This was from today. The first blossoms of the spring
Frank Sinatra said that he pities people who don’t drink because when they wake up, this is as good as they are going to feel all day long.
I think he was referring to how shitty you feel when you wake up after drinking.
Luckily it’s kind of warm because the junk I brought back from the wood pile is too wet to light and I couldn’t get a fire going. Basically, everything I did after getting a shit faced was a complete disaster.
I did however manage to get myself to bed and slept through the night without even the slightest hint of insomnia.
Is this material interesting to you?
Tuesday, April 26th 2022
Good morning.
I had a talk with the ex partner and maybe we’ve settled our differences. I don’t mean to be glib but I guess I put enough drama into the situation for her.
I think the real thing is that she is looking forward to doing some gardening. I don’t think she really likes being in her office all day. Well, I’m sure she feels purposeful and it is extremely normal for her to be there and doing the work that she does. I’m sure she is grateful actually to have it in her life and to have a regular paycheck as well.
I could also say that she is the normal one for having this situation and in this country where people are obsessively prejudiced via their extreme monoculture, anything outside the norm is taken like a zoo park attraction. So for this I’m sure she’s even more grateful for the normalcy culturally.
I learned about this a long time ago. The thinking is that it’s like a big club and you are in or you are out. No matter how horrible of a person you are, if you’re in this is good and if you’re out this is very, very bad.
I’ll agree that it does kind of feel good to be in. I’ve been in a few times and been with in Friends. It’s a pleasant atmosphere perhaps in moments. I’m just not an in person. In person, I never know what to do to be an in person. In people have a vocabulary that exists only in their inness and very often they have no vocabulary whatsoever for out topics. If you try to go out there within people they are out of their elements. You put an in person in distress very easily by speaking out of the box or out of the norm.
But I am an out person. Unfortunately, out in this case doesn’t mean out and about which would make me very in. It’s summertime and the in people are all going out to stare at each other which is a very in thing to do. I’ve tried being in and going out and staring at the in people as in people do but it drove me out of my mind with boredom. I don’t understand why staring at people as they walk by is the most amusing thing in the world.
I’m being stupid with language this morning but I think that is the biggest truth of all. I don’t know why staring at people who are not doing anything is in any way interesting.
I like going to sports games. You can stare at people during sports games because they are involved in some pursuit or activity and struggling to achieve a goal or something like this. I like going to baseball games very much. I’m one of those people who talks to the folks around them during games and this is kind of fun. I also like going to the theater or I used to like going to the theater. I was not one of those people who talked during performances. I completely ignore the people around me during theater performances and if they are offended by this I really don’t think they should be attending theater.
Music concerts are another good way to stare at people. Public speeches or lectures might have some interest. I’m thinking mostly of University lectures here because listening to politicians makes me physically ill. I hate attending political rallies now because of how overbearing the state is. The speaking itself is not important, it’s just an expression of inness for them. They like to show everybody how tight and crisp and well formed the in party is and they take pleasure with how ill formed and cheap these out people are. It’s much more of a fashion show than a political argument because the image far outweighs the speeches which are basically meaningless. We can’t really vote, we can just be in.
I can’t really say that going vegan changed anything deeply in this regard for me. I’ve often thought that I have become much less aggressive since I quit eating meat and this is true. On the other side, I’m not really sure that any of the aggressiveness I might have had when I was younger was actually a part of me. Many times I understood that I needed to do something physical in a situation and made a conscious choice to do so. I was not acting on an instinct for violence, I just did it because I felt it was the appropriate thing to do.
I’m kind of talking about street fighting here. I myself never picked a fight. I have never picked a fight in my life and I don’t ever remember actively being a bully. I have bullied people out of frustration and I have definitely become a bully when provoked. I can be an obnoxious bully as you might tell from some of my ongoing conversations about my neighbors. I didn’t walk in here being an asshole, I had the mantle of being an asshole thrust upon me and just ran with it because I’m good at it.
But it is possible that not eating meat takes you away from the admiration of meat generally. I suppose I’m using these words “admiration of meat” to describe both meat that people would put in their mouths and consider food and the act of sitting around and staring at people as a way of amusing themselves. I do think that sociologically, a mostly meat diet probably leads people to being meat crazy. If you think meat is food, meat is food and people who enjoy staring at other people are just playing with their food instincts Maybe.
