Friday, July 1st 2022

It’s about 20 minutes to 8:00 and I guess I’m starting to get moving. The most interesting thing about today is my ex partner heading to the market to try and pick up what are hopefully the last parts I need for the water pump to work. Yesterday was a long and disappointing day. I suppose I could have gotten on my horse and made the ride to town myself but to be honest, I really want to minimize my walking time right now. I need to give my legs a little bit of a rest. The ex partner is nice enough to do the running.

Me? I am a planner. I love making plans. Even the most romantic moments in my life started with a romantic plan. I understand that most people like random gifts. They like the things that come to them without planning or thinking. They like reacting to positive things and being grateful for manna from heaven. Not me. Literally, if God said he was going to send manna from heaven to save me from starvation in the desert, I would ask him if he had quinoa. It’s a better protein combination and you know, I need a little more energy to get going.

The problem with this plan is that my ex partner has no comprehension of what sorts of things I need regardless of the language I explain them in. She is not mechanically minded in any way. It’s also kind of difficult to make it clear exactly where she would need to go or what people she would talk to. So just before I started working on this blog today, I put together a compilation of the photographs and the names of the parts that I’m looking for. This picture here is a Google satellite photo, actually a Yandex satellite picture, of the market and the arrows are pointing to the specific shops that she should go to. Hopefully she understands from the overview where these two places are. Once she’s on the ground, she’ll be able to find the place as easily enough. If it’s a problem, she can call me with a video call and we will all understand each other in a few seconds.

When I sent the package along to her, her immediate answer was that she was still sleeping.

So, life is exactly back to normal. Maybe. Whenever she comes up here, I think the two main things that are going to get done is we are going to find places to plant the lavender. We have a lot of lavender, 17 or 18 small plants the last time I checked. They have been waiting patiently to go in the ground for quite some time. I don’t mind all of this lavender. The problem is just that I don’t really have room for so many plants. Lavender bushes grow pretty big and honestly, I tend to plant for food more than decorative. I do have some human planted flowers because my ex partner planted them. I agree that the flowers that I have growing in the vegetable boxes are a nice addition. They attract pollinators and like I said, I have quite a few butterflies hanging around these days. I’m just not sure if I really have the space for 17 lavender bushes. I don’t want to be disappointing, it’s just a lot.

Most of the planting will be in the front of the house. There is a big walnut tree and the Rose plant, it’s not really a bush yet, is sitting towards the front. Full sun. Unfortunately, too much sun and the one flower that tried to bloom the other day got burnt. Sad moment of lost beauty there. But these lavender plants need full sun and where there is place for them to be is almost unanimously going to be shaded by fruit trees within a few years. It’s a tough call.

We’ve had conversations about this before. The plants have been waiting to go in the ground for more than a month. Today we will figure it out though. We will figure out the lavender, I will help with some weeding and mulching of some of our more important plants and bushes. And then in the end we will do some watering probably using the old pump. The new one is even too strong and fast for watering. We will use the noisy one that upsets The neighbors but that doesn’t blow the wand off the end.

Other than all of this, Tomorrow is an extremely needed day off. Except for doing some watering, I’m not going to do much more than go through the potato boxes on Sunday as well. I’m not getting lazy, I just am in quite a bit of pain right now and have no idea if I’m ever going to be able to get medical care again. There’s nothing for me to do except just take it easy and stay off my feet as much as possible. There is a certain amount of getting up and walking around that I have to do simply because I have no choice. I’m just not really going to be very active because the risk/reward is just not worth it. And seriously, I really thought all of this bullshit was behind me during my last operation. I really thought I was beyond this.

It is my great hope that this last fix on the water pump will do the trick. The last thing I wanted to do was to work my well to death. And the water level is ridiculously low and getting some help from the rain was definitely why I invested so heavily in water barrels and the new gutter system. But again, I lost a thousand liters of very usable water in the last storm and there hasn’t been any water since. The weather service was 0 for six on their projections for rain and the current prognosis says no water even until the middle of this week. It’s a war right now trying to keep the vegetables healthy. This is not the time to go lame. It seems like this entire season is just a giant conspiracy.

That last statement is not really so crazy. I mean, I accept that to the numb of mind, the uninitiated and the too corrupt to care, a guy giving up a giant chunk of his life to think about and explore the possibilities of raising vegetables during the time of global warming, desertification and massive climate change is just personal awareness. Measuring my well is unheard of. Saving water is unheard of here. People just don’t want to know how bad it is. But yet, these same people jump in their cars to drive to work everyday. The same people jump in their cars to go to supermarkets so that they can buy foreign products and bring them home in single-use plastic bags. These same people fight numbly for their personal economics without ever understanding that these economics are tied to all of the ecological problems mentioned in addition to the war going on in the neighboring country. That war by the way is promising to spill over here as this country is getting dragged into more and more participation.

