Tuesday, May 17th 2022
It’s 3:30 a.m. and I’m not complaining about being awake. I went to bed early and it’s not unusual that I only need this many hours of sleep.
I checked in with the war and I found that Mariupol has fallen to the russians. The words in the news articles are putting a spin on it to save from saying these words but this is what has happened.
I grabbed this map from Google to make a point about what this war is really about. The Russians have been protecting their rights to do oil in the Black Sea and nothing more. Their argument is that they did not want Ukraine joining NATO exactly for losing the Sevastopol naval Base. Understanding the location of Mariupol to Sebastopol and Donetsk makes everything that Russia is doing clear. There is no argument here about Nazism. There is no nonsense about Russian Nationals being tortured. There is only demand to have access to black seed oil and nothing more to either side.
I’m not claiming to be an expert on this war. I have access to the same news stories as everyone else. I can read stories from the Russian side and listen to their propaganda and speak to people who receive russian-sided news on television and from their car radios and I have access to the English language Western media.
According to the news, the vote on a full on oil embargo against Russia fell short. Obviously it fell short because no one is willing to take the step to stop the madness. Nobody wants to give up the profits and nobody wants to bite the bullet economically.
I want to show you a piece of American propaganda.
You might say that I am talking crazy this morning and that there’s nothing related to the war in Ukraine or decisions made by the European Union that have anything to do with comedian Kevin Hart talking about getting your piece of the pie and becoming successful. But they are absolutely related.
This is American propaganda because this is mass media telling people to fight for the money in the hope that success will come to them. If you listen to this man’s words, he also puts double speak on the situation. He talks about rising through levels and actually being given a choice to stay somewhere or to go on to other levels. He uses words like “ability to get out of it” and talks about keeping that drive to go on.
What this argument fails to understand is that there is a vigorish, an advantage to the house who always takes their cut.
vigorish /ˈvɪɡ(ə)rɪʃ/ noun INFORMAL•US
1.an excessive rate of interest on a loan, typically one from an illegal moneylender.
2.the percentage deducted from a gambler’s winnings by the organizers of a game.
The vigorish maybe can be best explained by the zero and double zero on a roulette wheel. There are 36 numbers in the wheel plus a zero and a double zero but yet choosing a number only pays 35 to 1. This may be the easiest mathematics in the world. There are 38 possible numbers but the gambling only pays 35 of them. Roughly speaking, this means that every time you put money on the table, 8% of that money goes directly to the house.
The vigorish takes on many forms in Western life. It starts with taxes on your income and then expands to taxes and licensing fees pretty much touching every aspect of life. When you pay for home services on a monthly basis, there is generally a profit incentive. You can even go deeply into the thought and understand that hospitals and healthcare are run at a profit and are extremely expensive and connected to insurance policies which are extremely expensive. You can even go deeper than that and understand that prisons are run at a profit and that there is racial and ethnic objectification that uses people of darker skin and their misery for profit.
In other words, that scene that Mr Hart says that we are supposed to be able to get out of is our environment. The twist that he puts on the words is that there is optimism in the hope of getting out but it delays the fact of how horrific and downward pushing your environment actually is.
The world is under financial pressure. All people are under financial pressure all the time. And it is this financial pressure that drives people to work harder and harder to find some possible way to pay their bills. Everyone is trying to achieve some sense of stability under this pressure. But the truth is, the pressure never goes away at any level. No matter how much money you think will make a difference, it’s never enough. And even if you do achieve some level of financial stability, truthfully the insulation makes you insane to other people.
On one philosophical level, I don’t blame people for going crazy in my presence. I understand and understood from the beginning their problem with being faced with an American. I am not just an American. I am not a billboard or a piece of propaganda or a representative of the United States. I am just a man and I have a 20-year history of working here. But the image is what drives them crazy. I am probably one of the poorest people in this town right now. I have almost no access to money professionally right now and I have no way to receive money that I earned. And this is not even talking about family stealing from me. But yet, they expect me to be made of money. They expect that I could fart and the residue might pay for their lives.
Financial pressure has done this. Financial pressure has created the war in Ukraine. Financial pressure has Ukraine seeking to join the European Union. Financial pressure has the European undecided on how to say no to Russian oil. Financial pressure has driven the Russians to insanity. Financial pressure has driven my family to insanity. Financial pressure has driven my ex partner and my ex-girlfriends and my ex-wife and all of my friends to insanity. Financial pressure has driven me here.