I can’t say that this is absolutely the truth. I mean, there’s money involved and people treat the acquisition of money as if they are hunting. This is definitely the way money is set up around here and people understand that they are either in an organization that pays them a regular check or they are hunting. But not really hunting because there’s nothing to eat outside any of the in organizations so they are more like scroungers or bottom feeders, crustaceans trenching through the garbage looking for morsels to eat.
Giving up meat definitely gives you a sense of calmness. And it’s a genuine calm that perhaps comes from not having meat running through your system. You don’t have that meat instinct. You don’t have that violence in you. And if you eat factory meat or meat that you hunt, for sure there is more than a little adrenaline and paranoia and fear inherent in this food. You stop eating it and your inherent paranoia and fear sort of goes away.
Again, this is just anecdotal. I don’t know that this is absolutely true and I’m sure there are just as many paranoid vegans as there are paranoid meat eaters. Or maybe not. Maybe it is a question that is googleable.
Is paranoia associated with eating meat?
If you eat lots of processed meat, fried food, refined cereals, candy, pastries, and high-fat dairy products, you’re more likely to be anxious and depressed. A diet full of whole fiber-rich grains, fruits, vegetables, and fish can help keep you on a more even keel.
Bingo? Kind of a bingo. I’m not sure it directly connects to the idea that I had but it does make sense. You clog your arteries and force your body to deal with carcinogens, it probably doesn’t like it very much.
I’m going to stop here not because I have finished a great thought but because my body is telling me it has a function to fulfill. Another plus of eating a whole food vegan diet. In the morning you definitely have something to do that will make you feel quite grateful after you have done it.
***
This is truly a mess. I can’t find my glasses and I can’t find my hat. It’s a nice cool day, a good day for working but I can’t find my glasses and I can’t find my hat.
Yeah, yesterday I went to the store and I bought some vodka. When I got back, I had two shots and then went out and bullied the last of the woodpile into the woodshed and stacked it up and then I even cleaned up some of the residual junk.
I used to play pool a lot. I started playing often, practicing I guess is the best word, after I broke up with my ex-wife. I was pretty deeply depressed as you could imagine and I played a lot of pool. I have some natural talent in life, I am what some people would consider talented and I get better at what I practice. I’ve said this a thousand times but anything you practice at, you will get better.
So my pool game got to the point where I could play in a tournament and not embarrass myself. I was not aiming at a career in it, I just had a mind for seeing the shots in advance and eventually got my stick to agree with my thinking.
The reason I am talking about this is that I would mostly play in bars. Ironically, I didn’t go to the bars specifically for the alcohol, I was mostly hanging out in bars to play pool and to talk to people. I wasn’t even specifically trying to pick up women. Really, I just went there for the pool.
When you’re in a bar though, you’re sort of obligated to drink. So I would drink beer because that was the least amount of alcohol and the least amount of money generally speaking. But I learned something about alcohol during this time. If I was completely straight, I was an average pool player who practiced. I could make some shots and I could make some leaves but basically nothing special. If I drank one beer, nothing much would change but if I drink two beers, I could run the table and keep the table for quite some time.
Unfortunately, this is not a natural state and it’s extremely difficult to keep your blood alcohol content at exactly this level. I guess if I really wanted to get scientific about it, I could get one of those insulin pumps that truly severe cases of diabetes require. These are pumps that monitor your blood alcohol and would administer a few drops to make sure that you stayed at exactly this level. I have never bothered to scientifically measure it because I’ve never cared that much about it. But if I drank a third beer, the entire thing came down like a house of cards. I can’t play pool drunk.
My father taught me about alcohol brilliantly. He was a very social person, a salesman basically and he understood that social situations were the bread and butter of his business. He also understood that people made stupid decisions when they are drunk and so it was fortuitous to him to be able to hold his liquor and be extremely sociable and accepting of drinkers. He himself did not ever drink at home for any reason. Not for the weather, not from frustration, not because he was excited or tired. If he was at home and outside of the social situation, I never saw him drink a beer or a cocktail ever.
But if we were at some kind of a party, my father would hold a beer or a cocktail in his hand and take sips at it at socially approved moments. I never saw him gulp or take a shot. I never saw him do anything to make a toast of any kind. He would agree to a toast and raise his glass and take a sip. I never, ever saw him participating in Russian drinking or shot drinking of any kind. To him, alcohol was definitely a tool and not a crutch and he just used it to be socially acceptable.
