Friday, May 6th 2022
I just took a look at the well and found the depth to be 195 cm to the water. This is about 20 hours so the resiliency of the groundwater is about one day replacement. This is not going to be an exact science because a rainy day will put more water in the ground and several dry days in a row will mean less. In fact, the number could be completely wrong because it hasn’t rained at all in the last few days. This is knowable not only by the weather reports or firsthand observation but by any travel along the local roads. Let me rephrase that, any travel along the local beaches.
Last night I spoke briefly with my ex partner about the cabbages that we planted. Some of them don’t look so good at all. I was worried about the watering I did. The couplings did separate a couple of times and perhaps I did hit them with a harder stream than I had intended. But she said it was probably due to the frost we had last night. Indeed, a long, long time since last frost, we had another one yesterday, enough to freeze the water left behind in a bucket.
Did we lose some soldiers? Only time will tell.
What is obvious to me is that the first thing I said at the beginning of this year is still true. I am not an expert and I really don’t know what I’m doing. I’m learning as I go, trying to be as observant as possible and taking my best shots at doing good work. Anything you practice, you get better at and this is true for everything I’ve ever done.
But the real question is where I wish to put my energies. They say You’re supposed to pick and choose your battles. Some people say that you don’t choose your fights, your fights choose You. There are many platitudes about this. There are also platitudes about one’s method of choosing battles. Where do you look for your criteria? Are you emotional? Are you mechanical? Are you avoiding pain or seeking out physical activity? Are you working to save your life or are you working to harm someone else? Plenty of choices in this list.
If I think really hard about this and ask my gut what it wants, I am looking to create something beautiful. This is not necessarily a visual aesthetic like an Instagram picture. It is an immersive experience. I want to be surrounded by beautiful and healthy things and have food everywhere.
I don’t think I even need to explain this. Beauty and food? Where is there even an argument?
Of course, that’s a stupid question. We’re supposed to believe in money. I’m supposed to want money. I’m supposed to think money. I’m supposed to be money. And if we’re thinking money, the easiest troll in the world is how much time did you spend growing this food when you could have bought it at the marketplace for pennies? How do you answer this?
The problem is in that the person asking these belligerent money questions gave up beauty and food a long, long time ago. Anybody who reduces life to money or the quest for money has sold something of their own that they will never get back for that little bag of silver. In my opinion, almost universally, the thing that they sell is beauty.
Beauty is commonly described as a feature of objects that makes these objects pleasurable to perceive. Such objects include landscapes, sunsets, humans and works of art. Beauty, together with art and taste, is the main subject of aesthetics, one of the major branches of philosophy. Wikipedia
Okay, now we have a new question. How do we define aesthetics?
Aesthetics, or esthetics (/ɛsˈθɛtɪks, iːs-, æs-/), is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art. Wiki
I’ve just opened up a giant box of worms obviously. If we have arrived at art, I have my own philosophy, a group of words, that I came up with many years ago.
All art is communication. All communication is idea, format and audience.
So am I doing this for the communication? Am I doing this for the aesthetic pleasure? Am I actually doing it for the quality of food? Am I doing this as a political statement? Maybe it’s a teaching vehicle. Maybe it’s an opportunity to be pedantic. Maybe it’s just a workout that you can eat? Do you think it’s a fuck you to my neighbors? Do you think I’m doing this just to have something to write about? Is this art or commerce or food? I’m confused.
One way to delve into this problem would be with the platitude that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. What this would mean is that taste changes from person to person. One person’s idea of glorious beauty is another person’s opinion of great marketing potential. One person’s opinion of love and life and energy is another person’s one-night stand. One person’s idea of a beautiful way to spend a day is another person’s idea of a waste of time. One person’s love is another person’s hate.
Perhaps this is solved by remembering that the audience is considered in the communication. If you’re going to produce a work of art, it has to be for someone’s eyes.
I came up with a philosophy about that once. I decided that all writers require an audience of one. Every writer needs a reader and writing for a mass audience is simply commerce. You’re not really writing or doing art generally if you’re interested is to appeal to as many people as possible. That would be reaching for the lowest common denominator. And now we are back at Instagram which is not art, it is commerce. Therefore it is not beauty.
