Tuesday, May 31st 2022

I’m having a very late start today. It’s almost 10:00 a.m. and this is the first time it has occurred to me that I should be here.

The weather is splendid. It’s a perfect clear sky and it’s warm, summer warm. The air is extremely clean from all of the rain, the ground is still quite wet which is very good. I don’t feel any tremendous pressure to do anything. Yet, this morning has been busy enough.

I made some efforts to contact some legal people in the United States and I guess I’m going to do more of that today. I’m not expecting a gigantic amount of effort on my behalf. This is not paranoia or defeatism, just empirical evidence telling me that I should not expect too much to the good. My grandmother always told me that everybody has problems. I know that she meant that when she talks to her family, they all tell her of their complaints and problems. I heard it however simply means that everybody worries about themselves and therefore everybody has their own stories.

I did not just fly around in bed. I was actually in conversation with a very, very old friend of mine. He’s not doing so well unfortunately. The weight of the world lies on his shoulders and he is also a member of the tribe in a way. He’s not as proactive in the fight against corruption. He just suffers.

He is also an aficionado for conspiracy theories. He rails against the corporations and society for his troubles. He can’t understand why he should be so unlucky to be held down. He knows in his heart he has something to give but the world just refuses to give him a platform or allow him to participate. It hurts him and he can’t quite get away from how he feels. It’s haunting really.

He’s not the first friend I have had who has his thoughts about the miseries of the world. My friend cancer Mike was notorious for believing he understood the minutiae of life. Mike though was a better worker than my friend. Mike was a bit like me and made sure that his economic ass was covered. He also suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune but nevertheless, he managed to maintain at least his outward appearance and managed to show up at work. My friend has not quite mastered that art yet.

I guess I need to give him a name. I don’t want to be too brutal about it. Perhaps I should have asked him what name I should call him by when I mention him. Maybe I should call him right now and ask. Just a minute… okay, let’s go with Monty. Monty is not his real name but Monty is what we will call him here.

I will answer your question right here. Monty is not a bum. Monty tries very hard and wants very much to be a part of things. But Monty has his demons and his demons are relentless in their attack.

In our conversation this morning, he came up with a really interesting question. He asked me if I had ever seen my father’s obituary. It’s funny but I had never really thought of it before. We both went online and went looking. You would think it would be the easiest thing in the world to use the internet for death notices but both of us came up completely blank. No matter how we approach the search, we could not find any notice of death.

Monty immediately posed the question about whether or not the man was actually still alive. A great conspiracy to defraud all of us has taken place. Anytime there is family involved, they are like vermin hiding in the shadows waiting to steal any cheese left behind on The cutting board. Perhaps it was all a fraud.

Then he railed on about why the world presses down on him so much. He’s not such a bad guy. He doesn’t go around harming people and yet the world just pressures him in a direction he cannot understand.

My handle on conspiracy theories is not that they are automatically moot and unknowable and therefore only for lunatics. This is the rhetoric of the oil business and the big corporations. This is the rhetoric of the illiterati, those high-ranking people with mass media access who only wish the flow of money to continue to them. These are the people responsible for the wars, these are the people responsible for the cancer and the diabetes, these are the people responsible for global warming. This is not fake news or a theory, this is a concrete understandable fact.

He asked me how I could know. He asked me how I could really, really know. I told him that I have a book available on Amazon right now that accounts for 5 years of Russian corruption. The book is called Found in the Translation and it consists of all of the stories I translated over the last 5 years of abusive power, violation of public rights and manipulation of the law. It’s the story of what happens in a voteless society where people do not have any rights and are only abused by the powers that be.

It’s one thing to feel oppressed and not understand why you’re being oppressed. It’s also not easy to be under the thumb by people more powerful than you. I know this feels like on many different levels. I understand the lure of power, the drug of it. I understand this very well and have seen it everywhere from individual people suffering from jealousies all the way up to massive countries enjoying causing suffering on a grand scale.

I also tried to help him at least understand that though he definitely is in pain and while the causation is not something you can lash out and get a fist on, it is knowable and understandable. What is also knowable and understandable is that he’s not the only one who lives in a world where people are pressed and pressured to produce. He’s not the only person whose brain is overloaded by internet images and faux votes on the social Network. 

His heart is in the right place. His first thought was that if people knew, if they really knew what was going on, there would be an outrage. But it’s not going to happen. The mechanics of why it’s not going to happen are extremely obvious to me and literally, trying to tell people the truth has been my business for a long, long time.

To begin with, the human race has never had this much information pumped through its brains. I’m talking about the evolution of man, from cro-magnons to neanderthals to Homo erectus to Homo sapien to Homo sapien sapiens. Never has so much information been sent through people’s heads and never have we had to assimilate all of this noise.

When I covered politics 2 years ago, I noted the snow blowers used by conservative Republicans to fill the landscape with brutal white noise and conspiracy theories. Perhaps the most obvious example of this lunacy was Donald Trump’s oddly unreconciled covfefe tweet.

