Manicuring The Dog Yard, Taking Down The Bat House, Fire And Music For Halloween, Human Interactions Via Technology & A Few Meandering Thoughts About Human Relations
I woke up rather early and it was yet again a chilly morning and thankfully it was not quite as cold as it was the day before but it was pretty close. I was feeling rather groggy even though I slept well enough the night before. Doing the morning writing was a slow ponderous process to say the least and I think that I spent more time sipping espresso and staring blankly at the computer screen than anything else. Although I often enjoy my morning routine some days I just feel 'off' and although those days have become fewer and further between they still happen and I do my best to just muddle my way through and not lose sight of the bigger picture that most days I feel anything but 'off' which is actually a big improvement to how much of my life has been. I guess that I can honestly say that I have achieved the inverse to my past feelings and in dong so I have way more days of feeling 'on' than I do feeling 'off' and I have even become okay with that even though it still frightens me more than just a little.
All that jazz aside, the weather warmed up nicely by the afternoon so I got busy outdoors doing all my routine chores which was good because I had slacked on doing any of them the day before. While I was shoveling up the dog waste from the dog yard I noticed that the area that I had expanded the dog yard fence around had a heck of a lot of thorn vines growing in it as well as a bunch of small branches that had fallen from the trees so I spent some time cleaning it up and removing the vines so the dogs (or me) would not get snagged by them. While I was doing that I also noticed that there is a really thick layer of leaves in the area that I can potentially use for making that new compost for the chickens... if I ever make up my mind about making such a compost!
Since the bat house was in the same area where the vines and sticks were I took the time while I was cleaning things up in the area to take it down so that it would not cast any shadows onto where I am planning on installing that big solar panel. The bat house has actually held up rather well since I built it a few years ago but at this point I need to get some more black paint and give it a few coats of the stuff to seal it all up and protect the wood from rotting. I considered finding a new place to install it but thought it best not to because I would undoubtedly procrastinate painting it again if I have it installed somewhere. So I just stored it in the greenhouse and added it to my long mental list of things to do once I have the supplies to do so. Sadly I have never had a single bat inhabit the little bat house but that has yet to stop me from trying and hoping that one day it will be put to good use.
After all of that I decided to clean out the chicken coop and collect some leaves and pine straw to put in there since I either keep forgetting to buy straw from the feed store or fail to have enough money when I do remember while visiting the feed store. Since I mostly wanted dry leaves and pine straw to put in the chicken coop I decided to collect them from along the main trail where the sun has been able to dry them out some over the last few days. The trail itself needed raking anyway and like I have said every autumn (since I started making these posts) that if I leave the leaves on the ground in the areas that I walk then all winter those areas will be a slippery mess and thus hazardous to traverse especially when it has rained, snowed or been frosted with ice. I wound up raking the leaves and pine straw up from about half of the main trail, stuffing it all in a bucket and then putting it in the bottom of the chicken coop as well as in those two wooden drawers that I recently installed in the coop as laying boxes. Hopefully all of that works out well and the leaf matter continues to dry out and does not become a mess of rotting material in the coop that I will then have to clean out later.
It being Halloween and all I felt like I had to do something mildly festive so late in the day I made a little fire (which I conveniently burned the thorny vines in) and played a little bit of music which is something that I have not done much of lately aside from sporadically listening to stuff on my computer speakers. I did not even play the music all that loudly which was more not wanting to attract attention to myself than for any other reason. Considering how fucking polarized folks are these days in this country the last thing that I want to do is stir up any problems with the locals so I just listened to my spooky Halloween mixtapes in a bit of a subdued (and yeah underwhelming) manner. I have never had any problems from the locals with playing loud music here or anything and I generally disregard any feelings that would inhibit me from playing loud music (during reasonable hours of the day) and probably would not have created any problems in doing so that time either... but just the idea of causing strife was more stress than I really wanted to deal with.
The world after all is rife with stress and strife at this current juncture and although I have been doing my best not to 'breathe anxiety into the world' it is all just the sad reality of the situation and although music is a wonderful balm for what often ails my mind and heart... some folks are just looking for a fight and to be blunt I am not in the mood to be dealing with that kind of horseshit. A big part of that feeling of intolerance towards folks 'looking for a fight' comes down to having lived a tumultuous life and witnessed (and been a part of) entirely too much damned senseless hate and violence to put up with it at this period of my life.
It may sound odd but I look at the folks itching to be violent (like it is some holy grail of self expression) as folks that erroneously view themselves somehow (with no real past relationship with violence) be able to get through it all unscathed, uninjured and not be deeply wounded physically, mentally and spiritually because that shit (violence) always leaves a mark upon all participants in such a way that anyone in their right fucking mind understands that there are times to fight and times not to fight and the former better happen only when there is a damn good reason for it because otherwise the proverbial 'path of destruction' becomes the invariable route to self-destruction. I think that if more folks understood that and incorporated it into their behavior that the world would assuredly be a much more responsibly peaceful place. Humans are messy critters though and to deny that we have a violent nature is to blatantly disregard all of known human history and even prehistory because we damn sure did not crawl our way up from the primordial ooze by just being 'nice' to everything (including each other) that we encountered along the way that is for sure!