Maybe all of this is bullshit. When I say that I’m trying to produce something beautiful, I am not looking for an audience for my work. I’m not looking for people to stand and admire my work. Well, it would be nice if I got some anything for my previous writings. I have a couple of books available on Amazon and a few other things that are going to be up for sale if I ever get the motivation to do the work. But this little piece of gardening that I’m doing is probably just for me. Well, for me and whoever is close to me. Whoever helps put it together. Whoever puts in the time.
Maybe this is really what this is about.
If I break every human being that I’m aware of or that is aware of me and I put them into two categories, those who help and those who don’t, I have an amazingly huge pile to one side and a veritable desert on the other. I’m not saying that people need to be my slave. I’m not saying people owe me anything. But if I ask myself who I need or want to spend time with and who I don’t and don’t want to spend time with, there is a massive pile to one side and just a few delicate points of light on the other.
I usually blame the world we live in for this. They like to drop rocks from the sky and bang us on the head when we get too fixated on beauty. You go out on a beautiful morning, you start looking out for your plants. You move delicately, doing a nice thing, being a nurturing person and helping something live. And suddenly the air is poisoned. What are we supposed to do about that?
The answer is of course to make more money. There is no other answer. Money is the lowest common denominator. It’s about money and either you get busy chugging away at the hose that’s feeding you or you have failed as a person.
Philosophically speaking and with an eye towards the mechanical engineering of this thought, the hose chuggers belong on the big pile. I don’t actually have any hoes chuggers amongst the plus people.
I’m sure there are plenty of people who just got very violently angry. If they were waiting for something beautiful to come for me and suddenly I gave them a very specific image to chew on that was the opposite of beautiful, I could be accused of pulling the rug out from under someone.
But the thing is, the pile of rug pullers is vast and wide and high and long. The amount of exploiters and sycophants and glad-handers and obsequious smilers and carpetbaggers and rodent thieves is an endless Sea of poisonous shit. The problem we face is that if one even thinks about looking for beauty, even for a moment, we run into the residue or the actual physical form of the problem.
When talking to problem people, they are usually the first ones to be pragmatic and say that humanity is shit. Talk to Russians about the state of the world and they say matter of factly that human beings are the disease and should be wiped off the face of the Earth. There is no thought to putting effort into changing, nobody’s interested in more practical education, nobody believes that change is possible; what is called for is mass killing and then they head off to the KFC for some diabetes.
But how do I explain me?
Seriously, what am I doing? I’m no career gardener. I haven’t spent my life doing this. I worked for landscape companies for a while and I had my own. But I wasn’t the nurturer, I was the builder. I would build the walls that would support the gardens. This is what I have done this spring. I’m no good at the bloody plants. I just built the boxes and segregated The gardens and worked on the water system. This is my rational expertise.
The construction itself is not particularly beautiful. It certainly is not corporate, if this is the aesthetic you’re looking for. It’s just junk. I bought junk wood and slapped it together with whatever materials I had around. The lines are not razor sharp and the construction doesn’t give the aesthetic of strength. In fact, it looks ridiculously haphazard if you’re looking at it from a professional point of view. I mean, it works but it doesn’t have that money aesthetic.
There was a period in my life where I decided I was going to be an artist. I was in Canada. What a great place to be an artist. I was living and working at a youth hostel. During the day, when my services were not needed, I would wander around Vancouver waiting for inspiration. This was a trick I learned when I was living in Denver Colorado and wrote my very first play. You walk around and then when the spirit moves you, you find a table, order something cheap from the menu and scribble until the energy goes away.
I came up with a stage play called “The Delicate Task of Listening”. It was about two men who were out of the money system, extremely down on their luck but we’re both absolutely sick for the want of something beautiful. Into their lives comes a young deaf Street girl who is being cared for by a pair of heroin addicts.
Maybe I need to explain the metaphor or maybe I don’t. All art writing is a balancing act. You juxtapose one thing against another and try to find the perfect balance that disallows release of tension. The ball is not going to fall to the left or to the right very easily, the object is not easily obtainable and the tension is left for the audience to fight through.
