Monday, August 22 2022
Flash flooding & drought
This is from one of my weather apps. It’s not sponsored or anything stupid like that and I’m not saying this is a particularly wonderful weather app. It’s just that this particular mention has everything to do with global warming, desertification and some of the other problems that we are having these days as a complication of our eating habits and other such foolish human activity.
Forgive me for being overtly curmudgeonly but I am generally becoming sick and tired of almost all human activity around me. It’s not really about being sensitive to noise or something like that, it’s just that when the town people do things, they genuinely don’t physically do it themselves. This is the number one thing that I have noticed. They tend to do things, whether it’s trying to be a complete asshole to me or being a complete asshole to the planet, they find other people to do their work for them. Let me try to explain this.
One of the things that I picked up along my studies was that a whole foods, plant-based diet seemed to be the optimum diet for the human animal. I’m not talking about what you think or what you like or what you believe your personal freedoms would be, it just made sense to me that eating food, specifically plant food, that was as close to its original form as possible is pretty much the healthiest thing you can do for yourself. Right now because of the season, I’m getting to be able to do this pretty much straight from a living plant. I’m saying you can definitely tell the difference.
The opposite of this, and here we are talking about prepackaged or severely processed foods that tend to have a different effect on the human body. If one thing is a natural additive, the process stuff is an unnatural additive. The natural thing generally has some health benefits to it and the unnatural one has a tendency to malnourish or cause health problems. This is a great generalization but there is obviously truth to that.
One of the obvious effects is that natural foods seem to satiate me, they take away my hunger and eating processed food always makes me want to eat more. Eating one stops my hunger and eating the other makes me more hungry. I would say that’s a red flag right there.
Another way to talk about this would be pre-digestion. It seems as though we are letting the factories or the processing plants predigest our food for us. Now, cooking is predigestion. Almost any process used in saving food is a form of pre-digestion. Even using a blender is predigestion. Nobody is arguing this. But there is something to be said for eating as much fresh whole food as you possibly can.
There is a group out there called raw vegans and there are people out there who survive on fruit. You’re not really going to see this in the northern climbs but there are people who believe this is the way to go.
There is also an inherent argument about meat in this thought. By eating animals, theoretically you are allowing them to do the work of digesting food. However, if we are eating factory animals, I’m not even talking about the horrors and pain caused to sentient life here, I’m just saying that you are eating predigested hormone ridden original whole food stuffed full of chemical fertilizers and insecticides. Kind of delicious pre-digestion there I would say.
But then there is this tendency towards manipulation that comes along with this. I’m noticing this more and more as I seem to be drifting away from town life the longer I stay away. I mean, this is exactly what happened on this journey when I suddenly realized I was not enjoying hanging out in coffee shops for my social life. Just one day, I realized I was not enjoying myself at all and found that going away and doing things I personally wanted to do were a lot more fun. I liked my life better without than with.
Well, I didn’t purposely injure myself or anything like that, I got injured because of manipulative people in Minsk deciding to play with my medical life. This caused injury and now I am trying to do something to heal myself because of it. A lot of this is simply not moving around very much so I don’t exacerbate my problems.
But now I’ve just been hanging around on my own property for the last month or so and I’m suddenly realizing that I am seeing this huge difference between Town people and people who live here. The people from town only seem to play politics. They never do anything but play politics. Every move they make, every choice that comes to their mind is a power move of some kind. They butcher each other, screaming instead of talking and looking for ways to cheat on one another as a universal. I can’t see that anyone takes any pleasure from anything they do other than sucking the energy in life out of children. It’s extremely vampirish when you get to think about it.
This is not to say that the locals are not manipulative. They can be. But the thing is that they are pretty basic about it. They are not trying to take power over my life, they’re just looking to pick up a few dollars. That’s pretty understandable and it’s also pretty direct. This is not to say that everybody’s looking for money, I’m just talking about the abuse. The locals are not abusive about it. They’re not violent, they don’t scream and shout at you violently, they just ask.
This seems to be a pretty basic thought but these days, all of the things I’ve been writing about and thinking about seem to be coalescing in my mind. I’m starting to feel like the ghost of Karl Marx is inside me somehow pushing me towards a particular ending.
It’s the exploitation of the worker. It’s in the Bible. It’s the exploitation of people by the management class. It’s the expansion of security and the army, groups of violent people under the direction of non-workers. It’s all of the misery of the world being caused by groups of non-workers manipulating people into hysteria and violence all for the purposes of retaining their own power.
