Sunday, April 24th, 2022. Week number 16
It’s coming up on 9:00 a.m. and I haven’t done anything today. I am debating exactly how much moving around I’m actually going to do today. Most of my thinking is physical. I guess all that work I did at the end of the week hauling wood to the woodshed tore me up worse than I thought. There was some blood.
Yesterday, I actually broke out the crutches to get around. It was so bad. After a few minutes it didn’t hurt so much and I could walk around again without assistance. But I decided to rest and spent most of my day off just lying around. A couple of nice meals, some films and I didn’t really worry about anything else.
If I want to, I could take today off exactly the same way. I have plenty of religious justification despite all of the sarcasm I used last Friday. Today is a restricted holiday in the Jewish faith which means you’re absolutely not supposed to be doing any work. And of course, if you choose or believe you have no choice but to be Christian, today is Easter or Pascha if you speak any of the Slavic tongues. Nobody is going to yell at me for being lazy today.
Historically, this would be a good day to attack the Jews. Quite a few zealous Christians decided that the anti-Semitism inherent in Christianity meant that a really good celebration of the holiday means causing misery to Jews. I would not put it past Putin to include this in his thinking for not taking the day off from his War. I fully believe that somewhere in his mind is the justification that Zelinsky is Jewish.
If that sounds sick, it is because the entire situation is sick. If that doesn’t sound sick, you understand why I keep the lock on my door all the time.
I have three links that I picked up to share. The first one is Zelinsky talking to the World Bank about generally isolating Russia from the economic world.
The odd thing about this war is the nonsense that most countries wish to offer about helping Ukraine. First of all, the idea of dividing humanity into these geopolitical shapes might be one of the great mistakes in the history of the world. Drawing lines between peoples and isolating them as a justification for using and misusing each other has been around since power was discovered. Now, it just seems to be nothing more than a justification for war or crime. Having another place that is not under your particular jurisdiction seems to be an opportunity for criminals to flee or people to pretend that the early part of their life doesn’t exist.
I agree that I have kind of taken advantage of this. I was not particularly happy with my life in the United States and thought I might try something different. I was not expecting to have had such a spotlight shined on me or to have quite as much negative propaganda thrown my way. I cannot say that I haven’t had an interesting life though there could have been a lot more happiness replacing the misery. But on the other hand, were it not for these restrictive political borders, we probably all would have had to have been better to each other the whole time.
But aside from that, the two main reasons for the lack of genuine aid coming to Ukraine in this war are fear of nuclear war and people hiding within their own geopolitical structures. It’s not their War, it’s not their problem.
The other general mistake in this though is that the oil business is the foundation of all of this aggression and murder. The Russians have no ideological purposes in all of this. They are not a protectionist organization. And despite the fact that they are acting with the same impunity as has been historically the United States’ modus operandi for starting wars, the real way to fight them would simply be to quit the oil business. This should be the easiest International aid possible because it would extinguish Russia’s ability to function generally. Everyone knows they don’t have any substantial economy outside of exploitation of natural resources. Shut down the market, Russia goes dark and the war comes to an end.
Here is the real reason for the continuance of this misery. No country wants their people to stop moving around in automobiles trying to make a living. Nobody wants the world to calm down. Nobody wants the world to take a day off. Not once a week and not ever and certainly not on any particular religious holiday. Nobody wants the flow to end.
There’s another Zelinsky video where he is as vindictive as me and probably as all Jews are. We are a stiff necked people and we have a very long memory of abuse. In this video, the president of Ukraine promises that the war crimes will be punished.
Honestly calling the Jewish people have been thinking this and praying for this and for a certain class of heroes and military types, actively participating in it. There are Jewish organizations that have quite the capability of causing misery. It’s well staffed and well funded and well supported.
My issue is that what is really required of the planet is not more war. What we need is peace. Peace and quiet. What we need is to calm down.
