Thursday, July 14th 2022
Sorry about this. It’s a random thought that for some reason stuck in my head as making some kind of elegant sense. I personally don’t understand it but obviously someone does. It’s a strange sort of math. I mean, I think sometimes I just want to hang around the planet long enough for someone to explain it to me in a way that I’d actually understand it. I mean, in a way that genuinely made sense.
I guess I have one more thought here. I had a conversation with a friend about veganism. And again he told me all the usual arguments that people say. I personally think it’s an addiction. Meat I mean. I don’t think it’s human food at all or appropriate for our species. But the thing is, both drug addicts and meat eaters have a tendency to justify their behavior. Words are easy. I can attest to that. Words are genuinely easy.
But let’s say a picture is worth a thousand words. So before I get on with my day here, let me introduce you to a carnivore and then you can tell me all about how close you are.
Personally, I like dogs. They say they are man’s best friend. If your dog is your best friend, you’re not a carnivore.
***
Yeah, it’s about 6:30 and I am getting up and starting to move. I’m not sure how big of a day today is. I know I have to do some watering in the afternoon. Yes, we did get that nice storm and everything got nicely wetted down. But it was the only day out of the three that was predicted where we actually got rain. It’s been cool and cloudy which is nice and comfortable I guess. But no water which means I’m back to watering again.
The weather report, which is turning out to be one of the most useless apps I have, says that we are getting some more rain tomorrow. This would be perfect for my schedule. I do not expect nature to follow my schedule. I’m just saying that I take a day off on Saturday and all this means is that if the weather report is wrong again, I have to water two days in a row. The plants won’t mind and neither will I. It’s just more work to do.
I’m pretty sure Lena is coming by in a short period of time which is the main reason I have to get up. The house could use a bit of a clean. The floors definitely need it. I don’t take off my shoes coming and going. I’m sure in the town this is a typical Russian tradition to take off your shoes when you come into a house. I’m sure there are people here who do take off their shoes. I don’t and consequently, it means you have to clean the floors pretty regularly.
I’ve already got breakfast waiting for me. More soaked porridge. I’ve been eating this every day and I think it’s having a positive effect on me. It’s probably very healthy for you and it tends to fill me up and give me a very solid feeling going into my days. I’ve been eating cooked food in the evening most of the time but I like starting the day with this.
What else? Nothing else really. I’ve got a few things to do. It’s definitely a day I have to pay attention to the garden. So let’s go do it. I have no philosophy more important to share.
***
This week’s Torah portion is called Balak (בָּלָ֖ק). The word Balak is the name of the king of Moab and the beginning of this week’s portion is about how he decided to deal with this impressive Force that was now the children of Israel.
So Balak saw how many Israelites were getting close to his country and determined that they would eat him out of house and home. So he sent Messengers to Balaam, the head guy in Pethor and asked him for help in dealing with his problem. Specifically he asked him to send troops to help him out and to curse the Israelites because he believed that who was blessed would succeed and who was cursed would fail. Balaam had the ability to talk to God and he said that he would get back to them the next day. When he did, it appears that God told him that the children of Israel were already blessed. Bad news for Balak.
Not dismayed, Balak started sending higher and higher emissaries to talk to Balaam but no matter what bribes were offered, he would not budge.
However, we then run into an interesting moment at numbers 22:20-22:
20 God came to Balaam at night and said to him, “If these men have come to call for you, arise and go with them, but the word I speak to you-that you shall do.” 21 In the morning Balaam arose, saddled his she-donkey and went with the Moabite dignitaries. 22 God’s wrath flared because he was going, and an angel of the Lord stationed himself on the road to thwart him, and he was riding on his she-donkey, and his two servants were with him.
Well, over the rest of the third portion Balaam ends up getting into a serious disagreement with the she-donkey. The donkey keeps going off the road and Balaam keeps beating her and screaming at her to stay on the road. They actually get into a verbal spa and it turns out that the donkey was occupied by an Angel of the Lord who then showed up on the road with a flaming sword. Balaam profusely apologizes for any misunderstanding, it certainly must have been his own fault. And then God told him to go ahead on.