Covfefe is a misspelling, widely presumed to be a typo, that Donald Trump used in a viral tweet when he was U.S. President. It instantly became an Internet meme. Six minutes after midnight on May 31, 2017, Trump tweeted, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”. Wikipedia

This ridiculous tweet was left up for 6 hours until someone at the White House noticed it or perhaps Mr Trump himself woke up and realized he had done something completely irresponsible and ridiculous. Had he fallen asleep and dozed off while typing? Was he high? Let’s not take cocaine out of our thinking well regarding the actions of the former president. But yet, instead of clarifying the mistake or apologizing for human inconsistencies (sorry, I meant to say something else and then got distracted. My bad.) He made it into a game and asked people to figure it out for themselves. Even the president’s press secretary went on to say that the actual secret was known by a few close people but the real knowledge would not be allowed out to the general public.

Have you ever heard such a pile of lunatic trash in your life? This is the guy with the finger on the nuclear weapons. This is the guy who’s supposed to be our chief executive, our number one negotiator, the guy who is there to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. And this is what we get directly from his office? I’m not even talking about the stupid tweet, I am talking about the ridiculousness of the snow blower of information given to people that refuses to back down off of the man’s ego. It was the emperor’s new clothes. It was a naked lunatic sitting in the oval office and believing he could do whatever he wanted to enrich himself and his friends and he didn’t care who died.

Yes my friends, no fake news here, there were deep, deep, deep ties to the Russians. It was all covered in the media. It was out there for all to see, well explained, the details held strongly up to the light. 

But what happened? Nothing happened. Nothing happened, nothing changed, no genuine movement of legal action happened. No one was brought to Justice. They just stole everything and got away with everything and they’re still doing it.

This is the problem with the world right now. There is no relief for the pain. There is no relief truly for the ukrainians. There is no relief from my friend Monty. There was no genuine relief from my friend cancer Mike who simply had to get back in the game because he needed money really, really badly.

There really isn’t a public opinion that will matter anymore, I think. There is just too much noise out there for any information to be heard. Besides the snow blower of misinformation, there is all of the pleasurable nonsense that we vote on and direct our judgments to. People are all voted out. People believe that their opinion and their vote is the only thing that matters and that if they feel a particular way about something, this gives them ultimate justification to dismiss and abuse or forget any formal understanding of societal contribution. People do not have responsibilities except to give their opinion and they are asked to give their opinion about so much nonsense that opinions have become as worthless as photographs. They instigate, they bring up emotions but ultimately, they just rise and then fly away into the atmosphere like so much auto emissions. It’s just garbage. It’s just pollution. Mental pollution. And nobody can think straight anymore because of it.

Me? I’m just as frustrated as anybody. I just want my own businesses to run cleanly. I have some parasites in the works and they bring me much stress. I don’t like things that are dysfunctional. My brain doesn’t have time for it. My heart doesn’t beat in sympathy for dysfunction. I can’t find the emotion in it. I also can’t agree with a mix of dysfunction caused by issues of status. I don’t like people who feel like they have the right to share their dysfunction with others because of some status real or imagined.

Maybe this is the one thing I have learned from living out here. It is nonsense, most of it. The way people think and the choices people make are very often antagonistic to so many important functions. I’m talking about ecology and economy. People make decisions based upon their power and not because it is the correct decision to be made. People bring their ego into their thoughts instead of allowing their thoughts to be only for the positive. We are not helping, we are inflicting ourselves on others.

I try not to do this. I promise you, there is no benefit that comes to you from not inflicting yourself too much on others. There is no medal for it, there is no thank you, there are just a bunch of parasites wondering why I’m not doing my job of parasiting.

I feel bad for Monte. A few decades ago, there were authors who believed that they could help others who were lost in the shuffle. I read a lot of these books and a lot of it formed how I think. Robert Percy, Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, Carlos Castaneda, Jack London, Steinbeck and Hemingway. Maybe one thought comes to mind from Richard Bach, the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

The story is about a seagull who studies aerobatics. He’s in love with his ability to fly and in his heart, all he wants is to master the art of flying. He is of course shunned and kicked out of seagulls society for not using his ability to fly to eat. To eat is the ethos of the seagull. To eat is the reason for life.

So he goes off by himself and becomes somewhat of a spiritual being. Perhaps there’s a little too much magic. Or perhaps it’s incredibly true that we can exist in different times and places. You never can tell what the truth is. I mean, I have an argument with my friend in the Jewish community right now because he cannot understand why we cannot have the same conversation over the phone without my body physically appearing in his office. This is especially true right now for me because physically, I’m not really going to help anybody do anything.

What’s the truth in all of this? My grandmother was right. So many people and everybody has their problems. They are just openly killing us now. They are openly killing us with disdain. They are prompting violence to increase the level of killing. They are pushing us like pimps, like Mafia bosses, like pig farm owners, like Coke addict drug dealers, like there is nothing in the world that can touch them anymore. Like they do not even believe that they exist on this planet.

It’s not really a conspiracy theory. It’s a conspiracy. I’m sorry Monty. You’re not crazy, you are correct. You are dismissed along with everyone else. Your existence doesn’t matter and neither does mine.