The film The Godfather has been iconic since its release 50 years ago. In Eastern Europe, many people recognize that it is basically the blueprint for the oligarchs and the mafia here. I have seen many films where the boss of some criminal organization is in his office and watching a video of a scene from the movie.
There was also a film that claimed that all the wisdom in the world came from The Godfather. This film talks about a large corporation coming in and slaughtering small businesses in the area. And as advice for one of the small businesses going under, the owner was told to go to the mattresses. Go to war! It’s not personal, it’s business!
But if we’re going to take this film as gospel, we might as well remember a moment when Michael Corleone, forced to leave New York because he shot a police captain and a drug King, returns to the namesake of his family in Sicily, the town of Corleone. The first thing he notices though is that there are no men.
“Where are all the men?”
“They are all dead from vendettas.”
Wisdom? Wisdom indeed.
So, there’s some money going down to Ukraine which is being used to feed the people who are being bombed out of their lives. There’s also going to be loans to rebuild and all of those rebuilding contracts. There’s also a ton of weapons going down there. So Ukraine is going to be a place where there are a ton of guns lying around if and when this war finally ends. Guns and money and money and guns. Sounds pretty mafia, doesn’t it?
Forgive me for being the one to point this out. I understand my reputation is for unlimited violence and psychotic activity. Me. Seriously. That was the word that got put on me by The Americans and this was what got followed once I got here. It all kind of put limitations on my life here and led to quite a few people seeing if they could piss me off. This for fun and profit. So I might not be exactly the correct person to say this but the world is absolutely ugly right now.
Perhaps it’s always been. Perhaps all of this murder and mayhem is really the way we like it. There are a lot of people screaming democracy and other such faux political ideas that have no genuine meaning except as a reason to scream and hate. But this is the point. We are just screaming and hating and killing and nobody seems to have the common sense that we might like there to be a tomorrow.
A long time ago I was living in Oregon and it was one of my first tastes of freedom. I was living kind of an interesting life, kind of a semi Street person but also sort of a musician / philosopher. I guess you could say I was getting started on my art career.
During this time I had a thought about the difference between a dog and a human being. Believe it or not, there are some remarkable similarities. We are packed oriented, we are very different when we are alone or when we are with our friends. We all feel much more brave when we are tethered then when we are free and we all get unbelievably pavlovian in so far as allowing our behavior to be modified. We are trainable, we can answer to commands and we can be taught remedial jobs to serve our masters. Dogs.
But if there is a difference between a human and a dog it is consciousness of the future. A dog has a fine memory of the past. If you have been good to a dog, it will remember you as a good person and if you have been bad, you are labeled in its memory. The past and the present are easy. The future though is a different thing.
The future is an unknown and a bit abstract and a dog really will not invest too much energy in worrying about the future. A dog will run itself to exhaustion because it has no particular sense but it might need its energy on another day. A dog will eat all of its food and we’ll never have a thought about saving something for later. Okay, a mother dog will take the trouble to feed her children but I don’t really think food storage is in the natural dog lexicon. Today is the day, the past is the teacher and we just believe forward head first.
I remember learning about futureless languages from a TED talk.
I remember the first time I saw this video and realized that I was teaching English, a language with an extremely pronounced future tense, to Russian speakers whose future is much less pronounced. This isn’t to say that Russian language does not have a future tense, it is just that in usage, it is mostly spoken of as an abstract or as an aspect of the present that is still in progress.
Is Russian a futureless language?
Having a look at this question on Google, we find quite a bit of Keith Chen, the man who made the above video, and quite a bit about how languages shape our thinking. And it’s not only about how well a future tense might be verbalized, this argument also has a lot to do with languages that include a lot of gender divisions between the words. French, Spanish and Russian for example are all languages where words are seen as either masculine or feminine or neutered.
Okay, I understand that I am writing in the English language and therefore it might seem as though I am putting a larger than normal bias on English here but this is much simpler I think.
