Sunday, July 24 2022. Week 29
It’s 5:30 in the morning and I am awake because I was startled into consciousness by thunder and lightning and the sound of rain. The rain itself didn’t really startle me so much. It’s always a pleasant surprise. What startled me was when I reached for my phone to check the time and found that it was wet. I had left the window open for better airflow and of course my computer and electrical system is right under it. Oops. I might need to rethink this design flaw going forward.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the design of this particular room. I have taken it over as my personal room. It’s not very big and does not have the very best window view. In fact when my other neighbors decided to show up and inhabit their house, there is a certain lack of privacy that comes with their presence. But it is the house that has two places to make fires. I generally only use one but it has two if you really want to burn wood. In the winter time though this is the warmest room in the house and it came with a built-in bed right next to the fireplace so it is the warmest place to sleep.
The house functions beautifully in the summertime. With the windows open, it is a shady and naturally breezy place to stay. You don’t really need so much electric help at all. These days I end up running a fan because global warming is real and sometimes when there is no breeze, it does get very uncomfortable. But in any case, it’s a hell of a lot better than being outside. My plants take a beating when the temperature goes up.
Last night I kind of fudged on the religious nature of my days off and did a light watering a little bit before sundown. I had to do it. The pickles especially just hate it when there’s no rain. You really can see that it’s a drought. It’s not just heading into summer, a lot of the grass that grows naturally has been completely Brown all year. There are certain things that just aren’t growing this year and I probably only have 20% of the wild flowers that I had last year.
I’m also noticing that the groundwater is starting to bottom out. When I drop a bucket into the well, I can see that I’m already near the very bottom. I haven’t measured it in a while but you can see how low it is. Again, it’s not mysticism and you don’t really have to rely on the corporations to tell you what’s going on.
I had a conversation last week with my neighbor over the fence. It was mostly a question and answer session. She is happy to speak to me these days but I think it’s just optimism because she’s single. She allowed me to tell her “my version” of the story about the chicken people. She made a point of letting me know this was my version specifically. I didn’t mind. Fairness is important.
But when I was explaining to her several of my theories of agronomics and why I save rainwater and why I do not cut my grass, you could at least see a light dawning on her face. You can actually see two of the trees on her property are extremely dry and dying. I know she doesn’t care about such things, she just likes having access to a summer house three or four weekends a year, but it’s seeable. That’s the main thing, it’s seeable.
You can’t really believe the weather report when it says it’s going to rain these days but you can definitely believe it when it says that it won’t. My actual account is that we seem to get about 10% of the rain we are supposed to get according to barometric pressure and satellite images of cloud cover. I’m sticking by my story of cloud constipation. Too much pollution in the air for water to flow freely. I understand I’m looking at a tiny slice of the world here, kind of like the Hubble telescope looking at a microscopic pinpoint of the Galaxy. But reality seems to dictate that what I’m looking at is what we have in the world. Juxtaposing that off of what I know from Friends a little higher up near the Arctic circle, others in South America and of course my North American friends on both coasts tells me clearly that global warming is real. And that we did this to ourselves.
I probably have 7 weeks of fighting left. I call it a fight. I’m just talking about keeping my little garden moist. The amount of roof space that I have tells me that I probably could increase my water holding capacity a bit. If I save rain when we have rain, we have water. Right now, and I tend to overflow at some point which means I could probably have a few more barrels. The more girls I have, the more rain I can save.
Amongst the design changes I’ve been thinking of is moving or at least adding barrels inside the barn. This would be a wiser place to store water. It would require adding overflow valves keeping the water out of the barn but I could probably double my capacity there and be okay. My other most productive roof space is more limited though. It’s also the most exposed place for sunlight being on the barrels. Again, some thinking is required going forward.
Last year, I tried to incorporate some businesses into my writing. I decided that the writing project itself was not interactive enough and I thought I might make a community contribution. The original idea included starting several green businesses that would both employ people and draw attention to the reality of our environment and how it is changing negatively for us. If I am a writer, my entire reason for life would be to inspire thought. This exactly means more than just tugging at heartstrings, in my opinion, with power comes responsibility. I know I’m ripping that off from Spider-Man but it’s still true.
Why did these businesses fail? You know it, I could write a book just about Eastern European failures? We could call it “shooting itself in the foot; the story of the downfall of post-soviet Europe”. Do you think it would sell? I don’t.
