Monday, July 25th 2022

It’s about 7:15 and I guess I’m looking at another easy day in the middle of two easy weeks. The weather report says it’s going to be a little cooler today. No rain today or tomorrow. Tomorrow should be a little warmer. I should probably do a light watering today and maybe again tomorrow. I’ll get a Little help from God, possibly after that. I don’t mind working with God. It’s climate change generated by human activity and the inability of the weather service to cope with that that infuriates me.

It’s very quiet here now. More quiet than it has been. Perhaps it is becoming a contemplative time for the people in the village. I have no appointments for anyone to come here for work. I genuinely don’t need anything from the store. I genuinely don’t really need much of anything.

I’m going to do a little light work today. Today I’m going to separate the beans from all of the plants that we harvested a week ago. I don’t really think it’ll be more than an hour or two of finger work.

Other than that, I should turn over the compost pile. I understand this is a daily chore but I just don’t have the legs to do it right now. Unfortunate circumstance but I am determined to take it easy on myself. If I had full mobility, I would be embracing everything I have to do. Chores do exist and I could even start playing with some sense of perfection, trimming weeds in the paths or working on next year’s fertility and things like that. There is always something to do if you’re looking for something to do. I just have to stay off my feet because I don’t have any choice. I give myself a chance to heal or it just won’t heal.

I don’t think I mentioned it yesterday but I did actually get a text from my ex partner. She made no mention of any differences between us and simply said that she was taking the day off. I also didn’t make mention of anything. As to what’s happening between us, nothing is happening between us. We’re not talking and we’re not deciding. At least I’m not saying or doing anything and she is not saying or doing anything. To push this point a little more, I could of course start naming details that are not only interesting to me but appear logically to be in a situation. Maybe I’m doing it even by mentioning this. But basically I’m okay with this if she’s okay with it. We have problems.

We have problems but I’m not really interested in drama. I think this is the main thing that is true for both my ex partner and my neighbors and my ex-family and anybody else really. I just have no appetite for drama. If the thought of talking to me inspires drama, let’s plan on doing it another time. If it’s not practical or business, really, just enjoy the tension on your side and let me enjoy whatever happens on my side. I’m not looking for any unnecessary emotions. Please be happy and live your life and leave me out of any unnecessary problems.

“But we need money!”

“I don’t need your damned money!”

From the drama people, these would be the only two remarks to look forward to eventually. This is most unfortunate to me. It is the most unfortunate thing in the entire world that the only thing that is worth talking about or motivating people to move is money.

When I was a kid, my folks were probably upper middle class Americans. They might have had quite a bit of money but they were working people at the end of the day. My father was never an entrepreneur, just an employee. Perhaps an elite level employee for extremely wealthy companies working in the car business but still an unemployee . He was a slave everyday of his life.

Before I get on with this story, this is not an Oedipus issue. I am not an ecologist because of any adversarial relationship to my family or my father. I’m an ecologist because practical understanding and study has led me to the conclusion that climate change is the essence of the catastrophic error of modern human culture. I didn’t come by this because of parental issues and I will stand by this statement.

Anyway, there were quite a few dinner parties where big shots would show up at our house. My dad also had a membership at a golf club and would hobnob with some genuinely rich people sometimes. I had an opportunity to be exposed to upper class people on several occasions and one or two times, got to enjoy some ridiculously elite entertainment. Again, my family was not ridiculously rich but definitely Rich enough to have moments.

The point though of what I’m talking about is a particular character that I noticed from really wealthy people. It might be the only actual trait worth noticing in them. I am not sure that I remember anything particularly about them as individuals. I don’t remember learning any great enthusiasm for craftsmanship among any of them. A few people had great ethnic pride, usually when they were not white. The wealthy people who were non-white, had great ethnic pride. I’m thinking of the Japanese shipbuilder here mostly.

Now that I’m thinking about it, the thing that I remember had everything to do with money. Their love in life was money. This was a universal. The other thing I noticed was the preternatural calm that they had about them. They were completely at ease with themselves.

They were all in good shape. They all belonged to health clubs or golf clubs. Golf or tennis I guess. I don’t remember any of them being enthusiastic sportsmen beyond casual games but they had the time and an easy going place to get workouts regularly. They also obviously had access to fine foods. I guess I also remember an enthusiasm for good restaurants. Quite the hobby if you can have it.

Yes, what I remember about them is that they didn’t have any hunger for money and this made them very easy people to be around. They had enough money not to worry about things and they had access to all the things money could buy and this made them very relaxed and very comfortable.

The rub in all of this is that my parents were not actually at their level of financial ease. When my dad retired, he had an adequate enough pension not to worry about anything. His retirement was very easy because he was not worried about money. I guess my mom dying also had something to do with this. No offense.

