Thursday, September 1st 2022
It’s 9:00 a.m. and this is a very late start for me. Lena has come and gone, the floors look wonderful and I think she is going to get a few groceries for me. Nothing special.
It is possible that my leg is feeling a little better. I’ve started analyzing exactly where this pain is coming from. It’s possible that I’ve got some kind of infection similar to what I went through last year at about this time. There is some swelling and secondary symptoms that seem to point to my being sick. This kind of makes sense to me and the swelling I think is what has been causing most of the pain. This is ridiculous. This is exactly why I went to the hospital last year. I can’t believe I’m going through this again.
I didn’t do any watering today. There is no genuine reason for it except that I just didn’t want to get up and walk around. I don’t think anything is going to die by missing one day of water. Honestly, I’m getting tired of these do-nothing days. I’m getting tired of doing nothing.
To add to the misery, it was cold last night. According to the weather service it was six degrees. This equates to somewhere in the low 40s Fahrenheit and it was sufficiently cold to remind me of winter. I woke up shivering and immediately started setting things up as if I was in the middle of the winter. I did not light a fire but today, I’m definitely going to change things up a little to hedge against this sort of nonsense. One of the things is to remove the mosquito screen from the window of the Warm room.
I put that up on the advice of my ex partner. I am confused as to whether it is a positive or a negative. During the deepest heat wave, it allowed me to leave the windows open. Perhaps this is a plus. But I think it trapped more insects inside the room than it allowed in. During the summer, it is important to simply close the windows at dusk. Perhaps this makes the interior a bit more stuffy but this is usually sufficient to keep the mosquitoes away. By putting up mosquito screens, sure, the windows can stay open but the insects that are inside the house have nowhere to go.
But I think it’s time to take that down, either for the winter or permanently. I think it’s time to be able to close the windows to retain some heat inside the room.
Technically, the first frost is generally November 1st in this region. To my observation, it is more like October 1st. This may not be frost but this is when the temperatures start dipping down into single digits. Once your body adjusts, anything above zero can be comfortable. Freezing is always freezing and it’s very hard to get your body to understand that. If you live in town, the coldest month of the year are the first two weeks of October and the last two weeks of April. This is a world without thermostats so when the public utilities begin and end dictate this rather difficult month.
I guess out in the country the cold starts a little early. It’s still not cold enough to kill the plants. But it was definitely cold enough to make last night doubly miserable.
This morning I woke up and found the following notice on one of my weather apps.
It seems that El Nino, the weather pattern that tends to lead towards drought in the northern hemisphere, has come 3 years in a row. El Nino is not actually predictable, It generally comes every 2 to 7 years and is counted as a significant event. This is the first time this century that we have had three years in a row. The cause seems to be warmer water temperatures in the ocean. This leads to less rain which leads to less drought.
I don’t know how many times I’m supposed to say that global warming is real but global warming is real.
I had a conversation with Lena about what to do with those apples. I also started wondering if those apples had something to do with my current health problems. Do you think suddenly eating a bunch of apples could change my body chemistry so badly? They are unbelievably tasty apples. Lana says you’re not supposed to eat so many apples. I never heard that before but I wonder if it’s true. Maybe it’s a blood sugar thing.
In any case, the work needed to save these apples is a bit beyond the scope of my expertise. Lana offered to move them into the root cellar but then mentioned that there needs to be some modification to the room in order to support the apples. One of the tricks of saving apples is that they don’t touch each other. You can wrap them in paper or simply make sure that they are separate from each other. But then she said that these particular types of apples are not very good for saving. They are unbelievably delicious apples right now. I don’t know what to think about all of these new thoughts. Probably the best thing to do is simply cut them and throw them on the drying table. All apples can be dried and saved and make really good snacks.
Apparently, the Ukrainian counter offensive is now a thing. Here are some blurbs and headlines according to several news sources on the above page:
Ukraine’s troops say some southern areas have been retaken, but Russia has reportedly slowed their advance.
The Ukrainians were initially considering a broader counteroffensive, but narrowed their mission to the south, in the Kherson region.
As Ukraine mounts a new counteroffensive in the southern part of the country, Zelensky’s bravado risks setting expectations too high.
