Sunday, July 17 2022. Week 28

That’s 27 weeks in the bag and 18 weeks to go. 45 weeks. This is my third year. I haven’t counted the words yet this year. Maybe I should but I haven’t. Maybe I should… 

No, not right now. Too much work. Besides, I basically know the number already. 2 years ago, I broke it down into five books about the upcoming elections. It was 270 entries or essays and the total word count came to a little bit more than 700,000 words. I don’t remember the actual number. I could look it up. Last year the eventual count came to about 1.6 million. I was doing Volume last year. I kept a very specific ledger account and every week when I finished, I would put the actual number in and measure it on a ledger sheet. It didn’t matter much but that’s what happened.

This year, just by experience, I can see that my volume is down quite a bit. About the only discipline that I’m practicing is showing up every day and trying to get to the end of the page. I know that’s a weird affectation and it probably plays with my ability to say what I want to say. It also probably says that I’m tired of doing this. I’m not tired because I feel ignored. And I’m not tired because I feel like what I’m saying is not worth saying. But maybe I am really. I’m just tired because it’s a bit repetitious to me. A lot of times I do it just to do it. There’s nothing real going on or anything new happening. It’s just putting words on paper already.

Again though, I don’t have any negative feelings about all of this work. If I were on the outside looking in, I’m sure I could troll the living crap out of myself. I could say a lot of terrible things about this effort to diminish it or make little of it. Anybody could. Trolling is easy. Tearing things down is easy. Building things is the difficult part.

No, I’m proud of this effort. There’s an argument that I have sacrificed a lot by keeping this going. I’m still proud of it. There is a question of people’s opinions of me and how these opinions tend to grow. I’m okay with that. I’m still a bit proud of myself. You could even argue that my format could have been better and I could have tried to be more popular. Blah blah blah, this is what I did, this is what I am still doing and I’m pretty proud of it.

All of these words right here simply go along with the phrase week 28 of 45. Last night, I took another look at the calendar to check what I already knew. We are this week 45 come? When do I get to pack it in for the year?

In my first year, I used the American elections with a couple of weeks of wrap up as The logical end. I started on my traditional day to join the calendar year, this would be just after January 8th or whatever that Sunday was. There is a natural two-week winter holiday here that begins on December 25th Christmas and ends after Russian Orthodox Christmas on the 8th. 2 weeks off basically around New Year’s. In my history as a teacher, this holiday was always relevant with my students because everybody was in Holiday mood. Also, after all the drinking and partying, people started getting serious again about this time so it made it a natural season.

Last year I cranked it up again in January and then just tried to follow the exact same idea of running for 45 weeks. I understand 7 weeks is a pretty good vacation in the winter but it’s not like I’m getting paid for this so I can take as many weeks as I want? I only finished 41 weeks last year though because I ended up in the hospital with a rather severe medical problem. I don’t really care very much about the numbers or the records or the symmetry of any of that. It’s just what happened.

This year I’m planning again on 45 weeks but this year I guess I’m actually following the natural year of our trip around the Sun. I didn’t think about that really when I got started although I began to notice it. This year, I’m completely aware that everything I’m doing connects to the agricultural season and the cycle of life. I am starting at planning stages and I’ll be ending with the field completely buttoned up. 

I guess the truly ironic thing, if it’s even a case of irony, is that the more I have separated myself from life for the purposes of sustaining this writing, the closer I have become connected to the planet because of it. The more I thought about things and searched for the truth about people, life, economics, health and now food, the closer my connection to the planet we live on became and the more disenchanted I have become about human beings. The more I wrote about my subjects, the less I liked the characters.

Ghenna showed up at my fence yesterday calling my name. I never got up. I can’t even tell you how angry I was to have that asshole calling my name on a Saturday. You have to understand, I wasn’t the least bit curious about what he had to say. I had no social compunction to move even a single muscle for his request. There was absolutely nothing he had to offer that I was interested in on a Saturday. I didn’t even want the man touching me.

I just did or said nothing the first time and then for some reason he came back about an hour later and started screaming my name again. This time I actually did move a few muscles for his benefit. I turned around on the chair I was on in my office and raised my left hand with my middle finger standing up long enough for it to register in his head. When I could see some level of surprise on his face at being told to go fuck himself, I then added a dismissive wave telling him to head on down the road and then there was silence again.

Let’s be clear. There is no emergency that this man could be connected to that would require my action. I am not emergency services. I have no medical supplies for anybody who is hurt. I have no apparatus that is different from anyone else who lives nearby. I am not deeply connected to anyone in this village as family and as far as I’m concerned, I take care of me and they take care of themselves and I don’t care for the situation to change. 

