Sunday, August 14th 2022. Week 32

I just think that we all need to be aware of our environmental problems and agree to take personal responsibility to lessen our impact by being as practical and ecological as possible. We should do something to help rather than thinking selfishly for our pleasure and even when we have financial obligations. We all should be conscious and more conscientious to the maximum of our abilities.

It’s 5:30 a.m., the Sun is thinking about the possibility of coming up in the sky and I guess I am starting my week.

Yesterday was humid and warm but not blazing hot. We had some light sprinkles of rain all day. Not really enough to make a dent on things or genuinely make things better. But water did fall a little bit from the sky keeping everything wet. I guess it was a very nice day for keeping plants alive.

I didn’t really do much of anything. I ate way too much and I did not eat sensibly unfortunately. I didn’t need to overeat but I did. What I made was wonderful but now it is sitting inside me like a block and I’m afraid and probably going to be uncomfortable for quite some time because of it.

There is a vegan dairy trick that comes from when you blend up either chickpeas or any kind of peas really. If you heat up and remove the moisture from peas they tend to solidify. You can create cheese or tofu from this simply by heating and cooling. You can flavor them as you like and use them just like hard cheese or tofu. It doesn’t melt like cheese but it is something that you can use to slice or cook with. It also Acts like dairy in that as you’re cooking with it, it works to make an incredibly creamy sauce. Maybe you could call it a vegan alfredo. This is what I had yesterday.

It wasn’t at all difficult. I just put what was left of Friday night’s hummus into Saturday’s soup and let it thicken and it became the creamiest, richest and most flavorful spicy alfredo. Luxurious. Perfect comfort food for a rainy lazy day. However, if you eat too much as I did, it sits like a ship’s anchor on its way through you and this is where I am right now. 

I would not say that I am uncomfortable from this. I just don’t feel like moving very much and would prefer to remain plastered in place exactly as I am. I should know better. I really, really, really should know better already. I’m too old to be doing this to myself. Nevertheless, it was unbelievably tasty and I was pleased with being able to enjoy the inexpensive cheat meal for what it was. No guilt, no murder and no suffering and on Saturday when I have no work to do, I didn’t mind the rock being in my belly. Now though I’m feeling it. Now I am feeling regret.

It doesn’t matter what I say. I will never learn. You never really get rid of your awful habits. You just get better at living with them.

The weather reports say that it’s going to be very warm and humid today without very much chance of rain. I think they are finally coming to their senses or maybe not. Even humidity with cloud cover is a little bit better for growing things. I have to remember what this year was like and try to make plans accordingly for next year.

I have some pictures in my head about trellising some of the boxes. I’m going to need to trellis my grape plants either now or next year and I’m thinking it might be pretty easy to put up some cattle panels if I can find them. This is very sturdy steel mesh that can be used in many ways. It can be fencing and it can be curled to make archways and even makes pretty good compost bins when pulled into a circle. I have to look around and see the cost of this material because it might be the easiest thing to solve several of my problems.

What I’m thinking is that I could use this to create a little bit more shade around the boxes. If I put up something that takes away at least some of the blindingly hot sunlight and make sure everything is well mulched, I can probably get away without installing a bunch of plastic tubing for watering. I do not have super abundant water. I could increase my water catching capacity and this is probably something I should do, but I want to limit the amount of plastic that I bring on to the property. No matter what I do and how much good it might be, plastic is going to turn into garbage and I want to avoid that as much as possible.

One thought I had a little earlier this year would be to make a permanent water box near my barn. I haven’t measured it but I think it’s somewhere between 6 and 8 m long and if I were to build a covered trough out of masonry, I might be able to catch and save two or even three times as much water. I would also be able to install a permanent pumping station to irrigate and water the field. It would still have to be engineered to specific tolerances. This drought is not going to be getting any better and we are going to get less and less water every year. But it might allow me at least a little more freedom to keep my food moist and to give the plants a bit of a drink every day.