All of this confrontation with the donkey made Balaam late for his meeting with Balak, who was now also angry for him not showing up.
But then they went back to the camp and had barbecue for a while but it was all in vain. Again Balaam told Balak that the Lord told him that he had no right to curse the children of Israel and he would not offer any help to the people of Moab.
So Balak told him to take some barbecue with him and walk them up to the top of the hill to show him how many people he was talking about. Apparently barbecue was a well-known way to seal business deals back in the day. Probably still is. But then God appeared and talked to both of the men and they were convinced that they really weren’t dealing with a person here I’m not there was really nothing they could do about it. There was no blessing or curse that could be given. Thanks for the barbecue but my people are not going with you.
In the sixth portion, Balak took Balaam to yet another barbecue joint. Perhaps from this vantage point he would change his mind. But again, despite some really flowery words, there was no possibility to do anything against the children of Israel. He then went on to explain the strategy of the misery that was coming. He was quite detailed about where the attacks would be. After this, he said there was no more advice that could be given and Balaam went on his way.
At this point, as you’d expect, the war was another lay down and Israel moved to 3-0-1 in League Play. But here is where we learn a bit of a lesson about discipline. Right in the middle of the last portion at the beginning of numbers:25, it turns out that the Israeli army was prone to partying a little bit too much after their victories. They started having some barbecue parties with the daughters of Moab and apparently the Lord got angry at them. Can’t blame him a whole lot and seriously, you’d think they would have seen it coming already.
Well, by this point and especially after all of this barbecue, God got a little bloodthirsty and ordered all of the partiers hung. And when a couple of people came to apologize, bringing their women with them and saying that it wasn’t just all barbecue and sex party, they actually wanted genuine relationships with these fine women. They started picking up Spears and stabbing everybody.
Kind of a bloodthirsty mess.
I am being a little facetious in using the words barbecue here. What I’m calling barbecue is known as altar building and sacrificing animals. I’m assuming that they were eating the meat and therefore my take on this is my take on me eating generally. I believe it creates aggressive behavior, poor critical thinking skills and a genuine strain on our digestive systems. We are not supposed to be eating meat as a species regardless how pleased we are of ourselves for having mastered the art of self delusion.
I have told and retold the story of how I came to be a dedicated vegan many times. I believe I’ve also made it clear that I practiced vegetarianism and even veganism several times for long periods of time over the course of my life. Vegetarianism at least was a completely normal way for me to live. But then I would fall and revert to eating meat until the next time I caught a glimpse of the truth.
The difference this time was that I started out looking for solutions to potential heart problems. My father suffered his first heart attack at about my age a few years ago and that was about the only thing I didn’t want to happen. I wasn’t particularly happy with my life but I genuinely thought adding heart problems to everything would probably have been the end of it.
As soon as I started though, using the University of Google as a base, veganism showed itself to be the most logical answer. Removing saturated animal fats from your diet would remove a great deal of cholesterol, plaque and other arterial blockages. Take away the things putting stress on your heart and you have less heart disease. It seemed pretty mechanical to me and I liked this explanation of good health much more than the people that tell you to eat bacon.
But like Dr Greger says, “let’s put it to the test!”. Sure enough, almost immediately I noticed that my ability to work out, ride bicycles or do almost anything doubled or even tripled. My ability to recover from serious work also went off the charts. I also found, ironically enough, that my capacity to study and learn also doubled or tripled. Going this direction seemed to feed on itself and suddenly I was in the midst of a fit of clarity.
Whoever those people were who told us that we can be in love with bacon really need to be talked to for all the damage they caused. There is no way that doing something that was doubling your strengths and intelligence could be seen as bad or that going in the opposite direction. I’m feeling your heart with cholesterol and your system with fat could be good for you. Well, unless you truly believe that slavery is the correct way to live your life. If so, please enjoy your stupidity.