I have three opinions regarding this situation. Certainly it will be a global up should Ukraine win this war. A lot of people will feel very good for having picked a winner if they do. But, it might be nothing more than a chance for Russia to weed out old and outdated military equipment. Literally, they’re just dumping their garbage in Ukraine. And finally, there will never be anything again that resembles what the place ever was. This is not to say that it was such a wonderful place before this war but you have to expect quite a few changes.
What I’m trying to say is that any genuine nostalgia for Ukraine amongst people I know who are from there was nature. It’s warmer there. People have traditionally gone to Crimea for vacations on the sea and the warmer temperatures have allowed a lot of food production. We should also understand that traditionally speaking, life used to be slower here. All of that is gone forever and if we add in global warming and all of this lovely European industry that everybody seems to be so happy about, whatever was there to make one nostalgic is probably gone forever. Buried under an influx of money and weapons, violence and bloodshed and an endless epidemic of construction rebuilding.
There is never going to be a warm slow place like there was before.
Raped for money. This would be how I would sum up the entire business. The entirety of the country and especially the southern regions occupied by the Russians have simply been raped for money. Perhaps you could also include the Belarusians under this thought.
But all of this is just negative conjecture of a guy stuck on his couch. I guess I should be grateful for having a couch to be stuck on. I guess this is more than a lot of people have. I myself have a pretty easy life right now except for the physical pain. I have a nice place to live and a big old Garden to play with. And outside of those few miserable moments when my chicken neighbors run they’re disgusting cars, I have plenty of fresh air to breathe and clean water to drink. I have lots of fresh food literally lying around to eat and I have the capacity to keep myself warm in the winter time.
All of this makes me pretty lucky. There are quite a few people in Ukraine who don’t have any place to call their own anymore. Whatever their situation was before some rocket leveled their apartment building, they are now fighting for survival or living off of some kind of government handout while they become obligated to economically enslave themselves in order to continue. It’s like hitting a violent reset button on millions of lives. This is not even counting the rapes and murders.
This is also taking into account global poverty and homelessness. I could just focus on American urban homelessness right now. I want to name a number here but my guess is there are millions of homeless people throughout the United states, living on concrete and depending on the garbage of civilization to keep them alive.
If I’m being honest, we could go global and talk about genuine global poverty where people don’t know where they’re going to get their food from. This is from the effects of wars fought for money, drought caused by global warming, the drying up of traditional food supplies and all of this in a time where we have more people on the planet than we have ever had. All of this at a time where we never think about these things clearly or take bullshit misguided morality used exclusively to create more human misery out of it. All of this at a time where instead of taking note and action against genuine suffering both to humanity and the environment, we just keep fighting to take all the resources we can because of their monetary value.
I guess this kind of talk makes me a bleeding heart liberal snowflake or something like that. I’m a couple of years from following liberal conservative politics in the states. I count all of that as noise pollution these days. I don’t listen to local politics either. And as I no longer am working as a translator for independent Russian journalists, I don’t even have to live in the stories of political corruption. You know that the stories continue. You know that the situation has never changed. You know that nothing has changed and is only getting worse. I just don’t listen to the noise on a daily basis anymore.
There is an answer. There is a way to right the ship. There are genuine non-violent steps that could be taken. There are changes that could be made to minimize the disasters. There are things that we, I am talking about all human beings in this we, can do to make things better. It’s just that we don’t. We don’t because most everybody is locked into economic slavery that disallows them from moving to the left or right for fear of losing what they have. Fear keeps everyone locked into their own little worlds. Fear is exactly the emotion that is played upon by those in power. And all they want is to keep the money flowing in their direction so that they have privilege and power and can have at a discounted rate all of the pleasures of the world.
The destruction of the entire planet just for the power of a tiny, tiny percentage of the human population. All for the whims of a few greedy white people.
I think I’m going to go outside for a while. I have a few places to comfortably sit down out in the garden. I’m wearing my favorite sweater right now. It’s warmer outside than in the house. Pretty soon, I’m going to have to close down his office. It’s just too cold to be in this room during the winter. I’ll probably move my office into the warm room.
Winter is coming. Yeah, it’s starting to get colder. It’s starting to get colder but it’s not getting better. It never really gets better.
***
It’s 11:00 and Lena has again been here and gone. I got a few staple carbs from the local store. A couple of tomatoes and some pasta. The buckwheat has gone up in price. I don’t need much but it’s nice to have this situation.
