Not Everyone Should Do It

 

Last night we watched If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, an A24 film written and directed by Mary Bronstein. It seemed, from the trailer at least, to be a psychological drama about parenting a disabled child, told from the perspective of the mother. What it was though, was a surreal Lynchian dread movie with smatterings of Aronofsky's Mother!, a dash of Beau Is Afraid, and the paranoid, claustrophobic angles of Polanski's Repulsion. The film is semi-autobiographical, based on real events spanning an 8-month period in a San Diego hotel where she took care of her sick child. We were not prepared for the two hour stress fest that was to ensue. But the real star wasn't the impeccable performance from Rose Byrne, or the cinematography, but the sound design. I wish I'd seen the movie in theaters. We did manage to get close, watching it on the big screen here on the farm, with an overhead projector and a sound system, but this is no substitute for a full theater experience. Apparently they recorded the music for directional speakers, which provide a thoroughly immersive sound. As it was, the film was immersive enough, but I do hope one day to re-experience the psychological drama as it was intended to be seen.

This morning, after feeding the chickens and collecting firewood I had to tend to a power outage in the water supply room. Outside the wind is howling. When it gets that windy up here in the mountains, we lose power. Fiddling with the fusebox bought us a renewed supply of electricity, but I had to leave one set of switches in the down position to get the power to stay on. Part of me fears those switches are responsible for something essential. A message has been sent to our honeymooning friends in Thailand. Hopefully they see it soon. The responsibility of caring for another person's home is a big one, and fears can easily begin to swirl and gust through the bare branches of my synapses. Or is it dendrites? Or both...

Speaking of fears, I've come to realize I have deep fears about having children. Not inspired by the movie, of course, but the movie did help surface some of them. If caring for someone else's home can cause fears to balloon, I shudder to think of what caring for the life of a small vulnerable human could inspire. Images of abduction, molestation, accidents resulting in death, dismemberment and deformity dance in my head. And none of that is to imagine the possibility of a child born with an incurable or untreatable illness, disease or disability. Then there's the inevitable parenting mistakes that are bound to happen; the wounds and traumas and scars. It's a nonstop, 24/7 lifelong commitment to pain and suffering. Joy and elation and learning and satisfaction, too, I'm sure...but those other parts, those haunted parts, prowl through the dark alleys of my mind. On one hand I accept it. I know those things are part of the exclusive package deal, but part of me wonders if that's a deal I'm actually interested in. There was a line from the movie where Rose Byrne's character Linda says something like, "maybe I'm a person who is not supposed to be a mom; not everyone can do it."

Maybe not everyone should.

Getting Up

 

I've only got a few minutes this morning. Though I've been up since six, now is the first moment I've had to myself. Technically that's not true. The day started with reading in bed for half an hour before my alarm went off. I'm reading Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. I'd forgotten how engrossing his style is, how he crafts such strange and compelling worlds. It's a weird magical surrealism. As the alarm went off, signaling time to feed the cat its wet food, I imagined how I would then trudge down in the fresh snow with a bucket of feed in one hand and warm water in the other to bestow onto the chickens below. The land here is mostly sloped, so the chickens are downstream of where we are up in the wooden house. Following the path downward, behind an old dilapidated house made of crumbling brick and plaster, takes me to the second set of chickens. These ones are older. More sturdy. They seldom lay eggs, but they generally seem unfazed by the cold. On the upper level the young chickens sneeze and huddle together, hesitant to leave the meager warmth of their wooden coop. 

As I made my way back up I refilled the bucket of grains for the old chickens and collected the leftover snow-covered firewood from the wheelbarrow to bring inside to dry before starting the morning fire. As I entered I saw Asia was up and had already got the fire started. Now I realize I omitted one piece of the story. After feeding the cat and brushing my teeth I took out the bread I'd left to rise over night and set the oven to 200 degrees to warm. At around 8pm yesterday I'd taken the ancient grain flour made from plants here on the farm, and added them to a large bowl with cold water, some salt and a jar of sourdough starter. While I type this the smell of baking bread perfumes the room. I've got twenty-nine minutes left on the timer.

In a moment I'll prepare breakfast. Fresh farm eggs — gifts from the chickens. Shortly after that I'll march myself upstairs and setup the computer and microphone to record an episode of my podcast with a woman who works in the technology sector on Decentralized Identities. Even though I spent my entire adult career working in tech, this topic still remains largely opaque to me. On a fundamental level it seems the goal is to provide everyday people with more autonomy and control over their digital data. It's a way to take power away from the bloated bureaucracies of centralized governments or authorities. How this works, and why, I don't particularly understand.