The other day I asked a question about whether meat was responsible for human aggression and I got a positive answer back. Why would this be so? Well, to me it’s the addition of the strain on your system which would make you look for quick fixes to make yourself feel better. Obviously killing an opponent is much easier than making deals with them. And then of course there is the egotism that comes along with this sort of laziness. When you feel fat and lazy and satisfied, it probably does something to you. Firstly, it’s probably an extremely addictive feeling as would be the strain on your digestive system. Also probably addictive is the self delusion. People will believe anything if it comes along with drugs.
All of this is why I have no intention of going back the other way. It took me a long time to get here and I guess I completely understand that when I try to talk to people about this, it’s just one guy saying something and they don’t really understand how much time and effort and study I put into this. They also do not understand all of the people that I read or watched on videos or the medical reports that I read on the subject or those people who wrote these things. Most probably they are not even aware that these things exist because frankly, their internet algorithms allow them to exist on the far side of the spectrum. They live in a place where the people who tell you how good it is to eat bacon are the only voices to be heard.
All of this I guess connects to quite a few things. The history of mankind is intertwined with the history of religion especially over the last 3,000 years. Whatever power this book I have been reading had a few millennia ago, it inspired leadership to make use of this instrument of power. Whether you like it or not or just consider this my opinion, this was the origins of Christianity. Literally, if this first book worked and created such animosity towards leadership, leadership would create its own book.
I don’t want to be disrespectful to Torah study. I don’t want to be disrespectful to the Jewish religion or the people who dedicate their lives to Torah study. I don’t want to be disrespectful to every thing that my people have suffered.
But I cannot agree that the consumption of meat is healthy. No matter how many laws of kosher or whatever feelings of pity or respect for animals and how they are killed or prepared, it seems much easier and much clearer if we just don’t use them. And as concerns the idea of how we live on levels and we see ourselves perhaps as the top of the food chain, to quote my conservative friend, we missed the point that this arrogance is the thing that has genuinely brought almost all of the misery that is in the world now. Our belief that it is correct to have males over females or females over males, whites over blacks, gentiles over Jews, Muslims over this group of people, Chinese over himalayans or Japanese over Koreans, it goes on and on how we search out reasons to hate one another.
Ironically, I ran into yet another Star Trek worth talking about that absolutely and directly relates to this idea. The episode is called “Patterns of Force”. Here is the premise according to Wiki:
The starship Enterprise arrives at the planet Ekos to investigate the disappearance of a Federation cultural observer named John Gill, who was one of Captain Kirk’s history professors at Starfleet Academy. The Enterprise enters orbit around Ekos and is attacked by a rocket armed with a thermonuclear warhead, technology that is too advanced to be from either Ekos or their neighboring planet, Zeon; two very different planets: Ekos is a warlike/anarchist society-while Zeon is a peaceful advanced society.
Kirk suspects Gill may be responsible for the introduction of advanced technology, which would mean that he has contaminated Ekosian culture and violated the Prime Directive. Kirk and First Officer Spock decide to beam down to the planet to investigate. Before they transport to the surface, Chief Medical Officer Dr. McCoy inserts subcutaneous emergency transponders, a type of homing device, into the forearms of each in the event they cannot use their communicators.
Upon their arrival, Kirk and Spock watch in horror as a Zeon is arrested by Ekosian soldiers dressed as brown-shirted Nazi Stormtroopers. An outdoor video newsreel shows an Ekosian rally featuring huge crowds shouting Nazi-style slogans and waving swastika-emblazoned flags. A female Nazi officer, Daras, is shown receiving a medal of honor; the Iron Cross, Second Class. The “Final Solution” is mentioned, meaning apparently the extinction of all Zeons on Ekos, as a prelude to the entire destruction of Zeon. The broadcast ends with the reporter making a Nazi salute to a picture of the Führer—whom the shocked Kirk recognizes as John Gill.