I can also point out that dividing a country in half is not a new idea. The English have done this in India, the Middle East, in Ireland and in China. Political borders themselves are automatic divisions that create adversarial relationships. Donald Trump’s wall, one of the greatest ecological disasters of recent times is more divisionary politics used to create unrest and discord and pressure. This one as much of an ethnic division is anything.
Of course, you can also take a play out of the American playbook and show how you can justify military action by saying that you are saving people when really all you’re doing is giving yourself access to oil. I learned about this by using a map many years ago during a Time when the Americans directly involved themselves in the Somali civil War. I remember reading the propaganda and listening to how good the Americans were in preventing the unnecessary slaughter. There was good and evil at stake and the American army was obligated to go to save the poor Somali people. The action of saving them however meant only taking over the airport which had a very strategic place guarding the mouth of the Red Sea. Oil routes. The American military was brought in to defend oil routes.
So there was a moment yesterday when I was dragging the hose around trying to get water to my plants. Last year, I brought in 20 fruit and nut trees to plant in a row on my property. The idea is that these would be a visual blocker for my neighbors, provide shade and hopefully some fruit and nuts and would perhaps be something very beautiful in the springtime when they blossom. As I was watering, I lost my balance and fell.
I have a habit of vocalizing my frustration and I tend to swear in various languages when I do. Losing my balance is just something that happens these days sometimes. My legs are just not what they used to be. My chicken neighbors just happened to be out in their garbage yard at this moment and I heard the woman laugh at my frustration. My pain amuses her.
The ironic thing was that the place that I fell was directly in front of the only three trees that are not growing. All the rest of them have signs of life that directly relate to how much water is available to them. But these three trees just don’t want to live. The location of these three trees just happens to be directly in front of where she Parks her car. Right where the oil slick is is right where no life exists.
So while we are all under economic pressure, the chicken people are under economic pressure as well, we choose whatever means we can to get out of the pressure and to escape our misery. We all do the same thing and we choose any cost saving device we can or any means to allow us to make more money. Usually these roads lead to the oil business one way or the other.
This whole garden thing that I dove into this year came as a result of pressure. I wanted to do this for myself simply because I’ve been physically restricted for a very long time. I wanted something physical to do. But at the same time, I’ve probably destroyed more than I’ve created. I wouldn’t say that I’ve ruined anything. But I’ve created a situation that requires money to be spent to maintain. I need electricity to run my water pumps and they make a god-awful noise and create ridiculous vibrations that disturb my water system and my peace and force me into labor or the use of plastics. And all for narcissism.
There are several interesting futures available to me just as there are several interesting futures available to the world. Europe could snap to the realization that our environment is more important than our economic system and put a full oil embargo on Russia. Cutting them off financially from European money would be the optimal decision. Better would be to end the oil business all together simply for the ecological destruction that it causes.
If I were to quit gardening cabbages and Frankenstein human foods, nature would reclaim this Garden in a matter of years. Actually, the weeds would take over everything even this year and everything that wants to grow would simply make use of my soil boxes.
If we were to quit the oil business, simply having access to food would be the most important thing for people. If we quit the oil business, people would exit the city centers and head back to places where there was more food. If we stop being reliant on having our food delivered to us by truck, we would need to live in areas where we have direct access to calories.
The actual topography of my land has been improved actually. The pathways that I’ve dug to build my boxes are actually swales and I have stopped water from flowing quickly down the hill. The improved soil and the planting boxes is a good place for trees and berry bushes even without the wood restraining them. This Garden might be able to be a sustainable and self-sufficient habitat within a few years. It might be a shady spot at least.
All I’m saying is our environment is all we have. All I’m saying is that the ecology of the planet is the thing that sustains life. All I’m saying is that we should respect nature and do what we can to preserve our habitat and that everything else we do is suicide.
***
I have just one more thought here. It’s just a brief fantasy. I have a picture in my head over the chicken woman and her hen-pecked husband calling my name from the fence. In my fantasy, they address me as Adam Levovich or Mr Goodman, the only way I will ever allow them to address me for the rest of their lives. And in this fantasy the woman holds a piece of paper given to her by doctors. Apparently the level of lead in our body has given her both hepatitis and cancer. She wishes to apologize to me. She wishes to say that she is sorry and that I was right and that she should have listened to me. And then the fantasy is over because I can’t imagine what I could possibly say that I would believe in.