Maybe there is a business in rain collection though. We could pair it up with businesses catering to solar electricity and perhaps private windmills. If we can generate our own electricity, we not only take ourselves off grid, taking the stress off of central electricity (fuck the profits), we improve energy security. It just requires individual investment. You’re not supposed to think about how much you personally gain, you’re supposed to think of how you can help. Government subsidy would probably help.
I frankly don’t see any other way that it’s going to be inhabitable without these things. I also don’t think that unless we understand that what I’m talking about are going to be survival norms in the future, people might never be motivated to stop polluting and making garbage and relying on factory products that make more garbage and ruin our health and our habitat.
I’ve been talking a lot about my conservative friend and our ongoing conversation. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area and told me that he had tickets to go see the Giants play. I asked him what the cost of a hot dog and a drink was these days and he told me about 6 to $8 would get him some peanuts and a hot dog. 6:00 to $8 for peanuts, a hot dog and a beer.
Lately with access to a reasonably productive food Garden, a closet full of potatoes and a minimalist vegan diet, I doubt I spent more than $8 in a week during the month of July. I might be overstating that a little bit. I actually know the amount of money I spent on food this month. The actual number is $43 here on the 24th of the month. So I exaggerated. I’ve been spending $14 a week for food. Two ballpark hot dogs.
As far as the quality of the food, don’t think I’m starving, because I’m not. Yesterday I made a complete break from factory foods. It was a conscious choice that came along with my decision to use less nuts in my blender sauces. Shifting to oatmeal as a base had both a health effect and an economic one. It’s funny what taking a little bit more fat out of your diet will do to you. There’s a lot of clarity that comes with the last fat you consume.
I made bread out of the last of whatever smoothie I made on Friday morning, or maybe it was Thursday’s smoothie, and the bread was unbelievably delicious. It was probably the best flatbread I’ve ever put together. And for my meals, I really was not hungry at all on Friday night. It was just too hot. So I put together a very nice hummus to go with the bread and had some fresh veggies and called it a night.
In the morning, it was a little cooler so I made a quick veggie soup that included some red beets, onions, greens and both daikon radish seed pods and sweet pea pods. I used some flour to make a roux and thickened the remaining soup into a very nice sauce. It was amazing. And in the evening, I had some potatoes and veggies. I still have a little bit of bread dough left over for this morning.
However, I’m still not hungry. That is the darndest thing about this dietary change this week. I made this change consciously thinking about being diabetically inclined. If last week was a healing week, it is vitally important to control the blood sugar as much as possible. Therefore, I consciously stayed away from factory pasta and almost everything other than whole grains. I use some standard bread flour but I mix it to keep up the fiber. As a result, it worked. It worked not only with a very controlled blood sugar, but an amazingly clear head and a completely surprising lack of being hungry. It seems as though taking factory food out of your life simply takes the hunger away. Crazy how that works.
I admit that last night I was a bit hungry after turning in. I thought several times about going for a snack of some kind but then I just didn’t. Eventually, I fell asleep and woke up without any feelings of hunger whatsoever. It’s interesting really, the difference.
At the beginning of this year, fresh from a stay in my ex partner’s apartment after being in the hospital for 5 weeks, I developed several habits. I would drink coffee every morning and I started using a lot of salt in my cooking. I also had quite a noodle habit. I like noodles very much and of course there were always out of season vegetables. I think we would consider this to be a very standard diet. We ate vegan, this is true, but I think what we were eating is a style called supermarket vegan. This is where you understand, or at least I hope she understands, our relationship to animals in our food but nevertheless we ignore our relationship to the oil business and insist on high transport, plastic packaged non-local food. Also a mistake ecologically speaking.
This isn’t to say that saving food isn’t important. I could definitely start buying in bulk, reducing the necessity to go to town for food shopping. This would just take a little bit more planning. But there’s no reason that I could not reduce my food shopping to once a month. Actually, when the weather grows cold, if I could somehow increase my food storage capacity, I could conceivably go through the winter without any purchases. Food storage is not really refrigeration but mouse proofing everything.
I have a pretty spacious Root cellar. It’s a fine place to store things. But it’s got to be mouse proof. Or at least the places where the food gets stored needs to be mouse proofed. I don’t really mind the small amount of potatoes that got chewed on. They didn’t decimate that food source or even come close. I’m just saying that food is tastier when it doesn’t come along with mouse shit.