They weren’t bothering to mask anything. The Nazis were called Nazis and though they used the word Zeon (zai-on) instead of Zion to alliterate to the oppressed people, this was exactly persecution of Jews.
The first thing I thought of was the invasion of Ukraine. I mean, I was not oblivious to the Holocaust, I understood that part, but I did relate very much to the Nazi philosophy being applied as a reason to murder ukrainians.
There was one scene a bit later where they managed to capture Spock and the actual brains behind the beginnings of the final solution, some character named Melakon who was actually wielding power and using John Gill for a figurehead, gets a chance to have a good look at the Vulcan played by incredibly Jewish Leonard Nimoy:
MELAKON: What is this?
ISAK: A spy, Excellency.
DARAS: A rare prize. The Deputy Fuhrer can see this is no ordinary Zeon.
MELAKON: No, not a Zeon, definitely not.
DARAS: The Deputy Fuhrer’s an authority on the genetics of racial purity. How would you classify this one?
MELAKON: Very difficult. Note the sinister eyes and the malformed ears. Definitely an inferior race. Note the low forehead, denoting stupidity. The dull look of a trapped animal. You may take him now for interrogation, but I want the body saved for the Cultural Museum. He’ll make an interesting display.
My point exactly. This particular bit of dialogue is aimed at the infuriating stupidity of the study of eugenics.
the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable. Developed largely by Sir Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, eugenics was increasingly discredited as unscientific and racially biased during the 20th century, especially after the adoption of its doctrines by the Nazis in order to justify their treatment of Jews, disabled people, and other minority groups.
And though it is very difficult to be against allowing a certain sense of intelligence to go along with childbirth and mating and partnerships between people, the point is that with the possibility of corruption for the purposes of attaining power, there will be corruption. You can’t offer narcotics and not have it draw practitioners. You can’t put a drug in front of a drug addict and expect them to simply ignore it. And don’t kid yourself, we are all drug addicts.
Hence veganism. Veganism is my answer. I am not alone in this. My opinion is that not only would we do a lot to stop global warming, changing to a plant-based diet would do wonders for World health. It would also free up a lot of farmland that we currently use to raise meat which would allow us to permit reforestation which would be the number one thing we could do to start sequester and carbon out of our atmosphere. We are never going to be able to get rid of the damage that we’ve done but we might allow the natural systems of the Earth to work to cleanse itself. It would also free up a bit more logic and a bit less emotional decision making. It would also take quite a bit of unnecessary emotional aggression out of the world and probably convince us to accept that persnickety commandment about just not killing. It takes the hypocrisy out of it when you stop making exceptions based on levels or hierarchies or other self-delusionments.
In other words, everything positive, nothing negative. Well, the drug addicts will be going through withdrawal for a little while. But that’s what practical education is for. You’d be surprised how good you feel.
Yesterday the cab driver asked me if I’ve ever relapsed in the last 4 years or so. The truth is that I did a couple of times. I let my addiction get the best of me. The thing was that I really didn’t enjoy it. Once you stop, even for a little while, the clarity kicks in and it just no longer seems like something you want to put in your mouth much less your body. The moment you stop believing that meat is food, it just starts looking like dead bodies. Try going to a funeral with an open casket and tell me not you’re not looking at something from the chicken shop. It’s exactly the same. Flesh is flesh.
So today’s Torah portion is about a guy faced with the possibility of War. It seems like fear drives us to do things that we normally wouldn’t do and into making decisions that we normally would never make. We start grasping for straws that we would normally not look for. Perhaps desperate times call for desperate measures but in the end, self-respect is always the first thing to go. Ideology probably falls pretty quickly. Even religion pales in the face of savagery.
