Ego death is not a vacation for egotists
It’s 3:00 in the morning on another very cold night. There was a frost and it got to the leaves of the grapevines that had before then truly looked like they were ready to do something. Everything in the garden really wants to go this year. Even an old mother plum tree, whose gnarled and dried branches have been begging to be pruned, is absolutely full of green leaves this year. Life will not be stopped but an unexpected May frost will certainly be a reality check.
I am sick as a dog. I’m trying to handle it and process it out. I eat a lot these days. I use vinegar a lot in my food and tend towards vitamins as much as I can. I need to stay away from salt. The viciousness of the illness is profound. I can only imagine what non-vegans have to go through right now. I imagine they sleep with buckets next to their beds. I’m handling it. I’m not Superman. I’m just a vegan who lives a rustic life. I’m not really built for supplication even to illness.
Ria came for a visit. She was supposed to come a few days ago but I put off the trip. I had overdone it in the garden and didn’t have the legs to walk around with her.
My neighbor has finally succumbed to the illness she has been spreading around like butter. It’s the only reason that the car doesn’t move. It’s trading one shitty thing for another. She doesn’t bring in new illness but the one she has still radiates from her house along with the stench of cigarette smoke, auto fumes and filthy charcoal fires. They are the polar opposite of who I am and I cannot believe I have to be sick from them.
This evening’s rather ludicrous variant illness however is not from them. It’s from Ria. She told me on Wednesday she was going to town but still I agreed to open the gate today. I wanted to give her a tour. She wanted to bring me gifts. She never listens when I tell her not to bring me gifts. I am a delight for her and truthfully, she’s not bad for me either. I love enthusiastic gardeners and natural gardening is Ria’s life.
But to be honest, you get used to the COVID. It sucks. It’s like perpetual pain in your body. But as a vegan, you can just handle it. It really sucks though. I liked my life a lot better without it. I don’t know why I have to be so lucky to live with people who so love inflicting their misery on others. Such the conundrum. I’m not talking about writing. I’m talking about physically inflicting themselves on others. Jesus.
Ria is Russian but she’s at least a naturalist Russian in her way. She brought three gifts. One of them was some homemade tomato sauce that I truly wish she hadn’t brought. I hate when people bring me food. It disturbs my eating patterns. She also brought some Jerusalem artichokes and a bush she said would do something interesting.
I took her on a tour of the establishment and explained what was going on agriculturally. She found the place very pleasing. There is a freshness here and you could see it on her face. But she also enjoyed giving her own opinions on things. She’s Russian so you know She was paying to rape me. But, like I said, you get used to it. She doesn’t mind when I disagree and for the most part we see eye to eye. Other than the illness, we do have good energy together. You know, something to be occasionally enjoyed. But not very often.
Sometimes it’s difficult for me to follow her speech. I speak Russian well enough but I cannot say I understand 100% of every word she says. It’s not the language but the texture of her voice. Ria is a gnome in every sense of the word. She is incredibly small and has a scratchy, stuttery, squeaky voice that befits the size of her larynx. I have to piece together some of the sentences to make sense of them and there are some names that just will not stick in my head. It’s true the other way around. Pinambur is the Russian name for Jerusalem artichoke but even the word Jerusalem would not stick in her head. People have a problem with English. I don’t care anymore. She has no problem talking out loud and loves my attention. Her husband had a stroke 30 years ago and she’s been doing all the talking. He doesn’t mind. I think he quite enjoys his life just the way it is.
Jerusalem artichokes by the way are very good for blood sugar. That’s why she brought them.
I mention this because of course the ears of my neighbors were glued to us the whole time. There is no possible way they would not be listening intently to hear every word. It’s their hobby. They have nothing else to do but me. There is nothing any more interesting than me in the whole world. I am the beginning and I am the end. Where I aim my penis to piss, gold flows. If there is any possibility of the stock market rising or falling, it hangs on my words. The president of Belarus only dreams of having such power. The president of Russia’s jealousy is palpable. It makes vampires crazy to see things they can’t have.
