Friday, August 26th 2022
I said something yesterday about the removal of fear of nuclear war and what a relief it was to my life. How very grateful I am to the Russians this day for finding a way to bring that back. This is more than a fear of armies marching down our roads or missiles flying into our towns to knock down our buildings and civilian centers. This is a different kind of terrorism. This is the kind of terrorism that affects you for generations.
***
Not sleeping can be burdensome. It’s really early on Friday morning. It’s much more Thursday night than Friday morning.
My conservative California friend decided to challenge me on 13 years of drought. He thought perhaps I was exaggerating. I told him he should try the following Google query:
Severe heat and droughts are wreaking havoc across the globe. The summer of 2022 has seen significant, sustained drought across the globe, from Europe to China to the US and Africa, and has brought with it serious ripple effects, from energy shortages to severe food insecurity.
And this:
Global drought triggers massive economic costs as well. From 1998 to 2017, droughts have led to a loss of USD$124 billion, a number of which have risen 29% since 2000. Meanwhile, more than 2.3 billion people are currently facing water stress and almost 160 million children are exposed to severe and prolonged droughts.
And this:
Climate change is contributing to more droughts and water shortages on continents around the world. Northern Italy is facing its worst drought in 70 years, and more than 43% of US states are currently experiencing droughts. A new UN report says drought frequency and duration has increased by nearly a third since 2000.
This is just one of these things that if you find yourself drawn to writing things down and then just keep on going for a couple of years in a row you start to worry about why you end up at the starting line with so many people. It seems somehow a brain-breaking conundrum how some people live every day of their life without ever noticing anything.
Yes my friend, global warming is real. It’s caused by human activity spurned on relentlessly by the oil business and the big corporations and the meat industry and human selfishness and foolishness. Too much belief in bullshit psychology and not enough attention to the math and science of reality.
Slow down, buy local, stop making garbage, refuse plastic, make a garden, conserve water, quit your car and ride a bike or walk and start being kind to your neighbors. Learn to like where you live and stop looking elsewhere for your adventures.
***
Anyway, it’s 10:30 a.m. and without being even a little facetious, I haven’t done anything today. The reasoning is pretty simple. I really don’t have anything to do. Sometime today, I will go gather some food for my dinner. I might take a stab at closing up the hole in the fence to myself. It would not be a perfect fix but thanks to Ghenna heavy-handing the fence takedown, I have some pre-made material that would work just fine to close the hole. And of course everything got a full soaking yesterday. I don’t know if you can feel deep empathy with plants, but if all my plants are fat and happy today, this mood has rubbed off on me.
There’s also a part of this in that I’m just not hungry at all. Yesterday was pretty weird. I don’t really recommend this as a diet scheme but over the last while, I have settled into eating twice a day. Everything has been fresh whole foods so I don’t really have any outside hunger that comes along with factory foods. That’s either for the added sugar or just the processing. I’ve also been eating a lot of whole green beans including the shells and this is perhaps the hunger killer of all time. It is really the ultimate human food I think.
Yesterday I had a pretty good breakfast although it got interrupted by the well digging. By the time I got back to it it was pretty cold. A little while later I was hungry and I had some oatmeal. It might not actually have been oats, it might have been some other rolled grain. But that seemed to work as my second meal even though it was really early in the day. I never did want to eat again and the only other thing I had was a few dried apples and water for a snack before I went to sleep. I wish I knew about these tricks when I was younger. Might have made a big difference.
Yesterday was a good leg day. I did quite a bit of walking around and working yesterday because I could. No particular pain and I was pretty confident that I wasn’t causing myself harm. My healing process is very slow but it is going. Every time I look, I get more and more optimistic that I’m going to go all the way to the end. God damn the medical establishment to hell for putting me in this situation. But at least I had a good doctor for my cause. I absolutely recommend reading medical journals for all of your questions. You’d be surprised how many studies are out there and available on the internet if you take the trouble to look.
I know quite a few people will never do this. I think it’s a heart problem. When you ask people to do things they are uncomfortable doing, they feel a tinge of pain in their heart and back away from the effort. I know about this first hand. I also know that this fear goes away once you start allowing your circulatory system to heal. You take a lot of the fat and cholesterol out of your diet and the blood flow increases as the disease decreases. Again, math and science. No mysticism here.
That question above about global drought came from my conversation with my California conservative friend. I mentioned that it’s 13 years of drought and he questioned that. He just didn’t believe it because this news doesn’t make it to his personal algorithm. I told him to Google the question that I did but he said that he wouldn’t. Why in the world would he ever make a scientific Google query? Why on Earth should he be interested in such things personally?