I’ve often described my own situation as being between a rock and a hard place. Of my own personal situation, I don’t know that I’ve ever had a choice but to do what I am doing. Staying in town meant smelling Auto fumes every day of my life both in my apartment and out. It was also a drain on my money everyday to pay rent and utilities. So I moved out to the country and my financial outlay diminished quite a bit. Also, with the exception of the chicken people, I don’t really directly have to live with too many auto emissions.

But the effects of climate change and global warming are with me all the time. It’s with me for trying to do something completely foolish and irrelevant like planting fruit trees on my property. Only 15 or 20 years ago, it was just a matter of how much energy you wanted to spend keeping track of the trees and trying to limit the insects. Now, the insects are not even a part of the problem. Now there isn’t enough groundwater anymore to support life and even the entire Forest next door is becoming dry and brittle. The wildfires of California are just another symptom of what we have done to ourselves. The fact that we are now at the upper reaches of temperature possibilities almost every day here means that we are almost a month hotter than we used to be. The change in agricultural zones alone should have been enough to wave flags. Nothing. People cannot stop. They cannot stop hungering after money.

Well, all I can do is all I can do. I guess I’m going to go do something about breakfast right now. I’m not sure what. I might actually have to turn on the stove because I don’t have any porridge that I can simply soak into life. I haven’t been to the store and I forgot to ask Lena to pick me up more. I also have absolutely no money on me anymore. Difficult situation to say the least.

But a new month, new possibilities. You never can tell, right? You never can tell when things are going to start going your way. The medical commission calls and invites me to Minsk. Suddenly we start getting daily showers. Some world leaders stand up on a podium, glance over at the gun lobby and the oil business lobby and the pharmaceutical business lobby and large corporations and raise the middle finger on their left hand and call for public responsibility in the realm of resource conservation. Maybe they will inform people that we have to make less garbage, get off the roads in our cars, take up bicycling and start thinking about the future of the planet. Selfishness has got to come to an end, murdering each other has got to come to an end, hunger and poverty has got to come to an end and frankly, the party has got to come to an end. We’ve burned the match. It’s time to wake up and grow some roses. Either that or be cursed by all future generations for having been the stupidest people in the history of people. We were the people responsible for destroying the only planet we will ever have to live on.

***

I just checked the weather. I absolutely check the weather more than I check my finances, I promise you. The revised forecast is calling for rain both tomorrow and on Sunday. I think they’re just calling for rain every day because they don’t care anymore. They called for rain six times over the last week and there was never even a single drop from the sky. Just scorching temperature day after day driving everybody insane.

What I think is that they have figured out that it doesn’t matter if they lie. They are exactly like the conservative politicians and their connection with the oil business. They caught Donald Trump red-handed almost every single time and yet it didn’t matter. They started simply talking gibberish to people and it didn’t matter. The Russians noticed that all of their being careful in their planning and hiding and pretending that they weren’t criminals was all a great waste of money. Nobody cares about their crimes and nobody can stop them so they are just free to do whatever misery they want. I mean seriously, why is there an all-out war in Ukraine? Because nobody ever stopped them from doing anything before.

Maybe this is the new Russian weather service. They might as well predict rain every day. It doesn’t matter if it rained or not. Doesn’t matter if they’re right or they are wrong. It doesn’t matter what they say at all except that if they do say we’re going to get some rain, it makes them feel better. If they say it’s going to rain, people like them and think good thoughts about them and buy them cocktails at the bar after work. 

“Is it really going to rain tomorrow?” 

“Sure, why not. If it makes you happy to believe it, it’s always going to rain tomorrow.”

“Gosh, thanks. I feel much better. What are you drinking? Let me buy you another.”

Me? I’d like a drink of water please. I’d like to clean drink of water.

***

Well, it looks like we are back in business. My ex-partner managed the trip, the guys at the market were helpful in setting her up with what she needed, the parts were sold at the correct cost and the entirety of the situation is now well in hand. Her next step is to make her trip up here, she says she’s bringing up some food with her for me. Specifically this would be buckwheat, pearls barley and oatmeal. I’m out of all three but all three of these can be eaten without heat. I ended up cooking my breakfast today. Not horrible. I had oat groats with some green lentils and a couple of vegetables in there. I think I even put some quinoa in there.