I guess I’m rambling from subject to subject here without any particular philosophical point to lay on. I don’t really think there is any philosophical point to lay on except that there are some basic points to consider. This is for everybody. And I think amongst the basic things that need to be considered by everybody is the food we eat, where it comes from and what it does to us when we eat. That’s what this whole year was about thematically. I guess this is what the point of green food was supposed to be. It’s not about finding exciting recipes and traveling around to make contact with other vegans, it’s about making very clear decisions about what the human diet should be and why we need to fundamentally head back in that direction.
Has this last week had a positive effect on me? Yes, 100%. The visual evidence of my calming or even cranking back my diabetes is completely evident and measurable. The evidence that my leg is getting better is also evident. I’m not snapping into any particular state of wellness instantaneously unfortunately. These things take time. But there is evidence that I have made correct choices. I also find that my sharpness of mind, mental strength if you want to call it that, maybe resolve, has increased. I’m less motivated by whims. Clarity I think is a very healthy thing.
On the other hand, such journeys are lonely affairs. Diving into ideas such as changing your diet tends to isolate you from other people. I don’t own a restaurant and I don’t feed people regularly. I have offered my food to other people but generally they run away from me. It’s funny how crazy people are. Just a thought about eating what I eat scares people. I really don’t know why. It’s just logic. It’s just natural logic about taking the evidence that’s right in front of your eyes and figuring out what you need. It is crazy exactly how crazy people are.
It’s also crazy trying to explain this to them. It’s crazy writing about global systemic insanity. It’s crazy writing about the causes of global systemic insanity. It’s crazy writing about the logic behind why we have become what we have become and why we do what we do. It’s crazy following all of this causation down the rabbit hole. It’s crazy writing about slavery in 2022 over the internet. It’s oxymoronic to take a miracle like the ability to have global communication and yet have it be so impotent. It’s crazy how much craziness we have. It’s insane how insane we are and how long we have been this way.
But again there is another hand to this. I won’t live long enough to see any difference. I’m not going to be here forever. I doubt very much I have that many years left if even that. I’m not talking about climate change here, I’m also talking about myself. Last week I took a peek at the actuarial tables concerning my own personal situation. I might get lucky. I might have some of my father’s genes in me. If I can get the medical system to stop specifically trying to kill me, I might be able to keep an active enough lifestyle to last a bit longer.
My prognosis for happiness though is very dim. I don’t give myself much of a chance of finding personal success or even having my words spread out a little farther. I sincerely doubt there will be any genuine positive changes. At least not in my lifetime which unfortunately means there’s going to be a lot more misery before we start extinguishing ourselves in fits of radioactive madness.
Anyway, about today, I don’t plan on anything interesting happening. I have not spoken to my ex partner all week. She didn’t call me and I didn’t call her. Today would be the usual day that she would make a trip up here. I don’t know whether she’s going to read these words or not. If she desires to come up, I’m sure she’ll call me. If she doesn’t want to come up, she won’t. We are not very conversational when it comes to business. We’re not very good at conversation at all really.
Other than this, I watered last night and we’ve just got a nice bit of rain here this morning. I don’t know if we will have any more today but if we do, that will be nice. After today, they say we might get some rain on Wednesday but you can’t count on that. The long-term forecast shows very little rain on the way. What this means is that we might just run into the end of the road pretty soon. If my well bottoms out, there won’t be enough water in it to refill any tanks and once I get to the bottom of the rain barrels, That’s All she wrote.
Like I said, I would definitely like to increase my holding capacity by at least another thousand liters going into next year. Investing in water is smart. Perhaps if you hear nothing else that I’ve said this year, remember that. Investing in water security is smart. Don’t be stupid.
But that’ll be it. My plan is to take it easy again this week. I doubt Minsk is going to call me but if they do that would be nice. I’m not planning on going to town again this week. There’s nothing particularly I need to buy. And that’s about it.
I don’t know, I couldn’t go do something about breakfast. I still have some fresh bread I can make. I don’t know though. I’m just not hungry.
***
don’t know though. I’m just not hungry.
***
Fritz Haber is the scientist who invented the process that created Ammonium Nitrate, our basic chemical fertilizer. Unfortunately, he is also the creator of one of the worst chemical explosives and eventually, some of the worst chemical weapons people have ever used against each other. It is arguable that none of his discoveries turned out to have a positive impact on the planet. Here is an interesting 20 minutes for your Sunday morning.
