Wednesday, July 27th 2022
There is nothing better than waking up to the sound of rain. There is nothing better than a cool morning in the summer. Yesterday I gave my plants some water in the evening for a second day in a row and I felt pretty good about it. It seemed that the plants were pretty happy to be getting water every day. It was the first time all summer I think where I wasn’t worried about conserving water.
Eventually, it’s going to be sunny but not so hot today. I always believe the weather reports when they tell me it’s going to be sunny. Probably I have the day off from watering today but tomorrow and Friday I’ll have to break out the hose again. No problem for me whatsoever. Well, that’s not entirely true. It gets a little painful sometimes but this is what I have and this is what I do so I don’t think I’ll have a problem.
I guess the idea is to take things easy. I don’t have much of a choice and I don’t really have much else to do. Everything’s about food these days and I’ll be honest with you, I kind of like it this way. I like where the only thing I’m worried about is what I have to eat. It seems a pretty primal way to live really.
When I think of the word primal, I do not think about bashing other apes over the head with bones or chasing after animals with Spears or a bow and arrow. I just think of how fortunate I am to be surrounded by food. It is perhaps the basic need. Everything that lives has got to eat. Perhaps eating is the genuine meaning of what it is to be alive.
My relationship to food has always been tentative at best. My family had an athletic father and a head case mother, to say it kindly. Or perhaps that was unkind. My mom was not a fitness nut and my dad worked pretty hard to keep his body in shape. My dad was a ball player and my mom just wanted love and didn’t care who she had to kill to get it. She was pretty brutal and violent. I hear my grandmother was the same way but she was always pretty reasonable with me. Maybe there’s a difference from when the responsibility is not there.
My dad taught me to play ball and a few stray philosophical thoughts and my mom taught me how not to play ball. Actually, my dad gave me some ideas of how to get along with people well and my mom basically forced me to be with her. I’m not really saying anything that is different from anybody else really. I’m sure this is basically the way the world happens in husband and wife families. I’m sure most of the tension that I felt was pretty similar to most people where the father is forced to travel for money.
To be honest, I don’t remember too many families where the husband and the wife both got to live at home and the family stayed together. They say there is a 50% divorce rate. That means half the time you try to be in a legal long-term relationship with someone, it’s not going to work out. The word legal becomes optimal when the breakup comes because then of course you have to start giving some of your assets to other people to help you deal with your assets. I guess if marriage and the misery that comes along with it was not so economically profitable for other people, we just wouldn’t have it anymore.
My parents did that too. My parents pretty much brought every possible misery into my life. Physical and mental abuse, I’m divorce, uprooting and moving. And the food thing. My mom used food as a replacement for the love she was never going to get. She kept me close and never really let me run on the street when I wanted to. You get out of the habit after a while. I was still good at sports but I got fat. That probably colored my ability to deal with the world as much as anything.
When I was teaching, it became obvious how difficult it was to be fat in an educational situation. It became quite obvious that certain people were capable of serious mental functions, they could learn and grow in the material, but others just did not have the capacity. Probably the number one thing in this regard was the amount of fat, salt and sugar in their diets. The children from the lower income families were suffering from malnutrition from a really poor diet, some of the wealthier kids had access to more fruits and vegetables.
Eyesight also makes a difference by the way. The children who have poor eyesight also end up being divorced from the world a bit. I had that too. I’ve worn glasses all my life.
The thing about being a child is always you just don’t really know anything except what you are given. This innocence you have is simply a lack of experience. You don’t know what happens when you “grow up”. You don’t really understand the pressures of responsibility until you have them. You don’t really understand how the world moves or how people pull strings to make things happen. You don’t really understand if you are advantaged or disadvantaged. These things come only later and when your child, you just go with what they give you.
Was I advantaged or disadvantaged? Probably both. My parents were pretty good about making money but my dad wasn’t around, my mother would go crazy and I don’t know what else I can say. We had a big house but I got tortured. I had access to a lot of books but I had psychotic parents who would beat me for thinking too much. Not parents, my mom would physically abuse me and my father would mentally abuse me. I come from a strange place.
But again, I’m not really sure that idyllic childhoods are the norm anywhere. I’m sure all parents who have at least enough money to feed themselves believe they are perfect. I see how people are with their children here and the things they think are important. I have a lot of sympathy for the kids. I know that they have it rough trying to deal with the insanity of their parents.