Consequently, I have never really cared about alcohol. There have been times in my life where I have used alcohol as a crutch. Yesterday, I definitely used it as a crutch. I am seriously depressed right now for very logical reasons. I am not depressed because of alcohol and I would prefer about 1 million percent more not to be drinking. But I have some alcohol right now and I am using it as a tool because I have a lot of physical labor to do in a short period of time and I would prefer not to be quite so aware of how much pain I’m in or what kind of injuries I am causing myself.
Maybe it’s better not to do it. I’m talking about both the drinking and the farm work. No. I am exactly okay doing the farm work. I’m just not okay with how rank the situation is otherwise. I wish my financial situation was better than it is. I wish I wasn’t surrounded by abusive white trash neighbors who seem to think that pissing on me is a part of their rights. I honestly for the life of me cannot understand the mindset of such puerile people but this doesn’t make life any better. I’m not happy with my relationship with my ex partner right now and I’m really unhappy with people who could be considered my family. I’m also not particularly thrilled with my country of residence or my country of passport. I’m not very happy with the world and its attitude towards cleanliness or survivability.
I could also say something about my own physical capabilities but I don’t pity myself. It’s just a very, very, depressing part of my life right now and about the only thing I have to practice is this gardening. And I intend to practice and I intend to get really good at it.
So we will see how this alcohol business works. After I finished with the wood, I drank the rest of the bottle. I was pretty much down to the bottom when I talked to my ex partner. She told me that she was generally accepting of the situation, she was aware of my feelings about working together and she let me know that she was all in and looking forward to participating as much as she could.
She didn’t particularly have any qualm with my drinking. She grew up with alcoholics and works with alcoholics and lives with alcoholics and has absolutely no problem getting stuck into a bottle of wine herself.
I just really hate alcohol so much. I absolutely hate alcohol. I did not enjoy getting shit-faced last night. I did not enjoy bullying the wood. I did not take any pleasure from any of this. Alcohol is a motherfucking sickness. It’s a disease.
Probably it is a wonderful tool of butchery. You get drunk and your senses numb and you can bully through physical projects. Probably it is so socially acceptable because we have a world where people have to be heroes in order to survive. We live in an economic system that demands that everybody work at some level of athletic perfection simply to get through their miserable lives. Most of our lives, whether you work in a company or work for yourself is spent in money acquisition or doing some job that will pay you money. We give up the best part of most of our days and we are given so little time for personal pursuits. Most people get into alcohol because it is the only way to bully through a profession that people become sick of very quickly.
About 20 years ago, Portugal erased its drug laws. They said people were entitled to do whatever they wanted to do. They paid quite a bit of attention to this. The decision was that chemical dependence was simply a part of the problem. The real problem came as a result of the miserable life that people were forced to live. Their environment and their circumstance was such that they had no opportunity for pleasure or enjoyment and turned to drugs simply to fight the boredom in pain.
This was some pretty out of the box thinking and a lot of people were very interested to find out if they were right. Of course they were. Unfortunately, being right about the horrific conditions that human beings are forced to live under in this great animal farm we have constructed goes against the oil business. The oil business makes a lot of money by people being upset. The gun industry makes a lot of money when people are upset and miserable and unhappy. And countries who have politicians making 10 times their salary by taking envelopes from Big corporations in the oil business are very interested in keeping people as stirred up, unhappy and physically uncomfortable as possible. If you are not miserable, you’re not serving the Republic.
Me? I prefer to be in an environment I’m comfortable in. I prefer natural beauty to man-made industry. I prefer fresh air to polluted air. I prefer clean food to processed factory shit. I like the sounds of nature much, much, much more than I like the sounds of man.
Consequently, when the in people in this country blackballed me from teaching in the university and in the schools, they thought they were throwing me on the trash heap. The problem is I like going my own way much more than I like working in a bureaucracy. I like my freedom a lot more than I like being stuck in a box.
So I had a good run and I made some money and I saved it and now I own my little house and I have a little bit of land to play with and I’m growing fruit and nut trees and for the next couple of years until the trees shade everything out, I’m going to be growing some cabbages and leafy greens and other such table vegetables. If my ex partner continues to be here, we will have flowers and I think she’s into planting some lavender this year. Another find for our natural shitty Sandy Earth so the place might actually smell good.
