Friday, June 10th 2022

Like every Friday, the road to my day off seems always to be the busiest of the week. Procrastination always comes to bite you in the butt on Fridays. People usually wish to settle up all of their business on Fridays or even on Friday evening. All I want to do is get to the finish line and turn off the noise. I really, really need to turn off the noise.

I’ve already had my breakfast this morning. It’s turning out to be my favorite breakfast in the world. I take a couple of crackers with me and a glass of water and I go out to the garden and pick fresh leaves to eat with it. My ex partner was instrumental in choosing the closest box to the house as a salad Garden. She planted spinach there and several varieties of salad as well as a couple of onions. My habit is to simply take the biggest leaves and leave the plant behind. She recommends pulling up the plant along with the root but I’m okay with the plant rebuilding itself. I don’t know how all of this is going to turn out or what I should do if some of these things start to bolt. I might just let a few of them just for the seeds for next year. It’s our spinach. It comes from here.

As far as potato beetles go, some of the volunteer potatoes in the lentil Garden have been eaten pretty badly. I’m not shocked by this. That is exactly where they expected potatoes to be. As of the moment, we seem to have made a good decoy. They don’t really know what to do with the lentil plants. But because there are a couple of potatoes growing there, that’s where they put their efforts and that’s where they remain. Our actual potato box is growing wonderfully and I see no evidence of infestation whatsoever.

I have had a couple of cabbages give up the ghost though. A couple of them had their outer leaves collapsed but the center still seems to be alive and one or two of them just keeled over and quit. I have a problem with ants here and I think they get in and start chewing on the roots. Not much to do about it and the vast majority of what we planted is looking fine. The plan is to experiment with some natural insecticides. I’m not really interested in using too many poisons because I want there to be as much life as possible in the boxes themselves. I am mostly talking about worms but what I’m after is a living soil and you just don’t get that when you start killing everything that is annoying to you.

Other than this, my red plum tree is developing a lot of fruits. Last year it looked like I would be better off cutting it down. This year I have a roofing panel underneath it to increase water to the root base and I’ve made a point of giving it a good soak with the hose on three separate occasions. So far it seems as if these efforts have been positive and the tree is looking a lot better than it did last year.

Yesterday, when I got around to bringing a bucket of water down to the sweet potatoes, it was as if they heard me and had already perked up even before I gave them water. In the evening when I came with the hose to generally water the garden they were looking quite fine. I don’t think they’ll mind a double watering.

Also, this extra attention in the bean garden and where we are growing peas and broad beans is paying off. Even our second planting of peas is starting to jump out of the ground. I’m probably going to have to trestle that area a little sooner than I thought. Absolutely no problem for me.

The pickles look like they are hanging in there. One of them only was lost but even in the area where it was planted, my ex partner grudgingly agreed to plant some of Olga’s cucumber seeds. Again and again, the seeds that are from here seem to know the road pretty well. They’re doing just fine. Slow but sure. Step by step.

I think my most interesting agricultural project at the moment is doing something about transplanting all of this native ivy that I have growing All over The Root cellar and bringing it over to the other side of my property. I have an artistic vision in my mind of a green barricade growing wildly and beautifully. We purchased ivy plants for a few rubles and they arrived by mail. These are all doing well. But there’s something about looking at something point blank and suddenly understanding that I have all the raw material I want. There is a ton of ivy here growing naturally and I have read a few articles and watched a few videos about transplanting them. You’re supposed to make your cuts at the confluence of two leaves and then remove those leaves and plant the cutting in the ground in order for roots to grow. You can start them in water and let the roots grow first but it really doesn’t seem that difficult. Mostly the problem will be in the hole digging. We probably don’t even need to worry very much about the quality of soil.