***
I had a couple of pieces of stimulus this morning. Some of this stimulus or non-stimulus came from something I noticed yesterday and I seem to think that somehow these two things go together.
It might be that I wasn’t really paying attention. You kind of become numb to certain things that go on. You become so used to it that it doesn’t even seem to touch you anymore. Yesterday I noticed that I didn’t hear any weed whacking. Very often, Saturday mornings are quiet enough but by the time people get to the afternoon on Saturday, their restfulness has them cranky and they want to do something to work it out. Work of course equals gasoline powered products so either they jump in their car to go somewhere or they fire up the weed wackers to make sure that nothing ever grows on their property.
Yesterday however, I don’t remember hearing any weed wackers. It was very quiet all day and all evening. On the one hand, being a human being with the same human failings as anyone else, I sort of had the idea that maybe I had something to do with it. Could it be that my neighbors had decided not to bother me on Saturdays? I mean, every time I’m around and they see me, the show starts and they all start dancing, thinking that I am deeply connected to them or that I am somehow observing them. To locals, I’m not just an emissary from the United States in this regard, I must be an emissary from God or something like that. I’m not an emissary of the United States and as far as my prophet status goes. I don’t remember signing up for that either. Oh well, you can’t stop people from thinking what they think.
I actually don’t mind being so deeply under people’s skin here. They had it coming with how they treated me and how they usually treat me. It’s unfortunate that they misunderstand their own responsibilities in their miseries. This is the trick of scapegoating. It’s easier just to blame someone else or some particular group for your problems. It’s much easier to do that than to actually fix your problems or take responsibility for your own life. Nobody wants to do that, God forbid.
Then again, it was really dry at the end of last week. It was very hot and there was no water from the sky. Consequently, there was no growth. My plants will not grow without water and neither will the grass. No rain, no growth, no weed wackers. I hate to say that this is the recipe for our future of planetary desertification and starvation but you can extrapolate that thought any way you want.
The reason I’m talking about being personally a part of this little non-factor are three separate notices that I got by social network regarding people rethinking me. Apparently, someone somewhere started taking me seriously and this idea seems to have caught fire. Not fire as in people want to talk to me or anything like that, just a mild rise in respect towards me. It’s all very positive I’m sure.
The thing that is interesting to me is not that someone decided that I might be telling the truth or that I might know something. This is a little out of my range of belief but it’s not impossible. What was interesting to me is that all three of the notes had the same sort of language. They all started with the same phrase, “we were thinking that you were…”, and then they go on naming the justifications they used for either dismissing me or outright harming me. They weren’t particularly apologetic and they weren’t interested in creating new relationships. That would require learning and of course we don’t want any of that. But they did think it important to make excuses for their failures. This is extremely Russian. That’s all you need is a good justification for your failure and then you’re okay.
This I have seen any number of times from any number of people. I’ve heard this from all of my ex-girlfriends. I have heard this from many people in the community. I’ve heard this from several bureaucrats. I never actually hear it from people powerful enough to make things happen but I’ve heard this sort of thing over my lifetime actually many times. It seems I am one of the most easily dismissable people in the world at a glance but one of the hardest to get rid of after the fact.
What usually happens is that somebody catches a moment of reason, a moment of clarity or at least just a slight tinge of recognition of personal responsibility outside of themselves and suddenly I become an intelligent person. It’s like a trapdoor that has been sitting in the middle of the room for a long time but nobody ever gives it a second thought until suddenly it gives way. As they are falling through this existential window to tomorrow, they suddenly realize that someone was telling them not to walk on the bloody trap door.
“I’m sorry, we didn’t understand that you were serious.”
I don’t know why you wouldn’t. Was there something in my presentation that told them it was a joke? Were there some combination of words that led them to believe that I was somehow a clown, a comedian, a panderer? Was there something in my subject matter that told them that I was just in it for the laugh or looking for attention? Was there anything that I did that led them to believe that I was here as a joke?
Nobody really thinks about things that deeply. What they are talking about is that they had an emotional reaction and then just went with it out of some sense of complete personal entitlement. If something affects you emotionally for a moment, this becomes the rule book for life.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that this is who you were. We thought you were on drugs.”
