Mostly good these days. The sickness is dissipating slightly although it still exists. Nobody did anything about it but maybe we have let the infection eat everything it wants to eat and it’s just dying out naturally. Not my particular choice on how to deal with illness. Well, it is de facto my choice but I would not choose this in a perfect world. Forget perfect world, I would choose this in any world. It’s just not available in my world.
However, for all of you who read this and shake their head and say this is what I get for leaving America, I saw this short video today and I think it explains everything really well.
Anyway, here’s a brief list of topics worth at least talking about.
- Everything I put in the ground is growing. I wouldn’t say it’s an amazing grow and I need to feed the plants a little more than I have been. It’s been pretty wet for the last week and there is plenty of natural growth going on. I just can’t really believe there’s enough nutrition left in the soil despite this being my third year. However, it does feel good to see the places that I put together well. Some of my later ideas are really quite beautiful. If I can manage to get this thinking into the big boxes, maybe we have something next year.
- It’s been rainy and cold all week. This worked well for me because I really wasn’t feeling very well. It was nice that I never even had to water which is my bare minimum. I could have spent more time weeding but even that is not really that essential. What I planted is growing and either the wood chip mulch or the wood bark mulch or even the grass seems to be enough. I think I’ve got this permaculture thing down pretty good. Things will grow. It’s not heaven yet but considering I’m planting in a place where the neighbors want it to become the moon as quickly as possible. This kind of keeps everything down. This is of course what they do as a hobby with everyone so I don’t feel bad about that. But still, you can only dream of how nice things would be without them.
- The kittens are obviously getting bigger and their eyes are starting to open. They definitely have four different colors about them ranging from dark to light. I really don’t spend too much time playing with them. I don’t feel very good and I’m not really a child so I don’t get all gushy. But I check in everyday a couple of times and make sure that Reggie has enough food. She doesn’t go very far but she does take her walks and takes care of herself but then crawls right back in with the kids and plugs them back in. All they do right now is scratch and claw and fight to be warm and to be on the nipple. They live in a pile.
- Reggie is a fine mom. I have to say that I feel very warm towards this cat for the first time. I don’t really like cats or cat fur. I especially don’t like cat for during the time of COVID and she doesn’t like getting baths and I don’t like giving her baths so we have our separation. But I really respect her. She is a fine mother. I understand her when she needs to walk around and stretch her legs or even do a mild hunt. But she never goes too far and at the end of the day, even being an obsequious daughter of 50 generations of alcoholics doesn’t really take up much of her mind. She already knows she gets her food whether she needs it or not or asks for it. I think I like her. I like her because I respect her. I think she feels it.
- The Bay Stars have won three in a row and are finally hitting their stride heading into the All-Star break. I wanted to do some sports writing but I didn’t and I haven’t and I probably won’t. I keep thinking of the descriptive paragraphs. I still haven’t figured out how to watch the games but even allowing the statistics to go by is exciting when you’re pulling for the team. I’ve written them two letters already and I’ve even commented on their official site and gotten likes. There are teams that you can see everyday. There are teams that do not hide their broadcasting rights and worry about every penny. I don’t know why they can’t allow even a thousand people abroad to watch their games. Even when the Giants or the Tigers play, that’s it. Maybe 2000 people at the most. I don’t think anyone is losing money on 2,000 people and you can watch those two teams pretty much every day.
- I ordered some staple foods and even some bread from the service. This is the first money I have spent all month. I am both pleased by The frugality and that I bought some bread. I don’t know why this thought came into my mind. The last time I ordered from this service, this is not the wild berries national or international Russian monopoly, this is a local group that works in conjunction with a local supermarket. Yes, all my enemies. You have to get your food where it is. Nobody has been allowed to develop any local markets so, bitch all you want, if you want some beans and rice and you don’t want to go to the store, this is it. However, this time around I saw that they had some black bread and even some burrito wraps. Oh my God! I never saw it before. I ordered a bunch and it should be here within about a half hour. One day service and I get burritos for Shabbos? Yeah, life just got a little bit better.
- Berries are arriving. No, I’m not talking about bowls and bowls. I have not managed to raise the most fertile berry bushes but maybe this year has taught me a lot. But there are berries on the bushes and even some strawberries. I don’t gather, I graze. I have a whole garden bed dedicated to spinach. I don’t harvest that either, I just graze. I love it. I really do. I go outside to do something and there is a few berries to put in my mouth. It’s wonderful. Really, berry season will put anybody in a good mood.
- I ordered some wood. I guess this is me making a commitment to spending another year here. I don’t know what to say about that except that whether I stay or not, it’s good manners to stock the woodshed. And, has these things really never are my choice, at least I’ll have wood if things don’t work out. Things never work out so it’s better to have wood. I am not looking forward to doing all the carrying and I might take a pass it finding some help. I won’t go local though. I have a guy in town who’s young and healthy and I think if I offered him and a friend a nice wage for a day, I might get some athletic work and the whole five cubic meters stacked in the woodshed in a couple of hours. If not, maybe two weeks to a month for me if I don’t break my legs in the effort. Whatever.