But as a 20-year teacher with several tens of thousands of hours of teaching experience, perhaps I can offer advice to parents everywhere. It’s about food. Raising children is about food. Every living thing has to eat and your children are not Angels or gifts or punching bags or emotional sounding boards or dogs to be trained and taught tricks, they are not receptacles for your personal problems, they are just the innocent small humans who are going to end up living with the mess you make of their heads. If you’d like to do something kind, start with food.
My advice to parents is to raise your kids vegan. I mean this with all of my heart. Starting off their lives with sugar addictions and heart disease is no gift. I could start doing Google searches here to talk about childhood obesity problems, prediabetes and the effect of too much fat, especially animal fat, in the diet. I can also talk about the lack of rationality that comes along with consuming flesh from dead animals or the secretions of imprisoned beasts. I’m not talking about adding the fear and paranoia of these animals or the self justification that comes along with the belief that we are something other than animals ourselves. My advice is to raise the children with clarity. Clarity and simplicity.
I am not saying that I am better than anyone but it does seem that I have a bit more mental clarity than the vast percentage of people I run into. I’m not going to say that I am intrinsically better because of heredity or anything like that, I’m just saying that when I speak to people, I seem to understand things a bit quicker. This is not to say that I don’t understand people who are locked into their lives. People have to make money, people have to eat and I understand that these restrictions also remain on people. You can’t step too far out of the box for fear of losing what you have. All I’m saying is if it’s about clarity, there is a possibility of growth and when the road is muddy and the blood doesn’t flow easily, we get stuck in the mud.
I’ve heard vegan activists say things like raising children vegan should be law. I’ve seen videos of children raised with a diverse and healthy vegan diet demonstrate ridiculous clarity and mental acuity. Children have an amazing capacity to make use of their body. Their size mixed with the new energy of life really makes them super people. The most important thing I would think would be to not do anything to limit their capacity to learn. Of course we want to teach them good and practical things. It is extremely important to teach children to be good people and to live well in the world. But we really shouldn’t go out of our way to harm our children, even if we think we are being well-meaning or kind.
I’m not really sure people would be so easy to hand out candy if they thought of it as a drug. I’m sure most people think that processed sugar is a food. It’s probably the furthest thing from the truth. I’m sure everybody understands about tooth decay but I’m not sure people understand the problems of addiction. As a teacher, it’s easy to recognize a sugar freak. They have no attention spans and they are always waiting for their next fix. Literally, giving regular sugar to children either as a food substitute or as a treat for being a well-trained animal could probably be considered cruelty. And if you’ve ever seen a child go ballistically insane because they walk by a restaurant or a shop that has ice cream and the parent refuses them, if you don’t see the drug addiction, you are blind.
The thing about not feeding them meat is a bit more difficult to understand. If society genuinely believes that sugar is a reasonable thing for children, it will become something of an impossibility to tell people that meat is not food. The aggressiveness, the lack of blood flow, the clogged arteries and the beginnings of heart disease all have an effect on childhood development.
Diabetes is not really about sugar. It’s about too much sugar remaining in the blood because the blood cells do not have the ability to access and process sugar into energy because of an excess of fat in the lining of the cells. Diabetes is caused by fat. The sugar is just the symptom and the disease is stemmed from malnutrition. It comes from meat.
Even if you think there is some line between diabetic or pre-diabetic or non-diabetic, even if you think that it is healthy, blocking arteries is blocking arteries and keeping the amount of blood that can flow to the brain limited is equally a crime against people who are just growing up to become people.
Anyway, it’s about food. If you have the responsibility of raising children, I have no idea why nutrition is not the first subject. I actually have no idea why we do not have parenting classes. I’m sure that we do, I’m just not exactly sure why we don’t do it as a species universally. I also don’t understand why young parents are forced to live in an economically challenged situation. And even more so, I cannot understand why the Christians are so interested in making sure that every single possible pregnancy be brought to term no matter what the situation of the parents. We are institutional insanity. We’re not doing anything wise. We are not doing anything for the future except making sure that we are as insane as possible. Somebody noticed that you make more money from Insanity than calm. I’m sure they were Christian. Let them burn in hell for creating this.
This being said, I guess I’m going to go do something about breakfast. I’m not really hungry. It’s cool and overcast right now. The rain has stopped. I guess I’ll go pick up some greens and see how they fit in with whatever I have to eat.
I tell you, there’s something remarkably beautiful and easy about life when you have a field full of greens and it’s been raining during the night. It’s just a moment but it’s probably the kindest moment that the world has to offer us. It’s the moment that helps the food grow.
***
Excellent! Europe decided to live without Russian help.