Lena spoke to her mother, who is in a wheelchair because she doesn’t have a leg, and she said the best place to store apples was to simply put them on the floor under the bed. Because we have natural wooden floors here that have not been sealed, there is a natural air flow. In the summertime, this is one of the things that naturally keeps the house cool. In the winter time, it is merciless unless you do something to block the convection. I am currently working on that problem right now for the warm room this year. So now my bucket of apples that we borrowed from my neighbor’s dead orchard is under the bed in one of the unused rooms. It is simply a matter of checking for those who go bad and I probably have enough apples for 2 or 3 months. I’m good for another bucket if I want one.
She also told me that if I need a couple of bags of potatoes for the winter, she has relatives who will bring them along. Potatoes are a staple of Life out here. I don’t really want to grow potatoes. It’s too much work, the potato beetles are annoying as hell and though I like potatoes, I can be equally as happy with brown rice, buckwheat or pearled barley. I’m also good with making my own bread. Potatoes are nice but if it wasn’t a matter of complete survival, I don’t find them anything to cry about.
Lena by the way had changed clothes and was wearing a black dress. When I asked about the costume change, simply said that she took off the clothes she was wearing to come clean my floors. The black dress however was because her neighbor has just died. She told me the entire tawdry story this morning. A horrible alcoholic with more and more health problems. She had been taken to the psych ward even for convalescence but never could find her way out of the trap she was in. I guess this is one of these instances of relief when someone passes like this. I guess some people just don’t get enough out of life to justify not drinking themselves to insanity.
We talked a bit about Ghenna. Lena is amazing at running her mouth. She does so very loudly. If she was a guitar, she would be the simplest instrument in the world without even a volume or a tone button. In her opinion, she has nothing really good to say about the man. She agrees that he is a great worker exactly up until the moment he starts drinking, in which case he becomes a worthless lying son of a bitch. This is my opinion as well. So far, I have managed to harness the energy of sobriety well enough. We get along okay and apparently, I am sufficiently contributory to the alcoholic part of his days that he appreciates my existence.
As for what I’m supposed to be doing for the rest of this day, I don’t know what the answer is. All this summer, I have been at least able to get up and move around for an hour or two every day. It’s not what I wanted but at least this has been available. Today is a little less painful than yesterday but still, something is definitely wrong. I don’t really know what to do about this except wait it out and try to remain calm.
I am lifting weights though. I like doing some meditation with weights but usually it’s more of a calm down than it is a physical necessity. Now it’s heading over in the other direction. If I don’t stress my body intentionally right now, I’m going to fall completely apart from all of the sitting around.
The more I’m dealing with this the more I’m thinking about heading back to the hospital again. Perhaps we can try this one more time and get it right this time. This would include all aspects of my medical care. I guess if I had to say it out loud, I might be happier in a different country for this. I just don’t really have access to anywhere else and I don’t have the money to make the trip. And even if I did go back to the States and ask them to take care of this problem, there is no guarantee that any good can come of any of this.
Maybe it was the Black dress. Maybe it’s just getting sick. Maybe it’s all the additional care that I’m starting to require. It all just seems very sad right now. Hopeless and sad. Maybe I’m catching this mood from my plants and trees. Maybe they are all feeling this sense of nostalgia along with the cold and the coming darkness.
Last year, I had a much closer relationship to all the living things in my field. I really enjoyed hanging out last year and watching things grow. This year has been different. It’s been all business and not even a very successful business all things considered. There hasn’t been very much pleasure, just a lot of work and pain. Too much pain and too much work and not enough enjoyment or pleasure from all of this.
Yesterday however, it seemed that I got some thank yous. A few insects came and sat with me. It seems that there were some thank yous and some gratitude. Everything that was allowed to live here seems to give thanks. Of course this could be my own psychosis. Or it could be the truth. Being empathetic to living things doesn’t make you crazy. Probably the opposite is more true. Still, it was nice to be appreciated. At least, I understand their point of view.
***
This week’s Torah portion is called Shaftim (שֹֽׁפְטִ֣ים) and the word itself means judges.