For whatever reason he wanted me, we have no personal relationship whatsoever. I have already had my emotions run by this asshole. I am not looking to be ingratiated, I’m not looking for any sort of friendly company, I am not providing work for anybody nor am I interested in his personal problems which always seem to lead to asking me for enough money to buy vodka. I don’t care about his personal problems or his life or his family. The man could die or live and believe me, it’s his problem and not mine. And if anyone wants to yell at me about this and tell me how cold I am and how this is not the way somebody’s people go, I’m already sick of all of these arguments. I’ve been listening to this since the Russians demanded to make coercion the main currency of social interaction. It’s Saturday. Fuck off.

I have seen and heard from religious Jews that they prefer to be friendly in such interactions. There’s probably a philosophy about being kind. But I think these people live in isolated communities where they keep themselves in the social majority. Because they have higher ground and economic power, their “shabbos goys”, the gentiles they have working for them and keeping things moving during the day off on Saturdays are basically slaves. Therefore they are going to speak with great respect, step and fetch it, and Uncle Tomming as much as possible.

I don’t have any such political or military power. I just tell them a story and follow the rules. I don’t ask for anything and I don’t demand anything. And as far as social interactions go, I’ve already made it clear that I don’t really enjoy anything that they have to offer. I don’t want their food, I don’t want their advice, I don’t really want to pay attention to their women or be interesting for them, I don’t want to be studied, I don’t want to be a point of gossip, I don’t want to be a place for them to put their aggression and I absolutely do not wish to be any economic security to anybody. I am not the bank, I do not do micro loans, I am not a regular local employer. There is absolutely no reason to bother me unless you think you have some business deal where I might profit. If you’re looking to trade labor for money or to sell me goods, leave me your number and I’ll call you if I need you.

What I am talking about here is tedium.

the quality of being boring for a long time: Soldiers often say that the worst thing about fighting is not the moments of terror, but all the hours of tedium in between.

Understanding the tediousness of life is not very problematic. Running away from tediousness is pointless. Maybe it’s not for you. Maybe you have a very interesting life and maybe you feel that whatever drugs you’re using are perfect to quell the tediousness. And maybe you’re right. Maybe for you, life is just a blast and a half. Good for you. Bravo. Standing ovation for your accomplishment. Someone hang a lei around their neck and hand them their golden statue.

In my experience, that definition is absolutely balls on accurate.

When I was riding bikes in New York, a ridiculously dangerous job, absolutely a rock and roll profession, I got bored of it. Perhaps I got bored of it because September 11th ripped the guts out of New York. I was actually making bank for a little while and having some sense of social security connected to my actions helped.

Lately I have been listening to music from one of my favorite rock bands. Mr Big. It really were an amazing group of musicians doing a very specific gig. They honestly produced some of the best rock music and have some truly cool songs. The thing is, they never really exploded but for a couple of songs and most of their success came from Asia. They never stop being grateful to the Asians for loving them as much as they did but frankly, the band consisted of four Irish Catholic white guys and you couldn’t quite get away from the fact that they never were as big as they hoped to be. You can see this in interviews with them. It all just got tedious.

So is the answer to all of this that money is a good thing and that acquisition of money just makes everything okay? If you’re making enough money with what you’re doing or if there is enough money flowing around in whatever you’re doing, does it really make everything okay?

So you know I’ve been paying attention to Star Trek these days. I’m not really binge watching but I do find an hour a day to travel through the original series. That serious is almost always about fascism I’ve noticed. Every single episode concerns power and someone trying to take over the ship or take over control of planets. Everything is about the quest for power and who has it.

Yesterday, I started thinking about the economics behind Star Trek. Not the economics of producing the entertainment but the theoretical economics of the federation. Somewhere in the future they have created whatever they have created. They live in an ordered society that apparently has done away with quite a few social problems. And there is one key concept to all of this that seems to be behind their ability to get along racially with each other and with their ability to put together the ridiculous amount of natural resources to create starships.

They don’t have money. Or they don’t use money anymore.

So I drove into this and I asked Google about the economics of Star Trek and I found a couple of things that are out there where better people than me have already explored this thought. I’m going to give two links here that you can look into. Everything I know is from here.

The first is the following video on exactly this subject by a YouTuber named Steve Shives. Honestly, I agree with almost everything Mr shives has to say and I believe he touches on quite a few points that I have touched on myself in my thinking about the world, the potential for future Utopias and the ridiculousness of our current trajectory. Specifically, it is a point well made that before any utopian Star Trek future happens where people do not Chase material gain as the prime aspect of their lives but rather look to discipline, social contribution and perfection of self as a matter of life, they had to go through two massively destructive wars that took out a huge segment of the human population. They also had to get visited by the Vulcans. Without the introduction to a logical intergalactic species who based their way of life on logic, humanity was lost.

