Sunday, September 4th 2022. Week 35

This is a pretty slick presentation. Thematically and pace wise, they work it for everything it’s worth. I’m not taking away from the subject matter. It’s about the reprehensible nature of animal farming and how it is probably the main cause of our ecological problems. Of course this includes auto emissions, ecological damage in the processing of oil products and worthless garbage that we create with our consumerism. But it does make a genuine point about how the animal agriculture business has caused possibly irreparable damage to not only the land but also the waterways and why.

There are quite a few of these documentaries out there. There is more than enough propaganda asking people to try a vegan diet. It’s not in the least bit ironic that when I click on something like the above film, you automatically get these pro meat arguments below. The basis of all of the antagonistic to veganism arguments always rely that people have this personal choice. I’m not really sure how much personal choice people actually have. All I see is people are slaves to being maneuvered through this system. The system is extremely similar to animal agriculture by the way. You are basically maneuvered into your productivity. I’m not sure how much free choice is genuinely left for people.

I wonder what would happen if both the animals and the people were released from their respective economic slaveries. As for the animals, we would probably have a year or two of strange disasters. Most of the farmed animals would die off. We would have a brief spike in the lives of predators feasting on the billions of chickens. We could worry about what to do with the carcasses or we could just let them go back to the land. I suppose we would have a few more cows wandering around and eventually some small number of their population would rewild themselves. The Earth has a way of taking care of things like this. It’s not always pretty to look at but in the end, all living things return to the land and in turn give birth to New Life.

As to what would happen to people suddenly freed from economic burdens, I suppose they might live lives like rock stars in a way. Well, it’s not true because the only way to release everybody from economic slavery is to change our perspective to service. We could of course do this completely horribly so that the people in charge could remain in charge and perhaps we would keep all of our current systems in place. This would be I really brutal form of slavery where you have no choice but to go and do your factory deal. I’m sure nobody wants this.

There is an alternative utopian thought where people understand that they have to do their service to help the communities and people become very helpful, friendly and certainly a lot more healthy. We could ask people and teach them to refrain from violence or being harsh with one another. Of course, this would not be so far-fetched if you just took the killing of animals out of our lives. If we stopped the bloodshed and we stopped bloodlust. People would become more kind and helpful. I don’t know that this would be true but I’m sure it’s a pretty logical case.

The genuine problem though would be food. There is a lot of talk about how helpful the world going vegan would be. This would not only cure quite a few health problems for individuals but it would also free up a ridiculous amount of land that would no longer be needed to serve animal agriculture. This is the genuine problem represented in the film. We have been cutting down forest lands to create pasture lands simply so the world can eat more hamburgers. More pain, more blood, more cancer, more ecological damage all to feed the human animal something it should not be eating. Just perpetuate violence and insanity. Completely reprehensible.

It probably wouldn’t happen immediately, it might take a year or two to actually begin to rehabilitate. But all of these non-wage slaves, all of these people with their great sense of community involvement would of course immediately be off to participate in local agriculture. I’ve thought about this a lot and I’ve written about this a lot. It’s kind of utopian to imagine that people get out and do some gardening in the morning. But, if everybody is contributing, you never can tell. Maybe we get all of this amazing food to eat, we are proud to death as a civilization of our ability to feed ourselves with great style and of course we get healthier individually. No more middlemen, just a bunch of people helping out to the best of their ability.

The most wondrous ancillary benefit of this is that because we no longer need probably 70% of what was previously used as pastorland, the forest would come back. Like I said, this is not really a one-year thing. It’s probably a 7 to 10 year thing. But as the forest comes back and we stop poisoning the world, the air pollution that is around us will be sequestered down by the trees and filtered away. Most likely global warming will stop and normal weather patterns will resume. Most likely the sea will begin to heal itself from all of the garbage that we throw in there. I don’t know that this will happen but given a chance to rest and heal, all living things have a chance.

***

It’s pretty early and I’m watching the Taylor Hawkins tribute concert. I didn’t watch it live but I picked it up when I woke up.

As for food for my day off, I was really very sick on Friday and had almost zero appetite. I really didn’t want to do anything.

I contemplated not eating on Friday or maybe just having a bowl of oatmeal or something like that. Eating on Friday night is something I really look forward to. I do have a habit of going for bigger meals during the week too. I am a foodie or what other justifications I can make for myself. I like to eat. Eventually, I decided to put together something simple. Literally, being on my feet was torture. I was obligated to go out to pick up some greens and close up shop and every step was ridiculously painful. It was painful for the walking and it was also painful to have to look at the decimation of my field.