Perhaps the world would be better without the barbecue. Perhaps the world would be better without bloodlust generally. Perhaps the world would be better without inflicting pain and suffering on animals. Maybe ceasing and offering some sense of humanity to animals might actually be the beginning of offering humanity to each other.
As opposed to this from Venezia.
***
It’s about noon and I’ve just come back from walking the property. That storm didn’t do very much damage. A couple of our sunflowers started leaning over a bit as did some corn. I just propped them up straight. They’re not really harmed, just got blown over a little bit.
Ignoring the potatoes is always a bad mistake. Two days without paying attention to them and today the kill count was 59 and 2 for potato bugs. Two fell off into the straw below and I couldn’t find them. Actually three fell off but I found the third. I was dexterous enough to get to the other 59.
Did I feel anything as a result of all of this potato bug killing? Yes. I felt two things. The first is the feeling that I have no need to grow potatoes here anymore. I like potatoes just fine but I have no religious attachment to them. I agree, if it was a matter of complete survival, I would be foolish to leave them out. On the other side of the coin, they require more attention because of these potato beetles than almost any other plant and what I get from potatoes is not as much as I get from beans.
The second thing is a need to wash my hands.
The sweet peas are delicious as all sweet peas are. But we don’t really have any volume this year. We planted badly and what we have is coming in. It’s not hard to grow peas. We just didn’t really invest in it as much as we did for cabbages or the pickles.
We have pickles now everyday. They are very tasty and whatever we did to make this box is coming back with very sweet and delectable pickles. I’m not convinced that we are going to have enough pickles to save for winter. This was one of the projects I thought we might be looking forward to. I just don’t think we planted enough to be looking at a lot of kilos. They are probably just going to get eaten fresh and probably that’s good enough.
The zucchini is not doing anything. Those volunteers from last year that we’re so explosive and happy we’re probably sitting on some cow shit. Again, I did not get any. I did want some. I understand all about everything from a vegan perspective but you can’t argue with results. It was just that my neighbors decided not to help me out and so we had to go in different directions. Consequently, I’m not really getting such amazing growth out of them. I’m sure we’ll have some fruit before the season is over. It’s all just very late and so far nothing.
I’ve got quite a few pumpkin flowers though so we will get squash. The same rules apply there. I don’t know what I’m going to do next year. I have to think about that. I have a long time to think about it.
The truth is, there is an enormous amount of food to eat even without using anything we planted in our boxes. The other day I threw an entire beetroot into the blender as part of a smoothie/sauce and it was amazing. But I also used some of the rather infinite horseradish leaves that I have and that was amazing too. Last night’s smoothie / sauce was horseradish leaves and dill, two things that we did not plant at all, just gifts from God, and it was probably the most flavorful blender concoction I’ve made yet. There is absolutely no reason to be afraid of horseradish leaves. They are an excellent source of many vitamins and they are excellent for the digestive system. Fiber for days.
I have plenty of work to do but I could not really bring myself to dive into pulling more weeds. It’s probably not much more than an hour or two’s work and the weather is not bad. I don’t know why I’m shying away from it. Well, that’s not true. My legs are killing me after yesterday. This is the number one thing. My legs are not worth crap these days and they are preventing me from doing a lot of things. Getting up and walking around, even for necessities, are strictly levels of pain and there’s really nothing I can do to even slow that down. It’s just brutality already and it has me glued to my office.
I don’t know, maybe the inspiration will come to me sometime in the next short while and I’ll put on the gloves and go back to weeding the paths and carrying the vegetation over to my new compost pile. This really should get done and I’ll probably be happier doing it today then letting it wait for tomorrow or certainly next week. I just have to motivate myself to do it.
Just one more thing to note. None of my wigwams fell down. I cut these sticks myself out of some of the junk boards that I bought at the beginning of the year. Not one of them fell over in the wind of the storm. Shocking really. you would have thought some of those things would have fallen over but no. In fact, the climbing beans have already started wrapping themselves around the poles happily. Within a month, it should really be something to look at. Again, we are not going to have a massive harvest of beans but we will have beans.