Along with this thought, I don’t really talk to cancer Mike anymore. Last year my friend Mike was all over these pages. Mike got a particular type of throat cancer and had to go through two procedures of radiation therapy and some serious life misery to fight it. The cost of the procedures was massive and he’s lucky to have had a nice big insurance settlement to help pay for it. But the last I saw of him, he was drunk, living off sugar foods and smoking cigars and celebrating defeating throat cancer. It might have been mouth cancer. Either way, I couldn’t look at the picture anymore. I have my own problems.
In this fantasy, maybe local cancer treatment wins. Maybe they suffer for a couple of years, lose their hair and their health. But maybe the cancer gets beaten and they get to live some more. Despite the vigorish, I would lay my money on the table that my neighbors would go right back to being assholes the moment they are free from the pressure. This is kind of what people do. We just keep doing the same things over and over and over again. This is the world we’ve made and just like my neighbor said, just like my ex partner says, there is no other way.
***
Zelinski addressing students with English subtitles.
***
Yeah, the dialogue that I would say to the chicken woman just came to me. My first thoughts were to say something ugly like “enjoy your cancer” or to feign laughter at their discomfort and unhappiness. This is why I said I couldn’t think of dialogue. I didn’t like myself for thinking that way. But I think I have something better.
“I’m really sorry to hear this. Marijuana is excellent for masking the pain of chemotherapy. It allows an appetite and allows you to make friends with the process.”
Why is marijuana good in cancer treatment?
A number of small studies of smoked marijuana found that it can be helpful in treating nausea and vomiting from cancer chemotherapy. A few studies have found that inhaled (smoked or vaporized) marijuana can be helpful treatment of neuropathic pain (pain caused by damaged nerves).
***
Okay, 6:00 a.m. and I’m up and fed. I had the last of the field greens that my ex partner picked plus some buckwheat and chickpeas. I have some homemade mustard condiment, just mustard seeds and vinegar with a couple of local spices. I drizzled a little bit of olive oil in my first bowl. It wasn’t necessary. It was tasty enough and I have energy.
I just measured the well and groundwater is at 205 cm. This means I got back 25 of the 30 I used overnight. That’s not bad. That’s much faster than it was. I pulled a bucket of water up and it is cloudy and has a slightly off taste to it. I ran it through a cheap water filter I bought it to market last year and it still looks cloudy at the bottom. I’m going to try double filtering it and see if it helps. I’m not exactly there yet, but things are getting better.
At least, I believe things are getting better.
I had a few sips of the double filtered water. There is a bit of a taste to it. It doesn’t seem slimy and I don’t see any of the residue from the concrete or the chlorine. He didn’t put that much chlorine in there. I will see if I get sick from this but for the most part, it is water. If I was desperate, I would put this in a teapot and boil it and drink it.
My plan today is to pump the well as close to dry as I can. I’m going to try to fill two storage containers with as close to 500 L as I can get. When the well recovers again, I’ll have a good idea of my water quality.
I tell you though, try worrying about water sometime. Try thinking about how much water you use and the quality of water you have. There are countries in the world where this is absolutely normal behavior for everybody. If I’m talking to Americans right now or people who have gotten used to living in town with unlimited water, try this sometime. It changes your sensibilities when you are directly connected to how much water you have.
You can also understand that with even a few micrograms of community sense, and I’m talking about a lot less community since then the chlorine that got added to my well, you might see where a person would become an ecologist pretty quickly. If you want to know one of the absolute basic elements of life, it’s water. You make water precious to yourself even for one day and suddenly your sensibilities change.
No, this water is not ready to drink. I’m getting a little bit of an after effect from those few sips and I don’t like it. Even double filtered, this is not drinkable. I think I’ll get started pumping that well. If my neighbors are angry at the noise I make, I’m angry at the noise they make.
***
Here are a few more well numbers. I have just reached my limit that I can use. I am at 250 cm of depth.
The pump itself is 26 cm from base to top and the suction is at the very top. If I wish to cause less vibrations in the water, I need to dangle the pump rather than letting it sit on the floor. I can feel the hard floor now and I can feel where there is some soft sand remaining. The bottom of the well is 280 cm, basically where it was before. I don’t think we can dig any deeper.
I was able to get close to 500 L out before I had to stop. I’m getting this number because I filled up two tanks plus minus. But what this means at a 2 m water line is that at absolute best, I only have half a meter of water to work with. Basically, around 300 l plus minus. Today, I let the pump lean over a little bit to get another 10 to 20 cm, maybe another 100 l.
On a positive side, this is everyday and because the water does seem to recover. On a negative side, it’s only May and there is a great possibility that by the time we get to July and August, I might not have any water at all.