I guess that’s the thing about severe weather. This isn’t to say that there are no tornadoes or storms but all we have anymore is violent brutal weather. I noticed this starting maybe 10 years ago. There was a time when New Year’s was a very gentle cold place. There was always a lot of snow and it was easy to set up places for people to skate. The folks in town use the river for All seasons and people went down there to play hockey together during the freeze. Children would ride sleds down the hill in back of Lenin square.

And then suddenly it all just changed. It stopped snowing was the first thing. One year it was so warm they set up a disco instead of having the normal Winter games. Then there were years of absolute violent cold where nobody wanted to go out anymore. Then there were changes to the people. The politeness went away and we started having drunk and juvenile delinquency instead of this family fun. Some kids started climbing in the Christmas tree and it fell over. After that, they didn’t even have a live tree anymore and now we just stare at plastic.

Violent weather is what we have now. Violent people and violent weather. That’s what happened to my field. A couple of nights of ridiculous weather mixed with absolutely no water whatsoever and one morning I woke up and all the succulent plants had the life ripped out of them. No more growing time for you. Roasted by the Sun and then frozen to death by a killer frost. Poof. And it was all gone.

I eventually settled on pasta with a peanut sauce. I put some red lentils in the pasta to make it slightly more complex. I put a lot of things in the blender to make the sauce and cooked a lot of greens with the pasta. I sat in the kitchen enjoying this a little but I still didn’t feel very much like eating. When I was finished, I took a few apples with me and went into the warm room and closed the door.

Early Saturday morning, whatever was eating me decided to let me go and I had the most remarkable dream. I’m not sure I want to talk about all of it or even if I remember all of it. It was the sort of dream that I used to have earlier in life. It was about traveling somewhere and finding myself in an unusual place. Not a fantasy world really, just sort of reality but an unfamiliar face. And there was monumental sex in there. Truly, not fantasy stuff, just some memories. 

Then I woke up and realized that I have a broken leg. I know this sounds really stupid. Honestly, I think I broke my leg almost a year ago walking around after being in the hospital. I fell a couple of times and didn’t do anything about it. I figured things would be okay. But this last week, I did kind of overdo the work a bit and one particular night I found that my leg had swollen up greatly. Either this meant that I re-broke it or I caused myself some kind of distress or infection. This was the thing that had put me on my ass all last week.

Saturday is my day off and I don’t do anything that even resembles work. I enjoyed being lazy. I didn’t eat very much except for the leftovers from the peanut pasta. This and apples. I just really relaxed and let the world go and didn’t get up for anybody or anything. I have no obligations to do anything.

Somewhere in the afternoon last night the pain started going out of my leg. It’s still very tender but there’s a lot less pain and the swelling has started to go down. Some of the other things I have been doing are still effective but I’m beginning to think I understand the extent of how bad all this is. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about this. I have no faith or trust that I will be taken care of in any way by the medical establishment without going there with a lawyer and suing them. This is an unbelievably weird place to be.

Not that it really means very much. I can get around on crutches pretty well and if I take my time and don’t rush anything, I can cook for myself and go out and grab things when I need them. It’s just a matter of going very very slow and not asking too much of yourself. And I have some help. The ex partner is coming up today and Lena and Ghenna pick up some of the slack. I should probably make a trip over to the hospital though I’m not really sure what they could do for me short of hospitalizing me again and going through the same process I did last year. This all in the hope that they would all do their work, perhaps we could fix some original mistakes and of course the medical establishment for my particular problems would put their prejudices away.

I believe in this as much as I believe that we are ever going to see this utopian agrarian vegan society I wrote about. I believe in this like I believe in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus and all of the other positives I should feed myself.

I’ll be honest, I’ve also started to dream about getting out of this. I don’t really believe that I have anything waiting for me anywhere in the world but I’ve been dreaming that perhaps a hand comes from somewhere that allows me to change my situation. Maybe I could get better medical Care elsewhere. Maybe I can be more useful. Maybe I have something to give in a place where I’m not so suppressed and hated. Maybe there is a place somewhere that is not so bloody stupid.

I do not write by mood. I don’t write when I am offended. I don’t write out of any exterior stimulation except to talk about it and attempt to rationalize what I’m listening to. I like to be practical with things. I like to give the world a good solid look and say what I see. Maybe this is voting. Maybe this is me voting my conscience. Maybe this is me just giving a little push so that we might end up going in a slightly more practical direction.

