Friday, September 22nd 2022

I’m beginning to think that I am a great doctor. I am aware that I am not the most disciplined person in the world. I have my feelings and I get lazy from time to time. But I hate being sick and to avoid this, I prefer to live a healthy life.

The issue is immediate appetites versus general health. Metaphorically, you could equate this with spending money very easily. If you would like to have money lying around for important things, you should not spend too much of it on frivolous choices or momentary whims. The less you feed insignificant things, the more long-term and sustainable your situation.

In terms of food, you’d like to eat something that is satisfying to your mouth. You’d like to have something that’s very tasty and interesting. I certainly have certain foods that I would probably eat at every meal given a chance. I like spicy things and I like very flavorful things and specifically, I absolutely love noodles. I never lie about this.

What all of this talking is about is that I feel 100% better this morning. This is everywhere. This is in my leg and in my general health. I woke up this morning as if I am on the road back to health. And I’m pretty happy about this. I’m mostly happy because I looked at the situation pragmatically and scientifically and made a choice that would lead to a positive result. I seem to have gotten it right.

Last night, I wasn’t really very hungry but I chose to have a very simple high protein, high potassium meal and specifically left it bland. I would not say that it had no flavor. All things have flavor. I just left the excitement out of this one. I didn’t use any peppers and specifically I didn’t use any salt.

I want to tell you another thing that I know about the human body and possibly about the whole world that I have acquired simply by being exactly observational like this. When I made the choice to go vegan, I noticed that even one meal made a difference. It was almost an identical situation. I wanted to change something and I simply removed all meat and dairy from my evening meal. I woke up the next morning and I felt different. Not just different but better.

You know, I don’t even want to say it this way. I don’t want to represent this as something you just physically notice. The business of taking the meat and dairy out of my diet did not truly show itself until I got back on my bike to ride around some more. That is when the change away from animal products showed itself to be the right answer. Immediately, I was stronger and cleaner and recovered faster and had more staying power. I could ride farther and I could do it again the next day. This was also noticeable even with one single meal.

What I understand about this is that when you are eating things that are not healthy for you, you are simply harming yourself. No matter how much pleasure you seem to be taking from this, the truth is that you are taxing your system and asking it again to do more work than it needs to do. This leads to a feeling of drowsiness which most people misinterpret as satisfaction. Of course we get used to this feeling and we get on a cycle very similar to an addiction cycle where in order to feel normal, we repeat the same process again and again. We harm ourselves so that we feel lazy and slow and then when the energy comes up, we don’t know what to do with it so we harm ourselves again. Revving and calming and revving and calming and we do this again and again thinking that we are doing something else.

This is misinterpreting taking nutrition. What I find is that because I don’t have general Downs or sleepiness after eating a meal, I don’t really have this up and down up and down psychotic relax psychotic relax cycle going on. I can overload my system if I want to. I can eat a large amount of certain foods that will put me in a mode of digestive stress. I can put myself into a food coma if I want to, I just don’t do this very often. Sometimes I really want to do this simply because it is a holdover habit from my life but really, this is the residual of being a depression junkie like everyone else. It never really leaves you but you can learn to say no the vast majority of the time and you can allow your cheats to be small, inexpensive and generally inoffensive to your life. You don’t have to kill yourself with excess.

Earlier, I said that this is knowledge of the world and in my opinion, it is. There are many people talking about how to cure global warming and work on changing our carbon footprint. There are corporations saying that they will help this for us and people come up with all kinds of compromises that we can make that are painless as possible. Of course they don’t want to offend anybody or take anybody off of their happiness and freedom. But this is all bullshit. The answer to the question is simply to stop poisoning the planet. You stop poisoning yourself, you get better. You stop putting things in your system that are bad for you and you start to recover.

There are limits of course. I am not a young man. But there is definitely a difference between yesterday and today. I simply had been eating too much salt. I had been chasing too much flavor in my meals. Maybe it’s tongue numbness from having the alcoholics come around me too often because of all this work I needed to get done. My legs are not allowing me to do my own work right now and I am happy to have someone who can come over and make things better. But they are kind of rancid and unfortunately, they bring their bullshit with them. A numb tongue is one of the things you get from whatever form of bullshit is flying around this world. Lots of peppers, lots of salt, make food that you can feel.