But in the meantime, I forgot to finish filling the raised beds and getting some fertility into the lower gardens and getting our watering system put together. And I’m really tired and this is extremely difficult work to do physically for me. And I’m not using gasoline powered tools for any of it and unfortunately, I don’t have the money to pay anybody to do this work for me.
And I’ve got a couple of bottles of vodka lying around. Hopefully, these will be the last ones I buy for a very, very, very long time.
***
It’s 9:00 a.m. and breakfast was delicious. Fried cabbage and toast. Actually, fried and steamed cabbage with a little local spice. The oil that I bought from the store is a brand called postnoy. Post in Russian is the word for fasting or lent really and the meaning is that this is supposed to be minimalism. It’s made from sunflower oil but it has a dark color that it’s supposed to mean that a lot of the original elements are not removed so as to make it more clear. It does not say that it is cold pressed, which means one pressing similar to extra Virgin Olive oil. But it is a slightly higher grade of shit as far as I’m concerned. Breakfast was my vegan sensibility of bar food. If you’re going to be brutal, go all the way.
My coffee this morning was incredibly delicious. I wanted a little bit of chocolate but they didn’t have any dark chocolate of the 85% variety. But I did buy a packet of cocoa powder. The ingredients of which are cocoa pumice and vanilla flavoring. There is also supposed to be 10% cocoa butter and nothing else. It is listed as 99 98% cocoa. There is no sugar listed in the ingredients but it is possible that there is a tiny bit of sugar in the vanilla extract. It is an amazing cup of coffee.
I was just thinking of the Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven.
The basic gist of the film is that a cowboy goes crazy because a local whore laughed at his Johnson. He cuts her up pretty badly with a knife and the other whores get together and put a bounty on the cowboys that were involved. The town however only sees the women as property and the damage to the girls face was seen as depreciation by the sheriff. Word of the bounty gets spread around and an old Clint Eastwood joins with Morgan Freeman to take a crack at it.
Clint Eastwood’s character is a reformed bully and gunfighter who was known for his exceptional meanness. He was an unrepentant killer until he met a Christian woman who convinced him to quit drinking and take up farming. When Freeman finds him to ask him to come along on the bounty hunt, the wife has died and Eastwood is in the misery of trying to take care of a sick group of pigs.
During the course of the journey, we find out that Eastwood hates himself for the things he did when he was young and drunk and ruthless. The faces of the men he killed haunt him and he has become quite sensitive to how much other people dislike them or were afraid of him.
In the end, with their original attempts thwarted before even getting started by an equally brutal sheriff played by Gene Hackman, Eastwood takes up drinking again, rides directly into town in a rainstorm and kills everybody mercilessly.
The film won an Oscar and I’ve taught the script to classes. It’s a pretty good Western and it’s a little more thoughtful than the average. But if you want to look at it through a particular lens, it’s a great alcoholic film. Unfortunately, the ending required alcohol and that it is seen as heroic might be counterproductive to a reasonable society.
One of the biggest problems I have with my ex partner is that she gardens like an alcoholic. It means that she’s into killing as much as anything. Anything that is not man-made must be destroyed. Anything that she doesn’t buy from the store must be torn out.
When I was still with my daughter’s mother and I talked to her about getting a piece of land, the only question she asked me was whether or not I really wanted to kill animals. To her, doing any farming meant killing.
Every time I see one of the non-local people, people who used to live here or own the surrounding properties but now live in town, the only thing they do is rev up weed wackers and start killing everything growing in and around their properties. Owning a place in the country means killing all natural species that grow so as to create some man-made aesthetic.
And last year when I first got here, all of my neighbors took turns telling me where I was crazy for not killing everything in sight, tearing my house down to the foundation and bringing in a tractor to bulldoze the entire place.
Are you starting to get a clear picture?
Of course I’m not in here. Of course I am an out person. Of course I needed to be taught all of the wonderful nuances of Russian farming. Or, I can lock the gate and tell them all to go fuck themselves. And this is basically one of the main arguments with my ex partner. I am not an alcoholic gardener. I don’t believe in killing anything unless I specifically need the place for myself.
These raised beds I have are on the driest part of my land, the land that had the sparsest growth because there was just no water there for anything to grow. I chose those places because I would have to artificially water any vegetable garden so I chose the place literally that caused the least amount of damage.
In other places where there was a little bit more water available, I have just dug holes and planted trees. I’m probably going to have to artificially water these trees a bit this year and I am going to be putting rain catching structures near the trees because we are generally in too much of a drought to support fruit or nuts. But just like last year, I have no intention whatsoever of cutting down any natural plants that wish to grow.