- I’m thinking of adding maybe four or five more trees and maybe a dozen more berry bushes in the fall. This choice has everything to do with not really wanting to plant extensively. I watch lots of videos about farmers and homesteaders and permaculture people. I’m just getting so much food from stuff that grows naturally that it’s hard for me to care about head cabbage. I don’t really care so much about 27 different types of lettuce or trying to grow exotics. Last year there were some tomatoes but this year I didn’t even bother. Sure, it’s nice grazing on fresh tomatoes and throwing fresh tomatoes in the food. I just don’t care. I had much rather be lazy. I’d much rather do fruits, nuts, berries and throw some pumpkins and zucchinis and potatoes and beans in the ground and that’s it. A big bed of salad and spinach near the house and I don’t really care about it because I’ll just eat it one leaf at a time. I’m sorry, I like gardening but I like eating and living in a place where I go outside to get my food instead of going to the supermarket much, much more. I don’t mind taking care of plants but it’s really tiring growing too much human food, especially low yield human food. I’m just not interested in impressing anybody with my diversity. It’s already mid-June and I am not sick of horseradish Greens and lemongrass yet. I still can’t get enough of it. It’s the greatest thing in the world even without having the spinach hanging around.
- The solstice is coming up soon and for what it’s worth, even if I have been really sick lately, it’s a very fertile time of the year. I got a call from a female friend of mine who complimented me on my work from last year. She told me that my writing about the time of the solstice was very sexy and she appreciated being able to read it. I personally have been feeling until only recently that all of that was some delusion from last year. I’ve just been too sick. I can’t stop being sick and the sickness is actually kind of alarming. It’s disturbing and I hate that I absolutely understand where the infection comes from. But, if I have to say something honest about what it’s like to be a male exactly at this moment, I can say this. God is nature and if you believe God to be the most important thing in the world because you believe God is stronger than any army or any man or any leader anywhere, now is the time of the year when you feel it the most. Even sick as a dog, my dog is still alive inside me. I don’t know if that makes sense but it does to me.
- And though I am working so slowly it’s like I’m not doing anything, I am getting close to finishing with my catalog from the 2000 to 2002 time period. I need to write some blurbs maybe but I don’t know. I’m writing about a time in my life where I seriously was into writing plays for theater. I was deeply attached to the notion of being a playwright. Pretty much every time I found myself with empty space, I was creating things. These pieces are interesting. One is all dialogues with no expansive or violent actions on the other one has a really interesting style of pure innuendo but with tons of physical acting necessary. Really diverse things. I think one has something to do with being happy to be alive and the other one has something to do with the disappointment of learning you can’t. It’s a strange hypocrisy. You make relationships because people admire the life in you but then you find out there’s no reciprocity or worse. Anyway, I feel like I should touch on these themes a little bit. Or maybe not.
- Also the book about baseball is almost at the end. I have a bad habit of editing when I should be gathering. I don’t think it’s bad to just read something and do casual edits as you’re reading. It takes some discipline not to start yanking out things left and right. You have to take small steps and be patient. But sometimes I get so caught up in whether there is a genuine flow to the story or not. I know that it’s a hodgepodge. But even a hodgepodge needs to be readable. This is not just editing for language. It’s about trying to at least be agreeable to a reader. It’s not me that’s happening. I understand I might be talking about myself or be speaking in first person, but it’s not really me. It’s the track. It’s the road from the first word to the last word. I think of these things sometimes as bike rides or walks or even as athletic events. Maybe this means I think of my readers as athletes. No, probably it is just that I dream about a healthy readership. I’m not talking about many people bringing in much money. I mean the people that read me are genuinely healthy people. That would make me very happy.
- About my health? It’s bad but I don’t have too many alternatives. Yeah, it’s really a mess. It’s about as bad as it could be. If you want to think about me and decide that if I live in this country, obviously I am like someone touchable. Obviously I cannot feel pain like a normal person. Obviously I am something far from whatever modern man is. Well, this is really not true and for the last while, I have felt like shit pretty much everyday. I have moments of respite. I have moments where things go really well. Getting a lot of rest helps but also being physically active helps. But my own personal mechanical problems are made worse by the constant reintroduction of the pandemic. I can’t just take care of myself because my environment makes me sick. Everyday. Even though it’s a little less than it was a few weeks ago, it’s still true. They still traffic in it. They still demand that life is only misery quenched by alcoholism. They never really get better. I guess by definition, if they could vote for him, they would vote for Trump. But then again, Trump works for Putin. I don’t work for either of them but now you know who’s responsible for everyone being sick here. Vote wisely.
So that’s pretty much the whole of it. Tomorrow is Shabbos and although I was thinking about maybe doing some kind of writing, I haven’t. I’m really getting into not talking. Some of it is just suffering and some of it is dealing with physical disabilities. I just can’t move as I would like to move and so I’ve gotten really used to not moving. But at the end of it, I think it’s better to be alive than to be dead. I would rather be healthier and alive than sick and alive. You can say I have nobody to blame but myself but that’s not really true. In fact, that’s not true at all. I am really not to blame for anything that’s bad in my world.