The second link is from a book published by french economist Manu Saadia called Trekonomics.

The book deals with the topic of the scarcity in the economy by looking at it in reverse. The author describes the 24th-century Star Trek universe in which scarcity does not exist at all. The book explores a post-scarcity age and how our society would need to change to adapt itself to such an environment. It looks at the expectations regarding automation and artificial intelligence and takes readers through a journey of the fictional, moneyless world of Star Trek. It also looks at the challenges to the Star Trek economy. 

Saadia concludes that “Post-scarcity is not so much a matter of material wealth or natural bounty, but an organizational option for society.“

In both of these essays, it is made apparent that it is not really a moneyless society. Specifically, there are interactions with other species from around the Galaxy and not everyone is as elevated as the people of the federation. Even in the future, we keep our sense of social egotism and will forever believe that we are the highest form of life and the smartest. That will never change no matter how many examples we run into otherwise. Money must be kept to replace direct bartering in certain negotiations for materials. But then of course, if it is a matter of material acquisition, you always have the phasers and photon torpedoes at your disposal. We may walk softly and with a more gentle and caring way of life for our people, but we never stop caring Big sticks that can knock your head in when you disagree too much.

In the end though, the thing about science fiction or at least good science fiction is that it is a place to aspire to. When I took my crack at writing science fiction, I came to the same conclusion really.

DEI, who is plaintively looking out of the view port. Slowly, as she is thinking we pan around over the crew. 

DEI (In V.O.) 

It is uncertain exactly how we will deal with all of this… new information. Certainly, the existence of a genuinely sacred place, a world in which violence cannot be, brings the possibility of real peace negotiations. And, if what we have been told is true, to have the possibility of taking part in the process of universe building would seem to be the unifying goal we all need, the real purpose of life. 

So perhaps the point of all this is why go through the tedium. If it doesn’t really matter the level of tension and release, if it doesn’t matter what you do, what’s the point? I mean, the war in Ukraine is already tedious to quite a few people. Think about it. For all of the excitement generated, for all of the fervor of all of the people who go online and post anti War sentiments, paint their faces, wave flags in favor of the poor Ukrainian people, everybody eventually goes back to their own lives. Kill a few hundred thousand people arbitrarily, displaced 10 million more and it’s eventually not enough blood for us. It doesn’t stop the tedium of life. It doesn’t stop the redundancy. The blood no longer means anything to anybody except maybe the people who are shedding it.

Perhaps the truth is that this is not our true direction. Perhaps looking for the next interesting and exciting thing to give ourselves thrills is not the thing that makes life interesting. Perhaps running away from tedium is in vain no matter where you go, how far you run or how big of a thrill you might encounter along the way. Perhaps dragon chasing has always been a mistake.

For me, I have always tried to fight tedium with discipline. When you get to the point where you feel that life becomes just too much of the same thing again and again, my answer has always been to head towards minimalism rather than attempting to buy my way to happiness or some new potential thrills.

The reason for this is that there really is just one ultimate thrill. It is the thing that brings you closest to death. Hemingway knew about this. London knew about this. All of the great writers knew about this. The Torah is about this really. It’s about how close you can come to the end of life that seems to be the ultimate thrill. How much danger you can bring on to yourself. How much you can gamble.

Looking at it this way, we might be able to see Mr Putin’s inspiration. Certainly, he just wants access to more oil. But you have to imagine a fellow like that looking for bigger and bigger thrills, more and more blood all trying to find just one more thing that might make him feel like he’s alive. Certainly we can see this in Mr Biden. At his age, it must be rather difficult to genuinely muster enthusiasm.

In some ways, I envy Ghenna. The simplicity of physical addiction never gets old. He’s going to be in pain if he doesn’t do something to stop it. The hippies in Oregon that I lived with for a while 25 years ago taught me this. They said that the essence of life was to be addicted to something. Without a serious addiction, life was simply too tedious to live.

I don’t like alcohol. I don’t drink. I mean, I don’t like to drink at all. No wine, no beer and certainly no vodka. It makes me sick and I don’t like the effect and I don’t want the addiction. I don’t eat meat for the same reason. I don’t smoke tobacco for the same reason. I do not use opiates for the same reason. I don’t go in for addictives or the addicts that come along with them. 