Was this a good play? Absolutely. Or absolutely not. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just set up a set of criteria for myself, took some pictures that I had in my head and let the actors do what they wanted to do.
Maybe the best question is why I took the trouble to do that. Maybe the real question is why I took the trouble to try and write theater plays. What the hell was I thinking of when I dove into these projects?
I think the answer to this was simply to have a reasonable place in the world. If you get accepted as an artist, people cannot throw you in the trash so easily. If they know that you create things, they can’t piss on you. Well, this line of thinking doesn’t work at all with fucking Russians, especially money grubbing Russians which would bring us back to Russians. But it was the thought, I think. I wanted to create an aesthetic. I wanted to create a piece of art, a thing of beauty.
In this play, the question is asked several times about why the world does not allow beauty. Why does every resource need to go up for grabs? Why can’t beautiful things simply be left alone? Actually, I believe, if I remember correctly, the actual words were “why can’t we allow the existence of even one beautiful thing?”
A movie comes to mind. Sean Connery was a priest in the dark ages. A detective. The name of the book and the movie is “The Name of the Rose“.
The Name of the Rose is the 1980 debut novel by Italian author Umberto Eco. It is a historical murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327, and an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory.
I guess I should warn people about the 40-year-old spoiler alert but the question asked is who was killing the monks who were involved in transcribing religious texts and why. If you don’t want to know the answer, shield your eyes from what I’m about to say:
They were trying to make humor go away. They believed humor allowed too much freedom and wanted it stricken from the world.
Who are they? Well, the Christian power structure of course. They hated laughter and pleasure and joy because their power came from pain and suffering.
This morning I woke up early. I didn’t jump out of bed. I checked the baseball scores and half-heartedly made a list of things I am supposed to do today. Like every Friday, it’s a long day with a lot to do. I get a day off tomorrow and I have to make sure everything is okay before I quit. When I finally made it to the kitchen, I carbed up. Some veggies and potatoes, a little bit of local spice and I picked up the excess water with oatmeal. Like I said, a pretty Carby meal.
Then right in the middle of it my neighbor pulled out of her house backwards, paused to spray auto emissions into my kitchen during my breakfast and rolled away. Not a thought in her head other than evil. Self justification to the end of time. People in town told me she was a money grabbing lazy worthless bitch her whole life, not my words, just repeating and she has been eating me since I moved here.
I want to say that she is not in the pantheon of despised people. She is truthfully on the refuse pile with all of the other people who are completely unhelpful. Perhaps there is a segment of that pile of people who are specifically deleterious to my life. I have a few gnawing rats in there. I have people who eat me professionally. They never help, they are always just parasitic and none of them are ever, ever beautiful in any way.
This week I talked a little bit about the rise and fall of some of my ex-girlfriends. They actively pursued killing their beauty. What was beautiful about them was actively attacked. They did this from societal pressure. They did what they were told to do. They threw away their innocence and joined the killers.
Absolutely not helpful.
So why really? Why am I killing myself in this Garden amongst these miserable fucking people?
The answer is that it is beautiful. The work is beautiful. The attempt is beautiful. The plan is beautiful. And with any luck, maybe there’ll be some food that will be beautiful as well.
Sergei:
Pazhalsta. Why does it seem that they have forgotten even how much pleasure can be derived from simply listening? When I was small boy, I would listen many hours to my mother practice violin, I would follow melodies with such attention as she would stand by window practicing, I would crawl between her legs and place my face against her thigh so I could feel her muscles move as she swayed back and forth. To this very day the sound of violin can make me weep. Is music not beautiful here? Cannot you allow this one beautiful thing to exist?
Apparently not. This is a quote from the play.
Anyway, I guess I should get moving. Lots to do before I get to shut it down. I wish I was more enthused than I am. I feel rather Dead all over. Maybe I’m just tired or maybe I’m tired of this life. It’s really hard to say. There’s just not a lot of beauty to look forward to in this Garden we have made.
***
Science helps. Egocentric behavior explained:
Speaking of science, here is another video from Earthling Ed in which he debates a sheep and cow farmer from Scotland.