Actually, you don’t have to cook quinoa. In fact, if you sprout it, it has the exact same nutritional profile as when it is cooked. I don’t know if you’re a fan of this stuff but I find I get quite a bit of energy from eating it.

So now, there is really nothing to do but wait for my ex partner to show up and listen to the sound of my neighbor cutting down all of their grass with a weed wacker. Sometimes I think that the only time these people work is when they use gasoline products to do so. I believe I understand their point of view. People don’t like to give up their drugs easily and when you have something that decreases the amount of physical effort needed to cause rampant and unnecessary destruction to both the land and the atmosphere, it is really hard for people to let stuff like this go.

I’m just sitting in the office. I’ll get moving when the ex partner shows up. I’ve already been around the garden and checked the potatoes for potato beetles and their eggs. No severe damage. This is the fewest amount of potatoes I’ve ever tried growing and it is the easiest potato patch to manage ever. I understand that potato growing is a local art that is appreciated and practiced universally. In the future, I fully intend to practice the art of buying potatoes and supporting these brave and industrious local potato growers. 

***

It’s about 1:15 and my ex partner is watering the garden a bit. It’s dry as hell. The new park did the trick absolutely on the surface pump. We drained the well in less than 7 minutes. Unfortunately, we learned that I have been miscalculating the depth of my well. With all the water gone, the depth is not 280 but 265 at best. Perhaps 270 in the absolute center. This only means that we have somewhere between 60 and 90 L of water less than I thought. The news just keeps getting better and better doesn’t it?

But on the other hand, and unlike the bureaucratic system of the medical institution of the country, you can make plans to fix where your problem places are. If we’re not going to get so much rain, I can mind my groundwater as much as possible and pull perhaps even 2 tanks a day. I’m not sure how long it will take for the water to fully refill but I will check back in at 6:00 this evening and check the water level. If it’s up to the top, I’ll take the trouble to fill another one of my buckets. If we get rain all the better. If we don’t, at least I have water to keep everything from dying.

Right here in this minute with my ex partner diligently putting way too much water on the plants for this time of day, it all seems so easy. Just a little human effort and some planning. Everything is possible.

Now however the question of health comes back into my thinking. The people in Minsk have been telling me that it’s everyone else’s fault for the last 3 or 4 months. First they blame Germany. Then I came and I told them about reading that Germany was not withholding any medical supplies despite the war. After this, they told me the problem was in Moscow and that everything needed to be coordinated through them. Now they claim that we are waiting for a decision from Brest. Yet yesterday, I was told that I had already gotten the decision from them. Yesterday they said that they had clearly received this decision and we’re ready to go but today I was told that no such document exists.

So we combined this problem with the information chain and we put it together with this sarcastic bureaucrat who keeps pushing me for money and you tell me where the problem lies. In the meantime, though I am able to get up and move around a little bit, the pain has become ridiculous and I am aware that I am harming myself every time I walk around. It’s pretty much the same as it was last year. I don’t have any other way to talk about this except to call it torture.

But it’s been one hell of a project so far. Here we are on the first day of July, my plants for at least some of them are already burnt and drying out from the heat. I lost a week from a failed water system and a storm that knocked over a poorly built system under the barn. The weather service promised six different rainfalls over the last 3 days and yet we’ve never had a single drop fall from the sky. Add to that a morning spent listening to two separate neighbors kill everything on their property so that somebody would look and believe they actually cared. All for the approval of people who don’t know what they’re doing and are actually responsible for the global mass that we are in.

I have more to say about this but I think when you hear about this week’s Torah portion, maybe you will understand. Just sadness upon sadness upon sadness.

***

Hey, one positive note. It’s not even quite 2:00 and we are already back to 235 in the tank. Almost completely back and full within 45 minutes. There’s not much in there but that’s a definite plus.

***

This week’s Torah reading is called Korach. Korach is the name of the leader of a family who comes to see Moses to complain. I bet you saw that coming, right? He asks him why he has taken them out of Egypt, a place that he remembers as the land of milk and honey, only to let them die in the desert instead of letting them go into the land of milk and honey. She brings with him 250 men. It’s a showdown. It’s a power play.

Moses throws himself on the ground and begs Korach to quit and shut up but the man in charge of this new insurrection will have none of it. So the spirit of the Lord appears, tells everyone else to get out of the way and all 250 of the usurpers and all of their families get swallowed up right into the Earth. Like the 1989 San Francisco earthquake but faster and sharper and more direct.