English is a relatively modern language. Old English, English from Shakespeare’s time did have many elements that have been dropped in modernity. Specifically respect and seeing the difference between speaking to one person or a plural. In Russian, you can familiarly refer to someone as ты, one single familiar human or вы, either a group of people or one respected person. In modern English, we use the same word and there is no difference inherent in the grammar of the language to distinguish masculine or feminine words or respect.
Before I get too confusing here, I should also point out that there is a basic and inherent prejudice amongst Slovaks and especially since the Russians went into Ukraine the first time in 2014 that the English language is just not wanted to be heard. Literally, when I was writing my first Russian language play, I was told that this language would never lead this country. There was a sense of nationalism even then. But literally these days, people will just switch off their reasonableness upon hearing my voice just because of my accent because they will not compute a foreign language as being allowable.
If I put all of this together in my head, I have a cocktail for methanthropy. The absolute hatred of mankind. Isolated into a miserable present, complete disallowance of escape because of mistrust and fear and no ability to consider the future.
I’m not sure if I have made my point very well. Probably if I went back and edited this and spent more time on it, I could turn this into a pretty good speech. Or maybe I have made my point despite a few confusing left and right turns.
We are not considering tomorrow. We are living for the moment without regard to the damage we are causing. We are disallowing ourselves from having a future by being lunatics in our present.
And though this is not an absolutely perfect ending to this morning’s opening, I just have one more video to share. It’s about the ending of a baseball game in New York where the fans absolutely showed the nature of humanity in the year 2022. It started with some people taking pleasure in a player getting hurt during a play. And then when the players complained, the fans began to throw garbage on the field.
I don’t really know what to say. My life is actually kind of miserable. I mean, I’ve had brief moments of happiness in which I thought I had a nice situation. But almost always, the situation that I considered nice was such simply because I believed I could build a future with it. It was not just a moment of happiness, it was sustainable happiness.
My problem is that I seem to be the only one considering the future. I seemed to be the only one who saw that there was something that could be used in the future to keep things going. Universally, the people that I was with find a way to kill themselves every time. The people who I thought might be good partners to keep something good going always seem to choose the most miserable possible direction.
There is something deeply wrong with us. There is something bad going on inside of us. There is a screw loose. And frankly, we are the stupidest generation in the history of History by far.
Happy Easter. Go eat eggs and sweet cakes. Lots and lots of sugar and animal fat.
***
It’s a quarter to 11 and I’m just waiting for my breakfast. It’s kind of more of the same. Mostly leftovers. Hummus and potatoes and a little macaroni. Tasty but simple and very carby.
No oil though. I haven’t used any oil for anything and it’s okay.
Last night was the first night in many months that I did not have to use any electrical device to stay warm. I did build a small fire, enough to charge the bricks but I left the space heater off and was absolutely fine. I’m not sure what the actual temperature is but I’m just wearing a short sleeved shirt right now and I don’t feel like I’m suffering very much.
The sky is mixed. The sun is warm when it peeks through the clouds but there are rain clouds hovering around waiting to do something. It’s been very wet lately. April showers will bring May flowers and all of that.
My leg feels better but I am debating whether or not to take it easy. I’m still using crutches when I need to walk somewhere but standing up and sitting down is not agony. I just have to take it easy. I understand what this problem is and why I have it and in a perfect world why I wouldn’t have it but all the same, I have things to do. The wood has got to be put away, the last of the boxes need to be filled and at least theoretically, this coming Sunday is planting day.
About planting day, I’m not sure what’s going to happen. I am on the outs with my ex partner. I sent her one text when I received our shipment of ivy and she seemed moderately enthused to answer my letter. But when I did not actively suggest anything further, she did not actively suggest anything further. She is not calling me to put the drama to rest and I’m sick of the drama.
