Wednesday, July 6th 2022

It’s 8:15 and I’m waiting for the rain. I understand that I’m becoming obsessed. You have to understand my point of view. I just keep looking at these things we have asked to grow. They don’t look happy at all. There’s just not enough water to support them. Perhaps I’ve been too cheap with my own efforts and maybe I should be just watering every day. I just don’t seem to have the capacity to do this. There’s just not enough water here to give the plants what they want.

If the bottom line is that this was a failed endeavor simply because I chose a place that could not sustain this particular project, well, maybe that’s my bad. But then again, maybe what I wanted to do was not at all far-fetched for this region and all I’ve done is plant very normal things that people plant all the time and there’s just a different world to live in now.

Here is where the entire box of worms gets opened again and again. I came here and bought this house and told people that I wrote and that I taught and that my biggest interest in the world was climate change, ecology, global warming and doing things to hold water to help stop what was obviously becoming a desertification problem. And they just screamed and laughed at me and berated me and isolated me and objectified me and insulted me and tried to steal from me and literally called the cops on me. It is unbelievable to my mind that I should say something like this to people, I’m an ecologist and to have their answer be absolutely insanely violent. If not physically violent then at least psychologically violent. On me and on themselves.

And this is what has me doing all of this crazy dot connecting. What has happened to our planet that we cannot react to genuine existential dangers? What exactly have we done to ourselves and for what reason have we done it that we have gotten so far away from the basics of sustaining life?

Probably it starts with religion frankly. I really am trying very hard not to offend my friends in the Jewish community but what used to be an argument about belief? Whether I truly believed in the concept of God as presented by the Jewish religion, now our basic argument seems to come down to whether or not human beings are animals. Maybe this is the actual core of the argument. Why is it so difficult and so insulting to understand that human beings are animals?

I mean, the arguments are there? All independent living things eat and shit and piss and breathe, right? We have this in common with pigs, horses, insects, birds, fish and all other things that are animated and move around on this planet. Some eat meat and others do not. 

But we could consider the traits of those who eat meat, the flesh eaters, and the herbivores on the truthfully, our physiology so, so, so much more follows the traits of herbivores that it would not even be an argument. It is what we are as a species. We are herbivorous creatures who dabble in omnivoreism as a drug habit. I have no other way to think about it except that meat to us is digestible if processed in a particular way but the result is insanity. 

That’s right. This is my opinion. Meat is insanity to us. I don’t care how normal you believe it is or what the popularity numbers are, I’m saying that all of the concepts that people believe make life worth living are in complete opposition to the concept of eating flesh. If the thing we want most in the world is love and acceptance, if it is the natural driving force of our innocence to join and be accepted and be loved and to give love, this is the polar opposite of committing murder. And make no mistake, to eat meat requires murder.

But yet we cannot consider ourselves animals. We say “look at our clothing. We wear clothes and animals do not wear clothes.” True. But take off your clothes and what do you have? 

All of this delicacy and grandeur that we feign. We are like royalty. We desire our leisure Time. We desire our parties and our drunken flights of Fancy. We enjoy the luxuries afforded our wealth. Seriously darling, money is the only thing that is important. When you have money, you can enjoy your life.

What do you do to enjoy yourself? You take drugs. It’s the only thing anyone does to enjoy themselves. Even if you don’t like the concept of taking drugs because you equate it with people who take extremely debilitating substances like heroin or incredibly cheap garbage like crack cocaine or methamphetamine, even if you consider yourself above This, what about smoking? What about alcohol? What about playing games on your computer? What about sugar? What about meat? 

What about gambling? What about guns? What about social networks? What about coffee? What about factory foods? What about sugar? What about cafes? What about pizza or hamburgers or any fast food for that matter?

What about all of these things that we do to numb ourselves, to please ourselves, to make some isolated moment of our life less than painful? What about everything we do to take our mind off of our problems, to take ourselves out of our reality, to take the pain of Life away?

