Tuesday, August 16th 2022

It’s 5:00 a.m. and the sky no longer wishes to burst into morning. That is the trick about 52° north latitude. When the summer comes, you can’t believe how much light there is and how early today starts and how late it ends. We are not Northern lights nor are we White nights but you can definitely tell that there is a light part of the year and a dark one.

We are a full 60 days from the solstice and 5:00 a.m. is no longer morning. Perhaps you can see the silhouettes of the trees. Perhaps it is not pitch black. But when the light goes, it goes quickly. In the depths of winter, sunrise will be well after 8:00. What I’m noticing right now is what everything growing in my field knows perfectly well. It’s fall. The end is coming.

The weather reports are confused as usual. Most say there is absolutely no chance of rain. Of course we are in the 13th year of drought, a drought that takes all the sweetness out of everything here and turns the non-paved roads into beaches. Whenever there is a chance of rain according to the normal barometric measurements, it means nothing. There’s not enough water in the clouds and the clouds are too funked up from the air pollution that we believe we needed for economic security (slavery). Everybody needed to be an animal in order to survive but no one was allowed to be an animal in terms of our relationship to Nature. We went from being people who understood we were physical beings simply to being savages because this is what the oil business dictated of us.

Forgive my use of the pronouns we and us. I know I talk about that a lot concerning the group think of people here. This is a holdover from the time of communism, a cultural affectation that people still like to believe in in public moments with someone like me who they immediately see as an outsider. 15 years ago, they saw me as a human being, an animal with physical needs. Now I am simply a political object to be played with or a scapegoat to put their sins upon. Now the world is not pragmatic and understandable, it is broken into levels and everybody is busy climbing the ladders and trying to avoid the shoots.

The heat and humidity have been uncomfortable all night. When I went walking around last night, it was that perfect sweet spot temperature wise. But it never cooled off last night. I noticed that in the middle of the night. The temperature just stayed there. It’s the heat coming. Today is going to be the hottest day. This you don’t have to worry about from the weather service. When they tell you that it’s going to be hot and dry, they are not just throwing darts and hoping for the best. This you can believe like knowledge.

I guess this means I have another watering day today. That tiny bit of rain we got at the end of last week was just enough to prolong the misery. I can’t really stop watering yet. I have a lot less to do now. The season is dictating that things are starting to go Brown anyway so watering is a bit superfluous. I don’t have to water as long or as many places. But I do need to put some water on the field this morning.

Ghenna will be showing up to work for a while today. Him I can count on. He was hurting last night. He really wanted a few more rubles. He needed some vodka. To be honest, he brought 15 liters of potatoes. Probably more than 7 kilos and didn’t ask more than six rubles for this. My first thought was to overpay him but then I took that back, not from personal selfishness, exploitation or manipulation but from common sense. If I did something one time, he would always expect that thing. If I rewarded him for making a surprise visit, I would have nothing but surprise visits and I have made it very clear that I don’t like surprise visits from people seeking money.

The strategy of locking my gate has worked. People who earlier would pass by my open gate and feel some sort of obligation to say hello or a few friendly words on their way past had now a good enough reason not to expand the energy. Nobody wanted anything but potential American favor. There was no person living here, just an object to be observed, fought against or exploited. Good enough reason to close the gate and I have never been sorry for the choice.

You know, we never stop fighting the propaganda war against communism. We absolutely can fight a propaganda War against Moscow. This I agree with. All the arguments about communism and the destruction of property and the destruction of the elite class and forcing everybody downward is not necessarily the only way to do this. The brutality is not connected to Communism automatically. It probably is connected to capitalism simply because capitalism demands winners and losers and communism would seem to indicate simply taking care of each other. All of this is conjecture except I liked it better the old way and I like people who come from the old way better. I like people who embrace worker-mentality as being a universal. I like workers a lot better than vampires.