Ria’s visit was a humiliation. Not to me and not to Ria. It was humiliating to my neighbors. I was a gentleman with a lady. I deferred to a lady. She wanted to plant her presents with me. All of this was in front of them. Anyone but them. They have no credit to be invited. They have no credit to be listened to. They have no credit to be smiled at. They have no credit to be invited to sit down. They have no credit to vent. The jealousy was as thick as the stench of their home.
Why did I let Ria in? Because she is someone I count as a friend. She reciprocates. We talk gardening together enthusiastically. We get along well. I am not even moderately interested romantically and yes, a long time ago with blind Lena scrubbing the floors wearing only a hallot, a thin Russian house dress tied with a string around her waist, and blue panties if I remember correctly, there was enough sexuality in the air that Ria could look up at me with a hopeful smile. I’m sorry. Truly I’m sorry. It’s not reciprocated. And so we have been platonic, reasonably and happily, ever since.
Ria was friends with the previous owners and yes, my neighbors terrorized them as well. Ria still talks to Olga. Olga will ask Ria all about the scandals and what I have done to the property. I Don’t mind this at all. I got to talk about everything in a loud voice. I got to talk about the death of Lena. I got to talk about everything my neighbors do to make life miserable for everyone around them.
“They killed Lena. They caused her to commit suicide.”
“Lena was an alcoholic. This is how the alcoholics die here. It happens all the time.” Ria is Russian. She is dismissive and she has always been jealous.
“Not just an alcoholic. She was a human being. Even alcoholics have souls.They followed her mercilessly until she didn’t want to live anymore. She just wanted to be warm on her birthday. This was the birthday when she was going to get her pension. She knew that it was Friday night and there was no way I was letting anyone in. She visited Vassa and Tanya and Vanya hoping to find at least an enjoyable party. Nobody gave her anything. She had nowhere to go. Everything here is hate. It was her birthday and she had to go home alone to that empty miserable house. She never got inside. She simply laid down in the snow and died. Other than you, she was the only one who ever did anything for me. She was the only friend I had here. She just wanted some love just like anybody else. Olga understood this. You understand this as well, yes?”
Ria won’t fight a point if I’m serious about it. She was thoughtful for a moment. “In general, yes. She made friends with you. She was warm with you.”
“We were warm together. She was my friend just like you are my friend.”
Ria was Olga’s friend. She was probably Olga’s only friend. Everyone needs someone to gossip to. Ria’s been listening to this miserable situation forever.
I’ve been reading Carlos Castaneda. Journey to Ixlan. It is the journey of an aspiring warrior, or at least a journalist, who wished only to know about peyote and other psychotropic plants but ended up on a massive journey for power. He must learn to be a warrior. He must learn to understand the signs that the natural world have to give. He has to learn to give up civilization, which has taken from him everything including his masculinity. The modern World has left him nothing but a perpetual child studying by following his grandfather through endless journeys into nothingness. Not nothingness. Just desert chaparral and all of the life there. Not just the flora and fauna, the spirit world has to be learned as well. But in order to get there, he has to forget that he’s writing about it. Epic irony. And so our narrator endures much suffering just to stay with a genuine wizard a little bit more. Journey to Ixlan was the third book in the series. Don Juan, the teacher, had been a very popular character and made Mr Castaneda a lot of money.
Drugs are always popular in the world. Drugs are big business. Legal or illegal. People are completely lost in a slave society and as the quest for money never ends. So does the quest for relief. It is as relentless and horrifying as the war in Ukraine which Belarus is now absolutely a part of. The war has finally come to us in the most explosive terms. There’s nothing like having nuclear bombs mixed into the sickness cocktail we are all forced to eat. Get ready for the big boom. If you live through it, you’re probably going to feel a lot like I feel now.
My neighbor’s house reeks of cigarettes. Probably they are both incredibly sick. Everybody is incredibly sick. I am sick but I am still functional. I imagine they are in bed. I imagine they are completely helpless. I’m only angry that I have to keep going into the mosquitoes to get fresh greens. Sometimes the timing doesn’t work out and I end up feeding the female mosquitoes who are as voracious for blood as my neighbor. You have to learn to read the natural signs. You have to learn to be a warrior.
