Tuesday, May 24th 2022

That was outstanding. I’m talking about breakfast. Simply, outstanding.

The star of the show could be described as simple pancakes. Well, maybe not exactly simple pancakes but they were pancakes, they were simple enough, they were extremely tasty, a bit savory rather than sweet, and I think they packed a reasonable health punch.

Without too many specifics because I am absolutely no good at measuring ingredients, I started with some more split peas. We split peas are ridiculously cheap, they blend up unbelievably creamy, they are amazingly diverse and fantastically healthy for you in terms of protein. What a combination!

So I started with some peas, not too many really and followed it with sunflower seeds, a little salt, a little black pepper and some chia seeds to kind of help things hold together. Into the blender they went until they became a rather smooth wet ingredient for the pancakes.

I tossed all this into a bowl and then added in simple white flour until it sort of wanted to hold together a little bit. A little bit of vinegar and baking soda to add some loft, I stirred vigorously to create a little bit of gluten structure in there, a tiny bit of oil in the pot and let it heat up violently and in they went off of a shallow spoon.

At this point, I washed and chopped the remainder of yesterday’s horseradish greens and dropped them in beside the first pancake to start wilting and frying. These are fantastic leaves. If they are very small and very new, you can eat them raw and they actually have kind of a buttery taste. When they get older and more mature, you’re better off cooking them in a little oil. 

The thing that I really like about incorporating horseradish leaves into my diet is that they grow on my property in ridiculous abundance. What locals do is pull up the entire plant and grind the root along with some beetroot to create a purple condiment. Some people like this, I’m not very fond of it. But by just cutting the leaves, I have greens until next year. I probably have 20 or 30 kilos of leaves ready to harvest right now. Certainly, I could probably sell them but they do Wilt pretty quickly and they are not popular.

With me though, they are very popular and I used the pancakes for finger food and made a series of spinach pies. Fabulous. Amazing. Ridiculously tasty. Full of fiber, nutrients and antioxidants. A great green breakfast and a cheap vegan’s dream. 

I am still basking in the afterglow even as I write these words.

As far as what is in store for today, I certainly have a lot of things to do. The weather report calls for rain the next 4 days in a row but probably in the afternoon I will haul out the hoses and give all my plants and trees a drink. I’ll probably do this to drain some of the water gathering tanks. They will have an opportunity to get filled up over the next few days and I will be able to let the well continue to rest.

The water today is also absolutely fabulous. I didn’t even filter it and I feel wonderful and there is no particular nasty taste from it. I’m happy with a three or four day lag after draining the well to fill up any buckets in a time of need. I know we are not in the middle of the summer yet but as of the moment, I’m not afraid of at least my own water supply.

Okay, there is a potential for tragedy. I am extremely aware of this. But if we do not immediately go into a shooting War because of Ukraine’s entry into the European Union and immediately becoming a part of NATO, in a pinch, there is factory water.

Having said this, I worry if perhaps the seriousness of the situation is being masked by my really good mood after having eaten a gloriously wonderful breakfast. I think we are screwed generally and nothing I am talking about was natural for this region 15 or 20 years ago. I was here 20 years ago and I know what a Belarusian winter is supposed to be like and what the seasons are supposed to be like here. We are definitely in a drought, this drought has been going on for better than a decade, the drought is caused by pollution, land mismanagement all of which is caused by unnecessary human activity. They make us chase money and in this case, we use a lot of cars and a lot of oil and create a lot of garbage.

Okay. I’ve remade my case for the 1,643rd time. I don’t know if that’s actually the number or not but I feel a bit redundant anyway. It’s funny that I feel redundant and it’s only May. Oh yeah, this is my third year of writing.

Basically, you should listen to me when I speak. You should take what I say seriously or at least use it as a springboard for your own studies. I can probably explain why.

If someone goes to school for five or six years and studies incredibly hard, you would probably give them some kind of diploma or accreditation. Of course you have to pay ridiculous sums of money to go to the schools. We consider prestige and the ability to land a job as being among the most important reasons to go to an accredited school. 

What I have done here though really should not be dismissed. I think it’s been 5 years since I came back to Pinsk and basically, I have been educating or reeducating myself ever since I got here. 

For the 6 years before this, I was seriously employed as an English teacher with an incredibly steady flow of students. Basically, I lived my life, dealt with my physical limitations and taught English. This was pretty much all I did. There were no art projects, I wrote no books or plays, I just did business, held my money tightly and enjoyed a once in a lifetime relationship. Why not?

After this, I stopped being in this relationship which of course is going to make a person think really hard. And think really hard is what I did.

I’ve told this story many times so if you’re really not interested in the recap, scroll down till you get to the stars and see what happens next.

The first thing I did was to try and find a new relationship so I went out a lot. I was looking for a woman who didn’t mind spending time with me but one who would let me be myself and would not try to overmold me. This means bully in layman’s terms. I met some nice people, and I had a couple of interesting one night stands. I checked in occasionally with previous friends, drank a lot of coffee and became very depressed.