Yeah, this was the thing that I remember about growing up with my parents. They were constantly starving for money but hobnobbing and socializing with people who simply weren’t. They had access to wealthy friends, they were good entertainers, possibly even lavish, they had access to wealthy things like golf clubs and restaurants at times. I guess you could say they were in wealth purgatory. They were of an acceptable class because they were of use and service to wealthy people. They were amusing people.

I will admit that I liked speaking to rich people. When I came here, I was contacted by a really rich guy from this region who wanted to get to know me. I think it infuriated him more than a little that I wasn’t ever interested in kissing his ass. I think I might have been the only person in his life who didn’t kiss his ass. But my having grown up around rich people and the fact that I was pretty pleased at having my own business pretty much meant to me that I didn’t need to stretch to be in the guy’s company. Honestly, I think I enjoyed this tiny discomfort in him.

Now we are many many years later. Now my life has done what it wanted to do and all that has happened has happened. I’ve made my choices, made my moves, done my job and had happened what has had happened and now, it all sort of coalesces for me as something of great obviousness. This division of wealth is a mistake. That’s I think more important than anything else. If I take everything I know about all of my neighbors and everyone I know in this country, this region or around the world, the only unifying Factor that is absolutely true is that the money is destroying everything and everybody.

Right now, I really don’t have a lot of money. I don’t want anybody thinking that I’m rich. I am not rich enough to become a local employer. I can’t hand out jobs and especially not on spec or investment. I can’t even hand out jobs that would do wonders for the ecology though I would come out of retirement and show up to work everyday if I could. The point is that my lifestyle, exactly as it is, is comfortable as hell. Literally, in my own way, I have exactly what those rich people had when I was growing up. I’m not really worried about money, I have access to great food and I have exercise available to me at a private club whenever I need it. Or in other words, I nailed it and did so without the tax burden.

Again though, I’m not asking for jealousy or anger or trolling. I’m not asking for anything from anybody. All I’m doing is trying to point out that having everyone in the world starving for money, we have a race for resources that is ruining the planet. We are killing people just to make more money. We are destroying all of the wildlife and all of the animals in our quest for money. We are destroying every individual and every relationship and all of our children because of our quest for money. We are hateful repulsive filthy things who feel the land, air and water with poison. We poison ourselves with our horrible food, our horrible words, our horrible actions and our horrible thoughts. And all of this because we can’t think about anything but money.

You know, maybe I do have a business idea from all of this. Maybe I should do an online coaching class about how not to think about money.

This is a great idea. This would be different from standard life coaching. I would not be coaching people into great achievement. I would not be coaching people into meditating or isolating themselves or crawling into their selfish desires. I’m not going to teach a course about masturbating. I just want to teach a course about how to minimize our fear of money. Or better yet, how to get money out of your life and allow life to fill the void left behind.

Don’t worry, I have no idea how to teach such a course. Or maybe I just did it right there. Maybe the original idea that what we need is to establish for ourselves some thinking about letting money go for longer and longer periods of time.

You know, this idea is sort of making sense to me.

When I started taking Saturdays off religiously, the loophole of My religion allowing me to do so, I began to learn something about what religious days off mean. Not handling money is an absolute necessity. You don’t do business on Saturdays.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve learned a lot about life from my days off. I’ve learned how to make use of things that I get on my day off during my week and one habit that I picked up both from my days off and from the fact that I live on a budget is that there are many common many, many days that I simply will not spend money. I have gone out into town without money in my pocket knowing full well that there was no possibility of spending anything. I have known like knowledge that there was no opportunity or possibility to spend or make money during the course of a day. After a while, I noticed that I started to like these days most of all. The days without any money in them were the best days.

So maybe this is the Monday morning wisdom I can pass along.

I am on a bit of a medical break. I’m taking it easy on myself hoping to get some healing in my legs. The leg problems stem from the fact that I was refused medical Care in Minsk. One particular bureaucrat out there decided that she was going to shake me down for personal money rather than allowing social medicine to help me out. This refusal of medical Care has caused a problem and right now I have no other choice but to take care of myself and allow myself to heal. This is a fact, not an opinion.

But to go along with this little moment in my life is a secondary fact, I’m not spending any money right now. I’m not spending money on food or transportation. I’m not buying anything from anybody or paying anyone to do anything with the exception of a few rubles on Thursday for Lena to come clean my floors and possibly wash some clothes. And even that won’t amount to enough money to change anything for anybody anywhere.