Okay, I have segregated my growing spaces and I’ve dug out paths between these gardens to make sure that we understand what is a growing space and what is a walking space. It is a little industrial in this regard but again, I am not going to do anything about butchering any plants that want to grow on any of the land that I am not using. And there is a substantial amount of land that I’m not going to do anything about.
Possibly next spring, I will gather more grass than I did this year. I’m still learning as I’m going along and I probably should have taken more of it. But I don’t feel as though I’ve made a massive mistake because again, physical restrictions I’ve always been a part of this. Probably next year I will be much more ready.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I understand what my neighbors are. I understand that I’m not using the word who. I understand what they are and where they come from and why they think the way they do. I understand why they are completely blockaded from listening to me or showing me any respect. I understand what they are. And I understand what they are not.
I don’t feel pity for them. I really wish they were not in my life. I really hate alcoholics and drug addicts very, very much. And this is not specifically aimed at the street dreg alcoholics, I’m also talking about socially acceptable alcoholics who have access to public funds and commit crimes on a far greater scale.
I want to add one little note to this just to be absolutely clear. I do not hate everyone in this town. I do keep my gate locked because I don’t want people walking on my property anymore. This is not specifically because I hate everyone, it is because 99% of the people that walk on to my property are street dreg alcoholics looking for a handout.
But when I think of everyone who lives in this town and completely understanding that they are a gossiping lot, I truly only loathe my next door neighbor and the hunchback across the street. I’m not particularly fond of my other working alcoholic neighbors just a little bit down the road but they don’t bother me very much and I don’t bother them. Basically, the only time I see them is when my ex partner is here and the husband usually comes sniffing around when she’s here.
I know when he’s here because I can smell him a mile away. Like all alcoholics, he is a constant cigarette smoker and the stench of him is completely noticeable.
But the reason I hate my neighbors so much is because of the aggressive and abusive obnoxiousness of the chicken woman. I don’t know who or what gave her the right to believe she should have access to me. I understand that to her, I am food. But to me, I don’t believe in whatever packing order she believes is the truth. She is not my mother, she is not my wife, my girlfriend, my daughter, my relative, my boss, my peer, my social worker or anybody connected to me in any way shape or form except by the bad luck of geography. I don’t owe her any money, I don’t want her company, I don’t need her face in mine and truthfully, I don’t know how her henpecked husband can tolerate the sight, smell and sound of the woman. That man has been pussy whipped into Oblivion and I don’t even know how he looks himself in the mirror to shave in the morning.
And the group of them feeling Nazi power and enjoying having someone to piss on is the great misery of my life. And when that ridiculous bitch called the police and told them that I had attacked her and the anti-american, anti-semitic, hypernationalist conservative skinhead cop decided this was his opportunity to do some patriotic American bashing, it gave relevance and credence to my alcoholic neighbors. They believe they are entitled to abuse me.
This is the only misery in my life. They are physically disgusting pointless neurotic wastes of air. They are polluters. They are horrible to look at, to listen to or to smell.
But all I have ever done to them in our entire history was to ask them to be mildly moderate with their fucking automobiles so that I don’t have to have auto emissions in my kitchen.
They have been attacking me and openly hating me every day.
So I’d like to make this clear. When I took my bike into town, I rode past one coffee clutch of retirees and was invited to come hang out with them. I have stopped on occasion to waste a moment or two with the local alcoholic collection. I get along very well with the lady at the store and I don’t particularly feel threatened by anybody. The loud alcoholics up the road don’t bother me about anything. I don’t really need the noise from weed whackers but the blowins don’t touch me. My neighbor on the other side of the chicken people has always been fair and kind and reasonable to me and doesn’t go out of her way to bother me in any way.
So truthfully, with the exception of when these assholes run their car or actually leave their house to scream at each other as opposed to being inside the house and screaming at each other because that’s how they talk to each other, I get birds here. Just a lot of bird songs.
When my ex partner and I used to go on bicycling sojourns together, we used to enjoy trying to understand how many different bird songs we could hear as we were peddling. But then a car would come along and destroy all the noise except for the car. Cars are very loud instruments. All gasoline instruments are very loud. I used to become infuriated because every time I tried opening up my ears to allow the sound of nature to come in, I had to slam them shut again to protect myself from the noise of the cars.