When I first opened up this week’s portion, I saw two separate translations. The first is written that you shall set up judges and law enforcement officials and the second reads that judges and statutes shall be given to you. They both come from two separate sources and of course each source has its own commentary as always. I am not the only one who reads the Torah every week. But it is interesting to note the difference between the proactive version and the passive one. Even though the eventuality is the same, there is a giant difference between people who have agency and choice to do things and those who are passive and cannot do anything but sit around and wait.
It’s an extremely interesting thing to note in a world that is asked to be both proactive, where it suits The profit making, and passive as in what we are supposed to believe through the constant media deluge. It seems we are being trained to be active in one particular direction by being told to be passive in terms of what happens in our head.
I don’t have this link anymore but this week, I made a comment on a conservative video made by someone concerning Donald Trump and whatever documents were found in his desk. I personally do not believe Donald Trump is or has ever been a truly significant character. He is a figurehead or a puppet and there is no other way to understand this. There is no way that this gibbering idiot is any kind of a genius. The only thing he has is enough money to hire people to do his thinking for him. The only unfortunate thing is he finds more profitability in people who should never be listened to.
I vote ecology and not economy.
But I made a comment about this particular know-it-all. What he said in the answer to the question “do you like Trump?”, the man instead decided to say not only that the answer was complicated but to say it in a complicated way. Here is something else I have learned over the last few years. There are people who do the complicated work and then there are people who make things more complicated than they need to be so that nobody notices how simple their theft is.
This conversation with Lena this morning about her neighbor, the addict who went crazy and eventually managed to leave the planet because of health problems caused by all of this addiction had this argument in it as well. Lena herself has been a drunk for a very long time and it’s only now a few months into her sobriety. But all of the talking that she does is an inherent trait of addicts. Drug addicts believe they can talk their way out of anything. Natural manipulators.
To me, juxtaposing these ideas one against the other is not a complicated thing. I only do it to make things simpler, not more difficult. If you can’t tell the difference between someone who tries to solve the problems and someone who tries to talk their way out of the problems, you have the difference between someone you want to have on your team and someone your team would be much, much better without.
So really, is this first passage translated passively or actively? I am not an expert in Hebrew unfortunately. I can see what it says and I get the general meaning of the words but exactly what we are supposed to do with the word is open to debate. I guess this is what I am doing this year. I am reading the Torah but I am reading it actively and using my own thoughts as to its meaning. I know there are millions upon millions of people who have done what I am doing over the millenia. I’m not saying anything about good or bad. I’m just saying that I’m listening to me and my own opinion and I like it better this way.
You shall not pervert justice; you shall not show favoritism, and you shall not take a bribe, for bribery blinds the eyes of the wise and perverts just words.
Which is the next line and which is exactly my point.
The rest of the first portion continues on this note and begs us or demands that we be just in our actions. We should not pervert the word of God. And of course and of course and of course, if God equals nature and nature equals God, truer words have never been spoken. Actually, that’s the first commandment. We only have one God, nature, and every time we commit sins against nature, well, take a look at the shape we are in right now to know the truth.
The second portion says that we should set a king upon a throne. It also says that this King must himself be absolutely moral and just. It is essential in all things not to elect or allow corrupt people to put their fingers on the public funds. It is absolutely the most important thing about community living that we do not put charlatans and profiteers in charge of any kind of public morality.
Again, the thoughts and opinions of this blog and all blogs held within are that of myself. This is what comes out of my head as true to the best of my ability. Take my advice as you wish but at least trust that I’m not here to steal your money.
The fourth reading illustrates that there must be a priest class. The levite kohanim are guaranteed a place. These are the priests from the levite tribe. They are not entitled to property ownership and get paid from all of the tithing and free barbecue that comes their way.
Oddly, it seems to me that the rule of Chastity for priests does not seem to do anything but drive people crazy. Denying your sexuality is completely counterproductive. No matter what you think you’re doing by this or what level of morality you are agreeing with, if you are going to be fighting yourself over your cum or ovaries, you’re not going to do anybody any good and you’re only going to make yourself sick.
What might be a better idea is for priests and holy people to forgo meat. This would remove probably most of the savagery and confusion from the class and set them on the road towards being better scientists and clear thinkers. Let a guy have sex and we don’t really have any problems with pederasty in the ranks, do we? Maybe if we quit lying to ourselves about being animals, not animals in the thought of something low and stupid but animals in the sense that we have bodily functions, we might be able to dig ourselves out of this pit caused by misguided religion for so, so, so many years.