We are all searching for the power to get us out of our misery. I’m eating way too much. I shouldn’t need to eat so much. I’m not even sure it’s good but if I don’t, if I let my belly go empty, it’s worse. It’s much worse. I knew that Ria was going to be bringing illness with her from town. I’m afraid she might kill her husband with this. While we were walking, she asked if she could sit down because her belly was bothering her. She knew she was sick. I don’t think she understood that she would be giving it to me. I knew she would. I knew I would be suffering tonight.
Why did I let Ria in? Because I like her.
I also did it because I believe in my body to filter this shit out of me in a reasonable time. I refuse to believe that this is the Russian authorities being correct and that we just get used to the misery and say it’s life. This is traditional Russian culture and I’m aware that 500 years of servitude to the Russian Empire probably added an enormous bit of stoicism to me. If Americans are stoic now it has to do with Jewish immigrants bringing it with them. A German work ethic, Italian violence, Irish belligerence and English hegemony. Such a malicious cocktail should never have been born and all at the expense of the native Americans. No journeys to Ixlan for the white Europeans. Just how to figure out how to keep everyone around them on their knees so that they can rise. Christianity at its finest.
Now we have civilization. This is Ria’s word to explain the horror that is the continued existence of my neighbors. This is the word that they use. She also allows some measure of modernity into her life. Her daughter lives in Petersburg. She supports her daughter with money for reasons I cannot understand. Her daughter always needs money. Her portfolio always must grow. Civilization equals money. I am an untouchable socially because I just don’t give a damn about money.
That’s not exactly true. The last 2 months have seen more money leave my portfolio than in the entire year combined leading up to this. Maybe it’s just a seasonal thing and I’m stocking up. Or maybe the problem is that I’m eating so much trying to stay ahead of the illness. I keep needing things. I keep thinking about things. I can’t stop thinking that I’m forgetting something. It’s never enough. The material is never enough. Probably the fallout from those books. Should have listened to Barry Bonds. Should have been more patient. Should have just laid back and waited for a better pitch to hit.
I don’t have the legs to get rid of the pile of wood chips. Because there is still a pile of wood chips, I can’t buy enough material to do what I want to do to make a good planting. I don’t care about the money. I just want some good soil. My plan is to bucket feed the plants this year. But I don’t believe in my legs. I don’t believe I can do enough work so I keep thinking that other materials will stave off the problem. This is what was wanted by the Russian Empire. This is their reason to continue polluting. This is why my neighbors take so much pride in the destruction of all things. If you want to live, now you have to pay for the resources. And the resources always come in plastic bags. The world is covered in plastic and you need more plastic just to fight your way towards something that even seems natural.
I am a teacher. They needed to know. Of course I can open my gate. Of course I can be a gentleman. I am a gentleman. Only not with them. I don’t like to waste my time. They are the people who laugh at us. They are the people who believe we are nothing but insects. They believe they are slumming. They are the people who, with one twitch of a finger, pretty similar to the finger twitch to call the police to file false charges, everyone and everything will simply disappear. And if the level of desertification is as real as I have mentioned, polished glass will be all that remains. A big shiny spot where my garden and their anti-garden used to be. But that’s ok because Belarus is insignificant. Russians are the Ruling class. Quasimodo works for ciggarettes.
My garden is more important than me. I eat from my garden and I care for my garden. I am its caretaker. I am prepared to kill to protect it. I am filled with hate to have enemies in such close proximity. I am filled with hate to have to experience their pollution. To smell it. To taste it. I am filled with even more hate to know that all of this hate they have put into my heart has killed almost all of my creativity. They are lingering disease. I am obligated to live in depression. The moment I show signs of coming out of depression, they have an opportunity to attack. They eat life. They stomp on everything but for some reason nature continues to live. They love it. This gives them more to do. If there is a flower growing in their lawn, it is an opportunity to run a gasoline powered instrument to butcher it. Please, give us more to kill. Please let us kill more.