It’s also worthy of mentioning that it’s about a quarter to nine right now and I have seen no sign of Lena. I don’t know if I actually expected her to show up or not. Maybe I was strong enough to send her off yesterday. I don’t like hurting anybody’s feelings but I more hate being pestered. There will be other chances and truthfully, the floor doesn’t really need cleaning today. She wanted to press me for two meetings a week. I just don’t need two cleanings a week.

So that’s the farm report but in addition to this, blue blah blah I have two essays that I need to put together today because I have procrastinated both of them as far as I possibly can. It was probably just laziness or maybe it was just that I didn’t want to get too deep into anything. It really is quite warm and it’s really difficult for me to get motivated right now. I am not a fan of the warm weather.

Specifically, I have an interesting video about simple pleasures that I found that mentioned Epicurious, the Greek philosopher for whom The culinary title of epicurean comes from. Epicurious was not actually an eater philosophically speaking but more a man who believed that the pursuit of pleasures was an adequate philosophy for a thinking human being to pursue. It’s a bit more complicated than that but again, I’ve been sitting on this idea for a while and today is the day to dive in and see what we can find.

Also I hate waiting for the last minute but this week’s Torah portion is Naso. I have to get into that today as well and probably I will be the one writing the commentary. I could call my friend in the Jewish community for this or perhaps he might ask if he can do it himself. I don’t really mind having some help but on the other side, I’m okay with my own thoughts. We shall see what happens when I finally get around to this.

If it means anything though, the word Naso means take or count as in take a census. I’m only saying this because procrastination will kill you every time. Taking an account of what you need to do and being sure in your mind of your duties goes a long way to making things run right. Putting off for tomorrow what you could do today is probably the traditional folk wisdom for this. There is another bit of folk wisdom that says why do it today if you can do it tomorrow. I kind of prefer that one because it’s lazier. On the other hand, it’s going to be another broiler today and here I am stuck with an overflow of work. I think the first one has the more wisdom and I think going ahead and writing things down is the way to keep on top.

By the way, if I’ve never mentioned this before, aside from a vegan diet, a well-balanced vegan diet and to push oneself away from addictions whenever possible, I truly believe that we are more intelligent from the simple act of writing then from almost anything else we might do to retain mental acuity. I was taught a lesson about writing in the University. My teacher told me that simply the act of writing, because it takes time to actually manufacture and write the words down on paper means that you slow the thought itself down enough to allow for further analysis. Simply by trying to verbalize your thoughts allows them to be more fully realized and understandable. Or to say it briefly, writing makes you smarter.

I am an English teacher. It has been my career for a pair of decades no matter what my idiot neighbors have to say. I believe in literacy and I believe in freedom of thought and freedom of speech. And if we are going to have this right, if we even want to have this right, we really should remember our obligation not to misuse such a privilege. It’s better to take things seriously than to blow them off as jokes.

***

The first two sections of the Torah portion Naso concern taking a census of three familie, the Levites, the Merari and the Gershons. From just these three families, there were 8,000 people and it was deemed important that all men between the ages of 30 and 50 needed to be in the legions, to be soldiers.

One thing I liked about this was the military obligations. Of course, I believe that meat is murder and meat makes us murderers but we are obviously several thousand years from this enlightenment. But if you’re going to live in a world where murdering each other is something that is deemed unnecessary part of life, I like the age range. It implies a particular society that is not only run on economics.

Usually, unless you have some kind of deferment because of a medical condition or perhaps a stay in the universities, 18 is the year when people are enlisted into armies. 18 is a really interesting age to go into the army. Perhaps it’s the end of childhood in the beginning of manhood but more importantly, it’s very rare to have established anything personal in life at that age. Of course, there are all of those babies made in haste on the way out to the army, many women of course willing to go this way because of the regular military paycheck. The point is though the quality of man is different than what happens by the time you get to age 30.

Usually by age 30 people are well established. If they have children, these children are usually on their way and are at least ambulatory on their own. Also, all of the lunacy and frustrations of youth are well behind us. 30 is even after the first whiff of death, the first noticing of our own mortalities. There is caution in people of 30 years of age. It’s not all body, it’s body and mind by age 30.