Aside from the engineering, I’m pretty proud of myself for two mechanical fixes. When Sasha got brutal on my wheelbarrow and caused one of the bolts to rip through the aluminum bucket, I fixed it with a giant junk washer I had lying around. And this morning, when I got tired of the aluminum cam strap clamp holding the pump and the hose together, I made my own clamp out of some aluminum wire I twisted by hand. I don’t know how permanent it’s going to be but it was strong enough to hold it together. If it looks permanent, I’ll just cut the hose off for portability, put a coupling on it and allow it to be a permanent part of the structure.
I got a new nickname from a friend the other day for doing junk fixes like this. He called me союзник, soyuznik, basically a Soviet era worker. I understand it’s meant with a sense of sarcasm. In Belarus, anything that anybody says about anybody automatically means something bad. In fact, in the old days, you didn’t even have to say anything. You just needed to say their name and somebody knew it was something bad. But in this case, I kind of like it.
Anyway, the pumping is done and I have about 500 L of water available in the tanks. I still have two tanks that I can fill up for storage. As of the moment, I don’t think watering the field is going to be too much of a problem. Everything in the boxes is growing. It hasn’t really become full-on summer yet. I am a bit on the broken side leg-wise but I’m still standing. Basically speaking, they haven’t killed me yet.
***
It’s 9:30 and the well is at 210 cm. Not bloody bad. Also, the water is still cloudy but the taste is much, much better. It’s still not at the quality it was before I started using this damn pump but literally, that’s 90% recovery in maybe an hour or 90 minutes. That’s fast. Literally, that’s as fast as the pump.
My ex-wife used to say that nature abhors a vacuum. If I’ve ever had more proof of that, I’m looking at it right now. That’s fast. And more praise to Dima. The man did a good job. Differences are appearing everywhere.
I don’t have a massive amount of garbage to throw away but probably tomorrow night, I should do some watering. This means I will make my town trip on Thursday. And with absolutely no rain planned, I will probably fill up all of my storage buckets. After that, I can just let the well alone for even a week or two and let the sediment settle and I might just be in business.
Seriously, a surface pump would have been a better choice at the beginning and buying a second pump, even just to have a backup is not a horrible expense or a bad idea. But if I planned the hell out of this, I might just have the materials on hand to get through this.
You know what? I do think like a soyuzik. Do you think that is something that all ecologists need to be? You know, you probably do need to be a little bit of a communist to be an ecologist. That’s not so hard to imagine. That’s not so bad at all. But if that is true, that makes capitalists the cancer of the planet. Something to think about right there.
***
It’s about 5:00 in the evening and I’m making some dinner. I fought off the urge to go to the store. I fought off the urge to get some vodka actually. I drank some toasts with the guys who cleaned the well. I thought at the end of the day it would be nice to take a load off. It’s in my consciousness to do this now. But I didn’t go to the store. I went out on the field and got some greens and went to The Root cellar and got some potatoes and now all of this is in the big skillet becoming dinner.
I am not an expert nor am I the strongest man in the world but I do have a trick about breaking addictions. The first thing is that you recognize that it is an addiction. You have to realize it’s an addiction that you don’t want. And then, you have to find something that you like better. You have to have some place to go. You can’t just say I’m addicted and then walk away and live your exact same life. You need something in your life worth living for to take the place of the thing you use to run away from a shitty life.
Once you’re okay with this thought and you have some place to go, now there is nothing to it but to do it. Usually at this point, I take the thought that I want something and then I give it some refinement and art. Maybe I’ll do this or maybe I’ll do that. Perhaps instead of this I could do this or maybe I could put this with this. This sort of thing.
There’s also a place where you ask yourself if this is really, really, really what you want. Do you really want this thing? Do you really need it or can you live without it? Oftentimes I end up agreeing that I can live without it. And sometimes, when the thing you want is connected to people that you really don’t like very much, this becomes even a better choice. Why put yourself out for people you don’t like or respect just to get something you don’t really want.
In this case, vodka doesn’t bother anybody. Vodka is legal. I hate vodka. I hate drinking vodka. I hate having alcohol in my system. But sometimes I hate coming to a shit end of the day with absolutely nothing to look forward to but dinner and a movie. At some point, especially about 5:00 when the whole world gets off work and has the exact same thought about drinking, sometimes you get caught on the wave.
My decision tonight was to go for potatoes and greens. Possibly I will use the blender to make a little bit of cream but really, I don’t need it. The taste here is enough all by itself and with a little olive oil and perhaps some mustard, I think I can get by okay. I can always throw some salty peanuts on top. You can do that, you know? You could just toss some salty peanuts on top and it’s delicious.