Not the best way to get the job done, but a good step in the right direction. Just let it go. You’d be surprised what new things come to mind when you get rid of bad habits (and bad business partners) Sometimes, it is like the sun coming out for the first time after a long cold horible winter. Actually, this is only true until the next compromise. They’ll crack. Putin knows this.
Meanwhile, in the distracting bullshit department, we have even more teasers from the shit show known as Donald Trump. This entire business just gives me headaches.
Speaking of bullshit as a replacement for dealing with corrupt leadership, along with the above teaser reel, it seems Trump is hinting at putting his hat in the ring again.
Does this have anything to do with the extremely corrupt department of Justice agreeing to pass rules that no president or candidate for president can be prosecuted? Would someone explain to me how the chair in the oval office could be used as a coercion or simply to hold an entire country hostage?
You know, my neighbors have been working very hard to cover up their lies. When the chicken woman called the cops on me last year, she told them that I was doing a home invasion and attacked her. This of course is some kind of weird sex fantasy on her part and I have ample evidence. But the point is that it seems to be something that genuinely fills up the depressing emptiness of her life to build and build and build on her lies. It is so interesting for her to escape Justice.
All I’m saying is conservative is as conservative does and what we see in one place in the world on the tiniest of scales we also see on the grandest. I’m just thinking at some point we should just keep things simple and honest rather than thinking all of this extra drama it’s supposed to mean something. This is true as pertains to my ability to enjoy my life but it’s also true when we talk about the several trillion dollars in public funds available to the United States government and how that decent chunk of the world’s wealth affects everyone else.
Time to step back and be a bit contemplative? Of course not. That’s just not what we do, is it?
***
Cutting off the Russians is starting to spread. I believe this is false hope because I never trust the British. But I do believe in bombs falling on civilian areas, the lies and propaganda of the Russians and that hopefully, there is enough blood in this for people to move.
Do I believe that we would be better off without the blood? Yes, of course. But what am I speaking about? Without question, we don’t need War or military atrocities generally. We also do not have any need for the constant hysteria and paranoia that goes along with living under such governments. But what I also believe is that our inability to grow or function or leave our emotional decisions behind, and this is in the private sector as well as in the decision makers, comes from our consumption of animals. When you eat blood, you need more blood. Cut the flesh out of your diet and you stop needing it.
Do I really think a quiet more agriculturally oriented world would be better? Absolutely and endlessly of course. What argument could I put that would mean anything? It’s very simple. Imagine the most beautiful moment of innocent love you can possibly conjure. Imagine a romantic moment of him or her in a field of wildflowers and making love for the first time. Imagine a world where this is possible and you are probably imagining a world without blood and death.
Something to think about anyway. I’m just saying that I’m already doing it. I’m not asking you to follow me, starving and looking for a piece of meat to chew on. I’m just asking you to think about changing your diet simply for the purposes of becoming a quieter, more empathetic, healthier and cleaner person. Give it a try. It’s a money back guarantee. You tell me what happens to you when you let it go.
***
I had an interesting series of events. It’s kind of crazy how these things work out. It started with my need to go to the bathroom.
Veganism is great for regular bowel movements, clean gut health and a lower chance of contracting abdominal cancer.
So I got up and I saw that Ghenna was standing at my gate. He has changed his phone number but he wanted to know if I had any work that needed to be done. I really wasn’t planning on anything today. I wanted to tell him no but then I remembered exactly how much work was needed to clean out the lentil gardens once and for all.
Basically the weeds have to be chopped out of there and not just cut down. And then all of them need to be wheelbarrowed up to the compost pile and that compost pile definitely needs to be turned. Suddenly, I was absolutely sure that I could use a man for this job.
But it’s a funny thing what happens when your brain cracks open. Suddenly you start thinking of possibilities. At least I do this. Blame veganism for an active mind. I suddenly understood that there was quite a bit of physical labor to do on this project and that if Ghenna was into it, I definitely could use his help on several fronts.
First of all, he has access to fertilizer. Yes, yes, I know, yes, I’m talking about animal fertilizer. Yes, I know this is against vegan principles. And yes, it is something that I managed to live pretty well without this year and that if things ever work out well for me with public health, this entire thought will probably be something welcome for me to work on next spring.
On the other side of the coin, if it’s a matter of actually growing food, if it’s accessible and I have someone with the wherewithal to bring it over by horse cart, it might be definitely a very good thing to be able to fortify the lower gardens going into next year.
There are some problems to this thought. First of all, two of the gardens are not exactly level. This is not a massive problem but raising the lower level of the leftmost line and bolstering the barrier is about a day’s project. It’s not a ridiculous amount of work but I would need to extend the range of my drill or do all of the construction up top and then walk it into place. Again, not the end of the world either way but something that would need to get done first. It would also probably help to have perhaps some steel rebar to help hold the barrier in place. I can do this with wooden stakes too but steel is real.