The world is not worth living in. This is not a planet that is going to be conducive to life in a very short period of time. This is not any kind of prophesying. I am not saying that I was touched by the hand of god/nature to be his/her/its translator. This is an absolute scientific and measurable fact about our present.
Are we experiencing a mass extinction?
The planet has experienced five previous mass extinction events, the last one occurring 65.5 million years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs from existence. Experts now believe we’re in the midst of a sixth mass extinction.
What is causing our current Mass extinction?
What’s causing the sixth mass extinction? Unlike previous extinction events caused by natural phenomena, the sixth mass extinction is driven by human activity, primarily (though not limited to) the unsustainable use of land, water and energy use, and climate change.
Ask a question, get an answer.
So if human activity is the thing that causes ecological damage and the primary human activity is manipulation and exploitation of all resources including human resources, we have a guilty party.
I’m not making this up. I’m not a bad scientist. I’m not specifically pushing my findings to suit my needs. I’m not being paid to come up with these answers or being pressed in a particular direction. I’m just saying that in a microcosm, my asshole neighbors are the guilty parties for global warming. Each individual idiot towny, in all of their glorious manipulative violent wisdom, practices in action after action after action every single specific harm causing activity that is in macrocosm, the cause of the death of all living things on the planet.
Talking to them is pointless. I have an entire conversation with my American friend in which I keep saying that we need to be more ecological and he keeps saying that he’s tired of my manipulation. I don’t know why telling someone a bit of truth about our environment would make me manipulative unless to him, an American towny through and through, the guy worked with the police his whole career, he has no understanding of the world that doesn’t have manipulation in it. Or in other words, he has no connection whatsoever to the natural world.
You can’t reason with alcoholics. You can’t reason with Town people. You can’t reason with money people. You can’t reason with exploitation people. You can’t reason with politicians. You can’t reason with the cops or the military. You can’t reason with so many people that it kind of seems that you can’t reason with people.
The most unfunny irony of all of this is that there is a line of rhetoric that exists amongst the vampire class. This is especially true amongst modern new Russian vampires. They agree that humans are shit and that the world must come to an end. They agree that the future holds nothing but death. But for some reason, and if I live to be a hundred, I won’t but if I did, I will never understand this: they seem to take pleasure in this knowledge. For some reason, perhaps it’s some kind of ethnic sense of white entitlement, they don’t seem to be able to cognize the amount of misery, pain, violence and torture that comes along with this inevitable death. They don’t seem to be able to put together the thought that this bit of quaint pragmatic realism that they pat themselves on the back for having is the most gruesome bit of cruelty anyone can ever imagine. I just don’t understand why they so happily participate in it.
I had a moment yesterday where I remembered the Russian film that I saw once. I guess I could look it up but it was a scene in a movie about the war. There are more movies about the war than anything in Russian Cinema. In this case, an underfed and under-equipped Russian battalion came through a starving farm. I don’t remember where this town was, it could have been Belarus, it could have been Ukraine or it could have been somewhere in Russia. The family, a father, a rather pretty wife and a small daughter were hiding in the barn. The father begged the army to take them with them. They had no food to eat and no way to survive. The commander told the man but he could come along but his family could not be taken care of. So the man takes an ax and murders his wife and child and then returns to the commander to say that they are no longer a problem. The commander then takes out his gun and shoots the man in the head and then commands his troops to make their exit.
This film came to mind because of my neighbor cutting down all of her trees. I still can’t understand what their rationale for doing that was. Obviously, nobody wanted to take care of the property anymore. When I offered to buy the place, I was refused because the grandmother didn’t like me. When I told the grandmother that there was exceptionally nice fruit, she was offended at being told to collect fruit. They were Town people now. They didn’t do physical labor. I don’t know this, I’m just guessing but her move was to make the property maintenance free. Those fruit trees required work so they had to go.
I also noticed, I’m remembering right now, that when they saw Ghenna leaving my property last week, they called him and asked him to do work for them. I remember very clearly that they said “we can pay you very good money”. That was the big selling point. They don’t live here anymore. They are money people now. They are no longer stupid workers. They are elite now.
So they reduced the functioning orchard to scrap. They created a field that could be cut down with a weed wacker. They have created the illusion of ownership of a property. And they’ve created something that they can maintain by pre-digestion. They themselves don’t have to do any work.
Let’s call this a microcosmic metaphor for deforestation. Let’s take the local mono crop agriculture practices leading to roads that can’t be bicycled anymore and often can’t even be walked on to desertification. Let’s take the evaporation and loss of groundwater to the destruction of the topsoil and we have right here in this tiny little out of the way village in rural Belarus global warming in its essence and including its guilty parties.