So let’s let this be the wisdom of the day. We can even make this a daily challenge. Don’t spend any money today. Or, if it’s too crazy for you to understand, just start paying attention to everything you do that costs you money and start working on alternatives that perhaps don’t. I’m not saying that you immediately become one with the Buddha, I’m just saying that there’s something rather wonderful about life when you take the money out of it. There is something rather clean about living that happens when it’s not all funked up by money.

Anyway, something to think about.

In the meantime, like I said, I have a very light work day today. I have some lentil processing to do and maybe some light cleanup. If I feel like it, I should turn the compost pile and I guess I have a few gardening things that I can get to. And in the evening, I should definitely water the plants. Maybe earlier, especially the pickles, if they look like they are suffering too much.

That’s it. If Monday morning means back to work for you and you have absolutely no choice, I’m sorry. I just hope you’re in a job that you really enjoy or better, I really hope you’re in a job that you’re extremely proud of and one that causes no damage. If you can’t find yourself within those criteria, maybe you should take a serious day off and give yourself some contemplation about how much your life actually means and what value you genuinely have.

***

Just a brief food update at 10:30 this morning. I had a most unbelievably delicious breakfast. I know it’s kind of foolish already but I just want to make a point of this because it’s worthy of thought.

Last night, I soaked some pearled barley and some red lentils and added some sunflower seeds in there. Just a little bit of fat, some protein and a very good low glycemic index grain. Healthy food. This morning I went out and picked up a few horseradish greens, one onion and some lettuce that was just bolting a little bit. As for cleaning, I just cut the root off of the lettuce and gave everything a gentle wash in freshwater.

I was thinking about whether I wanted to have everything fresh, like a salad, or toss it into the blender for a raw smoothie but I decided that I wanted to give it a little cook today. I don’t know why really. Maybe it’s that the weather is a little cooler today and hot food wouldn’t be bothersome.

I emptied out the residual soaking water along with maybe half of the lentil/barley into the big skillet and then chopped up the greens except for the green part of the onion. I turned on the heat, added a tiny bit of spice and put a cover on it for about 2 minutes, just long enough to bring the temperature to a boil.

That was all I did and I immediately pulled it out and dropped it into a bowl on top of the fresh onion greens. 2 minutes of cooking. The result was probably the tastiest breakfast I have had in a long time. The cooking time was exactly only enough to bring out a little Sweetness in the veggies while still leaving them with quite a bit of their original texture. It was crunchy and chewy at the same time and the flavors were absolutely vibrant. And of course, there was a tiny bit of soup to it which had the flavor of everything I was using. Amazing.

There is something about eating fresh vegetables. I understand that I only have this for a few months a year. I don’t live in a place where I have one of those forever gardens. Perhaps nobody can have those things anymore thanks to global warming and climate change. But even if it is only for a brief window that you can enjoy something like this, I highly recommend it. There is an Elegance to truly fresh food. And if anything, it’s even better when you’ve grown it yourself and that you exactly know that there are no chemical fertilizers involved.

Cheers and bon appetit.

***

It’s about a quarter to three which means I have been working on the lentils for about 4 hours and I’m not quite halfway done. I’m not quite halfway done with the stuff we have harvested. We still have probably an equal amount still on the field waiting to be picked.

I am mentioning this because the actual amount of beans that I have harvested is about four healthy handfuls. Not so big.

It might be a little late to be asking but, let’s see what Google has to say.

How to harvest lentils?

1. Wait until the pods on the lentil plant have turned yellow.

2. Pull the entire plant out of the ground by grasping the main stalk and rocking it back and forth in the soil until it loosens from the ground. Pull gently and set it aside. Continue with the rest of the plants.

3. Lay each plant flat on a drying rack. The drying rack will allow the entire plant to dry out evenly. The drying process should take one to two weeks, depending on the weather.

4. Remove the dry pods from the plant.

5. Lay the pods on a paper towel. Place a second paper towel over the layer of pods.

6. Gently roll a rolling pin over the paper towel to break the pods. Remove the lentils from the pod by hand. Discard the pod or add it to your compost.

Doesn’t that sound gentle as all get out? Doesn’t it make you pine for the country? Even my vegan friends would have to be impressed by the beauty, simplicity and gentleness of this mild vocation. Can you imagine growing and harvesting your own lentils? That’s living, isn’t it?

All of this is bullshit. If you think that you are going to get enough lentils for even a single bloody meal by doing this gentle by hand nonsense, you will work for 500 years just to get lunch.

Okay, I want to be reasonable and fair. I am aware of how to dry things and how to harvest things. All I’m saying is the actual beans themselves are very, very, very small. Getting the pods off the plant takes time. Getting the beans out of the pods takes time. Separating the beans from all of the chafe is the really difficult part. And even after you figure out how to do this, your net is unbelievably small. This is just not a reasonable food project for home growers.