I don’t even know what that means. I’m serious, I don’t even know what the phrase “be on drugs” means. If you ask me what the word drug means and look for a negative connotation, I would come up with the definition of anything addictable. Anything that creates a mania in the user could be considered a drug.
We can back that up against traditional definitions.
A medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body.
I’m sorry, that’s too simple and too broad. You can’t say any substance that produces a physical effect because that includes everything. Everything has the potential of having a physical effect on us. Maybe there’s more in here…
Okay, Wikipedia gets a little closer:
A drug is any chemical substance that causes a change in an organism’s physiology or psychology when consumed. Drugs are typically distinguished from food and substances that provide nutritional support. Consumption of drugs can be via inhalation, injection, smoking, ingestion, absorption via a patch on the skin, suppository, or dissolution under the tongue.
Okay, this includes chemical substances that are taken in. Here we would include coffee or tea or any non food type items. Or maybe I’m not reading this correctly. It has nothing to do with food at all, I guess we would consider drugs in this case to mean anything consumed into the body that is not specifically for nutrition.
Even that doesn’t work very well because if you’re taking vitamin supplements in pill form or powdered, you’re taking drugs.
The water here is murky. It’s hard to get a handle on things. But also, what about this?
Can electronics or electronic entertainment be considered drugs?
Sorry, no quick fix blurb there but scroll down for yourself and you see that the answer is yes.
That’s not enough for me. What about cars? What about all of that beautiful ergonomics, the radio, the air conditioning and all of that style and jealousy? How much of this do we use for pleasure as opposed to pure transportation? We could also go further than that and say that even using automobiles to get to work are drugs or even the work itself becomes drugs.
What these people are talking about is that I like marijuana. I don’t like alcohol. I don’t like meat or milk. I don’t like most factory drugs and believe that I am pretty good at handling my diabetes all by myself simply by paying attention to my diet and exercise. I also believe I have diabetes because of all of those factory drugs that existed all around me as an American. Literally, diabetes came into my life the day they stole my bicycle and I lost my ability to cycle the crap out of my system. Words to the wise about that. We are going to have an epidemic here within a few years. Enjoy your KFC Sunday afternoon meal.
Crazily enough, most of the best creative and most interesting work that I have done in a long time came when I had a regular connection. I wouldn’t say I smoked marijuana to disappear from the world. Just the opposite, I smoke marijuana to participate in it. If anything though, it did sort of put me off quite a few social engagements. I found that I really did not like the noise, the smell, the food or the parasitic people that I was meeting. The truth was that I didn’t much like it before I had the opportunity to have access. I just didn’t realize how little I liked it until I sort of had my senses about me.
No offense, but marijuana is not a tool of delirium. It is anti-delirium. It is a tool of honesty and perception. It does not dull your wits, it opens your senses. Sorry to break the news for you but if you were thinking I was a maniac, it was because this is what you really wanted me to be in your own mind. It suited your purposes. Or your sexual fantasies.
“I’m sorry, I was thinking you were a maniac.”
I wonder why. Seriously, I wonder why. I wonder what people saw that made them think that I was a berserker. I don’t remember going out at night looking for fights. I don’t remember buying weapons of any kind ever. I don’t remember doing anything really to lead people to think that I was any kind of maniac, either a sex maniac or a violent maniac.
In fact, since I’ve been here, I have been an academic. This is especially true over the last 10 years but it’s really been true since the day I showed up. Literally, the day I got back from Poland the first two places I went to were the bank in college to see if I could teach English for them and the local theater to see if they were going to produce my play that they said they would. I don’t understand where a violent Maniac comes from an English teacher and a playwright. Okay, perhaps the added insight that comes along with writing might make me a little angry. But seriously, I ride a track bike, not a tank. I’m not Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I guess I’ll just take this as a grain of goodness. Andrea, if I’ve had any hand in helping people have this little moment of thought that makes them even slightly better people or at least a bit more aware of our contemporary genuine problems, I’m happy to have been of service. Good luck in your future with this new piece of knowledge. I hope it serves you better than whatever you were doing before.
No, the truth of the matter is that all of this was anti-semitism. You could say anti-Semitism and anti-americanism. You could also call it politicalism or politicizing things for personal gain which is also known as corruption. You could also call this anti-logic, anti-intelligence, anti-sentience, intentional stupidity or religious devotion. All of which also come under The heading of corruption.
