Wednesday. The first day here where I had no major task, like a drive or an interview (or a breaking and entering besides), that needed to get done without fail by a time certain.

It began innocently enough. One of the first things I did was to take that picture, and then post it, thinking it would serve unto itself as a daily spill and that I was done with my self-assigned job early.

I sorted piles of the stuff I brought; I found an out of the way temporary spot for the empty boxes. I had another sweet bath and got cleaner than I have been for years.

Then I got dressed and went for a bike ride down and up the prodigious Hill I’m living on, and then back down to the town. Coffee. A bite. An informal study session on where to park the bike, at the coffee shop, and an unexpected discovery that in spite of the many lush charms of the Tranquil Buzz, I may very well end up going back to being a Javalina Cafe kind of guy.

(In some ways the TB is a victim of its own huge, respectable, and well-deserved success. No matter when you walk in there, the atmosphere and the entire vibe is dominated by the endless lingering of comfortable senior citizens in tight little groups. My buzz is not harshed by this–and I’m not young myself–but it’s … not what I hunger for, in a coffee shop experience. The randomness and relative impoverishment of the Javalina clientele, too busy surviving to linger overmuch, is just palpably preferable. To me.)

Between coffee and the co-op I got rained on a little and didn’t mind it. I pulled another turkey bacon avocado. I studied prices and selection of some things that are staples for me, like hummus. I found myself hoping that when the new co-op building opens next year, the larger size of the place will mean good things, in terms of that selection.

I came home, conducted further studies on bike parking and access, took the trash to the curb, ate my sandwich, and crashed hard but not bad.

It’s been a long row of six or seven hour sleeps, and of long intense days. On top of that I had the uncommonly vigorous physicality of a more serious bike ride. So when I got home, and ate, my body just all at once said: Enough. It wasn’t the gentle maybe of an afternoon nap like I’m used to. There was a slam the brakes urgency this time, telling me in so many unspoken words: The System Is Going Down Now.

It was glorious and delicious. I had some of the usual guilt over sleeping well in the middle of the day, but also the consolation of knowing it wasn’t really even a choice. It was compliance with and submission to a mandate from a legitimately constituted authority. It’s no real fault of the conscious responsible productive mind, when the body says This You Must Do.

I am so very spiritually intoxicated by the fact that I have a temporary foothold here on living the life I always dreamed of living. In each moment, I am for now, quite literally … living the dream.

***

I woke to crepuscular dusk a little while ago. I poured a fresh cup and I resumed the sorting of my tools for life, with an emphasis on dishes this time.

While I worked I put my usual politics videos up on the big monitor and listened.

What I heard made me come back here and write.

We begin again, here.

Geraldine Dolan owns the Poppyfields Cafe coffee house in Westmeath, Ireland.

This is the electric bill for her little business there, for two months. Five thousand dollars/euros a month, to keep the lights on, even before the onset of a cold Irish winter.

She’s probably got air conditioning. Maybe she has a roaster running all day. But speculation aside, this is basically a death blow for her lovely, tranquil way of making a living.

“How in the name of God is this possible”?

I saw this in the first video update of the day by Alex Christofouru, and he pointed out something easily missed.

The Twitter account of this poor, doubtless hardworking woman is decorated with that little blue and yellow Ukrainian flag.

The answer to your question, Geraldine, is that God has nothing to do with it. This has been done to you by the real devil of your leadership class, the very same devil that brainwashed you into flying that little flag.

Quite contrary to what they’ve sold you, the proxy war in Ukraine has fuck-all to do with sovereignty, or democracy and liberty, or heroes and villains, any more than the endless imperial wars in Vietnam or Iraq or Syria or Yemen or hundreds of other places ever did.

You live in a beautiful green place that is owned, alas, by a capitalist oligarchy who picks your leaders for you and shoves them down your throat in a parody of democratic values, and it is in their interests that stupid sanctions happened, and those stupid sanctions resulted directly in your $10K electric bill, AND … you should get ready for worse still, in the absence of real and revolutionary change.

I’m writing this, as I write much of what I write, for the Geraldines of this world, to beg them please to wake the fuck up to the reality of the Matrix around them before it is too late.

If she understood the truth of how in the name of God this is possible, there is no way in hell that she could be blithely flying that blue and yellow flag of nazi pride, which is in itself just another meme that papers over the even deeper and dirtier reality of pure inhuman greed and economic slavery that this modern world of progress! runs on.

I’m not mad at her, I’m mad at them. I don’t think she’s stupid, I just think she’s all too typically, brutally, average.

Colors on the street
Red, white and blue
People shuffling their feet
People sleeping in their shoes
There’s a warning sign on the road ahead
There’s a lot of people saying we’d be better off dead

I don’t feel like Satan,
but I, A Vairtere, am to them.

I am no priest of Satan. I’m just a struggling half-ass sage with a declaration of true independence in my head and hand.

***

I have to keep reminding myself that a real sage doesn’t care if he’s smarter than you or not.

A real sage needs to learn how to not even care whether your blinders come off … much less engage in trying to rip them off his own damned self like some kind of bullshit John Brown reincarnate.

In two or ten or twenty years I won’t even be here to chant my lamentations and jeremiads, and none of this will matter.

All we have is the moment. I only ask and pray that you and I both live in it with full awareness, and act accordingly.

And Geraldine too.

Amen.