So I started out doing something like this but immediately realized that separating or isolating the lentils themselves is a ridiculous task. I understand everything that is said here and I did something similar or did several things that were similar. The point is that the actual food product itself is mind-blowingly small. This is the real murder of all of this work. You just don’t really get much.

So what I finally figured out is a system that looks something like this.

1. Find a comfortable place to sit down where it’s reasonably shady, not very windy and you can have your lentil plants nearby.
2. Grab a bunch of dried lentil plants, separate one two or three of them and then pull them through your closed fist against your thumb now until the pods have separated. It’s good to do this into a bucket or something but will not allow everything to fly away in the wind.
3. The next trick I came up with was to use a washboard that I have here in the house to rub the pods over with your hands. The friction and the metal bumps tend to break up the seed pods and separate the lentils. 
4. When you are convinced that all of the seeds have been isolated, simply blow on everything while shaking the washboard slightly, the chief will blow away isolating the lentils for the most part.
5. After a while, dump the lentils and everything else that has accumulated in the bucket into a sieve to strain away as much of the dirt as possible, blow off any remaining chief that is there and this is as close as you get.

This is not a fast process. I don’t know how to do this faster. We grew quite a few lentils but no matter how you look at it, this is ours and hours spent for very, very, very few calories. I’m not sorry we did this but I think next year, if I decide to grow more of this particular food which is a staple of my diet, I will do a few things differently.

1. I will not plant a few seeds in rows with a reasonable space between the plants. I will broadcast the beans into whatever area they are supposed to be and let them come up as they like, feeling the entire box as much as possible and maximizing the amount of potential beans. You can always send if it looks like a problem but I would rather have a jungle of lentils in an isolated spot then have to do meter upon meter of harvesting. The product itself is just not worth the space.
2. If anything, I will only grow chickpeas and completely ignore brown or green or red lentils. These other varieties are simply too small to care about and the harvest is too much work for the effort.
3. Or as a second possibility, I will plant the red, green or brown lentils but never harvest them and simply use the plant as green manure. They are excellent nitrogen fixers and I would rather have a few bean plants growing as weeds the following year than have to go through this exercise that I’m doing now.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not sorry for anything we did. It was an idea that came from outside of myself and I heard it and ran with it. I’m not sorry that I built the gardens for these lentils. I think those 15 m gardens are a good place and I think I couldn’t really make use of them next year to grow some good food. If I manage to get some genuine fertility in there and fix up the structure a little bit, I think I can genuinely make some very comfortable places to grow cabbages or sweet potatoes or zucchini without any argument. 

The only two things to worry about is making sure my access and ability to water these gardens is a little bit better than what I have this year and again, that I can upgrade the soil in bulk one way or another.

I’m talking about having access to shit. If we can get one or two cart loads of shit, I can make the lower gardens sing and all I need to do is add maybe 20 more meters of hose and a better spray wand.

Other than that, the nicest part of the day came when I caught my neighbor Tanya coming back from the forest. She had maybe 20 times as many Forest blueberries as I had lentils. She agreed to sell me 1 L of absolutely gorgeous berries for six rubles. I have been blueberrying all morning while working on the lentils.

I’m heading back out to do some more. It’s actually kind of a nice day. It’s very warm today but I’m in the shade and mostly I’m just sitting down. It’s not a really difficult task except for getting covered with lentil leaves and debris. It’s actually kind of nice work to do.

I’m going to go out in a few more hours and see if I can get finished with what I have and then I’m going to drag the hose out and give everybody else on the field to drink. Sometime this week I will pull the last of the lentil plants and then weed out the gardens and bring everything from there to the compost pile. This will be my first real task of the harvest season. It’ll be the hardest thing that I have to do for harvest season I think but I think I have it under control.

Once again however, I’m not angry at any of this. You live and you learn and this is my first active year trying to grow some food for myself. I’ve learned a lot and I have quite a nice structure in place going forward. I’ll be better at this next year. I’ve learned a few things. I’ll be better next year.

***

Well, I won’t lie that today was a pretty disappointing day. I don’t know why I ended up feeling such negative emotions over those damn lentils. I guess I should have seen what was coming and made some wiser choices but let my anger get the worst of me.

Looking back at my original plans, I genuinely thought the lower gardens were just a place where I was going to dig a few holes and plant a few fruit trees and not bother with it again. I certainly didn’t think I was going to be designing any kind of gardens out there or doing any kind of landscaping work. This is not to say that I made anything extraordinary. I just measured out 1.5 m wide gardens just like everywhere else and put some wood down for borders.