What this implies to me is that you are genuinely creating a collective organization. It is a place for all of the mature men to take matters of vigilance and common defense into mind. This would make a very intelligent and purposeful group of people all worrying about the fate and Future of the community. 

I like this very much. I like the idea of waiting until maturity before asking people to go into service. I like the idea of leaving our children alone to grow and find their mates and even be there for the birth of their children. Certainly, war is and no one has ever found a reasonable way to stop it. But there is no particular reason to leave women alone during this tender time and having their men at home and helping around the house is a lot more humane and probably practical. It’s also less abusive and manipulative to ask mature experienced men to join the national defense rather than demanding emotional and glandular youth to work with lethal weapons.

Of course in order to do this sort of thinking you have to have a community to start with. If there is no community and only an economic system where most people join the army simply because it’s the only potential paycheck for them, you don’t have a community, you have a big lunatic mess. And if you even attempt to hand lethal weapons out to people without any understanding of genuine community and only some allegiance to some flag or national politics that never actually touch them personally, we’re contributing to the lunacy.

Or briefly, I am not sure it is the army’s job to make men of us. I think we are supposed to become men and then perhaps we will understand that we are supposed to be defending our communities rather than the oil business or other corporate economies for no other reason than wage slavery.

In the third and fourth portions, they get into dealing with venereal disease again. This must have been a massive problem out in the desert. Obviously we have a gigantic mass of people. If you have 8,000 people and we’re only talking about three families, there must have been a tremendous amount of mixing and mingling and of course, quite a few people were coming down with diseases because of it.

The two points here considered are that people who end up being “unclean” should be segregated and the other is that a lot of these “sins”, whether born of practical forensic medicine or not, ended up having taxes and penalties paid because of it. In other words, they were making their living off of human misery.

Again, on the one hand, in the age before antibiotics, or even reasonable knowledge of birth control or probably reasonable knowledge in general, you need to do something not to have your entire group become infested. On the other hand, why can’t they just do the medicine and leave the fines and penalties behind? I’m not really sure that having enough money to pay absolution is the way we want to cleanse ourselves of our sins. That is automatically an unfair playing field.

No wonder Caesar and his legion of Christians wanted to steal our stuff. They saw a profit in this.

In the remaining portions, the mishkan, the portable temple was completed and consecrated and for the next couple of weeks, all of the families came and paid tributes and donated animals and bowls and money. This Temple would be the center of the community and the place from which all laws would be dispersed. By the time everybody was finished making their donations, the temple was rich and because of it, it had genuine power other than the word of God behind it.

Yeah, I’m one of these cynical people that doesn’t really believe in Jesus Christ. Don’t ask me if I’m worried about saying this out loud. I live in Belarus and I say enough shit to get me killed pretty much every day. I’m not saying that I have such full belief in the realities of the Old testament. I’m just saying that the New testament is a copy and that this copy was pretty much sanctioned or commissioned by Caesar himself. It is basically the way of power. It is the way to take charge of people and make sure that they support leadership.

Of course Caesar wanted this for himself. All leaders of all countries live for the obedience of their constituency. In theoretical democracy, perhaps one wants the belief and support of their constituency. Most often however, it’s easier to be a dictator than it is a secretary at the center of a functioning democracy.

And this of course is without even thinking about corruption. Being on the crossroad where public money flows In great waves is a rather intoxicating thought for the most greedy among Us. Certainly, we have partisans fighting for the rights of their communities. Certainly there are those with great hearts who believe that finding the best deals for their people is the reason to be there. I am cynical though. I believe that mostly the case is people just like having access to more money. Money is a drug and people always, always, always want more drugs.