I just popped the stove and I’m going to let this simmer just a little bit. I added a little bit of double filtered well water. I don’t really think I have anything to worry about in there except that it’s not as clear as it should be. Nothing poisonous. Possibly even some unexpected B12. But in any case it got boiled.
I have a couple of more thoughts before I quit but I think I’m going to go eat this mess that I just made in my pot. I’m actually kind of hungry. It’s been a really long day today and I would love something good right now.
***
Wow. That was amazing. That was exactly what I needed. Have you ever eaten something that the moment you put it in your mouth, your entire body says thank you? I’m not talking about something that tastes good. I’m talking about something that is absolutely orgasmic.
Way back when, probably 5 years ago already when I still ate meat, I would give in to my addictive urges every time. Literally, anytime I was bored or had a free moment, I would get something to eat. Usually it would be pretty junky. Or maybe it was just what was available. I love going to restaurants. I love going to breakfast restaurants most of all. And when I was in the states, I would hit a drive-thru.
The thing is though that there is a difference. I never knew about the difference until well after I went vegan. At first, it was a bit of a struggle. Well, I was enjoying it and I enjoyed what it felt like. I was more alive and had more recovery. That was not the issue. What it was was that there was no junkie 5:00 bar food. There was no “satisfy me, I’m in a rush” or “feed me really quick because I’m starving”. And honestly, sometimes you get into overeating when you first go vegan. It’s a problem. Have to manage your diet.
But then something happens to you. Probably the best word to describe it is sentience. You become more aware of what you’re eating. You begin to notice that things taste like something. I’m not talking about the usual collection of spices and salt and peppers that go into dishes. I’m not talking about the sauce. I’m talking about the food. Potatoes taste like something. These salad greens taste like something. It’s not just material to fill up the plate, each and everything that you bothered to put in your mouth has a specific taste and effect. When I went vegan, I slowly began to notice how much I was enjoying the food I was eating.
I need to qualify this even a little bit more. I’m not talking about the post meat meal release where your head doesn’t work and you sit back and you have that sort of drugged out lethargic feeling while your body tries to deal with what’s inside of it. I will agree that I’ve gotten some good energy off of some incredibly high rent seafood. But when I went vegan, the feeling became something different. It wasn’t narcotic. It was deep physical satisfaction.
I began to have something very similar to full body orgasms from eating. This is true especially if I was hungry. I would take a bite of food, maybe it was a piece of fruit or maybe it was something like this evening’s dinner and something would snap inside me. It was as if my body was saying “yes! This is what I want! This is what I need.”
I’m not just saying this for a fact that I never felt that way from meat. When I was eating meat, it was always the checkout. It was the heroin of it. It was The disappearance and the forgetting. It was to have my brain blocked out by fat or my whole metabolism slow down from trying to cope with the food I had just ingested.
Now it’s completely different. Now, though I still have that kind of drug like urge from meals, and yes I can make some epic meals especially on Friday nights and Saturdays, now it’s just a matter of putting myself right. It’s not check out time. It’s just fulfillment of energy. It’s just giving my body something to run on.
When I was talking to my religious friend the other day, I said that I was an animal and he said no. He told me that Darwin had some problems, though he did not specify what they were, and felt I was on the wrong track of thinking. The Bible says we eat animals and that’s good enough for him.
I don’t believe that this is the truth and I believe that meat is far more a narcotic and even a carcinogenic narcotic than it is an absolute food. Certainly, in a pinch and perhaps if it was a matter of survival, I could see it. But what I also see is the veracity for stupidity that mankind has. The belief that war and fighting ever solves any problem I believe is connected with the fact that we kill animals senselessly and ignore their pain. When you agree that you have the right to kill, you become a killer. Unfortunately, no good comes from killing. And right back at my religious friend, the book says thou shalt not kill.
My problem really is that I don’t understand why people are cruel to each other. The moment you start thinking about cruelty, cruelty to people or cruelty to animals, as a vegan, you suddenly understand the purposelessness of these unnecessary murders. And from this Genesis act of agreeing that we have the right to murder animals or that we are above them, immediately We Believe somehow that we have the right to murder each other and to place ourselves above them.
I don’t think like this. Perhaps I have always been more pacifist, but now I am definitely an activist. But I am not an activist, meaning that I enjoy hurting people. I never want to hurt anybody or cause anybody any pain. I just want to live in a fair world and be with people who respect me. I guess I could also say that I want to be around people that I personally respect. It’s just that these people are getting harder and harder to find all the time.
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