I don’t really need to make this a big topic of conversation. Breakfast is about a minute or two away from being ready and I think I would just rather eat some creamy potato soup and admire the spring morning. Whatever is going to happen in my relationship with my ex partner is going to happen. Even if it means we just walk away from each other, she will live and I will live. Or, maybe she wants to continue to participate in the gardening or maybe she just wants to get all of that cabbage out of her apartment once and for all along with whatever of my things happened to remain behind.
Most probably, Slavic women would want this all to be on me. They have an inalienable right to damage men and expect them to do all the work of fixing things. I don’t care anymore and I’m tired of being broken and asked to fix things. I’m tired of people breaking themselves and waiting for me to fix them.
And yes, it is extremely possible that this Russian Ukrainian war is simply a double suicide between a drunken man and his ex-wife and both of them are waiting for the economic help to get themselves out of the shit box they have done for themselves.
Alas, the world just sits there and watches you die like a TV show.
On the other hand, both countries could just lock their Gates, tell the world to go fuck themselves and do agriculture for their own pleasure and amusement. Truthfully, without outside economic interference, the young girls would be in white cotton with flower bows in their hair running around at about this time of year. Not that I’m dreaming nostalgically about a Slavic past that I have no part of. I’m from the Jewish people and we usually arrange marriages so as to save problems. It doesn’t save problems, it’s just a community thing that we do.
And no, my ex partner is not Jewish.
But anyway, all of this remarkable Russian drama aside, I’m going to go eat breakfast which is a remarkably foolish amalgam of Jewish food and Russian potatoes. Rock and roll.
***
You remember before where I talked about Easter being a good morning to fuck with the Jews, well let’s just say I am prophetic.
So, to start off with, I called my ex partner very briefly and all I asked was what she was planning. Her answer was that her mind has been on other things and there are variables available and basically she has no set answer. Thrilling. So I asked her to put together her most comfortable plan by tomorrow evening at 8:00. I would agree with anything in her plan that was worth agreeing with and we would haggle about what I don’t think would work.
Romantic? No. Just trying to get the misery under control for a change.
Breakfast was actually pretty good. Filling and tasty and I was pretty much just sitting here in the kitchen watching the world go by when my neighbors decided that they had not been spoken of for a long time.
And please, I have a movie of this.
The rumble of my neighbor’s car started and my first thought was that of course, even though they have no friends, they have to use their car on Easter. Whatever miserable sense of Christianity they might believe themselves to be a part of, today is a rest day so of course it means running the car and poisoning the world.
But that’s not what happened today. Today my neighbors pulled out of their driveway, backed up in front of my house and then backed up further so that they could look through my kitchen door which was open. And they just sat there letting me drink deeply in their Auto fumes.
You like this?
Well, being a hyper violent man as I am, I picked up my telephone and turned on my video recorder and started filming them. I also filmed my free left hand coming up with the middle finger raised to them. I’m not quite so sure I have a screenshot of this. It’s difficult to get the gist of the finger and the car at the same time but you can use your imagination.
And you know what they did next? They drove right back into their house. The entire exercise was simply to throw Auto fumes on me.
Would you like to explain to me the purpose of their actions other than anti-semitism? Would you like to explain to me other than pure hatred what their thought process was? Did I tell you that this is the traditional anti-Semitism day of the world? Have I told you what kind of trailer trash my neighbors are?
It is very likely that my war with my neighbors is a beautiful microcosm of the Russian war against the ukrainians.
Reports are saying that the Russians have spent themselves into obscurity trying to fight this war. They are throwing away their resources just like the drunken idiots they are, just like the drunken idiots that lost the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, just like the drunken idiots who have been losing the war of attrition since they started fighting against people with more resources.
But just exactly like the situation with the Russians, on Friday I noticed an amazingly beautiful thing. That stupid red Mercedes that the chicken woman likes to drive needed to be run during the day because there was some kind of a problem with the motor. At the time I heard this, I was very tired and sitting in the wood shed taking a break. My first thought was to take it personally but then I realized that they were doing simple mechanics.