I’ve moved on to the six Star Trek films. I don’t think I’m going to watch the entire Star Trek franchise including all of the spin-offs and different shows. I checked in with the original series and of course they made some movies after that. I watched the very Stanley Kubrickish first film where they dragged out a 1 hour television script to 2 hours and 12 minutes so that fans could longingly stare at the ship and its crew. The second one was a pretty cool film about a naval battle between starships. 

But at the end, Spock sacrifices himself by manually doing the labor to get enough power to escape a giant explosion and save the vessel. To do this, he had to walk into a room with enough radiation to kill him. He sacrificed himself for the good of all.

When Kirk showed up, he had to be held back from opening the doors and killing everybody in the room. Mr Spock was in the last moments of his life but when he heard his Captain’s voice, he made his greatest effort to stand and straighten his uniform to walk over and say his farewells. His actions were logical of course. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or in this case, the needs of one.

In the time it took me to make these words, we now have a gray blue in the sky. I can’t tell at the moment if there are clouds or not. There is no wind but there is just the slightest coolness coming now. I guess this is the time when the dew forms. This coolness would be from the morning mist and dew. I guess you have another way of describing global warming. When you take the water away, there’s nothing to cool us down anymore.

My conservative friend decided to help me out with some of his great wisdom regarding my constant conversation towards global warming and ecology. I suppose I have become as annoying to him as I tried to be with our local oligarch. You can’t take people’s drugs away and expect them to be happy about it. 

You cannot control or change people, places, or things. If people change it is because they want to. You can give them the information but you cannot get them to act on it. They need to want to.

This is of course the truth. The problem in all of this lies comes with how much emphasis we put on individual desire. How much do we tell people that the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many? How much selfishness do we preach? How much irresponsibility or freedom from responsibility do we advocate and base our world on?

How do you teach people the truth?

I had a thought a few days ago about how miserable the life of an ecological activist really is. There is no money to be made in the profession. There are no ecological jobs. 

I tried last year to get this exact idea started. I genuinely thought that you could very easily create green jobs and build them up as businesses to the point where they were self-sustaining. You need people to come and work these jobs. These jobs would be Hands-On, physical, movement oriented and centering on human effort as the main resource. But of course that’s the problem. Nobody wants jobs like this. People are too lazy. Exploitation is easier.

And then we have the information wars. When you have something that you believe to be true and you try to do something to influence a popular movement, you immediately find out that you are fighting for resources even there. Your adversary of course is people who are trying to make money or sell selfishness one way or another. You are either running against advertising, entertainment or self-help. Selfishness, selfishness and more selfishness.

This is what I have found. When I tell people that I’ve come to the conclusion that caring about our environment is the single most important thing that any human being can do, immediately I am treated as if I am selling religion. When I came across the thought that we would be great if people realized that God is nature and nature is God, all people heard was the word god and put me on the list of religious fanatics to be ignored. 

Yesterday I got another one of those “sorry, we thought you were” messages. I get these all the time. They don’t mean anything. When people come to some Revelation about me, it just means that they feel some sense of remorse from the harm, abuse or neglect that they allowed themselves. They do not actually start to do anything proactive or helpful. They just apologize for their opinion.

Well, unless they had had an opportunity to steal from me. They did that too. It was the same opinion thing but they felt they were justified because of it.

No, I don’t see how young people and their universal energy could be directed in this direction. It would be worse than telling your parents you wish to be an artist or a musician. It would be worse than that because there would not be any hope of making a living and of course making a living is the only thing that any parent thinks about. The truth of the world, these romantic dreams, you’re young now but you will learn, all of these things come to bear and you would never have a chance of saying that this is where your life energy should be spent. No one would allow it.

My conservative friend said something else that was pretty funny.

To quote a famous comedian “the plant has been around billions of years, people have been around a few thousand years, the planet will survive, it is the people that are fucked.”