The truth of the matter is that people let something into their heads that allowed them the complete justification to be as shitty as they wanted. And being shitty, giving back to others what they receive themselves everyday of their miserable lives is all they wanted to do. Anyone who has ever worked for the man, wants to be the man. And as the man now is coercive, violent and heartless, this is just the social currency that everyone plays with now. The truth of the matter is people just couldn’t wait for the opportunity to pay it along.
“I’m sorry. We were thinking that you’re jewish. We thought you would understand.”
I do.
***
So it’s 10:30 and I have not had a single word from my ex partner. That is not completely true but I’ve had no direct communication. The thought process is in play and the drama is there for all of us to enjoy. Possibly she looked up at the sky or noticed it rained. Or possibly she has a mildly different thought process. We just haven’t spoken in a week and we haven’t spoken today. If there is more to this soap opera, we will all find out in the future. As for now, there is nothing to enjoy but today’s drama or lack thereof.
***
I just came back in from a walk around. It’s very wet and overcast here this morning and unfortunately, it’s mosquito weather. All the tanks are full again as expected so this is a plus. And I think I found the problem in the tanks at the back of my house. They were both pretty full, more full then I have seen them. It was then that I looked close and noticed that the fixture was leaking.
I grabbed a wrench and tried to tighten it down as much as I could. It is of course a plastic fixture. I just can’t stress this enough how shitty it is working with garbage fixtures. There is a limit to how much I can tighten it before the threads give way. It’s also difficult to know when that point is. I did my best using a wrench and I think I’ve stopped it down to a few drops. Unfortunately, water is too precious to dump the tank and I also have no way to do this work without forfeiting all the water that’s in it. The best I could do is make sure that this water gets used first this week and that I put everything in the tanks to good use before I go back in and try to make everything more waterproof.
if it’s a positive in any way, I believe these are the only fixtures I have that are leaking. It may have been my own fault and I may have failed to tighten them down using a wrench when I started. I’m sorry about being so slow and figuring this out. I assumed it was going to be a decent place of water collection but every time I checked the bucket, it wasn’t really holding water. This morning is the first time that I saw it relatively full, the two tanks there are both about half full. But this was also the first time I noticed that there was a leak.
If this is my only problem and a little bit of silicone tape or perhaps a better fixture is all that’s necessary to bring this thing in line, I am happy. It gives me another viable water collection source and therefore more water than I had before.
Yeah, I have about seven more weeks to fight this war against global warming. After that, I’ll have an entire winter to see what I can do to improve my systems.
By the way, First Frost here is November 1st I believe. I don’t really think there will be anything left in the boxes by then. I can certainly see leaving certain things like sugar beets or cabbages in the ground to be picked up a little bit later. On the other hand, there’s not really that much food. I’m not an industrial farmer. None of this was for commercialism.
What this means is that everything is going to be packed up by November. All of the water tanks are going to be drained and in the barn. I will have the entire winter to decide what I want to do before April 1st. That’ll be the day when everything comes back out of the barn and starts catching water for me again.
And as for what kind of watering system I’m going to use next year, I will have the same 4 months to think about that as well.
***
***
By the way, what was the real reason for all of this ignoring and torturing? What was the real reason for the stealing and the abuse? What was the real reason for all of this mayhem?
They were starving for money. It didn’t matter how much money they had. They were always starving for money. I don’t think you need Google to answer that question, do you?
But then again…
People in an experiment reported feeling stronger for up to 10 minutes after handling money. If you’ve ever thought of money as a drug, you may be more right than you know. New research shows that counting money — just handling the bills — can make things less painful.
Aug 7, 2009 – https://www.npr.org › 2009/08/07 – Study: Your Brain Thinks Money Is A Drug – NPR
Ask a question, get an answer. The world is being run by drug addicts and taking us all along with them for the ride.
That would explain quite a bit, wouldn’t it?
Dude, I wasn’t doing drugs. I was getting off of them.
***
One more troll today. Truthfully, I haven’t done anything today. We got some rain this morning and I went out and checked the tanks. After that, I’ve just enjoyed my two meals already and hung around. I am just not overly inspired today and frankly, I haven’t been bothered by a soul except for a few people who aren’t even here. Truthfully, yesterday and today are probably the two most peaceful days I remember here. I like it.
The troll was a little bit sarcastic. This fella told me that he thought that I had said I lived in Paradise. Now I seem to be talking about all kinds of treachery. Why is this so different from all of my previous explanations?