To me, there is a particular feel to the farmer’s argument. It’s a type of rhetoric, a style of discussion. Technically, I believe you could classify it as hysterical stupidity. You could also classify it as an attempt to sound intelligent.
I hear this style of speaking all the time listening to conservative politicians try to explain something. They don’t actually use genuine empirical arguments or logic. They explain things egocentrically. They explained things in a way that makes people feel better about themselves.
In this case, the farmer uses another traditional trick of conservative corporate types in that he borrows legitimate arguments from those who are saying he should not be around and twists them, puts a spin on them, so as to make it seem as if he is the intelligent one. I think this probably has roots in plagiarism perhaps. Basically it’s taking credit for another person’s effort and stealing the product for themselves. And in this case, that is a perfect metaphor for animal farming, isn’t it?
The thing about a vegan diet is definitely the clarity. You see the world in a very distinct and reasonable fashion. If I try to think about why this is true, I get what I consider to be logical arguments. Less cholesterol and saturated fat in your food leads to less clogging of your veins and arteries and therefore you have better blood flow through your body and to your brain. This means you are more capable of clear thinking. And additionally, because blood flow to your body is better, your muscles have a better chance to recover, there is less inflammation and your body does not bother you from thinking. You can think of this as when you are sick and you just can’t concentrate on anything anymore.
Again, you don’t have to believe me but literally from the moment I decided to go vegan, if not the moment then within a day or so, I noticed that I was stronger and clearer of mind. I not only felt freer and cleaner in my body, it seemed to free up some space to do more things. Among this, I actually became more interested in the science than I was before because I had more freedom of movement to explore it.
I don’t know if this makes sense or not but suddenly, I didn’t just throw away ideas because I was too lazy to work with them. Suddenly, I was able to accept things into my consciousness because I had room to actually think things out.
In this case though, we also have the money argument, of course. The sheep farmer is worried about himself and his money. There is big money in animal farming because it is an addictive food. It is not food in terms of nutrition, it is food in terms of its ability to keep you starving.
Maybe a better way to describe that is that you become hysterical for food, you get your fix and relax, you get used to this process and suddenly You couldn’t possibly conceive of not living this way. This is not eating food, this is doing drugs.
I am taking a break in the middle of a very warm day today. I planted some onions before and I put some pickles into an old wooden box and left them in the kitchen/greenhouse to start. And I think what I’m going to do is take a basket with me and a pair of scissors and I’m going to collect a big basket of young horseradish leaves. I have this growing all over my property right now and I think that part of my dinner tonight will be a huge pot of spicy greens.
And no, there will not be any bloody bacon in there.
Just to check in with the war, Zelinski is expecting a new sanctions package. No, people are not going to stop driving their cars. But it is at least worth dreaming about that perhaps they will cut Russia off as an oil dealer all together.
It’s hard to say the effect that this will have on the war. Most likely, they will simply choose to wait it out or even end the conflict just to end the sanctions and restart the flow again. This would be a traditional way of doing business around here. My neighbors are guilty of this endlessly as are the ex-girlfriends and pretty much everybody in the discard pile. They create tension, they ease the tension and what you feel like with the pressure off makes them look like pleasurable people to you.
This game doesn’t work when you’re with someone who considers character or has a memory. If you are someone who writes things down or remembers people that take the trouble to harm you or stab you in the back, there is no release of tension when they stop killing you to make you happy. You don’t fall in love again because the war has stopped. I mean, people fall for this all the time probably. But those are usually the obsequious glad-handers who are looking for a tit to suck on. They will agree to anything just to get the tap turned back on again.
It’s hard to tell the future but I am pretty familiar with how drug addicts work. I’m not talking about personal experience except in the observational sense. I have known a lot of drug addicts in my life and have seen them do what they do. The one philosophy that I have taken from it is very simple. If someone stabs you in the back once, they will probably do it again. And either you accept backstabbers into your life because you have no choice or you do the very best you can to keep them as far away as possible.
Again, my wisdom is not going to be enough to get people to quit using their cars. Nothing ever stops a drug addict from looking for their fix. But maybe we’ll get a little bit of a percentage. And who knows, maybe someone will change their diet, have their heads clear up a little bit and suddenly figure out what is genuinely the truth and what is a worm with a hook in it.