***

It’s 2:00 and I’ve just come back from the lentil Garden. I know, we previously named this a bean field but that’s just not accurate. It’s a lentil Garden because 3/4 of what we planted in there are lentils. The fourth variety we put in there is chickpeas which is a very similar plant that looks pretty much exactly the same.

Today I was inspired. The weather is sunny and absolutely beautiful. It’s not too hot and the air is as fresh as a newborn baby. There was absolutely no reason to just sit inside.

I am not a gardening expert. This does not mean that I sit back and die whenever anybody decides to tell me their expertise. I will listen to a polite person and I will ask questions of people who are more experienced than me. I don’t like pedantic people even though I am one myself.

Anything you practice though, you get better at. Whatever you take the time and study will become clearer and More in focus.

This was I think my third or fourth go at weeding the garden. All together there are three 15 m rows which means there are 60 m of plantings to worry about. I set up that field exactly like I said up all my boxes with a 1.5 m width so you can get in from both sides pretty easily. I like to lay a board down between the rows and lean on it for support. Today I worked with a serrated bread knife. It’s actually a pretty effective tool if you’ve never tried it.

The two main things that I found that were interesting in the garden were a few potato beetles that I took the trouble to put out of their misery. That field has been a potato field for quite some time and it was last year. I guess there are more than a few eggs in there. I think they are pretty much shit out of luck though. I don’t think they eat what’s growing in there.

There are a few potatoes in there. These are volunteers that I didn’t manage to dig up last year. We have them all over the place. I don’t really believe in volunteer potatoes. Usually they are too deep under the ground to produce any kind of legitimate tubers. I usually let them grow just because they are an interesting plant. Maybe this is a bad idea and I’ll change my mind later in the year but I just worked around them

The second thing I found which is probably the main reason why I managed to get through the entire row today was the appearance of my friend Mr Saltbush. 

Saltfish plants have a darker color then most of the other assorted weeds that grow out there. I know I let them all grow last year but this year we are actually doing the gardening and I don’t really mind it. But when I ran into the Saltbush plant, I pulled up the first two I found and ate all the leaves off them. Saltbush if you didn’t know it is delicious. Actually, it’s not just delicious, I don’t really understand it but it supplies me with a bolt of energy similar to electricity. I don’t know why or how many vitamins it’s got inside it, but this naturally growing wild plant will wake you up.

I noticed this last year when I was getting to know the local Flora. No matter what you think of this, I didn’t have any particular problem tasting what was growing. You never know, right?

Salt Bush was one of the few plants that I ran into that were not only edible but had some wonderful bit of vitamins to it.

According to OldMansaltbush.com, the leaves of this plant have got a nice bit of protein, potassium, a ton of zinc, manganese and iron as well as being a remarkable salt supplier. No wonder these things have energy. Another website suggested something like 11 KJ. I have no idea whether that’s a lot or a little but I’m telling you from anecdotal evidence, you eat this stuff, your body becomes alive.

This made the weeding a little bit more complicated because now I was allowing two things to live in the garden. Three if you count the volunteer potatoes. In certain places where OldManSaltbush has already gained some size, there is a bit of competition. I’m not really worried about it though the plant grows about a meter in height and is made up of a center stock and some outstretching branches and leaves. It’s not really a very shady plant. It’s okay to let it go.

Most likely the truth is that it was that little bit of wild salad I ate while gardening that gave me the wherewithal to go through the entire row. It’s one of those things that’s like a wake up. It’s like you didn’t quite know you were awake or asleep before but suddenly you know you’re awake. Not psychotropic or anything like that. Just energy. Just pure vital energy. Thank God for amazing plants like this

The reason I’m so happy about this particular plant growing is not just that it’s food for me. It came anecdotally from a story about it when I first learned about this plant. Vocals don’t give a damn about it and you never find it for sale at the market. The Australians understand it and make good use of it as a plant but here, it’s just discarded like a lot of really healthy things. But what I heard about it is that it was favored during the famine by ukrainians back in the thirties.

I know I talk a lot about fake news and listening to people say what is real and what is not. But they didn’t have to tell me that story twice and I decided I liked this plant very much. He can be in my garden. You sir are welcome.

***

Just a few words to finish up. I don’t have anything particularly great to add.

About the only real revelation I have here today is that I genuinely enjoy the solace and quiet. I know I’m not doing very much to involve myself with the world these days. I’m certainly not trying to break the bank or become a millionaire. About the only social function I am serving is trying to be a voice of reason for ecology and the future of our planet. This is important enough for me to chime in every day with my best thoughts. Again, I never know if I am universal or egotistical. That’s for the reader to decide or lack thereof. But other than keeping my own tiny little boat afloat, I really am taking it easy.

The one thing that I can say though is that working in the garden is a remarkably interesting work to do. It is incredibly meditative. It does take some level of physical competence but mostly it takes mental and physical discipline to simply continue on and work as hard as you can not to make mistakes. And if the weather is nice and the air is clean and the Sun is warm, I would think anyone would be grateful for such beautiful work.