But as a result, I was retaining a lot of water. I noticed this in two places. I suddenly had a bigger belly. Also, I had a tremendous amount of pain in my legs. It took me a minute or so to agree to do a genuine analysis. Perhaps this was a mistake in not acting so fast but it seems that I had other things on my mind to worry about and paying attention to my own habits to see if I was doing something wrong was not the first thing that came into my head. I just accepted my situation for what it was and tried to wait it out.

I don’t know what to tell you but sometimes we just wake up.

So I paid attention to what I was doing, noticed a few symptoms that seemed to make sense, made a logical choice how to improve the situation by removing something that was offending me, did this one time as accurately as possible and now only a few hours later, I am experiencing less pain, less bloating less issues generally and I’m thinking that I got this right.

The thing about life on the planet Earth is that we don’t really move at the speed that media and commerce tell us we should. Life has its own cycles and it is much, much slower than the money/clock world that most people live in. Life on planet Earth follows the Sun and the Sun is a yearly process. I’m not going to go into the realities of astronomy, I’m just saying that no matter what our brains tell us and what sort of stories have been given to us to build up our sense of fear, these are one year trips around the Sun and all life on the planet is and should only be guided by that. Pretty much everything else we do is harmful.

So it’s Friday and this is my last day before the day off. Last night, Lana came by again. Her mother has been telling her to pay attention to me or maybe it’s herself. She brought me more apples. This new brand was not as beautiful as the cinnamon apples that came from my neighbors trees but they were nice. She said that she would come by again today to see if I needed anything. I guess I appreciate it. It’s nice to have people care about you.

I’m also expecting Ghenna today. He is coming by to collect the charcoal from the barn, turn over the compost pile and run a cultivator through the lower gardens. We have some grass growing there that needs to be dissuaded.

On Sunday, my ex partner is coming up. We talked yesterday about what sorts of things she should bring. It’s not an extensive list. I also think we are collecting our potatoes on Sunday. I’m also getting very close to making serious decisions about how to close up the boxes for the winter. I am not an expert at this and frankly, I’ve never done this before so I don’t feel very secure in making these choices. 

There are questions about whether or not I want fertilizer now or later. Do I want to do the job of loading up the boxes now or waiting till spring to do it. I have some studying to do on this. 

There is also the question of getting some steel to trellis the grapevines. I have a genuine thought in my head that this is not going to happen today. Ghenna has a habit of saying what he thinks you want to hear but physically, he just does what he has to do to get a daily paycheck. If he doesn’t believe that there is money coming from an action, even if it’s logical prep work, he just won’t do it and will find other things but get him paid.

In the talmud, it is recommended that one keep one’s servants to minimum numbers. It is said that if you have too many female servants, you have witchcraft and if you have too many male servants, you have theft. You can forgive my use of the word servant here but it’s understandable as a word. 

If the former Soviet Union was not only about the theoretical diminishment of worker exploitation, it was also about demanding that workers stay at a worker and not decision making level. In other words, it was not freedom for people to become better and learn to do the right thing, it was just a different way of managing the workforce. 

I’m saying this because basically that’s all the place was made of; witchcraft and theft. You can think whatever you want about this, it is what it is. But you need to know what to expect. And either way, it keeps you on your toes. I may not cut the grass on my property but I keep the help well trimmed. It tends to overgrow if you let it and it becomes a problem.

If I sound like I’m running the place, I’m not. All of this is so tiny, it’s not even worth discussing. It’s not Instagram worthy. It’s not flashy or beautiful. It is nothing anyone should ever be jealous of. This is not what’s going on here.

What is going on here is that it’s Friday morning and I have to get out and start moving. I am extremely happy to have diminished pain here this morning. I am extremely happy to see that I have less swelling. I am extremely happy to wake up feeling strong or stronger for the first time in days. I am extremely happy to have made some good choices for myself. It is much better to feel good generally than to throw everything away on a moment of excitement. It’s much better to feel well built than it is to be revved up unnecessarily. 