We just play with ourselves. It’s all we do, day and night. And if what I was saying was not true, we would not have a porn industry. We would not have tiktok or Instagram or Facebook. We would not have fast food restaurants, the Auto industry or War. Drugs for rich people.

To me, what all of this means to me is only that we don’t seem to understand that we are animals and that our basic need is simply to live. Like all animals, we need to rest and to heal and then we need to eat something. Other than that, there’s not really much to do except shit piss and fuck.

However, let’s just say that we have a different sense of community or at least the potential for a different sense of community. Let’s just say that we have discovered the intellectual possibilities of mathematics, the empirical evidence of science, the great possibilities of understanding life on the atomic level and have even discovered the secrets of chemistry and at least an inkling of the understanding of the universe that we live in. Let’s just say that somewhere along the way, we figured a few things out.

So all I am really saying is, if we as simply one of the species of Life on this planet have evolved our intelligence to the point of rational understanding of the stuff of life, couldn’t we perhaps find something purposeful to do with ourselves other than self-gratification on all levels of the human spectrum? Couldn’t we stop believing that the color of our skin makes any bloody fucking difference to the nature of our characters? Couldn’t we get beyond this ridiculous concept of belief in mysticism to the point that we could just function societally?

What I’m saying is, why couldn’t Russia just challenge Ukraine to an all-out War in soccer, hockey and basketball? Why couldn’t they just arrange a tournament in non-lethal combat to decide whatever genuine problems exist between them? Why doesn’t the necessity of making money for the oil business precede all possibilities of human life? Why does the religious heritage of an elected leader of a country dictate and demand unilateral murder of the civilian population and disbursement of 20% of the country?

Why have so many of my friends felt the need to leave? I understand that I have been teaching English here since I’ve been here and so most of my friends and acquaintances are those who came to me for help to learn English. I understand that this would disproportionately mean that people who are my friends are generally those who want out. But now it seems that everybody has left and those who have stayed are the most miserable people I’ve ever seen in my life. Why are we so antagonistic to life that there is no place for anyone unless you enjoy social position that allows you to torture others?

You see, this is what I’m talking about. I just want some clean water. I just want to drink clean water. I just want to enjoy the weather. I just want some clean air to breathe. I just want some quiet. I just want the noise to stop. I just want people to stop bothering me and pestering me and harming me and looking for ways to manipulate me. I’m just tired of being around starving people. And don’t kid yourself, my American friends are worse off than people here by a long shot. I don’t know even a single person from the United States of America who is not so tight you could play a drum solo on them. Do not kid yourself that America is such a wonderful place because I don’t know a single American who is not completely insane trying to keep their lives together.

I don’t understand the argument. We’re just animals. All of us. Those people in the ruling class eat, shit, piss, fart, get heartburn and headaches and catch nasty diseases just like the rest of us. We all live a human life and then we die at the end of it. There’s no difference in any of us regardless of geographic location except perhaps the color of our skin and our particular history of torture.

And because we cannot fathom this one simple concept, we are animals, we are herbivorous animals, we are communal communicative herbivorous animals, we are destroying our environment. We are destroying this one single known planet that we can survive on. We are destroying our home if we haven’t completely destroyed it already.

This is all I’m trying to say. This is all I’ve been saying for about 3 million words now. This is all I’ve been saying for two and a half years. I’m going to die saying these words.

Nobody wants to live here. We are miserable in our homes. We are miserable in our home because we have made our home unlivable.

And it seems that everything growing here on my little parcel of land agrees with this. Everything I put in the ground needs to be on artificial respiration because the environment is not strong enough to support life here. There’s not enough rain for the region, the sun is too hot, there’s too much garbage in the sky. We are drying out and dying and this is seeable, understandable and knowable if you just shut the fuck up and have a look for yourself.