Later in the day, when the woman returned from her daily pollution fest, the car stalled while entering the driveway. The chicken woman and her henpecked husband have mechanical problems. And as they are exactly money whores through and through, it’s going to cost them to fix this piece of shit.
The cop told me that I was known for my irony. I don’t think he was using the word correctly. I think if you would have had the vocabulary, he would have said sarcasm or sardonic wit or satiristic attitude to use a little alliteration. But what he used was irony. To him, it is ironic when a human is intelligent. Probably deep in his soul he is sure that human intelligence is an oxymoron.
But to me there really is irony here. The entire time they felt privileged to fill my world with their ungodly Auto fumes, they did not hear me say anything about the level of led the family might have in their blood because of owning these miserable machines. They also never bothered to listen to any of my thoughts about sustainable economy. They never really wanted to listen to anything I had to say because… well, let’s go with anti-Semitism because it’s the easiest thing to grab hold of.
They are going to lose the war because they can’t afford to fight it. Oh, they want badly to fight it. If they fight a war with an American and lose, I’ll probably have to pay reparations. If they fight with me and then we make friends, they probably feel like they will have a good tight hold on someone with deep pockets to help finance some of their most important and egregious dramatic problems. Most probably, this is how the woman has been making her money since she was old enough to listen to her mother.
Their war is petering out because I’m not going anywhere and all it does is cost them money.
So as a happy Easter, their decision was not to walk from their property with a vegetable dish or a bread baked in the image of Jesus on the cross to hand to me as a gift. For sure, they are not going to bring me a plate of ham and sweet potatoes and apple pie or whatever the hell they eat when they want to get stoned on fat and sugar. They didn’t even walk by and bow and say something completely ridiculous like:
“Mr Goodman, we wish you peace and happiness on our most important holiday. We understand that we are different people but in our hearts is only love today because of our love of Jesus Christ our Lord and savior and he only wishes us to be good people and to love. It is Easter Mr Goodman and we wish you peace.”
Fuck that noise. Do you think these ring-roaders think like that? Do you think this mess of gopnik goulash has the slightest sense more than a hungry dog looking for scraps along the road? Быдло. Nothing but white trash.
Yeah, Mr Zelinski has indeed made a good observation. You can’t ask the Russians to be respectful to anything. Not to themselves, not to others and not even to a religion that they all push on their people as though being a part of it meant being a part of a Great society.
I am no expert but I think I would like to add here on Easter morning one beautiful bit of wisdom from the farm:
“Pigs be pigs and y’all can’t expect them to stop being pigs anytime soon.”
***
Zamkadeshi. ЗаМКАДеши. This is the word that I was looking for. I couldn’t remember it to save my life and it took me a long time to figure it out.
When I first started translating stories about governmental corruption in the Murmansk region of Western Russia, I was given a text that named a rather low-borne group of people Zamkadeshi. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out. I googled it in Russian and I asked several people but nobody could understand what it meant. Finally, a friend of mine who was from murmansk but was now living in Moscow knew the word well. He smiled when he explained it to me.
The MKAD is a large highway that runs like a circle around Moscow. We have the same road that goes around Minsk and basically, almost every city center has a similar roadway. The k is for кольцевая, the word for ring and basically you could translate this as the Ring road.
Anyway, everything is status and status begins and ends with one’s proximity to Moscow. This was true for my friend and this was true for everyone else. Yes, my friend was from romance but now he lived in Moscow and this meant that he was a higher class of person.
Those people however who lived outside of the Ring, za mkad, were obviously of a much lower class and infinitely lesser social and economic status. And if you were to Google zamkadeshi and especially under photos, I think you would get it pretty quickly about the quality of human beings that I am writing about here.