Anyway, I do not want to get too far off on a tangent here but I do want to express some of the stuff that has been weighing on me of late and although most days are assuredly sort of 'pleasant sailing' that is not always the case. When any sort of holiday rolls around I get these intense bouts of loneliness and feelings of isolation and yeah the dogs make for good company and all... there is also a very human element missing in my life. In other posts I have gone to great lengths to explain my journey towards this strange hermitage lifestyle that I have embraced over the years so I will not reiterate all that here and suffice it to say that I often speculate as to whether my life actually contains qualitative human relations beyond the barest of minimums that said 'life' sort of requires. Hell, I barely even attempt to seek out such relations (I am talking about friendships here) and I think that when I do it is just enough to tell myself that I tried and absolve myself a wee bit from it all. Of course I recognize the behavior of myself which pours out a thousand odd words each day telling the story of my life to an unknown number of humans on the internet... and have to wonder what the fuck I am doing. Honestly it still fascinates me that folks actually read the stuff and that somehow throughout the course of it all I get to have what I believe to be some very genuine qualitative relations with other humans that is not encumbered by the weight of physical interactions but instead is encumbered by a slew of other not-so-salient things that all rely on technology as its vehicle and gods damn we all know how wily using technology alone can be on its own yet alone to have something as complex as human interactions being done with it! In other words it is all one vicarious route on my behalf to have human interactions but it sure beats the alternative of not trying at all.
As much as I like to think that I do my best with all this sharing stuff and interacting with folks I cannot escape the feeling every day that I could do more, create more, share more, have more direct engagement, have more meaningful interactions with other humans and ultimately just fulfill my fucking potential as the most evolved critter in the known universe. That sort of pressure is probably unhealthy in the doses that I treat myself with it but it assuredly keeps me putting one foot in front of the other and doing the steps that need to be done along the way to ensure that each month I can look forward to doing it for another month. It does not all equate out to some magical balance in a ledger that I can afford everything each month to keep the ball rolling but I often look back over the last several years and remind myself that 'hey it has gotten you from there to here' and that I should just show my gratitude by continually pushing myself to deliver more 'content' and maybe one day I can look back on now and say to myself 'hell yeah that was all worth it' which is kind of the attitude/behavior that has gotten me this far so meh. There is of course the argument of creating more quality content but that is always a wholly subjective affair and I try not to delve too far into that particular rabbit warren unless I absolutely have to.
Well, I have probably rambled on enough for one morning and am just going to wrap all this up and get on with my day. It is supposed to get below freezing tonight for the first time this year and I have a heck of a lot to do beforehand. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
My little bat house that needs a new paint job!
Thanks for reading!
More about me: I have been doing property caretaking (land stewardship) for many years (decades) and live a rather simple life with my dogs doing what most folks would consider to be an 'alternative minimalist lifestyle' but what I often just think of as a low-impact lifestyle where I get to homestead and spend the majority of my time alone with my dogs in the woods doing projects in the warmer months and taking some downtime during the colder months.
A little over three years ago I began sharing the adventures (misadventures) of my life via writing, videos, pictures and the occasional podcasts and although my intention was to simply share my life with some friends it undoubtedly grew into much more than that over the years and now I find myself doing what equates to a full-time job just 'sharing my life' which is not even all that glamorous or anything but hey folks seem to enjoy it so I just keep doing it!
The way that the Fantastica Chronicles came about is that I was living at another place when I started chronicling and sharing my days but eventually I wound up moving to a new place. The new place is a homestead named 'Fantastica' so I started with 'Day 1' upon my arrival here and just kept documenting my days much like I had done for the previous nine hundred and fifty-seven days at the last place that I lived.
I have mostly done that 'documenting' at Fantastica exclusively with words (and pictures) opting not to do the videos because as I learned at the last place, sharing videos over an intermittent and slow internet connection is horribly time consuming and what I often think of as an 'ulcer inducing' experience. All that said, I opted for simplicity with the documentation and have no real regrets for doing so.
The way that I look at it is that I give it all my best each day and while some stuff I write is better than others I think that for the most part I do a pretty good job at doing what I am doing which is simply 'sharing my life' as candidly as I possibly can and whatever folks get (or do not get) from it there is always the satisfaction of me doing what I set out to do... which is to simply share my life.
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That Is All For Now!
This post was originally posted to the Hive Blockchain here:
https://peakd.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-427