I just don’t believe in any of it. I’ve been doing this for too long and all I ever get for it is pain. I don’t really even think that it’s a reaction to anything that I do. I just see that this is the way the world is. This is the way people are. This is who people have become. This is what has happened to the world.

***

Anyway, apparently meat was not so much a part of people’s diets not so many years ago. This isn’t to say that people didn’t eat me but we ate it in much smaller portions and much less often. I remember reading even that during the time of the feudal Lords, the only people that ate meat in anything similar to what we do now were the elite class.

I also remember a friend of mine telling me something about the world. He was a fellow bike messenger and a guy who got me into the vegan movement in New York. He told me that when the Chinese discovered McDonald’s it was going to be the end of the world. He was 100% right, wasn’t he? The moment the global demand for meat included the largest single group of humanity, the Earth would never be able to handle the strain.

Things are going to happen today. My ex-partner is coming up, I guess I’m going to help out as much as I can. 

You know what? They just pulled the Taylor Hawkins tribute concert stream right in the middle of it. Can you imagine that? I guess there were some financial or copyright issues going on. Yep, this is just the way the world is.

***

It’s about 1:30 and my morning’s work is pretty much at an end. I wouldn’t say I got very athletic today but I did my part.

My ex-partner is out taking in the beans right now. We gave the things that are still alive some water and we took the potatoes. It’s not a gigantic amount of potatoes but there are potatoes there. This no dig business is not bad at all. We probably could have used more fertilizer at the beginning and definitely it would have been better if we had had more water. Also, just exactly when the flowers were coming was the first heat wave that simply roasted off the petals.

My ex partner is a state worker. We have our relationship but though I would not say Romeo and Juliet, we are definitely Montague and Capulet. But even the state these days is saying that this was the driest summer in more than 50 years. Some places in Europe are saying that this is the driest it’s been in 100 years. Will this be enough to alarm people into agreeing that global warming is real and suddenly tossed their economic systems aside? Of course not. Nothing will stop these people. Nothing will make them read the science. Nothing will make them give up their money or their power or the situation that they live in that feeds them their peanuts. You can’t expect slaves to suddenly rise up and be humans with a vested interest. You will never get that and especially after decade upon decade of training people not to have any vested interest in their local communities.

Meanwhile, my ex-girlfriend is flying off for a pagan holiday in Greece and my youngest daughter is off to the discos. No reason whatsoever to listen to Old me. Perhaps people simply ignoring me is the only reason I’m alive. This is saying way too much about my current health. I feel like I’m on the way out honestly. But metaphorically speaking, you would think that I would have at least retained a little bit of a voice with them. It was my job after all to be a teacher of young people.

This brings up important questions of whether or not to spend money and resources on this place. The situation is looking like another trip to the hospital for me. I at least need to go and get an x-ray taken to see the true extent of my left leg. If it’s broken, which is kind of what I think the situation is, I’m looking at yet another surgery and yet another recuperation. My ex partner is bittersweet at the prospect but she is not refusing to have me as a guest. Honestly, she doesn’t much like our romantic relationship much anymore but she definitely feels something for the sympathy part of it. Maybe also the company a little bit.

But then looking farther down the road, this place looks like it wants to become a desert. Even worse, the inspector, who still has not finished her work even 8 months later, tells me that they are changing the laws as far as protecting the forests. If you want to buy Forest land, give them some money and this land is yours. Of course I am the only conservationist in the world as far as this region is concerned. You absolutely know that there is nothing to conserve anymore. They know that the forest is going to go dry and burn down anyway. Mine as well just go with the flow and agree to cut everything down for whatever monetary value we can get from it. Like I said, nobody is ever going to wake up and do the right thing. They’re just going to figure out an economic way to sell off their resources. Just like my daughter’s mother.

I don’t really know what else to say. I would be a lot happier with more mobility and less pain in my leg. I don’t really think it’s going to happen naturally. I mean, the part of it that I was able to fix, is healing. I am patting myself on the back as a doctor for that. But if the leg is fucking broken, it’s got to get fixed and that’s nothing I can do myself.

I’m not going to procrastinate but I need to at least give myself some time to think about this. I need to know if there is an x-ray machine available in the next town. I’m pretty sure there is but possibly I have to go into Pinsk. There is all of that delicious bureaucracy that needs to be handled well. I think my medical service has moved to the next town. These are all things I need to know.

Either way, this is not a sudden catastrophic accident. There’s a lot of suffering but it’s all by choice what happens. Last year was a serious, serious moment. Last year was an emergency. This year, there is some thinking involved.