Next year, I’m definitely going to go in a different direction. Hopefully next spring a lot of these physical problems will be behind me. I can only hope and pray about that. But if I have another late winter or early spring opportunity to work on setting up my garden, I will make some improvements and I will learn from some mistakes that I made this year. I won’t make the same mistakes twice.
***
It’s 4:20 and a good time to take a break. I did get inspired and went out for some weed pulling. I’m not sure exactly how effective I was but I made a good solid dent in things. I’m working on clearing the paths through the lentil Garden. As you can imagine, I got remiss. But I’m probably only about a day’s work away. There’s more weed pulling and clearing to do. The land inspector wanted me to cut down some grass near the fence to show a clear property line. Something about her not being able to get it with her camera. Who am I to argue?
Once I get the weeds cleared, it’ll be time to harvest a little bit out of the lentil Garden. Again, this is not a magnificent food haul. We’ve talked about this any number of times and the way to have done these boxes was to simply broadcast and fill up the entire box with beans. At least it would have been ground cover and would have somewhat suppressed the weeds. Even if it didn’t, it would have given us exponentially more plants and potentially a better harvest. We planted in rows as if we were commercial farmers. It was a big mistake.
I very much like the idea of broadcasting when it comes to certain types of vegetables. I’m thinking of peas here especially. You can always thin if it looks like some weak plants are not going to make it. But if you’ve got a limited amount of growing space, you’ve really got to pack your plants in there. Also, I’m not really sure we needed to use our boxes for cabbage. I agree that I created some good soil for them and they are all growing and looking nice. It’s just that they probably belonged in the mid gardens or even down at the bottom. We should have used our box space much more for growing food. Even if we dedicated one box to nothing but strawberries, I think we would have been a lot happier.
But don’t get me wrong. I’m not unhappy. Everyday, I simply walk out of my front door and down to the Garden to come up with a very good percentage of my food. Tonight’s dinner is going to be potatoes and greens and with the exception of the store-bought lentils that I’m throwing in the pot with the potatoes, everything including the water I drink is from my own land. You can’t argue with that. It tastes good, other than the labor, it’s free. And then of course there is some sense of pride and accomplishment. Again, why not?
Also, by the time I was finished with my workout, my legs were feeling quite good. This was a bit of a surprise. I mean, it wasn’t perfect. I did most of the weed pulling on my hands and knees and when it came time for standing up, it was a bloody adventure. But after this, I actually felt pretty good.
I remember spending some time with this English gardener on youtube. I don’t remember her name. In one of her episodes, she explained that she had been suffering from a very debilitating disease that had had her quite broken. She was absolutely sure she was in her last time on the planet and couldn’t hardly get around without crutches. And then she took up gardening and found that spending time in her garden and all of the labor necessary sort of brought her back to health. It was my hope that this would be true for me too.
But maybe it has. I mean, the leg issue is a mechanical one. It’s not necessarily about disease. I mean, it is about disease originally but a little bit of medical Care would probably make things fine within a day or two. But even without it, the ability to go and do some light work out in the garden really does make a little bit of a difference, maybe even a lot. Even an hour spent taking care of the plants seems to mean something. I agree, it’s not native to my soul to be a caregiver. I’m not going to say that this is definitely a woman’s job but I don’t come from a family of gardeners just exactly like I didn’t come from a family of musicians. But now that I’m into it, I do find it rather satisfying.
Maybe the satisfaction doesn’t come from caring for living things. Maybe I’m not a very good doctor because I don’t have both of my feet entrenched in individual humanity. I’m not automatically a bleeding heart for SOB stories. Maybe at one point in my life, I was a little more open and able to be moved by tears and such. You try living in Eastern Europe for 20 years and then tell me how much room you have for SOB stories. This place will suck you dry the moment you agree that you’re interested in drunk conversation. It’s all they do. Really, it’s all they do.