***

Right. Well, the ex partner is coming up for a visit. The rain refuses to come down. I haven’t been outside yet but I’m on my way now. I guess we’re going to plant some lavender today and maybe do some light work in the boxes. They are definitely, definitely, definitely promising rain today. I downloaded even a few more weather apps and it seems that it’s raining all over the place but I can’t believe any of this anymore. The meteorological understanding of the weather is just no longer applicable. They need to jack up the standards. There’s too much pollution in the sky. The water simply can’t fall because the clouds are sticky with the shit we have put into them. And if this is not the truth, I would Gamble that I’m close enough to the truth for rock and roll.

I’ve got some uncooked breakfast waiting for me. I would happily share it with my ex partner but she doesn’t like eating my food. I’m not going to get into the concept of snobbery or hypocrisy, I’m happy for the help and the company. I’m sure we’re going to have a nice day today.

Other than this, there’s really not that much to talk about.

I mean, I’m not going to apologize for my choices. I am not going to discount my thinking and say that I was insane or drunk or making poor decisions because of this or that. As far as I am concerned, I have been wide, wide, wide awake for quite some time and I am completely happy with the logic of my decision making. If I am less than palatable for other’s consumption, I feel no compunction to alter my line of thought to become more popular with anybody. If you don’t like the harshness with which I look at the world, if you’re less than happy with all of this math, you should look at yourself for a while. Maybe it’s time for all of us to take a step out of the insanity and ask ourselves what we really need to live.

What do I need today? Not bloody much. I wish not to harm myself or anybody else. I wish for maybe a little intimacy with my ex partner. Maybe a few laughs would be nice. And of course we can make a dent on keeping the garden orderly. I don’t really think we will find the effective conversation that allows us to actually logically work together as a team. We don’t have that conversation which is the reason I call the woman my ex partner. But you should not look a gift horse in the mouth and I’m grateful to have such a friend.

So she’s on her way up by bicycle, the party will get started probably within an hour or an hour and a half. I think I’m going to grind up some sunflower seeds and Dill and have some breakfast.

Other than this, we can turn on the rain anytime now. Anytime you want to let the rain fall is okay by me. I’ll take as much as you will give me. In fact I’m asking, please, Let It rain.

***

I’m just taking a little break from the work right now. It’s a quarter to three and it’s been delightfully overcast all day. Very cool. Not cold. Just know brutal sun beating down on you or the plants. Everybody has energy today. Everybody is taking a break and relaxing.

Started with a long conversation with my ex partner that came to nothing in the moment and will come to nothing in the future. I don’t even know why we bother with these things. It was not a fight. It was mostly just statements made on my part about what is reality and what is not and the amount of work that needs to be done to do the gardening that’s been set up. Nobody was making accusations. Nobody was calling anyone guilty of any infractions. It’s just a matter of exactly how many battles need to be fought and how daunting it is without any help, especially from the one who wanted most of this annual human torture food.

I don’t want to be nasty. There’s no reason for it. In fact, there have been a few delights today which I am so happy to have been a part of. I ate my first sweet peas today right off the vine. If you are reading me and you have never experienced eating live food, you don’t know what you’re missing. It was one of those vegetable orgasms. Seriously, peas are such a remarkably wonderful human food. They give us so much that we need, they are very easy to grow, they grow in absolute abundance and literally from the moment the pods appear, they are completely edible. They are better with fruit inside but literally, it’s just wonderful food. Next year peas will be grown  here in great abundance in a different location. By that I mean I’m going to happily dedicate a box to them.

I also got a chance for something completely new for me and I ate a few green lentil pods. Specifically, they were chickpeas. Unbelievably delicious. Whatever that taste is that you look forward to from lentils or chickpeas, absolutely bright and fresh right in the pod.