On a positive note, I took up bicycling again which added a good measure of health back to my life. I got my heart moving again and put some strength back in my body. I rebuilt my bike to its original fixed gear specs and though it did not make me happy, I did a lot to improve my general physical health.

During this time, I started my studies at the University of Google. The tuition for University of Google is nothing except the willingness to ask questions. Pretty good price really and they are open 24 hours a day.

I went in there interested in heart health. My father had a heart attack at about my age and I was seriously interested in seeing what I could do to avoid it.

Almost on the first day of serious study the word veganism popped up before my eyes.

The argument about what sort of dietary habits we should follow is crowded. There are many people perfectly happy to tell you about their diets and lifestyles and how it makes you happy and lose weight and look better on Instagram. The meat people certainly have their say along with their arrogance. And yes, I tried a ketogenic diet for a while. It was good for about 2 weeks and then fell apart along with my heart health and testosterone levels. I didn’t do this during this time, this was a bit earlier but nevertheless, I did try it if it means anything to anybody.

The thing about veganism is it just made mathematical sense. If you take the cholesterol out of your diet, you get less plaque in your veins and arteries. If you take the plaque and fatty blockage out of your veins and arteries, you get better blood flow everywhere. Getting better blood flow means that your body heals just a little bit better than it did before.

Adding more fiber helps your excretory system. Removing milk takes an abundant amount of estrogen out of your system, not to mention salt and whatever carcinogens are present. Carcinogens also disappear when you take away the red meat and the processed meat and eventually even the narcotic effect, the tryptophan that comes from eating poultry went away as well. And really, it was only one or two meals that told me the truth. 

Suddenly, my bicycle rides became longer and my recovery from long rides became less. My muscles became stronger and my body became more alive. Literally, it was like I became 20 years younger than I was. And more, suddenly I had a greater appetite for study and thinking. Suddenly the testosterone came up on me and I started to get ambitious again. Suddenly everything was changing and I started moving to a place that really felt good.

Then came one miraculous moment when a friend of mine was kind enough to wake me up. I believe the phrase is “got woke”. 

I am sure there are quite a few people who would have been much happier had I continued on psychotically working on self abuse. I’m sure there were many, many people who were quite happy to see me working on my personal masochism. Trying to become an endurance Rider and functional alcoholic was not making me happy. One moment back in the real world questioning if this is really what I wanted and the whole thing came down like a house of cards.

It is my vision of the world to share this gift.

Yeah, suddenly I completely understood that most of my social life was not making me happy. It was not only not making me happy, it was making me unhappy, feeding me a lot of coffee I didn’t need to drink, having me hooked on drinking alcohol as my pleasure button at the end of my days or at the end of my rides. Suddenly I understood that I was not enjoying any of my interpersonal relationships. Literally, it all just became garbage.

At this point I could make the commentary that I understand how the world would have liked me much better just before this moment. A guy out there drinking himself to death and riding his bicycle and showing off his incredibly good health, showing off generally, is probably exactly the sort of picture that the state wants to see. I was a good icon. I was a good Instagram guy. I was putting on a happy face and working myself to death.

And this is right up until the moment the thought occurred to me that it was all bullshit.

I did not need so many kilometers on the bike to feel good or to be healthy. I did not need to waste a lot of money on coffee I didn’t particularly like or talking to people I wasn’t enjoying talking to. Suddenly I felt horrible about being an icon or putting up a brave face. Suddenly, I realized that I was much, much, much happier without all of this. I didn’t need the coffee, I didn’t need the restaurant food, I didn’t need the nonsense food or the snacks or the sugar treats. I did not need to walk around town and pose for pictures. All of everything that we do as a substitute for life just became uninteresting.

What did become interesting, for a moment, was the ridiculous global politics in the year 2020. This was the year that Trump thought he wanted to be re-elected and I did not want this to happen. I would not say I was a true member of the Democratic party, but I generally liked their noise much, much better than the absolute weirdness you get by listening to conservatives talk. I liked the side that talked about returning public funds to the public and creating good social infrastructure to help people who needed help and to keep the world on a level playing Field. I did not like the people that said that living selfishly and owning a car and following money while being completely isolated from our environment is the way to go. This and it was impossible to listen to them talk. Their rhetoric makes no sense and they are too loud.

So I threw myself into a writing project. At first, my thought was to put together an essay of some reasonable size every single day focusing my attention on the upcoming elections in the United States and the so-called elections in the Republic of Belarus as well. I am not going to say that I was a great correspondent. I did not go out and do field work like a reporter. I just stayed online and read and wrote and listened to people who talked to me. I don’t want you to get any romantic picture in your head of some gallivanting independent journalist crawling under barricades and over fences to get their microphone under the chin of some miscreant politician. It wasn’t like that at all. I was just looking and writing and listening and living my life.