To be honest, it’s a good question. It’s a question that deserves an answer. There are many answers that I can give including that this person should worry about their own lives instead of picking apart my credibility. On the other hand, I thought it was a worthy question so I thought I would take a moment and answer.
First of all, when you actually go into a new endeavor, it could be a project or it could be a relationship, there is always a honeymoon time. In Russia they call this мёдовой месяц, this roughly translates to the month of Honey or the sweet month or something like that. You always start out with clean slates. Just like new plants in the springtime before any diseases or insects or blight or drought gets to them. Just like people, we start out fresh and clean and then the world starts to tear us down.
I think it’s even more than this. I think the world we live in has a downward push that we all feel eventually. I talk a lot about the vigorish, this is the percent that the house takes for itself on your bets at a casino. It’s also the interest that you pay on loans. The word doesn’t come from legal bank loans by the way but it’s all the same principle. Marks wrote about this exclusively. It is the weight that we carry on our backs.
I think that conservative countries have the worst weight really. By depriving people of their vested interest, by telling people that they have no voting rights or that the system is all about games and thievery, they take away any of the kindness that comes along when people work together. The greatest relationships I’ve ever had in my life have been with people with whom I have worked or done projects with. These have always been the times of the most mutual respect. They have been the easiest people for me to agree to give kindness back to.
What this means is that eventually, everything is going to get taken away. In a world that is nothing but starved for resources, nothing gets left down the street except things so unappealing that nobody ever wants to touch them. Sometimes I feel that this is the absolute best place to be. If somebody thinks you have something of value, you’re going to end up either fighting or maybe even killing trying to keep it. When these valuable items become people, the people themselves become corrupt at their own self worth.
No, I have had many ups and downs here. I don’t know that I have ever truly felt that this place was completely wonderful. I did have very much of a honeymoon period here. I have had relationships that brought great happiness to my life for some period of time. It’s just that there’s no such thing as a perennial panacea. Everything gets old, the flaws start to appear and soon the structure can’t stand up on its own anymore. Everything sort of collapses after a while no matter how good you thought it was going to be.
Learning about this through experience changes you. It unfortunately takes away from some of the joy during the highs simply because you can’t believe it’s going to last. Once you lose that belief, you don’t really go all in for anything anymore and after a while, you just don’t care.
When I first came here, I didn’t really feel that I had anything of a foothold. But then on my last day the woman who ended up to be the mother of my daughter stopped me. If she hadn’t stopped me, I probably wouldn’t be here anymore but she did. I was never actually sure that we had anything that I thought of as a genuine relationship together. But she stopped me and I took her word for it that she meant it.
It didn’t last.
During our breakup, I met a nice lady who I thought I liked quite a bit. She was willing to put up with my negatives, I enjoyed her company quite a bit, we both seem to be on the same level in terms of our Outlook and I thought that this might be the thing. It wasn’t. Someone came in and stuck their nose in it and it all came down like a house of cards.
My job here took off like a rocket. That was completely unexpected. I really didn’t imagine anything but a tiny income but almost from the day I first opened my doors, I had a flood of clients wanting to work with me. It seemed I could do no wrong and just simply staying in business and paying my taxes was all I needed to do. I wasn’t getting ridiculously rich, but business never stopped so I never stopped working it.
Then they started a war down in Ukraine and all of a sudden Russian nationalism got into everybody’s brains and everything changed. They broke up the community, they broke us all apart and soon nobody really felt like they were a part of the town at all anymore. This is not to say that I wasn’t a townie, for a while I certainly felt like a pretty reasonable member of the community. This was a very friendly community. But then everybody became like everybody everywhere and our algorithms told us that politics was the most important thing. Soon nobody would talk to anybody anymore.
There was a great honeymoon when I first started seeing my ex-girlfriend. That stayed okay for quite some time actually. Actually, that was so strong, I didn’t think anything was really going to break us up. But people never stop trying. Pretty soon people were talking in her ear, everybody started getting smarter and soon, it was intolerable.
Without a doubt, it was the exact same issue with my ex partner. Almost no difference whatsoever. We had our honey time, and then we just slowly started looking at the flaws between us. I can’t say anything bad about the woman because she pretty much saved my life at the end of last year. She took care of me when nobody else would bother. I will never be ungrateful for that and I will never turn her down for anything she needs from me because of it. But you know, like I said, we all come down to the point where the cards don’t want to stand up on their own anymore.