Do you think they are this crazy because of the car? My other loud obnoxious alcoholic neighbors also drive a car into work everyday. None of the friendly people I have mentioned in the last few paragraphs drive cars. Do you think there is a mathematical connection between car ownership and empathy towards human beings? Do you think the activity of isolating yourself in a metal box with a gigantic noise completely isolating you from the rest of humanity has something to do with an inability to have human empathy?
That would make sense to me. That would make an unbelievable amount of sense to me.
***
Okay, I have got to go to work but I have one more old joke that I want to tell.
Vladimir Putin is in his limousine and driving through the Russian countryside. While driving through a village, a dog races out onto the road and the limousine strikes it and kills it. Putin feels the bump, asks what has happened and the driver tells him.
The president of the Russian federation asks the driver to pull to the side and to go inform the people in the house about what has happened.
About an hour later, the driver returns to the car, his hat is on funny, his tie is loose and one shirt tail is hanging out and he’s not walking very straight at all.
“What the hell happened? Where have you been?”
“Well,” says the driver, obviously a little drunk, “It was a very funny thing that happened. They invited me inside and treated me like I was a long lost friend. They made a giant table with many tasty dishes and toasted my health with the most wonderful homemade vodka I’ve ever tasted. And then, their 16 year old daughter took me by the hand, pulled me into her room and made amazing love to me.”
“My god,” says Putin, “What did you say to them?”
“All I said was that I am Vladimir Putin’s driver and we have killed your dog.”
***
It’s about 12:30 and I’m on a bit of a break. I got through 1/3 of the digging and hauling before my body just didn’t want to go anymore. Yes, you can use some artificial stimulant to bully your way through things you don’t or can’t normally do but you’re still using energy that’s not going to come back so quickly.
This is a metaphor for our intensive abuse of natural resources these days. We can’t make use of energy that we need in the future just because we’re starving and in need of something right now. Better to go slow and take it easy.
I’m not complaining. I know I chose this plan myself and I knew it would be a ton of work. I’m not sorry, I’m just really tired.
There is a ton of work to do though. I can see little knick knacks that need to be taken care of and I could really do a lot here. And I will continue to chop away at it.
But right now there is a great amount of heavy labor to do. Filling these boxes has been a lot of work. Doing it by hand has been a genuine task. Again, no apologies and no excuses. I knew what I was getting into and there’s nobody to blame but myself. I’m just saying that I feel it and I’m pretty bloody tired.
I’m also just saying that if you drink to get the energy to bully through, you may have immediate success but you’re going to pay for it tomorrow.
I did get a really nice note at the end of the day last Friday. It was something nice which I don’t really get so many of. Basically it was a compliment. What it said was that I had really left it all on the field last week. It means that I had truly put my heart into things and when I got to the end of the week, my friend thought it would be cool to let me know what they thought. Nice, right?
I’m drinking a pot of tea right now. This is usually what I do in the evenings but I figure I’m probably a little dehydrated. The weather today is perfect for some heavy work. Basically, I’m just cutting paths around the garden and using this material as my last layer in the garden beds.
I really am getting to the end of the heavy work. I had 21 trips to make here and I did seven before I had to put down the tools. I’m going to try to do seven more today. Maybe all 14 if I have the strength. After this, there are maybe 10 or 15 Forest runs for humus and forest soil to enrich the lower gardens and after that, I just collect some leaves for mulch and the construction project is over.
Okay, it’s not completely over because we still need a gutter system for the barn roof and I need to get more water retention and probably a new hose. But the heavy lifting, scoop shovel, wheelbarrow heavy labor is getting into the final countdown. For sure, this is the last week of heavy lifting.
Okay, just 20 more minutes and I’ll get back into it.
***
Meanwhile in Ukraine…
Lest we forget…
***
16 down and five to go. It’s about a quarter to four and I’m taking another break. In my mind, I believe that I will finish this today. I might just sit here for a while or I might have something to eat. I might even have something to drink. I’m just physically very tired and it’s starting to play with my balance a bit. My head is spinning.
I know this feeling though. When I was pushing the wheelbarrow, I remembered this feeling. It was from New York when I was riding messenger.
There was a particular economics to being a bike messenger. Every house had its own way of splitting the profits. I worked for four different companies and each had its own method of pay with the split being as high as 80/20 with one miraculously vicious and abusive company and my good Christian friends at cavalry couriers who basically had a 50/50 split with some bonuses for doing a particular amount of work. I had my mind set on making my bonus every week so this was indicative of my basic pay.