But what I do like is the thought of creating a world where we simply try to be good people and help each other and make our social contributions. I like a world without money because it brings with it less drug addicts and criminals. We have less gun violence in a world where we don’t fight for resources. We have less wars in a world where we simply take care of each other. We don’t spend our time figuring out how to kill each other when we simply work together to make sure that everybody’s okay. I like that world a lot better and that is the thing that keeps me doing this writing despite the tediousness.

So it’s 7:15 a.m. on Sunday morning. I forgot to put anything in water last night for breakfast. Luckily it’s cold and overcast today so perhaps some hot food won’t be so bad to start the day. I have to go out and cut some greens from the field. It is absolutely brilliant to have a selection of vegetation that I get to cut fresh for my food everyday. I understand it’s just a few months out of the year but it’s a brilliant time. I suppose eventually I’ll get better at saving food for the winter. Kind of a fun job to learn. Interesting tedium to practice.

I think the ex partner is coming up for a visit. Probably if it’s not too wet, we will put the lentil Garden into a little bit sharper focus and maybe even harvest some beans.

That’s all. Absolutely nothing interesting going on here. I personally do not require life and death struggles. I don’t really require any screaming or shouting. I like things quiet and orderly. I have enough problems in my life without making more. I just like it better when everybody does their job. When everybody just does their job and doesn’t make any unnecessary problems, life is a lot better. Sure, it’s boring sometimes, but it’s much, much better that way.

***

It’s about 20 minutes to 10:00 and it’s already rained a bit, it’s cold and I’m just waiting for the ex-partner to show up.

Breakfast was wonderful. It was a combination of buckwheat, red lentils and a little quinoa. I used some more field greens and one of my own onions to put some vegetation into it and I added just a little bit of heat. And I used a lot of water to cook it so effectively, it was soup. Absolutely perfect on a cold morning to warm you up and leave you in a state of comfortable realism. It’s not the kind of breakfast that knocks you on your ass like bacon eggs and sausage, God forbid. It was just pleasant fuel that tasted good and came at a helpful temperature for the weather. And it cost almost nothing.

I only have two things that I want to add in here that really just go along with this morning’s writing. It’s not any new calls for global socialism or references to anything serious from the war in Ukraine. Just too small things just for fun that I want to add in for two of the elements that I mentioned in my argument.

The first is a cover of the song Daddy, Brother, Lover, Little boy and by the band Mr Big. This particular cover is from a band called Ms.タービック. I’ll be honest that I don’t know how to pronounce this. But what I like about it is that they are making an extremely honest cover of the music. One kind of weird nuance of this song is that both the guitarist Paul Gilbert and the bass player Billy Sheehan incorporate Makita drills into a harmonic solo between the two of them. They attach a pic to the end of the drill and use it to make a tremolo effect while fretting notes with their left hands. I guess it has something to do with the song being about a man who is ready for anything a woman might need. I’m not really convinced that this cover band understands all the words but I like how they bring a drill in for the solos anyway.

Like I said, Mr Big was huge in Japan. You can find many legitimate videos of this song and lots of others from the band. Feel free to check them out.

The second thing that I want to bring in here is from a brief highlight from the TV show Big Bang Theory. The extremely successful show was about a group of scientists and mathematicians attempting to live in a non-logical world. The center of the show is the actor Jim Parsons playing the part of Sheldon Cooper, a bit of an autistic savant who never quite gets or even particularly cares about normal social interactions. He is an unapologetic genius, he is who he is and has absolutely no possibility of being taken from his perspective. In any case, this particular moment is about a moment of Star Trek that shows up in the show. It seems to belong here so I’m going to add it in. Enjoy.

Instagram will load in the frontend.

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Live long and prosper.

***

Just one more by the way. I called Ghenna on the phone and asked what he wanted. There was no surprise. He was just looking for some work to earn some money to buy some vodka. There are no hard feelings between us. As long as he requires vodka and he believes I have money to pay for day labor, there will never be any problems between us.

And you were worried…

***

20 minutes to two and I’m taking a break. The last of the paths have been at least broken. I would not say I’ve done an aesthetic job of it but you can walk up there now and see everything. We haven’t even gotten into the lentils yet. That needs to get done but the job we are doing is taking a little longer than I thought it would.

The task of running the wheelbarrow from the field up to the compost pile has been given to my ex partner. It is not a job she likes very much. She likes doing what she wants to do and not what needs to be done or at least not what needs to be done in my estimation. My estimation of the world is something that men have, an inferior thing to women and if she doesn’t like being asked to work very much.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re not fighting. It’s just that she’s complaining and not listening very much to anything I have to say on the subject. She wants to do what she wants to do which I’m sure is fine. But we are at a point where the lentils need to have something done with them and that thing that needs to be done has nothing to do with any knowledge that anyone has. We physically have to get in there and make some choices and if we don’t have a clear path to get in there and work, nothing is going to get done. So like it or not, we have to do what we have to do.