I’m leaving this here exactly as he sent it to me. The word plant can either mean plants or planet. I’m pretty sure he meant planet but when I read it, I saw plants and thought it was pretty funny as it was. Regardless, even this bit of humor has two flaws in it. First of all, he’s speaking as an abstract and from an insulated bubble. He personally feels very comfortable and does not feel that the road to fuckedness is going to touch him. He identifies as white. He believes he is above the law and especially the laws of nature. Secondly, he doesn’t realize that natural death is a rather slow, painful and debilitating process. It’s a process of compromise after compromise and misery on top of misery. Unless you go violently and suddenly, the road to your end is through sickness and misery. I don’t know why people would go out of their way to bring this on. I don’t know why we make a culture out of killing ourselves.

I have a couple hours before Ghenna gets here but no matter what, today is a working day. Perhaps not an entire day of work but it will be a working morning.

Deep thoughts for a Tuesday morning.

It’s light enough now that you can definitely tell that it’s morning and no longer night. The hysterical dogs on chains, people’s security to let them know that Intruders have come on to their properties, displace the sounds of nature. Dogs on chains I have nothing to do but scream. It’s their only exercise, the only way to get the phlegm out of their lungs.

Other than the electricity used to run the water pump, all of the labor will be physical and human. No animals will be exploited during the course of today’s efforts and no gasoline or any fossil fuels will be used. 

***

It’s 11:00 a.m. and this is already turning out to be one of these damn days. Weather wise, we have no rain but a lot of cloud cover. I genuinely think this is a positive thing. At least everything is not getting roasted by ridiculously hot sunlight and what water is on the field won’t get burned off so quickly.

I did all the watering this morning. It wasn’t such a big deal and it seems that what is still growing is growing reasonably well. I’m starting to have a little bit of work to do cleaning up. Some of the boxes need to be cleaned out and raked and put to sleep well for the winter. I think we are going to put in the fertilizer now instead of in the spring. There will simply be less to do. A little fertilizer, probably some Forest leaves when they start to fall and then we will just let the winter do what it’s going to do and worry about a layer of planting soil and mulch come the spring and we will be good to go.

Ghenna did not show up at 9:00. I just spoke to him on the phone and he says that he will be up in about 10 or 15 minutes. He said something about a deal in the neighboring town. I don’t care enough to believe him or not. But he is showing up for work which is nice enough.

Then I got a call from Ria. I was just thinking about her the other day and that I have not talked to her in a long time and sure enough, this morning she called me. She has a ton of apples that she knows I really love and she wants to bring them over. Actually, this is really true and she has some of the most wonderful apples in the world. The reason for the abundance of her garden is that she lives next to the highway which is raised on a platform. This means that when it rains, the water coagulates on her property like a basin. Because of this, she has a lovely orchard with tremendously tasty apples.

Of course, she has to endure the noise of the road and the pollution of all of the cars but she has long ago tuned that out. She is another one of those hysterical loud talkers that we make a lot of here. I am sure this is from the industry much more than it is from the culture.

When I first got involved with Belarus and started paying some attention to the Russian language, I remember getting a lesson from some Russian character explaining that my American accent was way, way too heavy-handed. He kept telling me that it’s softer, softer, softer. But then there was a gap of five years and when I returned, the first thing I was told was that Belarusians were not as I remembered them. Money had gotten in as had panic and everything had gone in a much different direction. The sweetness was gone and probably was not coming back anytime soon.

Ria said she would be up after she did something. I told her that I really appreciated the gift but I frankly had way too much food already. I have apple trees of my own. Even if they are not as sweet and tasty as hers, I really kind of just want to eat my own food for a while. This argument of course fell on deaf ears. So I’m waiting for her too.

Then Lena showed up with more apples and fruit and another zucchini. I need more fruit like a dog needs a fifth leg. Her mother had told her that she should come take care of me. Her mother had been on the bus with my ex partner when she went home on Sunday. They had talked and now it was important that Lena came up to see how I was doing. Perhaps I needed some washing.

We sat outside discussing the gossip of the day. I don’t really have very much gossip but Lena does. She told me all about her mother’s health, her problems with the local day workers and it was important for her that I noticed that she is dressing nicely and has changed as a person since she stopped drinking. This is usually about what we talk about.