And they love hating me. Let’s make this completely clear. In their mind, if they got rid of me, they would be at peace. It is much easier to get rid of the ecologist or to find a way to blame him for her than it is to control your personal practices and live in a sustainable way.
You try to get people to change their minds when you preach the same thing over and over again. When people don’t see things your way you preach more. Instead of giving people the information and letting them decide. Not everyone is going to agree with you or accept what you have to say. When that happens you preach harder and w/more facts. You cannot change people who don’t want to change.
-from a conservative California friend
***
I can’t believe it. It’s a quarter to 9:00 and it’s actually raining. I don’t know how long this is going to keep up or if it’s going to make a difference but I just brought in my apples and beans that had been laid out to dry outside and put them under the overhang. It is actually raining. Well what do you know about that?
***
Okay, let’s not get crazy. That rain lasted about 3 minutes. The sun is now out, the temperature is coming up and all of the drying things on our back out in the sun.
I also want to say that I had a great breakfast today. I felt like having some macaroni for breakfast so I did something new.
I broke the spaghetti in half. I know this is a sin but let’s say I didn’t have enough space to leave it long so whatever happens happens. Anyway, what I did was put some of the green beans in the top of the steamer with a cut up tomato, a couple of peppers and some field cabbage. I added a tiny bit of spice on top and a little bit of oatmeal for some creaminess and let everything go for about 10 minutes.
What I need to make very clear right now is that I did not buy a steamer. This is not a magic pot or any type of modern appliance. This is an incredibly cheap aluminum pot, I think it’s only 5 L actually, and a handle-less aluminum colander that fits perfectly over the top. I put maybe 3 cm of water in the bottom and it is an absolutely perfect steamer. I don’t think the whole thing cost $5.
This time, I put the broken spaghetti in the bottom to sit in the boiling water and all the veggies went on top. I amused myself elsewhere for about 10 minutes, returned and turned off the gas, let everything calm down for about 1 minute and then dropped everything including the water into a bowl. Absolute creamy tasty perfection. Every bite was the most comfortable of comfort foods and The taste was alive and mesmerizing.
I understand that people have their ways and most folks seem to think that a fat based diet is somehow beneficial to their life. I personally think that it’s drugs and my own life has become better and my perceptions sharper and my physical health much better since moving on to water cooking. It uses less resources, creates healthier food and in my opinion, is one of the tastiest possible ways to enjoy vegetables. It also probably has the easiest cleanup because it hardly requires any soap. If there’s no fat, there’s nothing to go rancid and you have less spoilage.
So no, there are no rains of salvation. Just a little moisture from the sky for a change. I am very full but amazingly, not stupid or sluggish in any way.
I just thought I’d mention this.
***
Well, I feel very not Russian right now. It’s just the way people do business here or at least the way people do business in the well business.
I just got a note from my ex partner that she called a few people that she found in the paper who dig pipe Wells. There seems to be a general cost of 40 rubles a meter which puts the overall cost at something like $300. A lot of money but I have a hard time wrapping my head around material costs. There seems to be an awful lot of variables in this including pumps and couplings for the pump. There was a lot of talk about picking up a pump if it was needed but then, I already have a pair of them.
So I talked to two experts, one old guy and one young guy. Both of were ready to come to work immediately and made me feel a little stupid about wanting to speak about the deal first. I don’t know why this is so crazy but where we place this thing, how much access they need to get into there, how much destruction they are causing to my property by digging the well and of course where the pump is supposed to go, getting electricity to it, etc etc. There are a lot of variables and I’m quite sure, hidden costs.
Nevertheless, both of them seem to understand that we are probably going to measure twice and cut once. I was given two numbers and called the old guy first. He didn’t seem to have his stuff together so completely. He tends to repeat himself quite often when speaking about inconsequential matters. I think he knows where my address is but I’m a bit obligated to stand out on the street to wave him in. My guess is he’s going to get lost. The second guy is younger and faster, he has the exact same sales pitch and seemed very disappointed about wasting his time coming out without going directly to work. When I was doing construction in America, I can’t even imagine what my world would have been like if I immediately went to a building site on a phone call and started banging nails. I’ve never heard of such a thing in my entire life.
Also, not that this is a huge deal, but I think both businesses are Cash and Carry. I don’t have that much money in my pocket and no matter what happens, I’m going to need to go to the bank to get enough cash. I completely doubt that the old guy would allow a simple bank transfer to a credit card. The young guy seemed disappointed by the same thought. I have no idea what I’m getting into.
