Last time I started writing a post with the title "What I've been up to", and ended up ranting about western imperialism. Hardly surprising, for it's been bothering me for a while. I was meaning to make a post about it, in fact. I also ended up saying I should also write more constructively.
So here is the promised post, once overtaken by bitter geopolitics, about "what I've been up to."
Even though I am happy with my life, I am always uncertain about the future. Truth is, I have zero skills, and thus, no job, no social connections, no nothing to fall back on if things start to go south. So it is that I spend so much energy into investing for the future.
I do not really care for money, however, nor do I know how to administrate it. All my wealth is in the form of knowledge, skills, and of course, plants.
Having clarified that, here is a list of those "assets" on which I am investing:
While my other "investments" are all stuff that lives exclusively in my mind, and as such remain, for the time being, as mere potential energy, here is the one which is practical, hands-on, and hopefully yielding material results.
Hopefully, I say, because I'm still working on it.
In reality, I've already started getting some results from the work of the years I've been engaged in this homestead project. Bananas, pineapples, mangos, soursop, avocado, coffee, cacao, are among the fruit trees that have already started fruiting. There are a lot of them that are still growing, and even some of those that have started fruiting are still yielding little, and in some cases I am still learning to gather and/or process some of these products. I am lucky enough to live in the small part of the world where vanilla grows. And yet, despite having had vanilla flowering for the better part of my stay here, I am still learning to work with it. Catch the flowering times (vanilla needs to be hand-polinized, because we humans have destroyed the habitat of it's natural pollinators), and then do the whole fermentation process which takes about three months. The same situation happens with cacao. I have tried to ferment cacao seeds a couple times now, and I have failed both times. Third time is the charm.... hopefully!
What I am doing for the first time (and not really) is growing crops. Actually, I've done it before. But this time, I'm serious about it. Past experiments were just that. Now, with the looming energy and food crises fueled by decaying imperialism, I have decided it's time to start taking matters into my own hands. This is generally new to me. I've never had any luck with stuff like tomatoes, for example. I had a few kinds of peppers in the past, and I'm working from that experience to grow new ones. I have a corn and beans patch growing. I meant for it to be a "three sisters" crop, but, for one thing, squash hasn't showed up, and for reasons the corn and the beans ended up growing each on their own side of the crop.
Generally, I insist, I am pretty new to this. I'm working, perhaps slowly, in trying to grow different kinds of veggies. I planted some tomato seeds, and I'm waiting for them to sprout. I want to try planting carrots, though I haven't gotten around to getting the seeds. I've been busy making the raised beds and preparing the soil where I am going to plant them. I also need to protect the growing space from the chickens and the ducks.
I also want to make a sturdy house for the chickens, and I'm still sitting on the project of making the pond for the ducks. But that is all properly the topic of the Chicken Report (yes, chicken reports are still a thing.)
So far, I'm doing well with Chinese and Russian. Both are progressing steadily. I am trying to get into the habit of listening to an hour of comprehensible input for each of them, and my mornings are always devoted to studying both languages with pen and paper. Another habit that I am trying to develop is that of doing all of the exercises in the books on paper, and not just inside my head.
I also started learning Persian...
It's funny how I like to learn the languages of the enemies of the anglo-american empire. But that is not the (main) reason for it. It is because they are the languages with some of the largest bodies of literature, two of them possessing cultures stretching back thousands of years, and they are also the world powers as the geopolitical order changes. I imagine that is also the reason that the anglo-american empire hates them.
Enough geopolitics, though.
It also means adding a third language to the stack. Can I manage it? Truth be told, I am ever interested in learning Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and Nahuatl, as well. There is a tug-of-war constantly going on in my head, between keeping the number of languages within a manageable number, on one hand, and wanting to get immersed in different cultures and, of course, exotic sexy writing systems, on the other.
Am I really going to learn Persian? Most likely, not. At least not for now. But that doesn't mean I can't start to build familiarity with it. That's what I did with Russian while I was still struggling with Chinese. And now I can understand both more or less decently.
But language for language's sake is a limited motivator to learn these things. So besides learning the language of a culture, I also like to read what I can about the cultures of which these languages are the vehicle. That's why I like z-library.