Lena has a very small pension and unfortunately, when her mother doesn’t live with her or God forbid, when she passes, there’s not going to be a hell of a lot of money left for her to live on. I promised her that I would at least have a few rubles every week. And I gave her some laundry to do. I’m not kidding myself that this is benevolence. I’m also not kidding myself that I’m going to end up handing out money like social security during the winter. I guess we will see what we see.

But then as we were talking my neighbor Tanya showed up as well. I guess the gate was open. Suddenly the women were discussing that my jeans needed to be mended. Lena was vociferous that she should clean the jeans but then she couldn’t sow them because she’s blind, she can’t get the thread through the needle. Tanya said she was able to do such things and would be willing to do it. She also made it clear that Lena should clean the pants first. I guess this is logical.

It seems that my political face here in town has become very clear. It is an absolute positive that I have more people that love me than hate me. I definitely have a few people that hate me which is fine because I hate them too. But today it seems that everybody who loves me, or at least a good 80% of the people who like me, all showed up to say hi.

Of course everybody who likes me needs money. I guess I can’t blame them for that. The people who hate me need money too. Maybe the difference between the people I hate and the people I love is the amount of money that they bother me for. The people I hate tend to be big time fishermen who need massive amounts of money to get by. The people who I get along with well don’t need very much at all. I think I prefer the minimalists.

About me? Well, I’ve been thinking about maybe doing some advertising. I guess I could use a couple of students. I don’t actually need so much money coming in but a little bit of an income might be nice. I mean, my days of believing that I’m going to be a millionaire have long since faded away. I don’t have the health for any massive endeavors and I certainly do not wish to do any traveling I don’t have to do. But maybe a couple of jobs here and there just to level out The ledger sheet would be nice. It would be nice if I could break even or make a mild profit here this year.

I mean, look how many people I’m obligated to support now.

***

Okay, 7:30 p.m. and I guess it’s time to tidy things up a little bit. Today was an excellent day. I probably had more local social interaction today then I have had all year. Literally, everybody came to visit me today and it was all really nice. I got some apples from Ria and I already cut them up and have them outside on a blanket drying. I’m thinking about putting together a better drying rack tomorrow. Another project I never seem to have gotten to. Tanya came by and said hello and Lena came by twice. But the star of the show was Ghenna. I’ll get to him in a minute but I guess what was lovely was simply that everybody got along really well. I don’t remember any drama even with Lena taking over all the talking with everybody and even getting into it with Ghenna. There were a lot of lies flying around mixing in with all of the direct honesty.

It’s hard to put all of the social dynamics into play here. I normally don’t like getting too much attention and I don’t remember doing anything to start this today but when it came, it came with a flood. Like I said, I’m just happy that everybody got along and nobody went home angry. I think. I hope.

Ghenna eventually made it and immediately went to work making up for whatever he thought his feelings were. The man was on fire.

Basically, I had two jobs for him that eventually will lead into a bunch more but he outdid himself. The basic premise was to turn over the compost pile and then to transfer the junk boards that I got at the beginning of the year into the barn. They have been sitting under a tarp since I got them and I haven’t used any boards in a while. These boards became my garden boxes and almost all of the barriers separating Garden from path. I did a lot of building with these things at the beginning part of the year and there are still quite a few boards left over.

He didn’t just do this job though, he started by making the whole Barn a lot more orderly than it was before. I wasn’t expecting him to do anything like that but we have a lot more room to move around in there and he did a really nice job of it. He also solved another one of my problems in that I have a bunch of charcoal briquettes in there that had been ordered by the previous owner. People here use this along with wood for heating. I don’t. They stink and you cannot use the ash as fertilizer. They are also a miserable smoked to put up in the air. This is why I only use wood in my fireplaces. I don’t care about economics or efficiency, I just burn wood and then throw the ash back on the field.

I made him a deal but if he came by with a wheelbarrow, he can have what was in there and he seemed to like this a lot. He even asked me how much I was charging for them and was pretty happy that they were free.