You might say that I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope someday you’ll join us

And the world would live as one

As for the rest of the day, I am going to remain on “take it easy” status for quite some time. I can see myself on minimal movement all the way to the end of this writing to be honest. I have done quite a bit of healing, which I am very pleased with. And certain amounts of walking around can be quite comfortable for short periods of time. I’m just not as whole as I was earlier this year and of course I never do get to Minsk to create a better situation for myself. They only seem interested in torturing me.

On the other hand, if last week was any indication, I have some reliable help to help get through at least some of the physical labor. I don’t know if my ex partner is going to come by today. We have not been speaking very much lately and again, there’s not really a lot to do except perhaps to do some watering today. If I get up right now and spray down the plants, even that will not be necessary. So if she likes the idea of coming up on a Sunday, maybe she’ll be by.

That’s about it. I know I have some things I want to talk about this week. We have a war going on and it’ll be good to find out what’s going on with them. I have some windows that need to be replaced or fixed. It’s not about broken Glass it’s just that the wood has reached the end of its lifespan. It’s time to replace it with something modern or to do the work of rebuilding it. It’s also time to start thinking about getting the house ready for winter. There are some things I’d like to do to help the warm room retain a little bit more heat.

Basically, it’s just a matter of my own physical capabilities. If I had the legs, I guess I would be doing all kinds of things to make my world better. As I don’t, I have to be kind of minimalistic about things. Perhaps minimalism is better than ambition. It certainly is cheaper. But like my adult students used to say in answer to a question about what they think will happen in the future or what needs to happen, let’s just read more and find out. They were never fond of thinking through problems or planning. They were pretty happy with sitting passively and seeing what happens next. Perhaps it is not absolutely my nature to do this but sometimes when you don’t really have much choice, it’s a good skill to have.

***

(Ecology) is a great idea but I don’t see it happening.

This is the point. It’s not a matter of whether you think it’s going to happen or not, it’s whether you personally agree to do everything you can towards that end. I don’t know if you have noticed, heard about this or even thought about it, but I spend quite a bit of time studying the science of global warming. This includes globally and my little region. We have fucked up the planet badly. We have changed the climate and this means that all living things are changing too rapidly to live. Mass extinction. All of this is true. I just ask everyone I know to try really hard to walk as lightly as possible.

I found this video about the meat industry. I have shown and seen many such videos and the point is always the same but for some reason, this one seems to hit just a little bit harder.

It seems as though I am fighting a war on many fronts but in fact, everything is very much connected. If I talk about going vegan for health, it also connects to people’s attitudes towards each other. This would be mental health as well as physical health. But if I talk about mental health this is also addiction. If we get into addiction, we get into violence and if we get into violence, we can even get into the ecological impact of War. If we start getting into ecological impacts, we are now talking about land use. Once we get into land use, we are right back to animal agriculture and veganism. 

I could make a chart showing this. Or maybe it’s just a series of concepts that all lead to the same thing. Something like this:

What are some things that are absolutely agreeably bad on this planet? I’m talking about things that absolutely no one would disagree are bad.

1. Poor heart health, cancer, diabetes 
2. Aggression, violence and a war for resources
3. Water, land and air pollution
4. Economic instability and massive enslaving debt

What is crazy is that going vegan as a personal choice would put a dent in everything here. Simply giving up meat would help every single one of these problems both personally and globally. 

I am only advocating peaceful coexistence. This would be coexistence with each other and with our environment. I don’t understand why this is so difficult to ask for or talk about. I don’t understand why people cannot grasp this concept. Or, I do understand why the concept is difficult to grasp. They eat meat. Meat fucks up your head. It plays with your head, it plays with your heart, it causes you to become violent and it is generally and horribly both carcinogenic and addictive.

No meat = having a better future might be a good equation. But I have a better equation:

No meat = having a future.

***

The ex partner is due up in a couple of hours. She is being very nice to me. Hopefully, I’ll get a bunch of fresh chili peppers. These will be both for eating and for saving for the seeds. Definitely, next year we have to grow peppers here.