That I think is the biggest personal change that I went through a few years ago. It all started with one single observation on my part that my life trying to be publicly social in town was not giving me any enjoyment. It was just a thought that managed to resonate and stay with me long enough for me to make a good decision.
I think most people get trapped by social entanglements that end up being very unhealthy. This could be with friends or family. It can be marriages where people go in different directions. Honestly, it could even be from your children. You can argue how important these ties are. You can live your life attempting to keep your group together. You can have all of these dramas and feel all of the weight and work extra hard to keep the money flowing for all of these structures. I’m not saying that there is no value in this. I’m just saying that one day I realized that I was not enjoying my social life at all. That was it. It was just that I was honest with myself. I just was not enjoying it.
When this decision came to be clear in my head, it wasn’t just an emotional tick. It wasn’t something that could be fixed with a smile or a good day. I mean, I was single and I didn’t meet females. I wasn’t a virgin during this time if that means anything. But the vast majority of the social connections ended up to be painful one way or another. Either I was obligated to run with people I didn’t enjoy running with or listen to people I didn’t like listening to.
Then there was the food. In order to be social, you end up sitting in restaurants and cafes a lot. I did not frequent the alcoholic establishments because I don’t like drinking and I really don’t like drunks. This was not a part of things. But drinking coffee or tea was. I noticed that I really was not enjoying the coffee drinks. I was getting nervous to the point of psychosis from all of the caffeine. The tea was often not worth drinking either and for sure, the restaurant food was always bullshit. Nobody paid any attention to detail, there was nothing particularly interesting in the food or the presentation or the atmosphere. It was just money going away for things that had nothing for me.
I started enjoying not going out more than going out. I also started enjoying my own company more than random social encounters. I started enjoying very small private personal interactions and started staying away from people who would push me back into the public. There are people who like the excitement of crowds. I’m not one of them. I’m a miserable group thinker. I don’t go along with the flow and I hate ending up being the center of group attention.
You can do the math on that yourself. I stopped playing this stupid game and as a result, I got happier, healthier and started making choices that led to better health and happiness.
That’s how I ended up here. Here I have quiet. Here I have generally clean air except for my chicken neighbors who do not have the mental capacity to calm down. They don’t have any concept of health and nothing exists to them outside of money. To them, money can buy happiness even though it never does and they are obviously some of the most miserable people I have ever seen in my life. Complete vampires of personal misery who cannot even live in their own skin without seeking constant distraction. I pity them or I would pity them if they weren’t so violent.
I just have a tendency to diagnose things. It’s just something I do and I think something a lot of people do if they give themselves the chance. You just have to look at a problem and come up with an answer. I like practical things that have function and wherever possible, I like to leave things alone and let nature do what it wants to do. I need to live but I don’t need to demonstrate my personal dominance especially over nature. I do not need to adhere to anybody else’s idea of aesthetics. I do not need to play social games. I just do what I need to do to get by and pay attention to my own business. Other than that, God wins every time, just the way I think it’s supposed to be.
God equals nature in this equation and nature equals God. When I say God wins, I mean nature wins. I just take what I need and leave the rest in the hands of nature. If you want to hear that sentence with the word God in it, please yourself.
Does this all boil down to diet really? This seems to be the thought of what I’m writing about this year. The foods we eat have such an enormous influence over us. And we influence each other, driving ourselves towards particular foods that do not really serve our physical bodies as much as they serve an economic system that seems designed around our misery and discomfort. It’s an unnatural way to live. It’s an unproductive way to live if one were to include nature in your thinking. It is a way of living that goes against nature, our nature and natural world that we live in.
One of the last times I saw my friends in the Jewish community, we had a very gentle disagreement about one statement I made. I said that I am an animal and they disagreed. Perhaps this is the fundamental problem with religion in general. It allows for an unnatural idea to take shape and one that gives license to go against nature or our own nature.
To me, there are three basic laws and commandments. Thou shall not kill and thou shalt not steal. These would be the basic two ideals other than taking a day off. And again, if we freely substitute the concepts of God and nature as being equal, you have either a recipe for success or failure based upon your breaking of these rules. The moment you start looking for nuance or loopholes, things get sketchy. The moment you start arguing about your rights to take more than you need or to cause harm by doing it, we end up on a slippery slope that takes us away from our nature.
What is our nature? I think we’re just a bunch of monkeys. I think all we want is to have enough food available to us. I think we just want to be comfortable and I think we react to our internal natures to care for our physical bodies.