So the plan would be to raise the lower level to be even with the top, lay down a decent amount of fertilizer and then dig out the pathway up above it as a topsoil and then we would be good to go. Mulch could be added at some expense and Forest leaves will be in huge abundance. But this would give an extremely positive growing medium and a pretty good place, definitely comfortable to work in, to grow some bulk food stuff.
This is the plan that I have in my head.
If I am ambulatory enough and mobile enough to do this work myself, I’ll probably be happy to have it in the early spring. It’s very cold here and having something to do and being able to move around is an absolute positive. Yes again, this is definitely connected to whether or not I actually can be ambulatory but I’m taking all of this into my thinking.
This plan would give me 50 more meters, 75 square meters actually, of growing space for serious bulk vegetables like cabbage, corn, maybe carrots and onions and it would allow me to change the upper boxes into more interesting places for faster growing foods. Spinach and lettuce is a given but also I’m a huge pea fan, we could turn a box over to strawberries and another one to sweet potatoes. We could even turn a box over just for flowers. This is for the beauty but also to attract pollinators for everything else.
Do I actually want to do this much work? This is simply a question of how much I want to grow my own food and if so, how much food I want to try to grow. No matter what you do, you need a reasonable growing medium. Your soil has to be healthy. To me, this means minimizing the amount of digging that I do, the amount of walking on the boxes themselves and to make sure to constantly have fertility.
Then again, I have been eating horseradish leaves all year long and I don’t remember getting sick from it. I don’t remember anything bad from this. And frankly, the horse radish grows in such abundance here, perhaps everything I’m thinking of right now is complete bullshit.
Or, I can build the boxes as I said and simply make a home for 9 more fruit trees with berry bushes and herbs growing in them. That is an interesting idea especially in the early spring when all of the blossoms might show up at the same time. The best thing about that Garden is that eventually, it would be self-sustaining and perennial.
But then we have some reality to toss back into this mix. Dreaming is wonderful. Having someone to help you do some work is wonderful. Having abundant fertilizer is wonderful. Having the legs to actually do some work is extremely wonderful. But let’s not forget where we are. I’m not talking about Belarus, I’m talking about the planet Earth in the year 2022.
So I did some wash today and refilled the water jugs. I probably used 35 l for drinking water and perhaps 25 or 30 l to do a little bit of clothes washing. Let’s say I took out 60 l.
The problem was that when I was pulling water out of the well, though the first bucket I pulled up was clean and smooth, I immediately noticed that my bucket was bottoming out. I measured the water level about an hour later and found it to be at 235 centimeters. This is not the actual groundwater, this is 235 L below the lip of my well. Perhaps the groundwater measurement itself would be something like 185. This is not important.
What is important is that I only have about 40 cm of water available. Measuring the circumference of the well, I get a little bit better than 6 L per centimeter. This meant that getting drinking water and washing some clothes dropped the water level to about 30 cm plus minus. The bucket is 26 cm. You can see where I’m getting here.
There are still perhaps 7 weeks of Summer before the temperature definitely starts to drop. It is supposed to be a little cool and overcast for the next 7 or 10 days. No excessive heat waves are planned. But we don’t get a lot of water and that groundwater is absolutely going to bottom out before the summer is over.
What this means is that any dreams I have are going to be very, very, very small and it’s never going to be less than tentative. Growing your own food requires several things but the most important element of all is water and where I live is simply drying out because of all of the human activity of my neighbors and all of the greed that demands that we all jump in our cars and accept globalization.
So what’s the truth? The truth is I don’t really have much choice. I don’t have a bank large enough to throw my wallet at the problem and make it go away. I wish a lot of things were different in my life but one thing I can definitely count on is that I am not rich enough to just pull up and go somewhere else where I’m more comfortable. This place is what I have, I can do what I can do to make it into a beautiful paradise at least in the Summers. But I’m definitely going to need the cooperation of the rest of the world and I’m going to need it fast if I really want to make something nice here. I’m definitely going to need the world to wake up a little bit if it isn’t already too late.
***
2:20 in the afternoon and happily, it’s been overcast all day. I definitely had some energy today. Some of it had to do with some improvisations to make myself a bit more comfortable. Unfortunately, when I actually do feel it, it’s hard to stay down.