Apparently this is not enough warning that you’re not supposed to mess with God because later, there were more voices. It looks like this group of freedom fighters were not alone and had the political backing of quite a few more people. Once again the spirit of the Lord showed up and said that he just wasn’t going to have any of it. This time, he put some kind of horrible plague on those complainers and about 15,000 people had to go.

After this, it seems that the disease was under control and they started counting out taxes and thinking where the goods from the bad people would go.

I have two takes on this reading. I have one from myself and then I have another one from my friend at the Jewish community. I think I will let him go first and then I’ll take my last hacks at the bottom of the inning.

This week’s story of Korach tells us a very sad part of Jewish history. It tells the story of people who don’t learn history and end up repeating mistakes again and again.

Korach is the name of the weekly portion. He was a smart person. He had prophecy. He had so many talents and pluses to himself but yet, it is such a crazy question how he allowed himself to fall in such a trap and cause arguments and fights. At the end of course, we see that the story tells that the land opened up and swallowed him and all of his people whole. I was the end of his legacy

The talmud asks how this happened. The answer is that he was jealous. He wanted to be the head priest.

And from this, we learn about the dangers of jealousy. The mishna tells us that there are three things that take us out of this world every time. One is jealousy, the next is craving too strongly after material gain and the last is when people crave respect from other people. All three of these forms of jealousy harm us. Firstly, we become blind and no longer recognize or have empathy for the people around us. Next, we lose our ability to think straight by bringing this hysteria into our lives. We lose control over our own actions. And finally, the ego and craving for acknowledgment explodes and suddenly, we are no longer a part of any society.

Eventually, it is saying that jealousy eventually comes to mean a failure to believe in God. When someone believes they should have more than they actually deserve, this goes against God. Jealousy leads to greed, greed leads to catastrophe and in the end, all honor is gone and nothing is left but one greedy individual bringing misery to everyone else.

Perhaps there are times when jealousy has a positive aspect. If someone is jealous of another’s knowledge while studying Torah, perhaps this is a positive if it inspires people to try harder to learn.

Like I said, I have two takes on this text and on my friend’s interpretation. The first is that you really should never ever go against god/nature. When you try to push nature, nature tends to fight back and things get dicey. I’m speaking today in the middle of ridiculous heat and thinking of all of my neighbors needing to keep their hysterical party going. Staring at me for how far out of their group I am and worrying about everything in the world but what is important. They haven’t got a clue and they just keep destroying things no matter how good or bad or pointless the ACT is.

The second thing that came to mind is that I’m not really sure that it was jealousy. It might simply have been self-preservation. Speaking as someone who seems to be living in the middle of a desert right now. Sandy soil, no rain fall, and inability to grow trees and plants and a constant fight for water, I can see that someone without vision could get angry at being forced to live in such a deadly place. Certainly they should have the opportunity to move into better territory.

But mostly, I just can’t help thinking that nobody ever gets it. I just finished making this rant to my ex partner. My leg problems come from people who can’t stop staring at me and wanting to cause pain. My issues with all of my neighbors come from their inability to stop staring at me and wishing to cause me pain. Is it just anti-semitism? Is it just that I refuse to join their most ridiculous group? Is it jealousy? Are they jealous of my being an American and what everyone feels are great advantages that I have that they don’t?

A couple of years ago it occurred to me that I was quite content with god/nature. I was absolutely okay with the mathematics that God equals nature and nature equals God. If you say this and then you start telling stories about people who go against God, who go against nature, for greed or jealousy or for whatever reason they neglect life in an area, the world just opens up and swallows us whole. Instead of living in a land of milk and honey, we are creating for ourselves a desert where nothing will grow. A place so desecrated that you can’t even go swimming in the water without catching a disease. And a place so diseased, that you can’t even greet friends without getting sick from their presence.

Is it too difficult to understand that global pandemics are a part of globalism generally? Is it too difficult to understand that when we completely ignore regionalism or allow people to have individual agency and a vested interest in their lives and their places and their families and their neighbors, we not only burn uselessly fossil fuels but also destroy the very fabric that keeps us together. 

Is it any Wonder that so much pollution has caused the problem in the water systems? Is it even difficult to understand that the natural Way of the planet, the way that has allowed our species and every other living species to live is leaving very, very rapidly?

So, you have this guy and he just starts talking about how he knows better what people should do. This shiny suit fast talker glad-hander starts telling people that he knows better and that history is just fake news. In the Bible, they just simply tell everybody to get out of the way and a hole opens up and they just drop into it and that’s that. And then they take stock of everyone who had been infected, and everybody got sick from listening to stupid information.