Of course, I didn’t have to go looking for life because it came looking for me with a revolution, the covid virus, some attention from the KGB, one or two friends getting beaten half to death by the police and one being sent away to prison for 4 years for being exactly that physically ambitious to the cause. 

By the end of the year, I was so tortured by my understanding of who was financing all of this and who was pulling the strings on all of the violence and political hysteria in the world, I decided I could not stay in town anymore. The auto fumes were too much for me to take and the increasing violence from people was getting more and more hostile. 

Literally, I found myself screaming at people to turn off their cars in the courtyard. Literally, it had never even occurred to them that they might be polluting people by this action. Pollution or climate change or anything dealing with our environment was absolutely unheard of in the national news. If I even tried to speak to people about this, I was meant with obsequious smiles and dismissal. I was fake news and money was God and I was going to get beaten to death if I insisted on fighting back.

One or two economic pitfalls showed up, one of which came from my family, and I decided it was time to continue my search for good health and I left town and bought the house that I am sitting in right now. The sudden excessive movement caused me some problems with my legs. Unfortunately, too much running around ended up giving me an infection that almost ended me. I didn’t go to the hospital then because I really wanted to be here and have some fresh air more than I wanted to sit in a hospital. Well, I wanted this more than I wanted to sit in a hospital laced with covid and sadistic American haters and anti-semites.

So I had last year and threw myself into writing about ecology. I wrote about ecology and I wrote about my chicken neighbors. I wrote about global politics and I tried to open a few small businesses with a green footprint to help out the local farmers markets and give some people good jobs that would be helpful to the city without adding any money to the oil business or polluting the world in any way. I also built a website and probably put 2 million words in the books. I don’t know if this is a completely accurate count. I don’t know how many words were in all of the essays needed to fill up the website. But it was a number somewhere near there.

I never got to finish the entire year last year. In October, while making one rather foolish and heroic effort to get fruit and nut trees in the ground here, I suffered another massive foot problem and went into the hospital.

This year, I’m not building any websites or working very hard at web construction. I’m not really doing any advertising for this and I’m not putting myself on any kind of work structure to make things happen. This year I’m sort of taking it easy and working in the garden a bit as a means of giving myself some physical rehabilitation. I have less fear of leg infections now but unfortunately, life is a little bit more painful than it was before. Maybe all of this will resolve itself someday. Hopefully, the resolution will come within the month. But mostly now, I’m just taking it easy.

What I know about health and the human animal I know like knowledge. What I believe is the truth about our global situation, climate change, global warming, and the damage being caused by continued human activity I also know as an axiomatic fact to be true. You don’t have to listen to me, I didn’t get any of this knowledge through any University but the University of Google and my own foolish willingness to continue meditating on these subjects day after day after day whether I like it or not, whether I get paid or not or whether it kills me one way or another. If I tell you that it’s true, I’m telling you this because I measure it every single day. I am talking about obvious, seeable, empirical evidence that what I’m saying is true.

So what’s the bottom line here on Tuesday morning?

Vegan diet would change the world. A vegan diet and an end to animal farming would change the world for the better. Removing the meat would remove such an enormous percentage of mental illness as to actually stabilize life on this planet and remove almost all of the threats that we bring with ourselves for the sake of profits.

Politically, I’m not talking about stimulus checks. I’m talking about giving people some money to help them get by and creating an economy based on food, clothing, shelter, reasonable education and practical medicine for every human being on the planet. We have to return to agrarianism and we have to remove profit and exploitation. We have to learn to simply take care of each other, to do our jobs, to go back to entertaining ourselves locally and to stop seeking the endless party. It’s time to stop chasing dragons because there is no satisfaction in what you’re looking for. The only real satisfaction is to live peacefully and do your job well.

Like I said, you don’t have to believe me but you should.

***

Yeah, here’s a different take on fried mushrooms. I’m not really convinced that fried food is good for us but we certainly have a predilection for it. I will admit that I enjoy fried food though I know that cooking oil is definitely not good for me. But let’s say fair is Fair. I have no intention of having fried Chicken anymore. That’s a lifetime decision and I don’t feel one bit bad about it. But if you are in need of some serious bar food, give this a try.

Anyway, it’s a quarter to 9:00 and I am bushed. I cut the wood for a small pickle Garden but I didn’t assemble it. Instead, I watered everything and took a major bite out of two buckets of water. In theory, it’s going to rain for the next few days. I have my doubts but I have space to collect some rainwater anyway. The watering though was made worse because I had to stop several times because my homemade strap wrench kept popping off. This pump I have is a nightmare and I even had a neighbor come by and complain. 

Ironically, she tried to tell me I was making too much noise and I told her that if I don’t have a voice in this town she doesn’t either.

But I had enough exercise and did enough to advance my life a step or two forward. Nothing is settled or decided. But I did what I needed to do and made sure to dot my I’s and cross my T’s. I mean, I do my job. If you want to know anything about me, I do my job. And that’s all I do.