But problem solving works for me. Again and again and again, I really need to keep myself in check money-wise. I just don’t have the funds to beat problems to death with my wallet. I haven’t had this luxury even a single day in the last two decades here. I need to keep reminding myself that we solve problems with ingenuity and hard work.
Thinking about it really, if I had been completely able-bodied, I probably would never have bought a pump and would have simply made it part of my daily chores to carry buckets of water. I still can do this if I really want to. It’s just not a very good idea. I am not a masochist regardless of the opinions of some.
Be that as it may, I have solved a few problems and I’m pretty pleased with myself. I’m not going to give myself a gold medal. Nobody’s going to give me a gold medal for this and certainly not me. But figuring out the water situation pleases me to no end. This Garden that I have, and it’s still not looking so bad, would never be here if I hadn’t collected rainwater. There is no possible way I could have watered this place with well water. And even if I could have come close to that, just doing that would have left me nothing to drink.
On a negative note, I don’t think we’re going to get any broad beans this year. Again, this was a bit of a mistake in planting. We should have doubled or tripled or even quadrupled how many plants we put in the ground. The problem with the broad beans was that exactly at the moment of flowering, this is when the big heat Wave hit and all the flowers got burnt off before the pollinators could be attracted to them. Some of it has to do with bad dirt in the mid gardens. I’ll give you that. But even the broad beans that we threw as extras into the garden boxes all got burnt. It was the same with the potatoes. There was just no real chance for this function to be served because of the heat.
Anyway, I’ve already cleaned up and I’m thinking about making some dinner. A little exercise in the afternoon is good. I absolutely believe that I can get away without watering today. I don’t think anything will suffer if I don’t. They also say that there’s going to be rain tomorrow. This of course doesn’t really mean anything to me but that will absolutely be the last thing I do tomorrow unless we get a substantial amount of rain during the day. I’m taking a day off on Saturday, you know. I always take days off on Saturday. There will be no gardening done on Saturday so, Friday is watering day unless God decides to kick in. I certainly hope he / she / it does.
***
Another day coming to an end here. Whether this was a good day or a bad day, I can’t really say. Lana never showed up this morning. Either she’s sick of it and is not interested in the job or she believes that Friday is our usual day. I’m okay with Friday being our day if that’s the case. It’s the day I need the cleanup the most going into my day off. There’s no clothes to be washed this week though unfortunately so there are no special fees to look forward to. I hope she’s not too disappointed.
I did not water today. All the plants look rather healthy from however much water they’ve gotten in the last few days. Also, though I’m getting tired of even talking about this, all of my weather forecasts say rain tomorrow. I now have four different weather apps and all of them say rain. Good luck with that. If I counted the number of losses combined over all four apps, it’s enough to claim general incompetence to the profession.
Dinner tonight was potatoes and field greens like I said and it was excellent. I didn’t spice it to the end of the Earth but all by itself, it’s amazingly tasty. I can’t stress this enough how lovely it is to have abundant greens. Just the fact that I have so much horseradish growing here and that I enjoy using it for food is an absolute Plus. I don’t know what else to say but God is a better Gardener than I am. Next year, I might not have so many potatoes from my own garden but unless the war screws us all to hell, I can always buy a bag or two and be just fine. This is what most people do and I’ll be grateful if the opportunity presents itself to do exactly that.
I saw a speech by Joe Biden today and I meant to put it here but I didn’t. He was imploring the voters of the United States to keep in mind that if the Democrats could not find a clear majority, at least half the states we’re going to make it incredibly difficult to get an abortion under any circumstances. Why they demand to bring such misery and unhappiness to the world, I’m talking about the Republican conservatives, is beyond my understanding. We are not talking about abusing the medical system, we’re talking about people that don’t want the children they are carrying. I’m sorry but in a world of too many people and a failing ecological system, I am not against population control nor am I against issues of privacy and our rights to do what we want with our own bodies.