They also probably like how much blood was here. It’s really easy to agree that blood is needed. It’s very easy to say that simply because you’re too insensitive to give a damn about the value of human life once you are sitting on a pile of public funds would seem to be as good a reason as any to jack up the killing numbers. I mean, once you are insulated and free from attack and have enough money to keep the cocaine and hookers and expensive Scotch flowing like a river, why wouldn’t you find ways to arm your people and send them off to war?

No, I am a moral man but I am not a religious man in the common sense. I am Jewish. I make no arguments about that and these days I even look Jewish. But I do not believe in such politics and I do not believe in relinquishing power towards some corrupt bastard for no other reason than they control the money. This makes no logical sense to me and it costs me too much to live such a life. I am not a horse, I am a man. I do not bend to the will of the person who tries to ride me. I would rather kick them off and then kick their head in. At least I get to run free when this episode is over.

***

It’s a few minutes before noon and I have found a really nice way to work in my garden.

I brought a stool out with me thinking I could sit down and work in the boxes. You can but of course you have to get up and move the chair all the time. Usually, I just stand and lean on the edge of the boxes for support but today I tried something that I really quite liked. Crawling.

I prefer crawling actually to bending or sitting or kneeling. I’m just not built for these variants anymore and crawling is about the most comfortable. The problem is with getting my jeans dirty. I know this is ridiculous but my ex partner is a lunatic about keeping things clean and my life is probably in danger if I get any more grass stains on my jeans. “We’ll just have to throw them out and buy more.” This is what she says. She knows how to hurt me. Spending money and making garbage or literally anti-Semitism to me.

But today what I did seems to be a perfect combination. Firstly, I wore bicycle pants instead of jeans. Secondly, I wore the knee pads that I got so that even these don’t end up with dirty knees. And then what I did was lean on that stool as I made my way through the garden pulling weeds. What comfort! What style! What speed!

I tell you, you live and you learn but when you find something that seriously works for you and satisfies both your need to get in and pay attention to things and your complete laziness and reluctance to put your body into painful positions for long periods of time, this is the answer.

I mean, it’s only the beginning of June. Maybe this will be pure bullshit by the end of summer and I will be working from traditional gardening positions. Or maybe I am going to make a point of hauling my stool around so that I can lean on it.

And by the way, for those of you who are now for some reason I will never understand visualizing me on my knees and leaning on a stool and finding this somehow and arousing thought, well, thank you. I think you’re weird but thank you.

I wonder if I should show this gardening position to my ex partner…

***

Epicurean

/ˌɛpɪkjʊ(ə)ˈriːən/ noun

1. a disciple or student of the Greek philosopher Epicurus.
2. a person devoted to sensual enjoyment, especially that derived from fine food and drink.

When I first started writing this blog about 20 weeks ago, the first thought that came into my mind was to understand the definition of what it meant to be an epicurean. I thought it was pretty cut and dried for the second variation here until I found out that the word itself was named after said philosopher and point number one. From Wiki

Epicurus (/ˌɛpɪˈkjʊərəs/; Greek: Ἐπίκουρος Epikouros; 341–270 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher and sage who founded Epicureanism, a highly influential school of philosophy. He turned against the Platonism of his day and established his own school, known as “the Garden”, in Athens. Epicurus and his followers were known for eating simple meals and discussing a wide range of philosophical subjects. He openly allowed women and slaves to join the school as a matter of policy. Epicurus is said to have originally written over 300 works on various subjects, but the vast majority of these writings have been lost. 

Platonism is the philosophy of Plato and philosophical systems closely derived from it. Platonism at least affirms the existence of abstract objects, which are asserted to exist in a third realm distinct from both the sensible external world and from the internal world of consciousness. This can apply to properties, types, propositions, meanings, numbers, sets, truth values, and so on. Philosophers who affirm the existence of abstract objects are sometimes called platonists.

To sum this up briefly in my own words, the philosophies of Plato leave that the ideas of man can be held in higher regard than others particularly based on our need to assign them to levels. As an example, you can say that the leaders of the political parties and their ideas supersede any other ideas simply because we believe the structure of power to be more important than something else.