It’s a little bit like fishing. There are regular runs sometimes with particular clients and we know that certain clients will send out packages at certain times because they do it everyday. But basically you go when the dispatcher calls you and tells you to go because he knows where you are in the city. You take your calls on the fly, you keep the addresses in your head and you readjust your routes as you go. It is an incredibly immersive job and that was probably the main reason along with the physicality why it was my favorite job I’ve ever had. I loved being a courier.
But there is something that happens to you when you get up into the high teens or the twenties in terms of deliveries. This is not just the Sprint, it is the lock up, the trip to the office to deliver or pick up and then getting back on your bike.
I forget the exact numbers for hitting the bonus but if we were making an average of $5 a run, we needed about 100 runs a week to get the bonus of an extra $100. Something like this. Maybe I’m wrong and the bonus was not based on the number of deliveries but on the amount of money so maybe we’re talking about more or less. You’ll forgive me but I have forgotten the actual numbers.
But there was something that happened to you when you got into the twenties. It means that you had executed between 40 and 50 or even 60 sprints during the day. It’s constant moving and constant bicycling vigilance and something happens to your brain when you start getting up into the high numbers. You get punchy. You get stupid.
A great messenger who was in New York for a long time, Mike D, did a comedy routine for us one time talking about how being a bike messenger was very much like being a Green Beret. He talked about the thousand Miles stare in our eyes after delivery 25. He was right.
He also told an extremely funny story about holding on to a garbage truck on his fixie bike when suddenly there was a fast turn and an unexpected stop. He had to make the choice, these are his words, between crashing into 12 tons of steel or a few very soft people.
So I have 16 runs down and I have five to go to finish and then taking a break and feeling a little punchy right now. Today has been a good day and there are some other things worth talking about but I think I’ll get to that later.
Three cheers for bike Messengers though. Another dying art worth remembering for its beauty. I mean, the black lungs from riding in New York traffic is not a prize worth cheering for. But riding on the track was excellent. Rollerball. Truly the best job I ever had.
***
It’s 4:20 and I just had the single most refreshing drink I’ve had in so long. I was just sitting here in the kitchen and staring when suddenly the inspiration came to me. I have some oatmeal sitting here and I have this lovely cocoa powder. So I just made oat chocolate milk or chocolate oat milk. Three ingredients if you count water. Four if you count the blender as an ingredient. I pulled off the top of the blender and went to take a taste and ended up gulping down half of the blender. I think my body was telling me something about being dehydrated from the vodka yesterday.
Truly, god, lukashenka, Putin, whoever is out there other than the KGB and the CIA who both read me regularly I’m sure, it’s 4:20 on Tuesday and I need some life in my life. Please bring back the green. I’ll go see a doctor and get a prescription for it every time, please bring back the green. Vodka sucks badly. We don’t need any more alcoholics. Please God, bring back the green…
***
Okay it’s 7:00 and I am definitely done. I did make those final runs and then I raked in all the dirt and buttoned up all the boxes. And then for good measure, I moved my stump from the barn to the woodshed and brought an ax and cut some kindling wood for fire starters. Last night I was too drunk to start a fire. Or, The junk wood residual from the woodpile was just too wet to burn. Whatever the combination of my ineptitude versus the ineptitude of the wood itself is not worth questioning. There was no fire, no warmth but I still slept through the night in a complete coma. If anybody wishes to measure this as success, I was successful.
I just found my way back to the kitchen, I’ve already dropped off the kindling wood and I have a bucket here to carry some more garbage wood back into the warm room. I will take another crack at building A fire. A little more careful this time. I also put some more oatmeal in the blender and had another smoothie which I also devoured almost in a single gulp. I am very tired and this is an absolutely rejuvenating beverage. It’s also got a bunch of oatmeal down at the bottom which is also not so horrible.
Two notes however about this that should be considered. Number one, if you have a full beard it is probably the most unattractive drink to belt down. I will let you use your imagination on that. And secondly for all of you mixologists out there, yes indeed if you were to throw some vodka on top of the oat milk and cocoa you would indeed have a vegan White Russian. Congratulations if you already knew that.