The fourth portion tells us that the priests also have reciprocal traveling rights. My dad used to belong to golf clubs that had this same reciprocity. Because you are a member at one club, if you find yourself traveling you can go and play around at one of the sister clubs. It’s a pretty good racket really. You’d be lucky to be a priest in these days. Well, there probably wouldn’t be much for you to do as a vegan priest, they seem bent on barbecue being of the utmost importance. I’m just saying that they believed the priests were the most important thing. These would be the law givers even more so than the king.
I mean, let’s take this literally. If we all believed in the laws thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal and thou shalt take a day off every week, having a class of people there to remind the king not to do any of these things might be useful. If however, we have corruption on either side, no amount of snow blower rhetoric confusion propaganda is going to make anything better. You can spin this thing until everybody falls over dizzy but it doesn’t make what is right right and what is wrong wrong.
The 5th portion has two parts. The first of which makes room not only for the priest class but also for profits, soothsayers and local wisdom. I’m not sure whether this is an active public kindness allowing the lunatics their place or if it’s just there to keep people’s brains from connecting the dots. Really, is this portion about being active free people or being passive slaves?
The second part says that when the land of milk and honey is acquired, the jurisdiction is to be broken into three cities. They don’t specifically say what those three cities are except that one of them is known as a sanctuary City. The definition of a sanctuary City is different depending on where you are or what the purpose is but basically it is a place for those who somehow exist outside the laws. I guess in a way this is something like a prison colony but in a more real sense, it is a place where people who wish to live more independently can do so. Again, this is by choice, history or nature, it is what it is. But someone who has committed a crime such as murder as mentioned here in the Torah or as the name means in North America concerning laws of immigration needs to have a place to go other than prison. So perhaps the idea of a sanctuary city is not such a bad idea.
Of course, one version of this ends up to be the dystopian New York from the Snake Plissken movie, but then again there doesn’t seem to be any irony that the toughest character in that film had a Jewish name. The actor Kurt Russell is not Jewish but his wife or partner Goldie Hawn is definitely Jewish. I’m sure it rubs off. And he has Jewish kids…
The sixth portion also has two separate sections. The first one is to be honest in your dealings and not to steal from or commit perjury against your neighbors. Good citizenry means being fair and not dealing with the people around you in a greedy fashion. These would seem to be wise words. The second part talks about being fearless in war but also benevolent to soldiers who genuinely have something else to do. I’m not exactly sure of the current laws of the draft, perhaps there are exceptions to such things that are easily acquired by going to a university or getting married and having kids.
To be honest, I don’t know why the military isn’t completely a volunteer organization. It would be kind of like voting really. Do you believe we need to kill each other and carry guns or do you believe there is a different way? For this matter, I have always believed that public service should be absolutely universal for both males and females. However, what I would say differently is that we should hand out mops, buckets and rooms and have the entire weight of what was previously known as the military put into action to wage war against pollution. Everything is the same except we don’t come out of it is murderers with PTSD, we come out of it with a greater sense of love for our environment and reasonable thinking about how to be a more sustainable species.
You know, it would still be a dangerous profession. The world gets pretty toxic in certain regions. But I would be much more pleased and emotionally moved by a young person who lost their life because they were putting their great efforts to detoxify the region then I would for someone who practiced murder. I would gladly take pride if service did not automatically mean being a murderer or contributing to systemic murder.
The 7th portion is one of these weird ironic passages that I have always had as a personal philosophy. It’s interesting to find out the route of where this particular moral thinking comes from.
When you approach a city to wage war against it, you shall propose peace to it first. And it will be if it responds to you with peace and opens up to you. But if it does not make peace with you and it wages war against you, you shall besiege it.
I have always held this as my personal way of understanding who people are. If I meet people and their first offer is friendship, I will take them at face value and keep them as friends. But when I meet people that wish to place themselves adversarily against me, I can never forget that they are an adversary.
Another way I see this mathematically at least comes from the understanding that I am not interested in any sadomasochistic relationships. We are either going to do this 50/50 or we are not. And if we are not and someone needs to be the boss, that boss is going to be me.