For the people who vacation by taking drugs, there are many psychotropic drugs that are now mainstream if you speak English. If you are European or American, the laws are meaningless. You get connected and that’s all. Even the danger enhances the experience, I am sure. It’s like being in the movies. Everybody loves to feel like a gangster.
Ego death. To take some substance recreationally that so completely rips apart your soul that you actually feel something. I watched Mike Tyson belittle himself with a young YouTuber with massive popularity. He took a handful of psilocybin mushrooms and put them all in his mouth. “I am Mike Tyson,” he tells us, “I need everything. Nothing is enough for me.”
These are our spiritual leaders. These are the people who teach us how to live through complete numbness. To be deaf, dumb and blind and helpless to do anything but scrape and scratch for enough money for your next batch. To be so completely brutalized that you cannot recognize brutality as being painful. To be inhumane enough to exist in a world so hopelessly horrible. To remain here simply because death is for some reason more frightening than reality. Just to remain alive no matter what the ecological cost. To live only for moments of comfort. To live only to give discomfort to others. To Jews. Or non-whites or non-christains. To continue lives only to revitalize the Nazi party. Here is civilization. Here is the world we have whether or not we voted for it. Here is the world we support with all of our hearts, all of our soul and all of our might. This is our orgy of group love.
I just made my last purchase. It was just a little bit more cat food. Other than this I’m good. I haven’t needed any food from the market in more than a month. I have all the fresh greens I want. I water cook. My house is getting cleaner everyday. My garden is becoming more orderly everyday. Tomorrow I start watering. I’ve already got my hoses out on the field. I’ve built my structures for my beans and cucumbers to climb on. I understand how I will bury my last few boxes of seeds. I don’t know what I will get and I can only hope that I have the legs to carry the buckets to feed everything. I’m just going to keep living here because there is not anything else that I can possibly do. There is nowhere else to go and there is nothing more interesting or better for me than being in my garden.
I only have one more thing to say. You could see it on Ria’s face. My garden is absolutely beautiful. It’s the most beautiful garden in the world. It doesn’t highlight how many features I can put in or how many materials I can buy. It’s just a big giant bowl of life. Compared to the absolute shit everywhere else around me, this is paradise. Their low rent ideas of civilization only make the beauty here more blinding. Not blinding like a nuclear explosion, you actually have to understand a little bit about nature to see it. It’s just that everything is alive and nothing particularly is being deterred from living.
In working on my catalog, the next work is called The Delicate Task of Listening. It was my first genuine attempt at theater. It takes place in Vancouver. It’s about a broken construction worker and Ukrainian opera singer without a voice. Two desolate people living desperate lives in a desolate situation. And there is only one question. Why is it that no one can allow the existence of even one beautiful thing? This was so many years ago and it seems that this is all I’ve ever wanted.
Towards the end of our conversation, I told Ria my house has a name. It comes from the flowers that live here because I don’t cut them down. The word Ria in Russian means heaven or paradise. Her phrase describing where I live is a little chunk of paradise.
So here is me decades later still fighting for the existence of just one beautiful thing.
I am pretty much finished. I understand my mortality. I understand my disabilities. I understand what is left of me is not really enough to win any wars. I understand my own frailty. I also understand that I have never been allowed to heal even one day since I’m here. My neighbors will not allow it and nobody thinks I’m worth helping. Not me and not anybody unless it turns a profit. Everyone everywhere is now an extension of the Russian Empire and everyone should die so that Russia can live. Russia, America, Europe. Everyone and everything must die. Even themselves. Even the leadership. Massive egotism feeding massive egotism and all to the death of everything.
What else is there but to pray for the death of your killers. How many thousands of years has this been going on? How long have we been playing this same stupid game? Everyone dies so one guy can live even when there’s not enough left of them to make even a meal out of. How is it possible that so much misery and death must come from the death rattle of such sick degenerate individuals? Such a club. The club never leaves. The club just stays there even though civilization has finally brought the ecological boundaries of the planet into focus. We collectively, by agreeing to their whims, have physically destroyed the planet Earth.
Welcome to California. Don’t worry. I’m sure you’re tough enough to live through the trip. And if not, who cares?
