got this morning. No, I didn’t say good morning or offered to chat over the fence. Chatting over the fence with this son of a bitch is about the last thing I need. I doubt I could do that without losing my breakfast. In fact, any physical effort whatsoever that I might do for the people who have been laughing at me for a year would be basically crawling. These fuckers will die waiting for the moment when I come for them.
Yeah, my mother’s side were ukrainians. Ukrainian Jews. Anybody want to say that we’re tough guys now?
I’ve been thinking about this for a while but I’m starting to like this AC/DC song. Actually, to be fair, the song is called Hair of the Dog and it was written by the band Nazareth and was also pretty well covered by Guns n’ Roses.
Heart breaker, soul shaker
I’ve been told about you
Steamroller, midnight stroller
What they’ve been saying must be true
Red hot mama
Velvet charmer
Times come to pay your dues
Now you’re messin with a
A son of a bitch
Talkin jivey, poison ivy
You ain’t gonna cling to me
Man taker, born faker
I ain’t so blind I can’t see
Red hot mama
Velvet charmer
Times come to pay your dues
Now you’re messin with a
A son of a bitch
***
I’m going to close up here. I’ve actually been down for a while. I stopped early because I really didn’t want to do any more. I’ve got a little bit of a cold, not enough to put me into complete bed rest but my legs are also shot. I’ve been in the warm room for the last couple of hours and I’m probably not coming out until tomorrow morning. I had some tea and ate some vitamins and that’ll be it. Just a boring old man.
I’m watching the new Batman film right now. It’s hard for me to sit through it in one gulp. I’m sure there are fans who just eat this up with a spoon but it’s a bit slow for my taste and I’m not really a superhero fan. There have been times where I felt I might be Batman. But those were many years ago when I actually lived in Gotham City. I wasn’t fighting crime at night, I was just slicing through traffic on my bicycle making a living by being a pro in a rock and roll world.
I’m probably not going to go to town this week. I can’t think of any real reason that I should do so. I’ve got some banking to take care of but there is no reason that I can’t do that from here. I do have some bureaucracy laying around but again, it doesn’t call for me to go to town. And then there’s the ex partner and I’m just not feeling it as far as going there for a visit. I don’t really care what anybody thinks, including her, I’m just not feeling it.
Tomorrow however is an interesting day. Tomorrow is April 20th. 4/20 for cannabis aficionados. Unfortunately, there is no way for me to do unity with y’all. The world has conspired against me and I do not live in a place or a Time where it is available. Believe me when I say it, if I could I would.
I could probably say some things here about the local system of acquisition but I won’t. It’s pretty illegal and most people are more frightened than anything. And as with most mistakes made in this hyper conservative country,”our people” just can’t be trusted to control themselves. We don’t have any progressive thinkers, nobody even opens the door to quality of life unless you’re repulsively rich and nobody wants anybody to reach their potential.
I personally believe that it is not a drug but an exceptionally good medicine that allows people who are restricted to become less restricted. If you have one, it is a tool of imagination. If you have physicality, it is a tool of movement. If you have creativity, it is a tool for art. And if you have love and passion for someone, it is an amazing tool of intimacy. And if you love nature more than anything, as I do, it is a door through which one can go to be even closer to our mother.
Probably tomorrow I’ll find a bunch of cool links to share in between my usual Jabberwocky. And for those of you fortunate enough to light up in public places in celebration of our mutual friendship, I will be with you in spirit. And who knows? Every year at seders during Passover, the Jews will often say “next year in Israel!” Well friends, next year we’re in.
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