This was also a part of the greatest debate I ever had with the Jewish community. They tell me there are 633 commandments in the Torah. Way more than the 10 that are presented as being worthy of stone carving. My thought was that god/nature has only asked me to eat, drink, sleep, piss, shit and procreate. Probably to get up and move around a little bit and that’s the whole list. Physical discomfort at not doing one of these things pretty much tells me I’m going against my nature. If I try to stay awake when I want to sleep, I’m miserable. And if I try to sleep when I don’t need it, it’s the same. It’s also true about eating when I’m not hungry or starving myself. It’s also true when you have to go to the bathroom and it’s definitely true when thinking about sex.
When all is calm, it’s because you have all you need. When you’re comfortable and healthy and you’re not worried about food, everything’s fine. When you have enough love in your life, life is good.
So if we take our two or three basic rules, don’t kill things, don’t steal other people’s things and remember to take a day off to rest and heal and dream, everything else ends up being bullshit. Bullshit meaning things we just don’t need except to grow plants.
So what’s going on this morning? Why am I so absolutely satisfied today? Well, I ate some good food yesterday. And even though my second meal was kind of small and early, I haven’t been the slightest bit hungry since. I guess some dried apples and water was a good enough snack to get me through the night.
At the moment, I don’t have any obligations to do any work. I don’t owe anybody anything and I have no need for anybody’s services. All the people in my life are busy doing whatever it is they do however they do it but none of that concerns me and believe me, I am grateful for such moments.
And of course, at least for the moment, the water problem is gone. It’s not a perfect or a bulletproof situation. I have some things that will need to be done to make sure that this water security can continue. Also, this food growing/gardening business is an annual affair and everything starts again next year. And there is preparation to do for next year. But as for this moment and this day, I’m just good. I have a pat hand. I can just play the cards I have and I don’t need anymore. Hell, I didn’t even need the garbage truck again this week. I don’t have enough garbage to throw out to justify walking out to the truck.
Anyway, I’m thinking of making some nice food later on in the day. I’ll go out and gather some greens and some veggies. I’ll make something tasty for sure. And probably, because we are not getting any more rain until I don’t even know when, towards the end of the day and before I shut things down, I’ll give my plants one more soak to get them to Sunday.
Is there anything else? Okay, maybe just this:
***
Something to think about…
***
It’s 1:30 and I have two things that I think are interesting to talk about. Maybe three. This is crazy, I have been having a hard time getting my numbers straight all day. Let’s go with three.
The first one is I fixed the fence and put the compost pile back together myself. I have a habit of taking myself out of the hospital too soon. I genuinely hope I have not harmed myself right like I said, I have been having great luck with my healing practices and I’m starting to feel really good these days. When I went outside this morning and saw the compost pile, I guess instinctively I grabbed a pitchfork and just started gently pulling. Within a few minutes I realized that it was not going to be any major amount of work and if my legs were stable enough, they were certainly more stable than Ghenna was shit-faced, it would only be a matter of minutes to finish the job. Maybe 20 minutes all together is what it took and now I have a nice neat pile exactly where it’s supposed to be.
Pressing my luck, I went over to the broken fence and had a look at what was going on. I came up with three strategies to fix it and chose the cheapest and easiest one. I just pulled up the old chain link fence as far as I could get it and nailed it into place on one of the remaining broken trees there. It’s not beautiful but it’s a reasonable deterrent to keep folks from walking between the properties. Eventually, The ivy will grow back and maybe I’ll even plant a few more trees there. It’ll take some time but we will establish privacy on the border again.
This work, although it really was not extensive, made me hungry and this is the second point I want to make.
Do you know what a knish is? You can do your own investigations but basically it is a potato pastry. As I know these things from growing up in New York. This is definitely German/Russian/Jewish traditional food. It goes by different names out here that I’m also not going to bother you with but basically it’s mashed potatoes wrapped in pastry. And if you like me, it’s one of the most delicious foods in the entire world.
What I remember about these is that there is a specific peppery, garlicky, oniony taste to the pastries. I definitely know this as a savory dish and I’m sure original recipes have a lot of dairy and fat in them. I could recreate this creaminess with oat milk or nut cream but it was not needed. This dish was creamy enough as it was and besides, what impresses me in my memory is the savoriness. It’s the pepper in the garlic that makes this ultimate comfort food sing.
The reason I am mentioning this is that today’s breakfast is a perfect example of deconstructionist thinking that works out well enough to bring a nostalgic tear to the eye. Without bothering to go through all of the steps that you might see by clicking on the internet recipe, I just took the basic ideas of potatoes with some kind of pastry covering and found a new way to create that flavor beautifully. I did not recreate the bun itself, I just recreated The taste and the feel and the comfort of it. I also probably made it more healthy.