I’m not going to get into the theory of male female relationships nor am I going to get into the details of male-female relationships here in Slavic Europe. I’m not going to bring up points like the noise, the very specific noise, that my neighbors make when they come home. The rumble of the car and then that scratchy chicken voice clucking away demanding that the man move. She’s always screaming at the man to move. She’s always screaming. That’s all she does is hysterically scream.

We had a conversation at the beginning of the day that my ex partner didn’t want to listen to either. It had to do with making hysterical decisions in the garden. It has to do with how much food is available or at least making decisions about what we actually want or what I actually want in terms of making use of my land. I’m not interested in fighting nature till the end of my life and then having it come back and reclaim the land. I’m not interested in fighting nature at all.

I’m interested in growing some food. I’m interested in at least knowing how much food I’m going to grow or deciding how much food I wish to grow and then going about it in an orderly fashion. The only thing I don’t want to do is be rude by emotions that come up moment by moment. I’m not a conservative. I’m not anything that anybody thinks I’m supposed to be. I just like living a calm, peaceful and reasonable life and making sure that I do all of the deals that I have to do to get by. The big decisions are mine and I take full responsibility for anything and anywhere and anyone that I’m responsible for. But I don’t want to be run by crazy chickens making crazy decisions in between moments of banging their head against the soil.

Believe it or not, we’re not even close to a decision about what to do. She hasn’t even taken a good look at the Garden. She doesn’t even see what I see. She has no idea what I’m talking about or what I want to do. She’s just fighting me to get away from my voice and to be able to do what she wants to do, which is in practicality, to get a good workout, breathe some fresh air and feel good about helping me. I get that. I get that plainly. It’s just not what’s really needed today. Today, we actually have a job to do and working with hostile participants does not make this job any easier.

I’m going to stop here and take it easy for a little while. I got a good workout so far. My legs feel pretty good actually and I’ve got some good energy from my day off yesterday. It is an amazingly good thing when my legs don’t hurt so bad and I’m able to do things. I also don’t mind that it’s a little cold and frankly, I don’t mind the rain. It’s a good temperature to get busy. So, that’s what’s going on.

***

Technically, it’s 2:00 a.m. and it’s already tomorrow but I guess I need to button this up one way or the other.

The day didn’t end very well. We got into a fight. She went home unhappy.

I don’t really want to talk about this subject but things are getting really hard between us. I guess these things happen. I could talk about this. I have the capacity to verbalize my thoughts. I can even verbalize her point of view. I feel I have a pretty good understanding of this entire situation. But I don’t think I want to talk about it here. I could blame the season. I could say it was a bad day. But I think the truth is we are both getting tired of each other. It happens. Actually, it happened a long time ago.

Leaving the personal stuff behind, at the beginning of the day, I chopped out the last of the past around the lentil Garden. We had not gone in there for a while and the rain had allowed a bit of a jungle to grow. I chopped down all of the paths including the past that leads into the forest. Everything became accessible for the first time in a while and at the end of the day, we went in and started pulling the plants that we had put there. It became a general harvest.

We didn’t take all of the plants because some were still green and growing. But quite a few had turned brown and dried out. Maybe the conflict started with the idea that we should do something. Neither of us knew exactly what the story was in taking lentils. I saw that we could go by the potato rule of thumb and when the plant was completely dry, it was time to harvest the fruit. If we left it there, it was only going to drop seeds in the Earth and if we even wanted to harvest the lentils themselves, it was time to take them.

We are talking about really small seeds here and sometimes only one seed per pod. If you think about lentils as a food, you know we are not talking about an amazing amount here. Maybe this was the beginning of our personal problems because communication is not our strong point. We are not good at discussing important things. But again, I’m not going to talk about that.

But for the second time in a row, we did this work. She worked at a different level and pulled up more plants than I did. Instead of just taking the ones that were absolutely finished, she decided that we needed to take some that were more green and hang them up to dry. This was part of her thinking that the plant needed to be hung to dry.

So we did that. But that part of the field has the most mosquitoes in it and it made her take more time than she wanted and again it became a race to get to the bus. Maybe it’s just the fall when people start to get shitty to each other. She looked really tired by the end of the day. I can’t really blame her. It was more than I wanted to do. But like I said, I don’t want to talk about this. Let’s see we did a lot of work but today was a bad day.