Before I pack up here tonight, I got a second positive call today. I don’t know what it is with the positive calls but it’s nice when they come. This one was from an old high school friend who messaged me because he was thinking about me. Apparently, my writing last year about ecology and getting away from The madness of town life had made an impression on him.
We had a long conversation with video from the garden and he seemed pretty enthused. He said a lot of nice things about me and talked about how he was more than moderately miserable in his life and his condominium in Utah. He said a lot of things about wanting to get out into the country and get away from the rat race and find some peace for himself.
I don’t know really what I can say about this. It does feel nice to hear good things from people and that people think well of what you do. It’s also nice to know there are readers out there who like me. But maybe the best thing about it is when you indeed get confirmation that you’re not the only one who believes the quality of life should take precedence over economics. To give your life over to slavery or to be forced by economics into a miserable situation that carries on for years or decades or even lifetimes there’s a brain breaker. It’s a bloody shame to be stuck in a miserable situation year after year with no exit in sight.
I don’t want to be specific too much but I knew a rather beautiful girl one time who was extremely miserable. She had gotten to about 40, was no longer able to rely on her good looks and was seriously depressed. We knew each other well and I reached out to her but her mother got between us. I had some strange reputation with her mother and she disallowed me from being friends. Less than a year later the girl killed herself. Bloody fucking shame. She just had nowhere to go and nobody wanted to listen to me that it was about the environment.
I do need to go into town this week but I don’t think I’m going tomorrow. I might be wrong but I am unbelievably tired right now. Going to town is always a ton of stress and it always turns out to be even more of an athletic event because I have to go by bicycle from place to place. I also have more physical work to do here. I don’t know exactly the amount like I did today but I think I need to go to the forest about 20 times to put some fertility into the lower gardens. That work will be a little quicker and slightly easier than the work I did today maybe. But it would be still another day of serious labor.
But you know the beans are coming in. You can see them. Not every variety is growing right now but there are quite a few little shoots poking up from the ground where we planted. That’s incredibly cool.
So the fruit trees are beginning to blossom, we have our first shoots in the New Garden, the garden boxes are pretty much ready for planting. Just planting and mulching is left and then it’s nothing but watering and making sure everything is okay.
I am excited about the coming year. I’m not really looking forward to the noise from the weed wackers. The weed wackers and the chainsaws make for miserable noise that ruins the quiet. But I am looking for the periods of time in between the pollution. I’m looking forward to the long quiet days and the warm weather. I’m looking forward to walking my gardens every day. I’m making sure the plants are okay. I’m looking forward to this summer very much.
At the end of the phone call with my friend I wanted to tell him just one story about being out here. He was saying that he really wanted to get out and spend more time in nature. He’s an American and used the word real to describe my life. That means something coming from an American and it’s not really a word that I like very much. I prefer physical to real but I’m sure he meant it as a compliment.
But the story was from last year and how beautiful it can be here during the summer.
We have a lot of grasshoppers here. I never cut my grass or get rid of the weeds and they let nature do what it wants to do so we have quite a few grasshoppers who make this territory their home. They get very loud at night sometimes making their cricket sounds.
Anyway, one day I was studying guitar a lot. My leg was really bad last year and I spent a lot of time playing music. I believe I was studying fives and sevens, learning to improvise over this basic polyrhythm. In the evening though, it was exceptionally beautiful and I decided to go outside and sit on a blanket in the grass and look at the stars.
But when I came out to sit in the garden, the crickets suddenly changed their music. Cricket music is like a pulse. All the crickets end up singing in harmony with one another. But when I made my appearance in the garden, suddenly they were chirping in 5/4. It was like they were saying hello to me or saluting me or welcoming me to the garden I recognizing the music that I had been making during the day.
You don’t have to believe this story. And you can accuse me of being in some mental state or another or even blaming my illness on a moment of insanity. You could also say that I simply imagined This. But I had spent a good couple of hours working on getting my body to understand that rhythm and when I went outside you could very clearly hear one two three one two, one two three one two, 1 2 3 1 2… then after a minute or two they switched to a different rhythm which I assumed to be welcoming some other creature who was with them in the night. Maybe it was the wind or maybe it was some animals. It was like there was a great party going on and I was a welcome guest. The crickets knew me by my rhythm and welcomed me.
Again, you don’t have to believe me. You can think anything you want. Whether you believe me or not, you have to agree that it’s a great story. But the thing is, I know it’s true. I was there and I heard it and I felt it. So maybe you can see why I think this place is special.
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