I also have one other thing that needs to be clear here. My ex partner told me that there was a standard 50 mm pipe. If the standard depth according to these guys for this region goes 18 m deep, this means that this pipe well carries a maximum amount of 35 L of water. One of them used the word unlimited but I have two different versions of what unlimited means. I have the pie in the sky version in which Ria runs her water for 3 hours without problem and then I have lanea’s version where the pump works and then stops and then works and then stops.
Now, there are two types of surface pumps that can be used to do this job. The first is what I have and you personally have to turn the pump on or turn it off. The second one is always on and has its own reservoir tank and shuts itself off if there is a certain amount of water not in the tank. This is a much more expensive pump than I have but it’s just the way things are. Therefore, I am a little iffy in my head about how 35 L of water turns out to be unlimited. The pump I have has a maximum of about 35 l a minute. If someone wants to tell me that this water is immediately replaced at the same flow rate, we have a possibility. If it doesn’t, and I sincerely doubt that the recovery is that fast, this unlimited business is just not real.
I am not an expert in this, I’m just thinking through the problem and using my best common sense.
So both of these meetings are tomorrow. The old guy, I didn’t get his name, is coming out late in the morning and the young guy, his name is Andre, will show up in the evening. I can add that he will disappointedly show up in the evening. I’m just saying that from the tone in his voice when he agreed to just talk.
I’m not a young man anymore but this seems remarkably like running into a girl who tells you up front that the first date is only going to be talking.
Speaking of only talking, I still haven’t got my jeans back from Tanya. I tried calling her number but it was not working. There are several theories about why the phone isn’t working. Having no money on the phone account probably means something. When she tried to hustle a few rubles out of me on Friday night, she called me from another phone. I called that number too today and was only told that she was not around but that she would pass along the message that I’m looking to get my pants back.
I also did not hear anything from Ghenna today. He didn’t make an appearance today or yesterday. I’m not completely broken by this except that he usually shows up as early in the week as possible looking for money. Either he got well overpaid for butchering my next door neighbor’s trees or there are some politics at Play. Or perhaps, he’s just busy right now. This is the season for day labor. Everybody has something to do so maybe he is otherwise occupied.
In any case, there is a lot going on. I’m not actually sure I was ready to make the decision to sink a well. There have been quite a few nuances over the last while that have me thinking completely otherwise about investing here. Exactly as I mentioned before, there are just too many variables and too many things going wrong all the time. I would rather not feel stupid about spending I don’t have on things that I won’t get any value from. I mean, if I’m going to do this and see how much food I can grow here next year, the second well is absolute water security. I can invest a few more rubles in more water tanks to catch rainwater but definitely, having a second well for groundwater means that at least I won’t go dry for my own use.
***
It is 6:30 and I have just finished one of those smashing and epic dinners that you just dream about. This meal was not steamed because I made some sauce out of sunflower seeds and a bunch of fresh vegetables I have lying around. The main part of the meal was more fresh green beans and potatoes. I went back to my big pot and water cooked them for a while until adding in the incredibly tasty and spicy peanut sauce. Outstanding. Perhaps it was a little too fatty for the weather. It is of course not raining but it is humid and after eating, I broke into a sweat. Too many chilies and a little more fat than I am used to.
The meal however brought a feeling of tranquility that I haven’t felt in a while. I have felt quite a few emotions lately. I wouldn’t say violent ups and downs but certainly it has been even more hurtful than usual around here. This meal gave me a sense of absolute restful peace. For that, I’m grateful for having had the idea.
That well digger Andre called me again and said that if all that was required was talking, he could come by tonight. We had a walk around and talked about various ideas of what would be good or better. As any good salesman would, he very much wanted the most expensive possibilities such as putting the well under my house to put running water in there. He said something about it helping during the winter to prevent freezing in the pump. I got all that but I told him the truth. I’m not doing this for myself, I’m doing this because I want to grow some fruit trees and raise some vegetables. He got the point and I think we’re going to pick a spot just at the back of the root cellar. We can use my pump and it will save some money.
The entire package is not really so much money. He guarantees endless water. I talked to him about the mathematics of a well that physically held no more than 35 l. I really didn’t see and still don’t see how I can use a pump that draws 35 l a minute and somehow have the water replenished in the well so quickly. He says I can water all day. I have my doubts but depending on what happens tomorrow with the other well digger, I’m pretty sure I will be in the well business and hooked up before the end of the week. I’m not really convinced that it matters anymore. This year’s coming quickly to an end as far as taking care of the field. But if we have it and it works, it will be a piece of tech that I can carry into next year. I’m not going to stop saving rainwater but it will be nice to have some water security.