Any high requires a low. Any violent up will get a violent down. All action has an equal and opposite reaction. This is Mr Newton helping us understand the way the world works. You either jump on the roller coaster or you stay off it. I don’t want to ride anymore. I don’t need it. I don’t need the UPS or the downs. I don’t need unnecessary rides. I just want to be healthy and to breathe clean hair and eat nice food and enjoy the quiet. I just want peace.

***

Okay, it’s only 2:00 but I am closing everything up right now. I am sick. Yes, I felt a little better first thing in the morning. But after I went out to cut up the apples and have a small walk around, I realized it was worse than ever. It’s excruciating pain and I have a temperature obviously. I cannot say what exactly this illness is from but whatever it is, I am done now for the week and everything is closed up.

We had yet another bit of ridiculous bad news. That low temperature might not have been a frost but it might as well have been Frost because everything in the mid gardens that was in any way succulent has passed away. The sweet potatoes closed up shop, the pumpkins and the zucchini dropped dead. We have some pumpkins and more zucchini but this was the absolute end of any thoughts of further abundance.

I probably should have watered the things that are remaining and I even read somewhere on the internet that you should give water to those sweet potatoes. I just could not bring myself to drag my leg around the field. I can’t put any weight on it and even resting it is excruciating. This is absolutely ridiculous.

Ghenna called me at about 10:30 and told me he was being delayed in the next town over and that he would be by at 12:00. Waiting for this asshole to show up and do his work was about the only thing keeping me from going to bed and pulling the covers over my head. I just called him and politely told him to go fuck himself for the week and if you felt it, he could come by on Monday. I sincerely doubt he will come with steel. I sincerely doubt he will do anything genuinely useful other than find some rubles for himself. I understand that I’m just talking shit by saying this. He only does what I ask him to do. I just can’t deal with whatever it is going on with him. If I believed him as a genuine contractor, this would be different. He is simply more a drunk than a helper. You get what you pay for but there comes a point where you just have to snip.

As for what to do about dinner, if I actually am hungry, I will make something extremely simple based only on what is in my kitchen. I’m not going to go field shopping anymore today. I don’t want to do any walking that I don’t absolutely have to do. I need rest more than anything. There is nothing else I can say about this.

This is about the earliest I’ve ever closed up shop. I haven’t been sick all year. It’s been a source of pride that I’ve never been sick. I can only guess what are the real reasons why I am sick right now. I’m not completely sure it’s any food choices although I might have been using too much salt and eating a little bit too much for pleasure and not quite enough for health. It also could have been prolonged exposure to the two local alcoholics. Whatever illness they carry on them, by allowing myself in close proximity, I end up catching it. Too many fist bumps with Ghenna and too much allowing Lena to scream in my face.

Have I learned anything this week? I don’t think I can say that I have. I can’t really say that I’ve seen anything that touches me as being particularly new. I can’t say that I’ve had any great thoughts about the satire that is our modern world. I have suffered the Fate of so many crushed people empathetically and I have forced myself to listen to the rhetoric of those who cause this suppression. I have listened to enough crazy people and enough people who make people crazy.

I listened to Joe Biden’s speech about the power of democracy. He is simply doing his job and stumping for Democratic hopefuls in the elections. It’s all mudslinging and nobody is genuinely paying attention to anything except these great big movements of papers signed and pennies deposited here and there. They just make rules. They just talk. They don’t actually do anything or change anything and most importantly, they never give any power to the people other than to continue to vote. No matter how little anyone believes in the voting process anymore, they just keep telling you to vote. The only thing that you’re voting for is the self-confidence of the people in power.

I am really small right now. I feel completely insignificant and I’m in too much pain to do anything. I get cold very easily but it is agony to stand up and do anything or go somewhere else where it might be warmer. The only thing that I have going for me right now is that I have a nice bed to sleep in and enough wood lying around to build a fire to keep that room warm.

With this Frost, it seems that the year ends with a whimper more than a bang. I would not say we had such wonderful success. I would not say that we have any huge harvest of anything really. Perhaps there’s promise for next year. But for now, I am just done.