***
Wow. I just realized that I completely spaced posting all of today’s writing online. It’s almost noon and I haven’t written a word yet as far as people who know me through the website are concerned. That’s crazy. I’ve been doing my job but because I didn’t put it up, I didn’t. I mean, it will be there eventually and as far as the record is concerned, I was here and did my thing. But this is stupid already. It’s also going to be a lot of stupid editing. I am not that fond of wordpress. A little good and a little bad just like everything. Damn.
***
Okay, it’s 4:00 and I’m going to say that this is enough for me. I realize it’s early and that if I was going by sundown, I have at least 4 hours to go. I don’t have 4 hours of anything left in me. I am ridiculously tired and I just don’t want to work anymore.
As far as getting the house ready or having the kitchen available, I’m good already. As far as keeping the warm room warm, I got it. It’s not going to be a problem. The field is buttoned up and the tools are put away. I have plenty of water and plenty of food. I don’t really need anything else.
I do have one more task to do. I need to take a basket down to the field with a scissor and pick up some leaves. My plan is to make some kind of a macaroni dish with a ton of wild greens. Hopefully I’ll get some energy from this. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.
Usually, wild food has something about it that’s different than what we might call human food. There’s a different type of energy that comes from it. Probably, you could equate this very easily with the difference between supermarket meat and meat you hunted for. I’m not an advocate of hunting and I don’t want to kill any animals but the thought is exactly the same. Things that grow in the wild have to be tougher. They have to be more resilient and stronger and eating wild food probably passes these characteristics on to the person who consumes them. I’m not saying I know this and we probably couldn’t get a good call from Google. But this is probably something that is obvious to the eye and mind if you think about it. Anyway, that’s the plan.
But this has been a hell of a week. There have been many unexpected emotions and thoughts. I have a personal issue that I haven’t spoken of directly that came up and it’s probably the most draining thing I know of. It’s a hateful thing from a hateful person who probably perceives himself as being a hero. Or maybe before this week, he perceived himself as a hero. Or maybe I’m overthinking it and he has always been just a lying jackass con man punk bitch rat. Were there enough insults in that last sentence? Deserved words.
There was a game that was set up around me many years ago. This was a little bit of bullshit from my family probably to cover their own ass for damages caused by their own thoughtlessness. They were merciless people and tried to cover their shit with more shit. Probably they spent the last years of their lives in denial or just flat out hiding from their mistakes.
As for me, I want to say that I understand these things. I understood these things many, many years ago. I know who I am and I know where I come from. But unlike some broken Street people that you run into who never seem to get over their family shit, I got over my family decades ago. I saw who they were and I know where I come from and I live here and not there for a damn good reason.
But I have this family thing that has chased me down. It has a mild hold on me but only because the person fucking with me believes he has power. That is the most pathetic thing about this situation. I am forced to look at a person who believes he has power.
No. I didn’t get that right. I should say that another way.
I want to Google something because I’m interested to see what results come from it. It is the phrase “why did you make me hurt you?“
You can look at what I got but I don’t think this question is understood. This particular trope in my mind comes from an abusive person who believes in his heart that he is a good person. I’m using a masculine pronoun here but it definitely applies to women as well.
If you want to imagine a drunken father taking off his belt and slashing at his wife as hard as he can while screaming this phrase. It was her fault you see. She made him beat her. She should have known better? She should have understood the rules? Why did you make me hurt you?
The absolute truth is that you have a person who wishes to do violence. We could talk about the societal pressure behind this. We could talk about upbringing and child rearing and cultural norms as taught to us by the powers that be. Seriously, how many murders are committed in the world by guns or people with guns? How many mass shootings have we had over the last years? How many people have burst into schools where children not even 10 years old are sitting through their day just to wipe them all out with what automatic weapons that they could buy over the counter without a permit because the laws allow it? How many people have picked up a gun because the justification is right exactly there at this moment. Why did you make me do this? Pop. Pop. Pop.