My ex partner ran into a problem with her bank. The machine ate her card (or she forgot to take her card out of the machine) and the bank refused to give it back to her. Whatever happened in this situation will only be fixed after a week or so when she gets her new card. So far, I have not been enlisted to help. Such would be the normal call from a boyfriend girlfriend relationship. My ex partner has never wanted one of those so this is just a story about what happened during her day.
I called Ghenna and he agreed to come out to work tomorrow. When I called, he was ready to come out immediately. I wasn’t interested in starting any projects today and besides, I could hear in his voice that he had already come to the end of his work day. I admire his moxie but I have enough problems keeping quality assurance in line without him coming out to rebuild a fence completely shit-faced.
As for cutting down my neighbor’s orchard, the only thing he had to say was that it was out of his control. That woman is the Mistress of the house, this is what she wanted and to him, it was a pain gig. He agreed that he knew better but also agreed that he had no choice. The world works for money and it doesn’t really matter what people who have money want. It’s not his place to complain, it’s just his place to collect paycheck and do what is asked of him.
Both the money from the job and the ridiculousness of it as well as breaking my fence in the process probably had a lot to do with why he didn’t contact me yesterday or today. His word is shame. He is well aware of shame, public reaction being a part of his training much more than mine. Nevertheless, my guess is he understood that the entire experience was a stupid shit show and he probably felt pretty bad about doing it.
Did she cut down the orchard out of spite? I believe she probably did something that would just have less work to do. In her mind, well divorced from her communist upbringing, modern thought is a place of easy tranquility with nothing to do. All of those trees just meant work for a little money. When you think modern like this, there is no epicureanism. There is only Instagram style. We are smarter now. We are rich people. We have become better.
One of my neighbors is burning weeds or something like that right now. There’s a lot of smoke in the air. I don’t think it has anything to do with me. I don’t have any open fires in my house and I don’t really have anything that would catch fire. It’s a pretty smell. There’s no other reason for lighting fires. Unless of course the forest has caught fire already or maybe a grass fire. I’m 20° higher than Southern California and even 10 degrees higher than Oregon but still, global warming is here and global warming is real.
I never did hear from Tanya. Her phone doesn’t work and her friend Natasha has not seen her. I’m beginning to think that I have seen the last of my jeans. If there’s one thing that I have genuinely learned about my friend Tanya it is that this was the last time I pay for work in advance. I completely understand that the woman needs money and doesn’t have a lot of it in her life. I can go deeply into this again and talk about her diet and health choices. I’m not going to talk about trying to be reasonable with anybody nor am I going to look down my nose and claim social class distinctions because of character. She’s a nice enough lady. But this is the last time I up front payment. I hope she doesn’t mind that I’m going to pay on completion in the future. That was an easy lesson learned and one I will not forget. I am not a bank and I do not make loans and in the future, only when it’s done.
When my ex partner was up here on Sunday, I threw something in her face. There have been quite a few ideas bandied around about water or planting things. I have also come to realize that she has her training and what she knows and understands about agriculture has not come from years of practice but memory of what she learned as a child. This was also from the Communist days. People were more earthy back then. They were also easier on the ecology. Most of what everybody thinks of the world comes from a Time where the land was clean and so was the food. I feel foolish explaining back to them what they already knew.
Yes, even if this well is not as productive as this Andre fellow claims, if it is even partially good enough, it will become a game changer for next year. Having access to fertilizer will be a game changer. Having systems available and materials that can be brought up here is a game changer. Perhaps it’s a matter of having paid my dues or perhaps it’s simply a matter of the working people here not enjoying practicing cruelty as much as the townspeople. Perhaps somewhere along the line, I have earned a small measure of respect. Perhaps when people talk of me, they might not like me but I don’t think I’m a child anymore. This I noticed quite a bit. I don’t get smiled at so much anymore.
This is a good thing. This is an honest thing. A combination of a little bit of respect and some reasonable resources at my disposal sort of elevates this game potentially. It also diminishes the impact on my towny chicken neighbors. You can play all the head games you want but if the goods show up and you have enough muscle to make the thing go, they become the dogs barking in the wind instead of me. It adds more authority to my middle finger.
So tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow has some work in it. I’ll show up. I’ll be here.
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