I have tens of books in my hard drive. I produly download all of them illegally, partly because I cannot afford to buy them, and partly as a way to say FUCK YOU to the copyright mafia. I like to read what I can, and I am actively trying to read anything outside the so-called western tradition. Naturally, I read them in english, written by scholars who write from the perspective of western scholarship. That is pretty much inevitable. A bridge has to be build to get there, after all.
I've started reading the Quran, the philosophy of the nahuatl-speaking peoples, mayan literature, russian poetry, several aspects of chinese intellectual and material culture, vedanta philosophy, sufi mysticism, and, of course, Tarot.
Yes, I am a Tarot afficionado. I like reading about Tarot. Tarot is a topic on which much has been written, and yet little is to be found.
By which I mean that most of the books one can find easily about tarot are beginner guides, with a card-by-card explanation of the meanings. That is not to say that is the whole body of literature. There are actually a good number of good books on Tarot... but one has to find them. Finding them, and even reading them, however, is not enough. It may be detrimental, if one does not engage in the practice of reading the Tarot. If one is interested in it, naturally, one would naturally want to learn to use it. Otherwise, one may just be interested in the imagery and it's artistic qualities.
I've been curating a list of books on the Tarot (and also on the yijing, but that's a different story), but rather than reading about the tarot, I've realized that it is better just reading THE tarot, and writing about it.
This is why I've started keeping a Tarot journal. And, having just written the first few entries, I have found that writing out my interpretations of each spread helps a lot in the process, and allows one to learn to better read the cards. So I put all those books aside and I've been focusing on reading the cards themselves and writing about them. It also serves the double purpose of also being a personal journal. As for the personal journal. I am still trying to keep the habit of writing it. In fact, one of the things I am trying to develop, is my writing.
This is a thing that I've always liked to do. My only creative outlet, if you will. However, my skills in writing are rather lacking. But I am impelled to get better at it, and to write more, to write out my thoughts, for I feel like I have something interesting to say.
As I said, a personal journal may be a good way to get practice, but honestly, I like to write (as if) to an audience. I like to write with the idea of there being someone else to read it, in order to transmit something, to feel like I am participating in the cultural exchange of ideas, idk.
That's is the reason I come back to the pub. I am aware that my thoughts on western imperialism may not be very welcome among english speakers. But I haven't yet found any better medium to write them, and to practice my writing. It is both the more convenient, and the one I've found, for I don't really spend much time surfing the web anymore. Of course, on one hand there is reddit, social media, and all the AI-ridden cesspool of the "mainstream" internet, one that I do not care to look at anymore. But there is a better internet, with the likes of gemini, gopher, various pubnixes, neocities, and much more. Perhaps I should spend more time exploring this internet, as I know there are webrings, engines such as wiby.me, through which I can go and explore the good parts of the internet. But I spend most of my time browsing books on z-lib.
So I intend to write more, and to try to develop my thoughts. For the most part, I have trouble starting to write, but once I'm rolling, I tend to spit out everything effortlessly. Which is a bit of a problem, too, if I am trying to develop an argument without starting to rant, like I usually end up doing.
Note the question mark. This is a skill I would like to recover, as I haven't done almost any of it for a good while. As with writing text, I usually do not know where to start. I have a few things that I would like to do, but I feel insecure as to starting to develop the code that shall ultimately turn into the kind of project that I want done. There also exist the questions of choice of language, and size. I have a few favored languages, though I haven't really developed the patterns that allow me to express myself in them as I would like to. I can sit and write a lot of C code, but I don't really find C all that fun, it just happened to be my first language, and the one I can, so to speak, write "natively."
So, I think about getting back into programming, I think it may or may not be a useful skill, so I spend most of my energy elsewhere, but the nagging thought keeps going back to my mind, especially when my brain is tired and looking for something different to chew on.
I always end up writing a lot. And I don't suppose anyone cares much about what I am doing or thinking. I don't actually feel very comfortable talking much about my personal life. But getting into the practice of writing also means dealing with discomfort, and, anyway, it's a good way of "breaking the ice", so to speak.
Next time, I may write about The West in a series of scathing rants, what I like to call my "perfidious rethoric", or about The New World, that is to say, the kinds of positive actions I would like to take in order to move towards the world that I would like to see emerge out of the bloody mess we've all gotten ourselves into.
Until then.