When the wood was put away, and we suddenly have a lot more space to do other things. The next several jobs that I never managed to get to myself concern removing some fencing and opening up the space between the back of the property and the front. I’m using these fences as pallets to hold my water tanks. Once the last of the fencing is gone, I will have an outside place to add three more tanks of water holding capacity. And, if things go particular way, we will put all six barrels up on blocks. This will allow me to gravity water some of the boxes near the barn. This will be easier especially for working in the garden.

The second thing is that it will open up a road that will allow materials to come in at least by horse cart. I no longer have enough space for a tractor, not that I want one, but I can get fertilizer or different building materials by horse cart. All of this connects to Ghenna by the way.

You know, on days like today, you start to see how all of this subjectification and negativity that the world here carries with it plays out. Ghenna not only worked efficiently and effectively but literally was strong as a bloody ox. At the same time, both Ria and Lena were absolutely dismissive of him and even openly hurtful. Now, let’s be fair, I have also seen the man at his worst. I know what he is like when he is at the bottom of his capacity and it’s pretty discouraging. He also has a habit of transferring covid which generally is not appreciated.

But today he hit three home runs. That Barn has never looked that good, moving that wood undercover has been one of the things that has been driving me crazy for my inability to do the physical labor for it. All of the work he did today and over the last couple of weeks basically have the place looking like I wanted it to look from the beginning. It was like my own personal failures have been lifted and turned into complete successes.

Ghenna has an army pension that he claims to give to his daughter to help her pay for her own life. I don’t know much about her and I’ve never met her but he says that this is the truth. He also works for the local State farm and helps take care of 170 head of cattle. This is what gives him access to horse carts, fertilizer and other building materials. It is like having a relative in the Soviet Union really.

He also lives alone and though he denies it, he is a wreck of a depressive alcoholic. He does what he does and lives how he lives and tries to be a good person. He also suffers his own company and his own sense of worthlessness. The local women don’t do much to lift him up and as far as I can see, he doesn’t do very much to win the favor of women. He’s had three wives, I know at least one of them died. They have a long history here in the village the women and him and they all knew each other back in the day. Now the man happily lives alone. I am the last guy in the world to argue with this.

You know, I didn’t mind the socializing one bit. I didn’t feel in any way as if I was looking down on anybody. I enjoyed the conversation for what it was and I enjoyed what connection I have with everybody. I apologize for however they see me. On my side, I’m just happy to have this many people who think of me positively and somehow believe I’m a good enough person to look after. I’m still not sure how I could ever possibly repay this kindness, but I don’t believe any of this to be a joke.

We are all a ragtag group. We are not dazzling cosmopolites. Everybody just lives with a connection to their land and does their best to grow food and be helpful. Ria has some money and she has a head for business. Her children are modern but they are also workers. Lena has her failings as a mistress, Haizaika (хозяйка) is the word I’m looking for. It is basically the female boss of a property. There is a lot she doesn’t know. But she is a worker. She has the hands of a worker and the furious work ethic when there is actually something to do. I don’t believe she has all of the nuances of taking care of herself. Unfortunately, she has been making great periods of time disappear just like Ghenna, but also like him on days like today, she has her winning moments.

Who am I in this mix? I don’t know. I know that everyone is aware that I was a teacher. They know that I have made my money online. I’m not sure anybody knows that I write, not that that is surprising in almost any circles. Everybody knows that I am a devout ecologist. They absolutely understand that I eat a vegan diet, don’t smoke cigarettes and have absolutely nothing to do with alcohol. Actually, I kind of think that they like these things about me. They themselves don’t believe in any of this except for Lena who hasn’t had a drink in a while and will not stop telling people about that.

Today was a really good day. Today I got to spend some time with friends. Today I got some genuine help and shared a bit of warmth with people I like quite a bit. Oh yeah, Ria didn’t want a penny but Ghenna and Lena both work for me. I guess that’s a part of things too.