There were a few other positives that I found along the way that made life a bit worth living. There were a few relationships that I had that I did my best to keep afloat as much as I could. I’m not naming every relationship I’ve had here. But the truth is that it just doesn’t matter how good it is or how far or how high you fly with it, eventually the world is going to find a way to tear it down. No matter how lovely or beautiful or easy things are, people will find a way to ruin it for you. There will always be someone talking shit and there will always be a moment where you can’t help but listen to it.
About whether or not I live in Paradise, I don’t suppose any place in the world is Paradise really. I don’t remember smelling any gas or listening to any weed wackers yesterday or today. I don’t remember anything but the town being exceptionally quiet. People just left me alone and that was exactly what I wanted.
Even if I take what is a normal Saturday or a Sunday, there are still going to be people running gasoline powered instruments or poisoning the air. We have these human activity types. You could say that they are working people but I’m just sort of seeing things a little differently these days. We have quite a few retired people here in this village. The population is mostly retired people. And the people that just stay here and take care of their gardens are almost always easy to get along with. It’s the people that live here and need to commute to town that are the noise pollution and the problem. They are the ones who don’t take it easy. They are the ones who cause the most noise and the most pollution.
About having the neighbors looking to cause me problems, well, that’s really more bad luck than anything. Truthfully, I feel kind of like Israel. How many enemies does that state have around them all the time? Everyone who lives there pretty much figures a bomb is going to fall out of the sky one of these days. It’s a shame. Life really doesn’t need to be like this but that’s the joy of anti-semitism. If you jewish, it’s kind of in our DNA. This doesn’t mean we like it or I like it. I like it better when I’m with decent people who pick up their end of the stick. I like it best when I’m with people who work for a living. You can’t talk reasonably with alcoholics or conservatives and it’s just a shame that God had to give me such an interesting collection of both to live with.
Take all that out of the equation and I’m pretty happy to have a garden that I can go out and get fresh food from. I understand that I’m in the season right now and that it’s not every day of the year. I understand that there’s a lot of work to this place even if it’s just cutting wood to stay warm in the winter. But I feel grateful and blessed to have this place. There hasn’t been a day where I have been sorry that I got it, all chicken politics considered.
Even that has its flaws. I write about ecology everyday. I still write about politics, of course. Maybe this year I’m supposed to be writing about food. But if we take the cumulative vigorish of climate change and all of the pollution that we put so regularly up into the air, even this little place that takes so much effort to keep going right now is already in a steep decline from what it must have been 10 or 15 or 20 years ago.
It isn’t like this house ever had a glory time. There have been times where people work the place as it was intended for them to do so. This place was around during communist times and people dealt with it just like how they were taught. I see the scars of all of the plowing that went on year after year to keep the dirt on this place viable. I see the quality of the land that remains. I can see that it’s already had its juice taken from it.
Maybe there is some Joy in the restoration. Not the restoration of this house per se. This old girl is hanging in there just as she is. I’m just talking about having a parcel of land that can still bring a little love if cared for.
I don’t really think I’m in the honeymoon phase for what I’m doing. I don’t think I’ve been allowed to have a honeymoon phase here. My neighbor started killing me almost on the first day they met me. It’s hard to fall in love in such an environment. The thing is though, that it’s not the first time I’ve seen what people do. It’s unfortunate, but there’s nothing you can do about it. I mean, it’s a shame to have such ugly parasitic people simply spreading the misery around because they have no other way or currency to live in the world. It’s a bloody fucking horrendous shame. But this is the world we’ve made for ourselves. This is what we are as a species.
I hope this makes sense. I’m really tired of having people try to wring emotions out of me. That gets old here very quickly. It’s amazing to me that people still look for emotions in a world that has been an emotional desert for as long as history has been recorded. But Hope springs eternal and every spring has the potential for New Life. I hope this answers the question.
Or, if I have to put finishing words on it, let’s say “life is what it is”. Sometimes we get a nice hand to play and it’s our job to enjoy it as much as we can. And in the bad times, the best we can do is weather the storms and hope we get better chances. But remember that we can’t go back in time. We only go forward. So, be humble and grateful for good moments and agree they were enough. I mean, you can try to go back and chase nostalgic dragons and fight for more but It’s never worth it. What you get back afterwards never seems to be the same. Life is what it is.
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