She also sent me a picture of some of my favorite noodles. These are noodles made from beans or cornstarch or something other than wheat. I like them because they are much, much healthier and better than those packaged dry noodle soup things that are the staple of college nutrition. I make my own soup to put them in, thank you very much. But now it seems that the cost has doubled. This has something to do with some game being played either by the Russians or by the Chinese. These things disappeared from the market for the last 2 months or so. Now they have reappeared but at twice the price. I call this gouging.

I really should live without them but I’ll take a few packages and just go lightly with them.

I don’t hate myself for being addicted to noodles. I just hate myself for not having the energy or desire to become a noodle chef. I just prefer not to be on my feet too much these days. I’m hoping that this investment will be helpful to me in the long run. But what it really means is that I don’t have the patience to be a chef, at least for things that take experimentation and practice to get correct.

Or I should just live without. Probably, unless the price has come down or this winter turns me into a noodle chef, I’ll just learn to live without.

***

Brutality. That’s the thing we can start living without.

Brutality: savage physical violence; great cruelty. “brutality against civilians”

What causes brutality?

In countries with high rates of killings by police, there is often a combination of factors including inadequate laws, racial or other forms of discrimination, insecurity or conflict, and entrenched impunity.

It’s interesting that they went directly to police brutality. It seems like police and brutality seem to go hand in hand. I wasn’t actually asking about police brutality but this seems to be the main connection. As I cruised down the page though I ran into another word that seems to connect to police or any organization really. That word was corruption.

What causes police corruption?

A culture of corruption arises primarily from failures in four key areas: (a) recruitment, training, and promotion; (b) resources, such as pay and equipment; (c) systems of accountability within departments, courts and the law; and (d) cultural traditions that inhibit the development of professional police standards.

Do you think you would be fair to say that we live in a culture of extreme corruption and brutality? Perhaps we need to rethink how much money we invest in security and police and instead invest in equality and quality of life for all people. It seems that this would be a more peaceful solution and a better use of resources.

I could probably make a huge project out of this thought but maybe the thought is all that’s needed.

***

5 questions:

What countries sell the most guns? There is a lot of agreement but here is the dirty dozen.

So here are a few things that I recognize from this list. With the exception of China and South Korea, everyone on this list is white European. The second thing that I noticed from this list is almost completely universally, the people buying the weapons are not European or white. It seems as though supplying guns to India and Pakistan and to the Middle East seems to keep the gun business alive. Do you think that it’s just a coincidence that we have caucasians selling guns to non caucasians?

What are the incidences of gun violence according to race?

I’ll give you a hint here that these numbers are identical all the way down to the bottom of the list. There are a few places where they say it is not applicable but as a general rule, we can see that more guns exist in darker skinned people than in white.

There are two ways to look at this. First of all we can say that white people are better people, calmer, more gentle and more Christian in their benevolence and gentility. Or, we can say that we provide the means for black people to be more violent. 

How can we know the difference? Well, we learned something about corruption a little earlier today. What if we asked a question, and this is a complete waste of time because you already know the answer, about the differences in economic possibilities between the races.

What are the economic differences based on race?

This is not much of a study and I’m not bringing such academic skills here but obviously we see something. It’s the simplest correlation in the entire world. I am going to add one more thing here that would be as equally as obvious. Where there is more money, there is a higher quality of food. Where there is less money or poverty, we have a lower quality of food. When we say low quality food, we would immediately go to things like fast food and other processed garbage.

So what happens in a world of poverty where there is no end to people trying to sell you guns? And then what happens, when we put a spin on this basic situation and ask people to buy guns simply to protect themselves from people from the lower classes, i.e, non-white people? It does seem to be obviously corollary, doesn’t it? I mean, you really don’t have to think too hard about this to see the obviousness of the situation.

Here’s a question that I’m just going to bet has been asked before. I bet we will get a pretty obvious answer.

Why are white people so brutal?

You can go in and have a look for yourself. Like I have said many many times, I’m not the only one who thinks like this. It’s not so much however that we argue over the existence of Truth here. What needs to happen is change. What needs to happen is real societal change and we need to make this change quickly.