Epicurious however believed that the main idea of life was to achieve some sense of personal happiness. He liked relief from fear. And, he liked to eat well and drink well and engage in interesting conversations. In other words, he was an exact rejection of belief in one thing that is more powerful than others.

For Epicurus, the purpose of philosophy was to help people attain a happy (eudaimonic), tranquil life characterized by ataraxia (peace and freedom from fear) and aponia (the absence of pain). He advocated that people were best able to pursue philosophy by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends. He taught that the root of all human neurosis is death denial and the tendency for human beings to assume that death will be horrific and painful, which he claimed causes unnecessary anxiety, selfish self-protective behaviors, and hypocrisy. According to Epicurus, death is the end of both the body and the soul and therefore should not be feared. Epicurus taught that although the gods exist, they have no involvement in human affairs. He taught that people should behave ethically not because the gods punish or reward people for their actions, but because amoral behavior will burden them with guilt and prevent them from attaining ataraxia.

Epicurus was an empiricist, meaning he believed that the senses are the only reliable source of knowledge about the world. 

You can catch the full brunt of Epicureanism here.

How I came to this thought was specifically through food. The idea of an epicure is also stated as one who is a gourmet. My Also from Wiki: 

Gourmet (US: /ɡɔːrˈmeɪ/, UK: /ˈɡɔːrmeɪ/) is a cultural ideal associated with the culinary arts of fine food and drink, or haute cuisine, which is characterized by refined, even elaborate preparations and presentations of aesthetically balanced meals of several contrasting, often quite rich courses. Historically the ingredients used in the meal tended to be rare for the region, which could also be impacted by the local state and religious customs. The term and its associated practices are usually used positively to describe people of refined taste and passion. Gourmet food tends to be served in smaller, more expensive, portions. There also tends to be cross-cultural interactions when it comes to Gourmet, introducing new ingredients, materials and practices.

Or again simplified to the best of my abilities, and epicurean is someone who really likes good food. Good food and life’s pleasures and one who is rather against the miseries of life such as war, crime, violence, corruption and all forms of abuse. A true epicurean is one who enjoys life and is not one who goes out of their way to make things harder than they need to be or create misery in others.

Perhaps I am a little bit conflicted this year by using this word for myself. I’ve always considered myself a foodie but this year it seems as though I’ve lost my genuine love for slow preparations or complex recipes. I much prefer things that I can prepare quickly that taste good and serve my nutritional needs. Yes, I like my food taste good but I’m also very cheap and influenced by the amount of pain that money causes me. I am still an epicurean in the food sense, but I am more interested in minimalism and simplicity.

This is also exceptionally true if we are taking into account how much pollution is caused by transporting foods from foreign markets to our tables and purchasing them in plastic bags from supermarkets rather than local distributors. That one would think that the basic idea of enjoying life cannot exist in the same breath as someone who is supporting pollution, corruption and the economic suffering of at least some of their fellow locals. To truly seek out the pleasures in life, one must be conscious of not causing suffering in others to get it.

You know, one of my biggest problems here is my reliance on text without any particular reference to help people out. Probably this is the death of my popularity in that I will put people to sleep more quickly than modern visual stimulus. I mean, if you actually have to generate the electricity to create pictures in your head, modern people simply will choose to live without it.

So just to make things easy, here’s a remarkable video by a very good YouTuber named Einzelgänger called The Cheaper Your Pleasures, The Richer You’ll Be | Minimalist Philosophy

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As you can probably guess, I agree 100% here. I agree with it because it’s the truth and I agree with it because it’s intelligent. But mostly I agree with it because it is the direction that we need to go as a species if we wish to continue living here on this planet. And though I cannot 100% assume that the animals understand their situation. It’s hard to believe in animal sentience when human beings have so little of it. But just to take a wild guess about this, I would say that the animals are praying that we take up this particular form of philosophy very soon. I bet they are just begging us to please leave them alone.