I got started on a tree transplant project. I have a fruit tree that I foolishly put in one place but definitely needs to be moved to another. It is very successful where it is. It certainly would be because it’s in one of the wettest places in the garden just underneath a roof and where a lot of water flows. I planted most of my berry bushes in this region.
After this though, I realized that if the tree grows, I’m going to lose I really lovely view from my kitchen window. It’s exactly The view to enjoy thunderstorms from. Or to listen to the cricket concert every night. The crickets are brilliant these days. They are in full voice and I find it hard not to feel some sense of sentimentality towards him. I’m not going to tell the story again but needless to say, this is another one of the beautiful things about living in the country.
Unfortunately, some rain and my ignoring them for a couple of days led to a minor infestation on the potatoes. According to police reports, there are now 136 missing potato beetles. My guess is they are not showing up for dinner anytime soon.
It’s also a lovely time for green cooking obviously. This morning I soaked some buckwheat and red lentils and on top of it, I made a green sauce from some peanuts, a little oatmeal, some deal and some bolted lettuce and spinach. If you use the blender, you don’t really mind so much if the plant gets a little bad. I’m saying that if you want to eat it raw, The taste is a bit sharp but mixed with a little bit of fat from the peanuts, it settles in really nicely. I also spiced it up a little bit.
That of course has even more to do with how much energy I have today. Eating a raw breakfast like the one I just described will give you a ton of energy.
I also found a moment of inspiration from a local actress. She posted a sepia nude of herself on Instagram and when I saw it this morning, there was yet another small Rush of energy. So I contacted her and asked her if she was interested in reading a text. A few hours ago she wrote back and said it was interesting so I sent her a copy of nadia/hope and right now she’s doing whatever she’s doing with it.
Of course inspiration like this will drive you crazy. It is a screenplay so immediately, I started solving some of the problems of the production. I can’t help being a planner. It is who I am. The film itself takes place here in Pinsk for 90% of the film and there is nothing particularly special or would need to be built. There are a few minutes that take place in New York outside but I have always felt a friend with a decent camera could cover those shots in one day. They do not have to be shot in New York but I think things like the Staten Island ferry and the middle of Central Park are a bit iconic.
I don’t really have any more to say about this. I don’t know why I did it but I did. And you never know. The word Надежда in Russian means hope. It is also a woman’s name, Nadia exactly. And the story is about a woman looking for hope.
It would be cool if she liked it. It would be even more cool if it got her to cry a bit. It would be crazy mad lunatic cool if this little movement led to a parade of events that ended up in this film being shot. Why not?
I just want to say that this particular screenplay was already tossed around by a film company. It was a pretty local film company to be honest but things were moving in that direction. I also know for a fact that several things that I’ve written have been well received.
So that’s it. Lights, camera, action!
***
Who is Dr Greger? This is Dr Greger.
Carcinogens in chicken meat?!?!
Say it ain’t so…
***
So that’s about it for today. No, it was not the most active day I’ve ever had but surprisingly, I got some things done today that I have been waiting to do for a long time. It’s just that time of year. The time for creation is pretty much done and there’s nothing else to do but reap some rewards and start thinking about the future. That’s harvest Time. Yay.
The rain did a good job of filling back up the buckets. There’s a lot of pleasure in that, believe it or not. I even have pretty well filled buckets out back. I guess the wrench work I did was good enough. I don’t need to replace the fittings. It isn’t the most active place for water gathering but the tanks are almost full and I will be ready to draw from them whenever it’s needed. I also noticed that the place does justify two barrels after all.
I think Lena is due to show up tomorrow. This will give me enough reason to make sure everything is tidy and ready for the day off. I don’t think I can ask her to go to the store for me because I don’t think I have the money on hand. It doesn’t matter. I don’t need anything really.
I just had an interesting moment. I was sitting here trying to think of something to say. But there was nothing in there. I don’t have anything profound to add. There are no deep thoughts.
So I just sat here quietly waiting for something to pop into my head. But there was nothing. I don’t have anything profound to add. I can’t really think of anything really wonderful to say except that in the silence of trying to find something interesting, I noticed that I am really enjoying listening to the sound of the crickets. I guess they make a joke about this. When someone tells a joke that isn’t funny they have the sound of crickets. The lack of laughter is illustrated by the sound of crickets. The lack of response leaves only crickets.
I really like the sound of crickets. It’s really comforting. I have so many grasshoppers. They don’t seem to be destroying anything but there are so many of them. When you walk here, the grass comes alive with these little guys jumping out of the way. The pattern of their chirping is mesmerizing really. Maybe the sound of crickets is something we all need more of. It’s enough
Leave a Reply