Not to be redundant, but I believe it starts with meat. 

Does eating meat cause brutality?

I’ll give you a hint of what’s going on inside here. The only reference that even moderately disagreed with this was the whitest journal of all of them. Check it out for yourself and tell me you don’t see what I see.

***

Here’s a little more just to continue the thought. I went to YouTube and simply wrote the words meet and violence.

You probably don’t want to watch this one. It’s the one I do not usually put up here in favor of more conversational material. This one’s kind of straight up.

For example, this video which has never been very popular or widely seen discusses exactly what I’m talking about. There is a separation between our perception of the violence involved in eating meat. We do not believe that there is any violence being done in order for us to enjoy our food, meat, milk, cheese, chicken, pork or anything like this. We don’t perceive the pain because the separation between the actual moment of causing harm and our sitting down to enjoy ourselves is something that we ourselves never see.

This one is sort of the polar opposite of the first. It’s all inexpensive animation and eventually comes to the resolve that allows you to believe that meat is delicious. I personally don’t think meat is delicious anymore. I’m sure there was a time that I did but I’ve been thinking about this for so long that I kind of think it’s disgusting right now. I really don’t ever think about going back unless it’s in a moment of complete self-loathing. Or in other words, meat is really not food as much as it is an addiction posing as food. It’s genuinely something I wish people would think about.

This one takes basically everything I have been saying and goes right to the heart of it. Meat equals money. Whether or not it is carcinogenic, it is, whether or not it is sadistic, it is, and whether or not it’s generally an addiction, it is, all of this still generates money and that is at the heart of the problem. We are not making choices for public health, we are making choices for money.

Okay, blah blah blah blah blah, let’s get back to the bloodshed. Maybe people should just join PETA (people for the ethical treatment of animals) already.

Because it is about brutality. Because it is about cruelty. We are talking about committing cruelty and brutality without thinking about it. And all I’m saying is that there is a connection between the violence we do to each other and the food we eat. Whether this is a direct physical connection that comes from the carcinogens, the heart disease or just from the ACT of eating flash, I’m saying it just takes a matter of understanding but perhaps this is something we just do not need. Let’s put a period at the end of that sentence. Maybe this is something that we just don’t need.

Sorry about the age restrictions on some of these videos. It seems that the truth somehow gets mixed up with “community guidelines”. God forbid young people might get influenced away from this habit…

***

It’s 4:00 and I am sitting on the couch in my office watching my ex partner cook something. We have a vast difference of opinion about food resources and we have been having this conversation for the best part of the last hour.

The problem is exactly the problem and the difference between us since we’ve known each other. She cooks from set recipes and I eat what I have. She creates things that need many different resources and at least a kitchen in town and I take a look at what is available and just eat that. My way is cheaper and sometimes exciting. Hers is resource intensive and relies on so much more.

I often feel like I’m apologizing for my way of life simply because I don’t think most people will come off of their feelings of either personal narcissism or jealousy from things they have read or heard. Of course the media is full of international foods and exotic dishes but paid no attention to the season or location. I am completely dependent or if not completely, 90% dependent on the season. And considering that I have a field full of food right now, it seems a bit crazy to do all of this thinking.

The second part of this is that she will not eat the food that I’ve already made. She doesn’t ever want to eat my food. I eat my food everyday and rarely have any digestive problems whatsoever. I’m definitely not skinny. But she just requires a certain level of disconnectedness but I don’t really have anymore. She buys her food and currently I grow or at least gather my food. Not 100%, but a decent percent and especially right now in harvest season when I have so much food to eat.

We’re not exactly fighting. We’re not fighting because my decision was that she should do whatever she wants. And so she is going through my kitchen looking to make something that she thinks will be delicious. All I can pray for is that there are not too many open packages that were not previously opened or at least if they are opened, they are moved to a place where they don’t invite the mice to eat after we are done.