Honestly though, I really wish I could do this in a different country. I wish I could do this in a country that wasn’t trying so hard to kill me. I wish I could do this in a country where every day wouldn’t be a war and people trying to make things harder on me than they need to be. It’s not the actual ability to do the job that I worry about. The doctors and the tech people, the people who physically do their work are fine by me. I’ve never had a complaint about competence for people who physically do their job. But it’s the people who lie there with nothing to do and the bureaucrats who run the place who never seem to have anything better to do. The people who work are fine. The money people are the garbage.

***

You know, I know this. I know this like knowledge. I know this like I know my own hand. I know this like I know the sun will come up in the morning and there won’t be any fucking rain. That’s how much I know this. But I don’t think I’ve ever actually directly asked this before so let’s do it.

Is Belarus experiencing a drought?

Peatland rehabilitation in Belarus in response to drought and sand storms 

Why land degradation and drought are important topics for Belarus?  The warming and prolonged vegetative period caused by climate change bring new opportunities for agriculture, forestry and local people, but also demonstrate the vulnerability of the land and the need for urgent actions to preserve land productivity. 

Where do you think these photos come from? 

This is not an African or Arabian desert. This is the Republic of Belarus, a country in the center of Europe with a typical Сentral European climate and 40 percent of area covered by forests. Belarusians affectionately call their country “blue -eyed” for its large number of lakes, more than 10 000.

Water, while abundant within Belarus, may deteriorate in quality due to increased flooding, extreme rain events, and changes in runoff patterns. In a country with almost 40.1% forested land, rising temperatures are likely to change ecosystem function, forest composition, and certain species of trees, such as spruce, will suffer. Drought and increased temperatures could make forests more vulnerable to climate-related threats, such as disease outbreaks and forest fires.

The most vulnerable sectors are agriculture, human health, forestry, water resources, and energy.

Or to be very brief about it, absolutely yes. It’s noticeable and seeable and worthy of something to be frightened of. And like I said, news from my persnickety land inspector is that they are changing their public policy towards ownership of the forest. If you want it, you can buy it. And of course, this means that people who want to up the money are going to do so to make use of the lumber, not to be conservationists.

I mean, I understand what they are doing and why they do it and why they do the same things every year. I understand this because this seems to be all I can write about every day. I’ve been talking about the people in this country and what has happened to them for 3 years now and I never see anything that shows me anyone is ever going to wake up or care about anything but the money. They are not only in the pocket of the Russians, they are hell-bent on committing environmental suicide at all costs. Literally, whether people know it or not, these people vote for Trump who works for Putin and there’s no other way to look at this because this is exactly what they do.

Here’s another photo that came from my Instagram today. This particular character is a full on travel bicyclist. In summer and in Winter he is absolutely on the wheels. I don’t know if he even owns a car. One can only imagine that he is indeed a health nut. Good for him.

But take a good look at this service road he has had the bad fortune of having to ride. At a first glance, this would be taken in the middle of a desert, wouldn’t it? This picture was taken between two towns that are about a hundred miles from where I live. You tell me what’s going on here and how sincere I am about my observations.

We gathered up all the beans today. There were many that were still green but there is no point not to bring them in. There are still some things in the boxes and some cabbages waiting on the field. We are not completely boxed up yet. The original plan was to go at least until the end of the month but after this last frost and an ongoing rainless schedule, there is no point. There’s nothing to save. Probably exactly the same thinking about the local Forest. We killed it already, we might as well make a buck over it.

At the moment, my ex partner is busy harvesting our sunflower seeds. Sunflower seeds are demanding. If you leave them outside on the drying rack, the birds will get to it. If you try to bring it inside, the mice will get to it no matter where you put them. Perhaps some people have good advice about what to do. My best idea was to fill up two racks in my oven with however many seeds we get and just close the door. I don’t think there’s a way in there for the mice or the birds. The rest should go home with my ex partner.

We also got a little bit of a harvest from some plums which were not that bad. These were plum trees that my neighbors failed to kill. They were not in such beautiful condition as those apples I managed to take. They weren’t as good as the plum tree on the edge of the forest on my land. But we have some more food. I got her to taste one of those amazing apples. I don’t want to say anything bad but her first decision was to try and say something shitty. And then she tasted the cinnamon. Bloody shame. It’s a damn dastardly bloody shame when people just kill things and never realize the value of what they have.