Don’t you just love religious holidays? Don’t you just feel clean all over thinking about renewal and Christ rising from the dead and bringing us the holy words to make us whole and better and More beautiful in the eyes of God? Don’t you just feel warm all over knowing that you’re following in the footsteps and the words of the Lord and savior?
Truthfully? I’ve been thinking a lot about getting drunk. I don’t want to drink alcohol anymore at all. I don’t think it’s very good for me. But I seem to be experiencing constant pain and I don’t really see any appropriate way away from it as the world is right now. Maybe getting drunk is the only way to handle living in this place. I mean, they shit on me for trying to grow a garden. They shit on me for politely declining their company and minding my own business.
Zamkadeshi. That is exactly the word that I was looking for. Cheers.
***
It’s about 3:20 and I’m still sitting in my kitchen. Today is a beautiful and sunny day. It’s very warm and I have just eaten another meal. It was a big meal. It was kind of potato pancakes. I made some on the stove top and I made some in the oven. There were some beans in the mix. I’m very full. Stupid full. I’m sure that will be my last meal of the holiday.
I never did find the great urge to do any work today. Probably if my leg was straight up I would have. This day was really just another healing day as much as anything. I’ve got a big week ahead but there is no reason to torture myself to death. I’m not a masochist. I’m just a mostly retired guy trying to make a garden. Or to say it another way, I’m just trying to make something beautiful out of otherwise thoroughly degraded land.
I have however been thinking about what I need to do this week. I definitely have to go to town for one reason or another.
First of all, I need to hit the bank and pay for my utilities for the month. I usually would have done this a week ago but I took an extra week. It’s not really so much money and it’s all within the budget. I am really pleased to have cut my electric bill down as much as I have and as I mentioned, I am for the most part off electrical heating unless the world tells me otherwise. I’m probably going to continue making one fire a day just to make sure that the room has a little bit of heat in it. But that’s it. Every penny saved is a penny earned.
I’m also thinking of getting a new hose. I made a big mistake and bought the one I got. I should have measured everything out perfectly and I should have taken the time to buy a better piece of material. What I bought was a mostly plastic weave that doesn’t want to roll out straight at all. It carries water okay but it never wants to uncurl and it’s not even long enough to do every possible job I need it to do. I don’t think I can return it and now I’m kind of stuck with it and thinking about how to make use of it somewhere. The hose was a mistake.
It’s also possible that the water pump I picked out was a mistake. I could have picked out something that was quieter or had more function. The one I picked out was very simple and truthfully, was the standard during the Soviet Union. On the positive side, it’ll last forever. And if something breaks, it’s infinitely fixable. But it is very simple and you have to make up for its lack of functionality with your own human effort.
I want to get a wand or something like it to water the boxes with. This doesn’t have to be complex but basically I want a long tube with a shower head on the end of it so that I could reach out a ways over a garden and just let the water flow. Again, I know I can’t use a spray gun and I’m not kicking myself for this but I do need an extension to make things easier.
After this is whether or not I am ready to put in gutters. I never quite have this game completely set up. I know how to do it and I have some plans how to do it, but no matter what I am still a few tools short and I feel foolish spending money if the parts are not compatible. I have some gutter material lying around, not really enough for the job and I have not found similar material at the market. I can buy pre-manufactured PVC or metal but these are usually pretty expensive and again, it’s not a natural fit because the roof has a long overhang. Even if I wanted to just cut the overhang off, I don’t have the angle grinder and I don’t really want to play with cement asbestos. Local guys say they don’t care, I’m worried.
After this month though, my needs to go to town are going to become very small. I have the capacity to change my banking so that I don’t actually need to go to the bank very often or at all if we’re talking about paying bills. As for shopping, though of course I love the women at the market, the quality of the roads and the amount of time it takes to go into town seem a little bit different than what I called the perfect ride last year.
Last year, I had it down to a 3-hour sojourn. If I got to the train on time, there was a nuance that if I could get to the market and back to the train station in about 50 minutes, I could be back on the train that same day.