And as far as getting into fights with these types of idiots who like adversarial relationships and fighting, I propose that they just leave me alone. I agree that after a while it seems that I wish to be left alone by the vast population around me. That’s just poor training and bad leadership. But the idea stays intact. The longer and harder we fight for fairness and peace, the more fairness and peace we will have for ourselves. They say that you reap what you sow. I am in complete agreement with that and not only metaphorically.
The final portion talks a lot about the problem of shedding clean blood or unclean blood. There is some confusion as to what killing is allowed and what killing is improper. Certain killing is called murder and other killing is called patriotism.
Like I said, I’m a little tired of people who make things complex like this. I’m in favor of no killing. I’m in favor of not killing animals or people. No confusion there whatsoever. We are herbivores and we don’t need to play games or bother the animals. We don’t need to breed and imprison them, we don’t need their milk and we don’t need to eat their dead rotting flesh.
If we remove killing, we end up getting rid of War as well because if we’re not going to kill each other, I guess this only leaves reason for our disagreements. I mean seriously, I mean absolutely and genuinely seriously, do we really, really need bullies in this day and age? With all the available information that anyone can get for free every single day, do we really need to bully each other for our resources or our social status?
Maybe we just don’t need any of this bullshit confusing us and making life miserable for everybody.
***
I just had an idea that maybe one of the culprits in all of this pain misery that I am experiencing these days. I’m beginning to think it was the salt.
High sodium intake has been associated with inflammation in patients with high blood pressure and atherosclerosis in observational studies, and lower sodium is associated with reduced mortality, heart disease and stroke. One small human study has documented increased indicators of inflammation on a high-sodium diet.
Over the last few days when I have most suffered from pain, it occurs to me that I overdid it by putting salt in my food. I don’t know that this is the answer but when questioning whether diet plays a part in my situation, I couldn’t help but come to this conclusion.
This morning and yesterday I noticed quite a bit of swelling in my legs. This means something and several other health symptoms seem to point to this as well. If I’m not quickly recovering these days as I usually do, the only reason for this is that I am suffering from something that is diminishing my immune system. If it is the exact same thing as all of the salt in my diet, perhaps it’s time to take some action.
I’m going to stay in contact with this thought. Tomorrow’s meals are going to be without salt. If I end up making bread, I will probably use some soda as a raising agent but I won’t add more salt. I also won’t add salt if I make some kind of hummus or peanut sauce. I’m going to just stay low sodium this weekend and then we will take a look at what the story is come Sunday.
Usually you can tell how these things go pretty quickly. I will probably know whether or not I am doing the right thing within the first one or two meals. If I don’t bring myself any inflammation or retain fluids I don’t need to, my guess is I’m going to have a diminishment of the pain. Less inflammation, less water retained and perhaps I will be on the road back to normalcy for myself.
Listen, I never said I was perfect. I just said I try. Sometimes when it’s time to make myself something to eat, I really want a little salt in there. But keeping that to an absolute minimum or leaving it out entirely is also an answer to several problems. Not all the answers but some of the answers.
Let’s give this a try and see if it helps.
***
Nandy Bushell is speaking truth to power. Let the children rise up. Or at least, let’s give them a chance at having a nice place to live.
***
Just one more link because it’s never a bad idea to listen to Dr Greger. This one is about fat in the bloodstream.
For health, I just had a very filling dinner of red lentils and buckwheat. The only additions were some zucchini pieces and one onion. What did it taste like? It tasted like these ingredients. It was warm and it was straight and I finished a nice amount.
Why did I choose this for a late evening meal? Potassium is among the things that helps you lower sodium. It’s also a big shot of protein and generally good human food. It also is a very warming comfort food. I have shut all the windows in the house already. I am prepared for another cold night.
The question is the reason I am feeling sick. I know these things and the truth is that I have been eating for my pleasure a bit more than health. I am eating whole foods but I have been adding a ton of salt and spice. Perhaps this is to overcome the health burden that hits me with so many visits from Lena and Ghenna. These people are carriers for whatever diseases are happening in the village. For sure, none of my socially higher-monied neighbors are any better. They also go from face to face and Carrie whatever diseases all of their friends have. Nobody wears masks anymore.
I just want to feel healthy. I just want to be able to walk without pain. I just want to do something to fix these health problems and I want to do something that works.
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