To be fair, there was a moment when we were doing the potatoes when my ex partner showed her colors. She is a Russian speaker and she works for a state shop. Well, it’s not really a state shop but the state is well invested and has a huge say over what happens and doesn’t. I’m not going to be vicious here but she suddenly looked up and decided that we should cut all the grass in the meadow because it might make good compost. I asked her what she wanted to do with that land. She didn’t think anything. It only came into her mind that perhaps killing things and making everything look more orderly was the correct thing to do. This is the same mentality as my neighbors, as Ghenna, that’s pretty much everybody in this popularity contest we call a country. No reason for doing it. Just the opportunity to kill something felt right.

I asked her to have a look at the landscape of my property. I asked her to notice where the Grass grows exceptionally tall and perhaps she could figure out why that happened. This was the grass she wanted to cut. She got the answer right. There was just a lot more available water right there with both my neighbors roof and my own. But then I asked her to look where all of this abundant grass ended and became more like a desert. This was seeable as well. 

“This is where I planted my boxes. This was a place that was degraded and useless land and the only way to keep it would be to artificially irrigate it. That’s why our boxes are here. I’m trying to take something that’s worthless and make it into something beautiful.”

And then she said that using the grass for compost was not a bad idea and I counted that we had plenty of weeds all over the place that we could happily cut down and use for compost. As far as my meadow goes, as far as all of the things that live there in that habitat, let them be. If we don’t have any use, or better said, if we don’t need to touch this land, let everything live their lives. The last thing anyone needs in this god-forsaken country is to exercise more control. We are already psychopaths from all of this control bullshit. Better to just let things live a little bit. We’d probably actually have some results if we did.

***

Sunday has come to an end. Unfortunately, and I guess this is pretty usual, it doesn’t seem as if any problems have been genuinely solved. I don’t have any particular agreements with my ex partner about how to proceed. She is not against helping me out if I do end up in the hospital. That’s a plus. But as far as dealing with the remainder of the field and doing preparations for next year’s crops, I don’t feel like we had any kind of a decent meeting. She doesn’t understand what I want and doesn’t really want to do any effort unless it’s one of her own ideas. Of course her own ideas are exactly the sort of thing that I do not want.

 I don’t want to grow standard food and I don’t want to attract their standard insects. I don’t give a damn what people think is normal or how people may think that they are smarter than me. I want to do what I want to do. The only thing that bothers me is that people won’t listen to me when I simply tell them what I want. It seems that if I do not agree to complete submission, they will just walk away. It becomes a political issue and about the great difference in economics between the US and whatever they believe their country is.

I shouldn’t really complain about this because this has been an ongoing problem for as long as I have called her my ex partner. There’s a real reason for this. She’s not conversationally available. I am just her hobby. I appreciate that she’s there if I have a full-on health crash. I am very appreciative of the work she does. It just doesn’t help things get done agriculturally.

She just doesn’t understand that I’m not looking for more work. She doesn’t understand that I’m not a dog looking for a chew toy to vent my frustrations. I don’t have an office job and I don’t need to break away from the covid wracked Halls. I don’t need any of this shit that my direct neighbors have to deal with because I am not here trying to be anybody’s idea of normal. I don’t give a damn what they say or anything that comes to their lips along with the word we. I don’t give a damn about all of the things that they have done to ruin their landscape while in search of money. I can see absolutely clearly what has happened here and what they do.

I just want to go outside and grab a bite to eat. I just want to shady Glade. I just want to be able to reach up and pick up a snack. I’m not here to do any farming. I don’t really give a damn about quantity or yield. I just want to build up a full ecosystem that for the most part takes care of itself and I just want to go for a walk in there or maybe just have a nice sit in the middle of a sunny day. I don’t need to impress anybody but me.

But then there was just the absolute craziest thing in the whole world. I told my ex partner that I had had a dream about maybe ending up in Israel. I didn’t do anything about it. It was just a thought that came to my mind while I was sleeping. But then today I got a message from a relative who lives there. That relative is not the answer to my problem. The only thing that relative has is some sentimental value. It doesn’t allow me a living situation. It doesn’t allow me anything but bureaucratic misery forever and ever. Still, I wonder how he got that message. Maybe he’s the one who sent it and I just heard it.

I would not say that today was a greatly satisfying day. We have more food lying around. It’s nothing particularly special or exciting. Just usual bullshit food.

I know why I ended this day as hateful as I did. I am hateful right now because I feel great amounts of hate. I feel hate for the people that have allowed this ecological catastrophe to continue and I have hate for the individuals who I know who just won’t hear the words. They’ve got this sense of propriety in their shit heads. They don’t do their own reasoning. They think in whims or they don’t think it all. I’m just saying I get tired of this sometimes. Sometimes I just don’t have the patience to live with such stupidity.