I don’t feel like telling the story but the worst thing about this week is I completely understand the story. For the last year or so, I’ve been a bit in the dark. I got ignored when I went to the police about this situation. I saw it starting. Actually, I saw it starting years ago and I went to everyone who had their fingers in it and asked him not to do this to me. Everybody seems to think they had a right to harm me. Everybody seems to think harming me is a really good thing to do.
You know, I’ve written about this shit. I’ve written plays about this. I have delved and thought deeply about the people I grew up with and how they treated me and what they thought was a fair relationship with me. I did not come from thoughtful people. I came from hysterics. You could easily say that I came from drug addicts and the guy that is currently back in my life to my great misfortune is also probably some kind of a crackhead. I might be wrong and he might just be sick but I know enough about him to put two and two together. It would not be a great stretch to say this.
I just don’t really like the company of criminals. I don’t really like the company of people who sit around trying to figure out how to get easy money. I don’t admire this type of thinking. I’m not amused by the game. I’m a worker. I have been a worker since I had to take care of myself. And from the moment that I had the opportunity to take care of myself, I have tried to be a great worker.
Okay, there is a flaw in this argument. I didn’t start out in an orderly manner and I did not have any preparations. It just became time to swim and so I learned to swim as fast as I could and as well as I could. And looking back, I have no complaints. I would not have had it any other way.
I mean, I’m not rich. But I’m not broke either and I did It My Way. Without any offense to Mr Sinatra, of course.
But I am having a visit by a person who comes from the other side of the fence. I come now to have the misfortune of having to deal with someone from the past who believes he knows me. He doesn’t know me, he knows me as I have been explained. But he was a fool for accepting the explanation and he was a fool for putting himself in a situation to listen to this bullshit. He had his ears open because he wanted the money. This fight is about money that I don’t care about but that he is rubbing my nose in.
He’s also doing an incredibly stupid job of it. This is the problem with criminals. They are not really workers. They don’t really take care of business. They just plan things for themselves and they never think about the repercussions or the failures or what’s going to come and bite them on the ass when the failure comes. And the failure really always comes.
For this, I have been a little distracted this week. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to fight back. I do not seem to be given any rights to legal help. The USA is a funny place to have to deal with. They think a little weirdly out there. They don’t think in terms of people’s lives, they think in terms of power. It’s an unfortunate thing. It’s an unfortunate thing to have an entire country full of primadonna sitting in the middle of the world making everybody miserable. No matter what you think of me or my American status, believe me, I have been looking at this from your point of view for many, many years.
You can’t make friends with Americans. You just have to let them do what they want to do just like crazy women. And maybe that’s the best way to say it. It’s a country full of crazy women.
Earlier in the year I started using the word fagot to describe a particular type of person. I understand that the connotation is usually reserved as a negative monitor put on homosexuals. I tried to explain this rather deeply that there is no sexual innuendo in my thinking. I am talking about the lack of discipline and personal self righteousness of a criminal type who believes their shit doesn’t stink. That’s how my mom used to say it. People who think their shit doesn’t stink.
Technically speaking, this male who is leaning on me is exactly the same as the chicken woman. He is a hysterical woman. Whether he gets this from his mom or his wife or it’s something deep inside himself, I can’t say. I know the people he comes from and I know how he has lived his life. I have spoken to him during times of difficulty and I understand what his relationship was to my father during my father’s last years. I just wish he wasn’t such a fagot. I really just wish you was a reasonable guy and we could have figured out the nuances of this stupid bullshit many, many months ago.
Basically, I’m being shit on by someone who should never, ever been allowed to climb up a ladder and think he was above me. I am being abused by someone who cannot wash my underwear. And it’s a bitch move on his part. He probably thinks he’s bringing me down because I’m so snooty. I’m not snooty. I just don’t want his company. I don’t want to have to sit and listen to him talk. I don’t want to be involved with him or listen to his stories or have him think he has an attachment to me. I don’t do this nepotistic blood sucking. I’m not that emotionally needy. And he is. He’s just a needy little whiny bitch and he seems to be the last gift my father left me. Thanks dad. Really, thanks loads.
I’m going to live through this. I’m going to live through this episode and then I’m going to go and live a little more. I don’t know how this is going to end. But let’s hope it’s soon.
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