It wasn’t really that much of a challenge except that there really isn’t a lot of extra time. You can’t stand around and meet people and some friends that I had at the time who are not really around anymore we’re angry at me that I wasn’t getting them any more. They weren’t interested in my not wanting to be covered in Auto fumes or covid. They were not interested in how little I wanted to be exposed to town life and the current air quality you get there. They might not think much of it. My neighbors obviously think that auto fumes are vitamins or something like that. I personally prefer fresh air and therefore, 45 minutes in and out seemed reasonable.
Now I’m not quite so sure I’m physically ready. I seem to have issues these days and I am a ways away from being perfect. I know I write about getting jobs done but these jobs beat the living shit out of me and there is no way to say that I am out there functioning like some giant hero. Everything I do is really hard and it’s a constant struggle even when things are going well. But when they get really messed up like the last few days, I’m just going to come home bloody and these sorts of things are a different matter altogether. The last thing I want to do is start bringing infections back into my life.
Then there’s the ex partner.
What do I want from this? What I want from this is something that I do not think I will ever get from anyone here. I don’t think they are emotionally capable nor do I think they understand the nuance.
Like I’ve said many many times, they seem to think that interpersonal drama is The stuff of life. They seem to think that creating problems is the only way to get attention or to find themselves standing in the middle of the road blocking the way so as to pick up some money. It’s the same game every time from everybody and all of this “pay attention to me or suffer the consequences” gamesmanship just has me tired already. I was tired of it with my daughter’s mother and I am more than a little tired of it with my neighbors. Like I said, it’s the same game every time without reprieve.
The problem with all of this is that it’s not a game that you can win because you are being forced to play with losers. You cannot win because there is no positive ending. You have people who tell you that you have to slow down and die for them and that they will bring even more misery to your life if you ignore them. Tell me how to win this game?
If you pay the money, they will come back for more. If you treat them with respect, they will come en masse to suck up all the energy they can possibly find. And if you tell them to just fuck off, they take it as an opportunity to make use of you whenever they feel like it. It is a whore’s game played by whores and sons of whores and nobody here feels a bit bad about it. To them, somebody else made them do it and there is no possible way they could ever be responsible for their own actions.
Did I bring this on myself? Sure. I came in here thinking I could do something nice. Depending on how you look at it, I did make a few nice things. Everything that I did by my own work with the exception of working well with a few groups of students to create some literature worked out okay. I stand by my work and I’m a bit proud of a lot of the things I have created. What things I got involved with that related to other people working independently around me generally turned out to be shit. This would include people that I have paid to work for me. Anything where you have locals involving themselves with even the slightest decision-making process is an invitation to the above chicanery.
Again, what is the answer? I don’t know. I really don’t know. I never called a break from any of the work I did abroad. I never got any great invitations to participate in anything that led to a different life. I just worked here for a long time, did the best teaching I could for two decades, wrote some pretty decent literature and tried to be a friend to a few people. What I took for myself was not very much and was never very large but I have had some interesting moments with female friends and I have enjoyed some of the apartments that I have lived in. And of course I own this place that I’m in right now and I have what might turn out to be a very beautiful garden in a very short period of time.
If I do it myself, I have a good chance at being happy with the result. If I involve somebody else, they are going to be standing in the road with their hand out waiting to be taken care of or waiting to commit suicide or waiting to steal everything that’s not nailed down.
Do you want to argue with me? You want to continue trolling me? You want to show me your art or your life’s efforts or what you have built with your own two hands with or without adversity? Would you like to trade credentials with me?
Other than this, the only complaint I really have has as much to do with all of this writing as anything. I am sick to death of people staring at me instead of looking with me at what I’m looking at. I am not an actor looking to play a part on a stage and I am not looking for anyone’s advice about more energy that I could possibly spend doing more things. I just wanted to show some people things and if there is anything I’m really tired of is that nobody ever looks at what I’m pointing at except to throw it back in my face. No matter what I do or where I go, people just can’t stop staring at me and refuse to take a look at my work.