There’s also a second issue going on here that she eats smaller meals than I do. I like to feel like I have eaten something when I eat. I guess this is another reason why I’m not skinny. I like to eat and I tend to have bigger meals. Pete’s very small meals and more often. She’s also a sugar freak and I don’t have anything close to sugar in my house. Just fresh fruit and no other sweetness is available.

We spent probably the last 20 minutes trying to figure out whether we should water or not. The wind is kicking up right now a bit violently. I can see that the trees of the forest are definitely getting pushed around and the windows that are not tied open are all trying desperately to close. I have five different weather apps available and none of them can agree on the situation. One of them says absolutely no rain, the other one says it’s going to rain all night. One says we’re going to have rain at 5:00, another at 7:00, another at 9:00 and another not at all. How can these weather services look at the same information and the same weather charts from the same weather bureaus and come up with such vastly different thoughts? I need to be in the weather business. You can say any damn thing you want and all you have to do is have attractive packaging and people will buy it. Such a business kicks ass over teaching English, I promise.

What else? Nothing else. I got some care packages from town. I got one kilo of fresh Hot chili peppers. These things have become so valuable to me that I don’t even cook them and just eat them fresh along with my meals. Even bothering to cook them into the food will just ruin how nice they are to chew on. I am a chilly head, in case you didn’t know.

We also have some more sunflower seeds. I have a ton of seeds lying around right now. Pumpkin seeds and zucchini seeds both shelled and unshelled. But it’s nice to have some sunflower seeds. Of course I have a small box of sunflowers growing out on the field. Literally, if you’re talking about blenders, you can use the entire head of a sunflower plant and end up with a creamy sauce without even trying. And I think some tomatoes came up as well. I do love black tomatoes.

Anyway, it seems we are to have a pleasant meal of millet, some steamed vegetables and a vegan blender sauce. It is as if I am visiting town in my own house. I can’t wait. In the meantime, we’re just waiting for rain again. There’s really nothing else to do but sit around and wait for rain.

***

8:00 is a good time to call this thing. My ex partner has just taken off to make the last bus back. I think she’ll be on time. It is worth saying that the meal we had was lovely. Literally, it was like eating in her apartment in town. It’s the same type of vegan food that she makes for me. There’s no reason to argue. It was very tasty.

We eventually ended up with some broccoli, zucchini, new potatoes and onions all steamed from the field. This was served with wheat berries for a starch and for a sauce, more like a paste really, we had some peanuts and sunflower seeds with some spices and one fresh hot chili. It was very nice. It’s always very nice.

As for the field, there’s really not that much to say. Perhaps next week we will close up the potato box and bring in the peas and the broad beans. Some of the field beans are starting to get a little yellow but the climbers are still doing their thing. There is some fruit lying around but unfortunately, we don’t have enough groundwater to really take care of fruit trees anymore and it’s hard to find something genuinely sweet.

Most of the day was really just bullshitting. We both lied around a little bit on the couch talking about unimportant things. Some of it might be important. It’s hard to say whether I will get to go to town in the near future but perhaps my ex partner will call around about things like t posts, cattle panels and some insulation squares. All things we need. I mean, there are a lot of things to take care of. A house always needs work one way or another. It’s just a matter of how much competence I have to do it myself, how much I need other people to help me do the work and whether or not I have the money to pay for these things.

None of this is really hard information right now though. I have too much non-moving time these days trying to stay off my leg. It seems that everything I wanted to do was centered upon being free to move around. And yet here I am right back in the exact same boat I was in before, all courtesy of the better Russian medical establishment. For some reason they just couldn’t hook me up when I needed it and now everything is gone to shit because of it. As to how much of that is intentional, who can say. In the meantime, there’s not a damn thing I can do about this except wait to heal and hope that when I do, it will stick.

All of this aside, it was a nice Sunday. It’s always nice to have some company. My ex partner seemed to enjoy herself. All she wanted was a quiet day and I did everything I could to accommodate her. She seemed pleased on the way out.

I don’t know what else to say. I guess this is what both of us get these days. We get a Sunday to hang around and do some things in the country. At harvest Time, there is some fresh food to play with. After that, I guess we both got a quiet day together.