So this morning’s breakfast recipe was simply to toss some new potatoes cut up into the steamer with five or six small onions from my field. I added some garlic cloves whole in the pot, chopped up one chili pepper because I love chili peppers and then added some salt, a touch of vinegar and some fresh ground pepper. For a final touch, I shook some barley flakes over the top of all this to add the gluten and pastry aspect and let it steam. Again, it was about 10 minutes before everything was beautiful and I threw the whole concoction into a bowl including the steaming water. Mix it up a few times and what do you have? A beautiful delicious potato pastry mess that gave a sense of even more perfection then I had before I put it together.
I tell you, if we live by mood alone, I feel like I’m a millionaire today.
The only thing I can add to this is the third thing which is how good it feels here in the office. With this remarkable food in my belly, literally all of the nagging work done, no reason to interact with any drunks whatsoever and only some light watering, vegetable gathering and a nice warm shower left, the cool breeziness of being in this room is absolutely delicious. It is baking outside. There are a few clouds in the sky but they are doing nothing to dissuade the blast furnace heat. It’s brutally hot outside. It’s hot enough to make you burst into a sweat just standing outside in it.
Here in the office however, we have a much different story. Here it is easily 10 or 15 degrees cooler if not more. The way the house is built, the air flow is gentle and constant with the windows open. As miserable as it feels to be outside right now is as delicious as it does being inside.
The local lesson is clear that you’re not supposed to allow yourself to enjoy the UPS quite so much. The Downs are inevitable. Perhaps part of this feeling comes from the natural suppression the news about the nuclear power plant is having on everybody. Perhaps the actual threat of death has people minding their own business for a change. They have to put their hobby hatefulness away and think about real things for a moment. Maybe this is what it is. Or maybe it’s just that I have water security and all my work is finished. Maybe I’m just reveling in my lack of responsibility and how sweet my life feels right now. And really, the food was amazing. It’s a must recommend.
I’m tempted to say that this is about it for the week. I feel like I’ve written less words this week than over the past while. I don’t know why or what that means. I’m tempted to close up but I’ll leave some final thoughts for a little later on. You never know, maybe something will happen that’s interesting. But for now, I’m just going to kick back and allow the heat of the day to pass me by. I might even just take a nap. Why not? There is no nervousness here right now. There’s absolutely nobody here to wake me up and bother me with unnecessary drama.
***
It’s about 6:30 and I’m almost at the finish line. All of the work that needs to be done has been done. This stuff I set out to dry a few days ago has been banked and brought inside and my hot peppers have replaced them on the screen. The veggies have been gathered and are in the kitchen waiting to be prepared in some delicious way. And the field has been watered. It is a pleasure doing this job right now. I can definitely see making a few improvements over what I have here. Generally however, it is a dream. And even after one day with one really good soak, everything on the field looks so much better.
The only jobs left to do are to clean myself up and do some cooking. I’m going to change you out of my dirty clothes and put on something clean. Actually, the cooking is pretty much done, at least the flavorful part. I put together something in the blender with dried peas and peanuts and several other usual suspects. I had a sneak taste and it’s amazing. I think I’m going for pasta tonight. You can’t go wrong with pasta.
I don’t know if it means anything or not but Ghenna came by on his bike looking for some work. I really did not want to be too sarcastic with him. I don’t really have any bad thoughts towards him. I also didn’t have any work for him.
I asked him if he still had any of the $100 left over and he said that he did. I don’t really think I need to believe too much of anything the man says. This is no direct comment on his character. Actually, I’m completely aware that it absolutely is a comment on his character but I’m just saying that I don’t really care too much. We have our relationship as it is and I’m not his friend because I believe in the quality of his words.
He seemed upset that I had done the work of rebuilding the fence and fixing the compost pile. I was pretty happy to be able to do it. I even had a brief conversation with my ex partner while I was watering. She’s not going to be around on Sunday so I thought I would show her what the new water pressure looked like. She told me several times to take it easy and not overdo it. The only effect the words had was to take some energy away from me. I guess it’s like that. I also won’t hold that against her.
There is this business with the nuclear power plant shutting down that puts a black cloud over everything. That is a really harsh way of putting things but it’s the truth. I think that more than anything has colored people’s attitudes and very much changed the energy. The place has become much quieter, much more somber and a little bit more gentle.
I like it a little better like this. I like it when people become deeply worried because it stops the amount of energy they put towards scapegoats. I’m only one of them but there are always so many people to address your hatred towards. I would say all of this is an exhibition of self-hatred. I know it’s ridiculous to say thank you to nuclear disasters to break the cancerous sclerosis of the brain of these people. But it’s true.
But other than that, this was the best week I’ve had in a long time. I’m gaining my health back. I have enough water. I have enough help. And I am where I am supposed to be. I don’t really think people need more than this. I’m healthy and I have plenty to eat. It’s enough.
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