I should probably add a few words here about eating raw food in the summer. If you like to believe that you are a carnivore in some way, I definitely think you are missing the point. Veganism is not a fad nor is it a protest. It probably gets considered a lifestyle if it’s balanced against people who eat meat. I’m not asking for a popularity contest I’m just making a statement. You feel something. You feel something like an internal strength. I might be over stating this because my ex partner is hanging around and she is definitely adding energy to the exercise today. I’m just saying that there is a feeling of cleanness, a sharpness or a sense of definite reality. I have a lot of raw energy today. Okay, I’m kind of sitting on the couch in the office right now and typing out these words instead of gardening so maybe I’m a hypocrite. I’m just saying that I highly recommend it especially in the warm weather.

I was on my way back to the house and I got even One More beautiful Surprise and our first pickles are coming in. The first taste was like butter. An absolutely delicious cucumber. It is so nice to actually have some human food available. I was just grinding on how little the payback for all of this work is and then, as soon as I finished talking, the garden fed me.

My ex partner is working on the mid gardens. I am up near the house cleaning spaces to plant lavender in. We have finally agreed on a good location for at least most of the little plants that have been waiting for a home. We are not going to be in the middle of the field. We are going to plant along the edges and fence lines and next to the foundation of the house. Perhaps in the future some of these places will lose out sunlight when the trees and the grapevines come in. But in the interim, we get to enjoy lavender, its flowers and all of the positive properties that come with it.

We have different philosophies of gardening, my ex partner and I. I am very deliberate and purposeful. I am also ruthless when it comes to moving things. She is more nurturing and takes a moment to fluff up all of the plants. She gets caught up in Weeds growing in the past and I just go straight to removing what’s not needed and leaving what is.

My favorite tool for weeding right now is a bread knife. It is already dull from use in the land and against roots and stems. But it is a great instrument for clearing a place of weeds. It is as exact as a knife literally and is able to deal with grasses and other things very easily at the root level. Reading about Japanese gardening tools showed me that they have something called a hori hori knife, a garden trowel with a serrated edge. I understand the thought completely and a bread knife does exactly the same work.

She likes to work with her hands. She puts on a pair of gloves and gets her hands into the soil and likes to touch everything for herself. I do too but I like having the weapon simply for the effectiveness of it. It’s much more work working with your hands.

I would not say that we have gotten enough rain to make a difference. The barrels down under The Barn are pretty much full. I pulled a dead bird out of the main barrel. He had already started to go bad and there was a bit of a stink in the water. Luckily, it’s not for us. It’s just something to feed the plants with.

And how nice and moist everything is today means that I can get away with not watering tomorrow if I don’t want to. Maybe I will just to be sure. The real watering day will be Friday. I’m pretty sure that Fridays are always going to be watering days especially if I plan on taking Saturdays off.

That’s all I have to say for now. I’m a little bit tired and we’re getting late in the day and I still have a few more meters of garden space to clear for the lavender. I think maybe I’ll close my eyes for 15 minutes and then get back out into it. I’m pretty tired but it’s nothing like when the sun is beating us to death. Days like today when it’s cool and overcast are perfect for working outside. Good weather, some company and some help I’ll make for a perfect storm. Today is a good day.

***

It’s a quarter to 9:00 and here’s the wrap up for the day. My ex partner is staying over the night. We have done very good work between us. We cleaned out all the mid gardens very well. I’ve made space for the lavender plants around the front of the house, at least half of the job. These are not the most wonderful garden spaces nor do they have the best soil but I understand that lavender just likes a lot of sun and doesn’t care how Sandy the land it lives on.

We took a break after 4:00 and my ex partner did some cooking. She made a lovely salad, cut up some zucchini and did something like dry marinating it with some vinegar and some of my mustard. Pretty tasty. I had my first cooked food in a couple of days which tasted just wonderful. It was the same as I’ve been eating without cooking it but still, a little digestion doesn’t really hurt the taste buds. And then hoping to find one last bit of work to do, We got down into the root cellar and found two large baskets of the largest and most edible potatoes I had left. The rest are going into a bag on Friday morning and get shipped off to one of our friends who has animals and chickens and doesn’t care too much about the quality of potato that she feeds them.