You know, my ex-girlfriend once told me something that was entirely not true. She told me that the only thing she could do for me was sex. This was so remarkably untrue and as far away from my thinking as possible. I understood that she had learned this bit of “knowledge” from her new group of friends outside of my sphere of influence. I understood who was talking to her and what was wanted from her from the world in general. I was not stupid and I am not stupid and I’m very well aware of where I live and how human beings are treated here. But this is what she said because this was her best shot at pragmatic intelligence as she understood it.
The real truth was is that she had everything in the world to offer me as a friend and very little of it had to do with sex. No, I will not say that sleeping with the girl was unpleasant because it wasn’t. It was a piece of beauty that I will never forget. But I wasn’t with her because of her body, I was with her because I was absolutely sure that she was the best of the best and that she genuinely loved me.
Unfortunately, nobody gets paid for their work in this world. We just get used as resources. We live on an animal farm and we get processed just like all the animals on all of the animal farms. They take our blood and their bodies and our secretions and throw away the dead carcasses when they’re done with it. And it ain’t just me and it ain’t just her, it’s pretty much everybody I’ve ever met.
It’s also true for my chicken neighbor and her henpecked husband and the hunchback across the street. The hen might think she’s clever but I know where she has come from and I know who she is. I know who he is too. There is nothing special in any of this and if they weren’t so fucking jealous, we probably just would have been neighbors. If they weren’t jealous and starving to death, I probably could have been the best friend they have ever had.
So don’t feel so bad about my ex partner or what this summer has to offer me. I am pretty damn old physically and I am never going to be completely whole again. I’m certainly never going to be the big hitter on anybody’s ball team and I am never going to be Mr. Excitement in anybody’s bed. Well, I could probably pitch an inning or two and do okay in that regard but I am no wall peg to hang your hat on. I am just me and I’m just trying to make one really beautiful thing that might have some sustainable function to it. And if that’s not enough to amuse you, you’re not supposed to be here at all.
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Okay, I have said this before but I’m going to say it again because I’ve just had three people completely not listen to what I just said and offer me some empty stupid repetitious advice about what I should do. Please, let’s get this straight once and for all.
- If you are not offering technical support or advice for something that I am speaking of, I don’t need it.
- If you want to inform me of your opinion on how I could change my life, I don’t need it.
- If you just want to tell me I’m stupid or troll me for anything that I’m doing or saying, I don’t need it.
So, just to save time:
Would I like to move?
If I had a genuine opportunity to go somewhere else, I might just do it. But as far as leaving the country to go anywhere else, I don’t have the money at all. I have a little bit of money, maybe enough to retire on if I am shrewd. But it is not enough to retire on anywhere else and especially not in any sort of developed country.
Would I pack up and go to another country if I had the chance?
If I had a situation that would allow me some sense of personal freedom or to do a job I might enjoy or be capable of doing reasonably, I would take an offer. Why not?
If I had the opportunity to live in a similar manner of life but in a place with a slightly more developed social situation, i.e. I could live in a place where I’m not thinking of returning to alcoholism as a way to numb what the world gives me on a normal basis, sure. Why not?
But I do not have these opportunities or these invitations. If I did, I would not be here. And I am here and I am doing the best I can to get along the best way I can. And until that offer comes or if it never does, I am building a garden and trying to stay healthy. If it’s alright with you, this is how I live and mostly what I think about diet and lifestyle and our personal responsibilities for trying to keep the world a reasonable place so that future generations can live. I am a writer and I am writing and these are my opinions and this is what I’m writing about these days. And if you can’t get that through your head, please stop trolling me. I have enough trolls in my life already and I have enough Conservative Republican asshole head fucks for a lifetime without anybody else deciding that this is a good place to waste their time.
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