I dug out the pathways and used a lot of that dirt for filler levels in my garden boxes. It lowered the paths a little and made the land a little higher. My Hope was for better drainage. I didn’t have the ability or the strength to genuinely build up the soil of those boxes but we did add some fertility and burned a lot of the garden weeds in those boxes in the early spring.

The idea to plant lentils was from my ex partner. I’m not blaming her. She suggested that lentils are nitrogen fixers and having them would at least improve the quality of the soil. That was our first thought or at least the first thought that I latched on to is being intelligent enough. With this thought in mind, I started digging out the paths and laid out the three long beds.

Well, there’s a lot of weeds down there. There were a lot of things that we didn’t do. I admit that I didn’t take very good care of the lentil Garden this year. It was a place that never really got water. There are some real reasons for that but it was the one part of the field that got neglected. Whether or not this God in the way of our yield is inconsequential. 

When I noticed that it was time to do something about the lentils, I asked my ex partner what we should do. The choice was to harvest them or do we just plow them into the ground. I just wanted to know what the plan was. She said that we should go ahead and harvest them. That was about a week and a half ago and today was the day I wasted my time trying to collect lentils.

By the time I was at the end of my tolerance, it was already eating and I still had to go and do some watering. The hose was a little uncooperative and I had to stop and start several times. I was yelling a bit. All I can say is that you live and learn. 

The only thing bad I want to say is against the quality of conversation I have with my ex partner. That’s the thing that had me most upset and probably has me most upset. I just don’t feel we have the kind of conversation that actually solves problems. Without that, just using the words ex partner is something else completely.

But I’m not going to point my finger. I’m not going to blame anybody else because eventually the choice was mine. I didn’t have to do anything. She said something and I thought it was a good idea and I’m as guilty as anyone else for any problems that occurred along the way. This is my place and I make the decisions about what goes on here. I should have known better and I should have had the plan in place for what to do.

I’m not going to sit here and make excuses for my failures. I’m not asking for anybody’s sympathy. In a perfect world however, my legs would not be a problem right now. In a perfect world, I would have gotten some medical Care back in March when I went to Minsk looking for it. I would have had a little medical Care and it wouldn’t have hurt anybody or been against any state rules but instead I ran into a bureaucrat who decided that I should be punished for something that only she understood. She thought it was a good opportunity for me to decide between torture and paying money. This was her mindset.

Well, it’s been an interesting period of time since then because unfortunately, I have had to fight a bit more of an apparel battle then I intended. I make no bones about the fact that I prefer to be lazy. Truthfully and honestly, my neighbors can go fuck themselves if they think that I should be driven to a higher level of performance. They should go fuck themselves anyway but they should definitely go fuck themselves for even thinking like this. Not only am I none of their goddamn business, but they’re just talking fucking stupid and they don’t have to live inside my body. Forgive the language but I’m in a pretty bad mood this evening. Having said that, my neighbors can go fuck themselves.

But I guess this is what a failure feels like. If we did end up putting more nitrogen in the soil because the plants grew there, the lentil Garden got overrun with weeds because I didn’t have the wherewithal to go out and keep it worked. In that line of thought, it was never my intention to do a garden that required a lot of time on the ground. I never thought of using that lower land for anything but a couple of trees and berry bushes. I wasn’t looking for high maintenance and I definitely wasn’t looking for a garden that would end up being ultra high maintenance for absolute non reward. All that work for absolutely nothing and nobody even knew what they were doing by the time we got to the end.

So today was a bad day. There’s nothing else I can say about it. Today was not the worst day and today was not the only time I have to admit to making a mistake. Mishandling the fourth water barrel underneath the bar and roof cost me a thousand liters of water. It also cost me some money trying to figure out a way to get this second pump working. It cost me money and several trips to town trying to make this thing work for me.

But here I am at about 10:30 at night and I’m calling it a night. I’m definitely pretty tired and I have been trying to calm down and allow my anger to leave me for the last 3 hours. I’m normally not emotional but today I kind of lost my shit and screamed and growled a bit.

My decision is that I’m going to go in and chop down everything growing in those gardens and then tote all of the organic material over to the compost pile. One positive thing about growing a lot of weeds is that you get a lot of organic material for compost. After that, either this fall or next spring, I’m going to build up those three gardens. I’m going to use the pass again for some filler and bring in some decent fertilizer and then probably raise the walls. I’m going to use those 50 m to grow food next year. I understand there will be some weeds but I’m not worried. The

My original plan was for more trees but I’m having a hard time believing in them. Global warming is real, my life situation is real so next year, I’m going to use that space to grow some food.