It was a good day. The gardens look nice now that they’ve been weeded and it is true, the plants you want to grow do better once they’ve had their adversaries removed. Of course this is a plus-minus question because there are certain mineral changes that happen and of course the amount of water transferred down into the root system also changes. But this is human gardening.

We had a long talk about how much work this place requires. True, we knocked out most of the things that needed to get done today. We probably did about 85% of all of the direct food related work. This is not true if we count the lentil Garden. That is very weedy but then again, we already have lentils in pods out there so they really are just doing their thing.

The big argument is just about how many adversaries I have and what the world does to me when I’m out here on my own. I’m not going to lie, there was a lot of energy here today and it was not only my ex partner who was banging away. There are plenty of excuses I could make about the heat over the last week or so or about how nice it was today with all of that cloud cover and cooler temperatures. It is a lot easier to throw yourself into physical labor on a cool day than it is on a super hot day.

The question in the air though was whether or not all of this human food was worth it. My ex partner brought some food from the market up with her. True, the salad she made came somewhat from my garden. But it also had avocados and tomatoes in it.

The point is that I’m not really a full-on farmer here. I’m not looking to do any commercial growing. Maybe somewhere in the future I will feel that I have some level of expertise and try to acquire more land. Now it’s just extra. But it’s a genuine question about how much I’ve invested and what my return on the investment will be this year.

My original plan was not to care too much about all this annual people food. If I want annual people food, I can go out and buy it inexpensively and locally just like everyone else. I wasn’t trying to hit some percentage of my diet. And if you really want to know the truth, I did plant a lot of potatoes last year, these are still the potatoes that were eating now or I’m eating anyway, and though there was a period of time last year where maybe 75% of my diet was zucchinis and potatoes, we really didn’t have to do so much extensive work for what we’re getting back. I’m talking about building the boxes and filling the boxes and of course all the work that is required to care for these things.

The truth is that all of this human food, the beats and the cabbages and the carrots and such, they really don’t want to just live. They require a great deal of care in order to become some amount of food that can be consumed. Growing wild here, I don’t know how many kilos of horseradish leaves I’ve eaten but I don’t remember becoming sick because I ate them. I frankly was very happy to have a tremendous amount of greens lying around that I could have as much as I wanted. And that I did not need to do a damn thing to take care of them. Just walk out on the field and take him home with me. The same is true for saltbush. This morning, I had another green smoothie or perhaps it was a salad dressing but I didn’t feel it with a lot of spinach, just a good solid Dill plant, the entire stock and leaves and flowers, and seven or eight saltbush plants where all I did was cut away the root. Everything, leaves, seeds and stock went into the blender and it’s arguable whether or not that contributed to how much energy I had or have these days.

Of course there are certain things that are gigantic and wonderful producers. Eating those sugar peas right off the plant was an absolute highlight. Knowing that we can get something out of lentil plants was an absolute positive. And of course there has been a lot of salad and onions and Dill available. We have lots of stuff here.

The point is though that it is only wonderful if I am in love with the service. If I enjoy making myself of use in fighting back nature so that these particular plants can live, it’s all justified. Because this is the real argument. It is whether or not I get something positive from either having the work to do or doing the work. If you are someone of this mind, and this region has produced many many many people who believe that this work is the stuff of life and even the reason to live in the old age, of course it’s worth it. And on a day like today, maybe it is.

There is though that other side that says I have no idea why I’m fighting nature. I was pretty content just living on a meadow and getting to know all of the native species that like to grow here. There are signs that the forest will eventually take us over and I have a thought in my head that this might be the greatest thing that could ever happen. Last week when the temperatures went way too high and everything went way too dry for this region, a lot of stuff that I have wanted to quit living. I sensed this and felt it too.

Of course it’s nice to have my ex partner around. She is into Russian agro-culture and loves this work very much. Not enough to quit her job though. That’s still 50/50. She doesn’t want to throw in and just be a partner on this. She likes dictating policy from a distance and being a hero sometimes. Like I said, 50/50. She likes it better like this.