No, nobody ever seems to get it. If I say listen to God, people say I’m religious and this is a reason not to listen to me. If I say listen to Nature, they tell me that this never works because nobody will listen and it goes against the economy. What I’m telling you is God is nature and nature is God and going against one means going against both. And both actions are more than dicey and the plagues and the drought and the global ecological catastrophe that we are all living with right now stems from our own jealousy and stupidity and failure to be respectful where respect is required.

I’m sorry but if you can’t see this, if you don’t get what I’ve been trying to say now for 3 million words, you’re just not one of the good guys. I hate to be the one to break your bubble. But if you really don’t get it by now, you’re taking us all down to hell with you. Perhaps a little reflection might be in order.

***

Okay, let’s make this the last entry of the week.

My ex-partner just got in a cab to go back to town. Resources wasted because I couldn’t make myself get back on a bicycle this morning. If I told you the cost in dollars or rubles you might say that it wasn’t so bad. If we did the mathematics on ownership of a car and all the gasoline and oil and repairs and tires and insurance that one must pay in order to have the pleasure of working for the oil business, you might say that it’s a pittance. Was it an emergency? For sure but it’s not an emergency. I just couldn’t bring myself to do the work of riding a bicycle through all of that sand to make another trip to the market to buy another piece to make this well work for me.

Maybe I could make myself feel better and say that it’s my first year of genuinely working this system. Next year I will know more. In this case, the check valve problem came because I just didn’t really know the word. Of course I understood the concept, I just didn’t have the word in my vocabulary. I know I’ve lived here for a long time but technically, I’ve never worked as a mechanic here. I do perhaps 80% of the work to keep my bicycle going and truthfully, I’ve designed every bit of water system that I have here. I just didn’t install my own electricity and I didn’t put the gutters on the barn. I just made sure that I was harvesting rainwater when it came and kept my eye on how much electricity I was using to stay warm and functioning in the winter.

Обратный клапан. That’s what it’s called in Russian. Once I had those words, everything else was easy. Well, it was easy and then it wasn’t.

We drained the well twice today. We used a little more than one bucket to water the field. My ex partner is a little more conscientious than I am. She works slower and makes sure that everything gets their drink. I’m not horrible at watering but I’m a bit more brutal. I have a harder time doing the job itself. It gets frustrating sometimes.

The third time we went back to the well we couldn’t get the pump moving again. I was right back to yesterday all over again. The same problem. Open the caps, prime the pump, check the system, close the caps, start the pump… and nothing.

On my third attempt the idea came into my mind that something was getting into the check valve. We pulled it out of the water and took it apart and sure enough, the thing was filled with sand. I have sand in my well. I washed out the check valve and blew on it from both sides. One side allowed me to go in there and the other side was restricted, just what it should be. But we never did get it started again.

I took apart the entire system looking for some small thing that perhaps I had missed but we couldn’t get it to draw any more water. Where I sat here doing this for 4 hours yesterday, my ex partner sat around for two today trying to get this last third well draining done. Nothing. No dice. No water. No nothing.

The culprit was sand. When the pump was working, sand was going through and into the bottom of the hose. I blew both the hose and the valve clean and washed it out with water. It still wouldn’t work the third time.

Then we both said fuck it and called yet one more taxi cab to take her home and that was the end of the day.

I’ve got a dough ball to make flatbreads out of. I’ve got some greens and vegetables to make some kind of a sauce out of. I’m not very hungry to be honest with you. I ate a pretty good sized breakfast and my ex partner brought some strawberries from her family as a gift. I don’t feel really hungry at all. But maybe I can make a couple of flatbreads and throw some veggies in the blender to get some kind of a gazpacho. Fresh cold green soup with fresh bread and some greens, why is that so bad? I think that sounds pretty good to me. Say a prayer, have something nice to eat and let the gentile world go for a little while.

Don’t think I’m a pure racist for saying this. Jews are as much part of the pollution problem as anybody else. Jews are just as easily swayed by jealousy as anybody. Of course, I could blame the gentile world for the corruption of the Jews but really, that would be too idealistic to even hope for any truth in it. We’re all to blame. We are all stupid drug addicts, selfish reprobates, hateful money grubbing whores blindly grasping for every possible Penny we can find. There is no panacea. There is no group to join. There is no flag to wave.

I am going to take my day off though. I am going to say a prayer, eat a nice dinner and let the world go for a while. Truthfully, I’ve had enough. I’m beat to shit and shot to pieces. I just want to get off my feet and close my eyes for a while. Thanks for listening to me.