***

I just got a text from my ex partner. The guy with the water barrels will be showing up before 6:00 today. It looks like we are a little late to collect rain this weekend but we are absolutely in business for the long haul.

***

Well, it’s 4:30 and I’m pretty good about shutting this down. I sincerely doubt I will have any kind of a last minute burst of rhetoric that needs to get out of me. It’s a bit too hot for my taste and I feel a bit like a wash rag. I am not inspired to do more.

This has been a very productive day. I did manage to do the weeding in several of my boxes. I checked on the water situation and I am still as of the moment waiting for the guy to deliver four more water canisters for us. These will go under the new gutter system under the barn and will probably be our primary garden feeding reservoir. I have to work out the math but I think there are several options that will be available for watering that will be more efficient because we will actually have water waiting for us in three or even four different places. This makes how we use the hoses different and we will have several options to economize.

As far as my chores, I have done a little sweeping up. I’ve picked up all of the stray glasses and filled up the local water canisters. My water looks reasonable and is very drinkable. I even did the washing. It was a cold water wash of course with just a little biodegradable soap but it has been very hot and I have a bunch of sweaty t-shirts that needed to get rinsed out. I can save the hassle for several people by doing this myself.

I also did all the cooking that I wanted to do. I made a big batch of hummus so that there would be some protein. I’ve made a dough that I will use to make flatbreads and I brought up a load of greens from the field to cook down with some spices. Greens and beans, all anybody really needs.

Other than this, I’m not sure what else needs to get done. I finally paid for that inspection. I paid for it the moment I got the bill from the government agency. I don’t know when they are actually going to come out and take a look around but they are welcome whenever they find the time.

So really that’s about it. Was this a good week? Maybe. It began with a little bit of a Jewish holiday and it had a few okay minutes to it. I’m pretty happy to have gathered the hardware to tie the water barrels together and I’m looking forward to my first opportunity to do this work. It’s a bit of a shame to not have everything ready if it’s going to rain tomorrow or Sunday but then again, that’s just the way things are. If we had done this work correctly when it was put on the table, I should have had those barrels even 2 days ago. But we didn’t and now we are just looking at the world spinning around and waiting again for rain.

Speaking of rain, I probably should go out and do a little bit of watering. I should but maybe I won’t. I watered yesterday and the ground is pretty dry on top. I wouldn’t be harming anything to go shoot some more water. I guess I’m just tired. The weather report says that it should rain a little bit around sunset and then again at about 2:00 in the morning. There’s also rain planned for tomorrow so I might get away with it.

What else can I say?

If you are reading this, I hope you like the picture of my poppies. They really only bloom for a day or two before they collapse to allow the seed pods to grow. It’s not a long flower, it’s just a big beautiful one that’s only around for a couple of days. Glad I took the picture.

But maybe that is the theme I can use to close up this week’s piece of writing. Maybe it’s important to notice that beauty is fleeting. My grandmother used to tell me that life goes by so fast. I remember her telling me this quite clearly and can see her face and hear her voice even though she’s been dead for 25 years. It indeed does go by so fast. If you blink, sometimes you miss it and then it’s gone forever.

Every week I say some prayers before my Friday night meal. I’m sure I don’t do it exactly correct by other people’s standards but I am okay with the prayers I say. The point of them is simply to say thank you. The point is to take a moment and show some gratitude. Gratitude for the food especially but also gratitude for any moments of peace and beauty either might have been during the week might come in the future. I say we should be thankful for moments of genuine beauty. And for love. And of course simply to be alive.

The point of this writing, ironically enough, is pretty much the same point I’ve made in all of my writing over the last 25 years. The more I think about things, the more I come up with the same answers. We are not grateful enough for our opportunity of life and we waste so much time that we will never get back on things that we never needed to fight for. People waste lifetimes on the most meaningless things. I think it’s better to be grateful.