But torturing people for the purposes of keeping them crazy is what this power mad ideology is all about. I think if anything, today’s writing is all about that. We started out hearing that people have no problem handing out guns but didn’t want people to have the right to get high if they wanted to. Someone’s going to need to explain that to me sometime though I know they can’t. There is no justification for it except that certain people feel they have the right to dictate moral policy on others. And once it’s understood that the possibility of acquiring power to do such things is available, there is no problem finding people who want to climb in and drink from that well.
I still get trolled by conservatives. They are the trolls by the way. This is something that I’ve come to understand very well. It’s not that Democratic liberals are automatically kind although it does seem that they are people who tend towards kindness towards others. But the entire idea of throwing monkey wrenches and bringing chaos to people who would prefer to have calm and reasonable existences seems to be what the entire premise is about.
My only question is how we allowed ourselves to get this broken of brain. Why have we allowed ourselves no agency or vested interest? How is it that the idea of democracy could become so perverted that people don’t even understand that they are supposed to vote their own conscience and for their own experience. It seems like there’s no such thing as genuine representative government because there’s no such thing as local government anymore. Everywhere and everything is controlled by the center and no communities are genuinely allowed any vested interest. And of course they never stop having war.
When I was in college there was a moment where I thought I had gotten my girlfriend pregnant. We had not done anything to create babies. I had been as perfect as I could about my side of things. It wasn’t any profound argument for either of us. We liked each other or loved each other and we liked having sex together. It seemed to make both of us happy and keep us together. At the same time though, neither of us was ready for the responsibility of children. Perhaps I never became as responsible as people might want me to be but I was all in for my children when that was the situation.
In that moment when we thought that we might have a mistake on our hands, there was no doubt in my mind that we should not have this kid. There was no desire to tear both of our lives down and force us into economic slavery, which is the absolute purpose of this you must understand. Don’t think anybody makes laws like this unless they see profitability in it. Neither of us wanted our ability to finish school changed. It wasn’t that I was raping the girl, I was just having safe sex and enjoying the relationship for what it was.
It turns out that she wasn’t pregnant. We dodged a bullet. But I can’t even imagine what such a thing would have been like if there were laws against abortions. This wasn’t the case where she intentionally tried to get pregnant as a way to hold on to me. Don’t think that that doesn’t happen. And we were not trying to start a family. We were just doing what people want to do. But if there were laws that said she had absolutely no choice but to go full term, it would have ended both of our college educations. At the least, it would have put us years behind other people if that is important to think about. It also would have put us in other people’s hands, people we did not want touching us. Here I’m talking not only about the government but also family members who eventually turned out to be the absolute wrong choice for any of this. In other words, it would have been nothing but misery and we would have paid the price for simply having sex with someone we loved.
In his speech, Joe Biden talked about a 10-year-old girl who got raped and yet had no way to stop the pregnancy. A 10-year-old girl getting raped and she has no right to have a doctor terminate a pregnancy that her body probably would not handle very well. Can you imagine the shortsightedness of such a thing? To put layers of governmental bureaucracy in the way of a 10 year old girl and her right to try somehow to have a decent and reasonable life? Can you imagine the pure evil of people who demand such situations?
My conservative friend went back to his argument that we have the teeth of carnivores because we use them to tear flesh off of Bones. He was talking about eating ribs, covered in sugary tomato sauce and cooked until there was no tension whatsoever left in the meat. We have been friends for a long time and I have respected him for many many years for being a man of character and one who shows up to his job without question. At the same time, it’s hard for me to respect his ideology. He just doesn’t really think beyond himself because absolutely nothing in his life has led him to require any such thinking. He has been working for money for three decades and knows no other thought other than that.
We are talking about a damaged civilization. We are talking about listening to gibberish as gospel. We are talking about cruelty practiced unilaterally for the purposes of profitability and causing pain. We are in error and we need to hit the reset button bad.
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