The next item on the agenda just announced its arrival with a gaseous warning cry: it's time to shit. 

I bid you good day.

1 O' Clock

 

I'd like to reclaim a daily practice of writing. For many years I'd written here, and then shortly after moving to Berlin, I stopped. If I'm being honest, even leading up to that period my resolve got sloppy. Life gets in the way. Sometimes it gets in the way of even those things we most enjoy. I realized recently that I've also stopped listened to music. Music and writing were two of my biggest joys. I guess living in a van for a couple of years in remote places makes listening to music a little more challenging. But even the desire to listen, now that we're house sitting for a friend's farm here in the Polish mountains, somehow dwindled and evaporated. It's odd. Even passions can disappear.

It was a long time ago that I last wrote here. Or, at least it seems that way. Lately I feel as though there are things I'd like to say but I'm not quite sure how to say them, or what they even are. Writing has a way of focusing the mind, uncovering what's simmering beneath the surface. But here, now, pressing words into existence key by key feels like trying to get a frozen motor to turn over. The key is in the ignition, turned to 1 O' clock, but the engine just groans. 

The world is in a sad state of affairs at the moment, particularly where I'm from, back in the United States. There's a piece of writing I saw the other day on social media that summed it up quite nicely:

"Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared."

That was written nearly 80 years ago, to the day, on January 13th, 1943, by a young author named Anne Frank. I never thought I'd see the things I'm seeing — the things we've been seeing on social media for the last few years; genocide, the wanton destruction of civilian populations in Gaza, men women and children blown to pieces, maimed and bleeding in the rubble; imperialist invasions into Latin America to steal the nation of Venezuela's supply of crude oil; ICE agents, deputized as the president's private police force, murdering US citizens in broad daylight on residential blocks. None of this is new, of course. I realize it even as I type it. This kind of behavior is the cornerstone of western democracy, and has been for a long time now. People of color know this. Women know this. Anyone who's ever been marginalized or oppressed or disadvantaged by a cruel and unjust system knows this. I just hadn't seen it so nakedly before. There's no longer any attempt to even conceal or deny it. The masks are off. Except for the ICE agents. They still wear them as they terrorize city streets, abduct mothers and children from elementary schools, deport legal US citizens to torture camps in El Salvador, kick, bludgeon and trample the elderly and infirm, illegally detain critics and dissenters bold enough to publicly challenge and denounce US policy.

There's much more that can be said about the US's transformation towards fascism, but I tire of the topic. It's everywhere you look. Sometimes it's important to pause for a moment and take a second to breathe. Speaking of breathing, the air here in southwestern Poland is notoriously poor. Some days when I step outside the air greets me with the quiet charm of a clenched fist around my throat. It has a dirty, sooty quality that curls the lips into a subtle snarl and wrinkles the ridge of the nose. Small particulate matter floats in the air, sometimes visibly, as an ominous smog. These particles vary from coarse to fine to ultra fine, the latter being able to penetrate not just the lungs but deep into the bloodstream where they can circulate throughout the rest of the body and pose serious health risks. This is the air we breathe. Not just in parts of Poland, but in many places in the world. Our seas and skies are polluted. Our soils, too. We've made a proper mess of things. Humans seem particularly vulnerable to those things which we either cannot see or imagine, or those things which move slowly, glacially, accretially. In the case of air pollution, it happens to be both. We are the frog being boiled, and the ones boiling the water. 

The wood stove which heats the home we're staying in demands that I continually feed it fresh cords of wood. Its appetite is insatiable. I need to occasionally monitor it and provide it with new wood every so often, resulting in an interrupted flow here this morning. Add that to an already icy and rusted writing capacity and I'm sure this won't make for a smooth read. 

My humblest apologies, dear reader.

Perhaps I should take that as a cue to wrap this up. There are other things to tend to here on the farm. Sure, the chickens have been fed, but they didn't seem interested in their food this morning. Their water was frozen and they were sneezing. I'd like to check on them. The cold does them no favors. Our wood supply is thinning so I'll have to make a short trip up the hill beside the house to collect more fodder for the oven. Last night when we arrived late after a long and arduous drive in the snow from the mountains of Slovakia, I dragged the wheelbarrow to the woodpile and its icy metal handles instantly froze to the warm pads of my fingertips, especially my thumbs. I wear the sort of fingerless gloves you'd see on a dapper homeless man, the kind you may remember adorning the handsome hands of The Wet Bandits in Home Alone. Needless to say, my fingertips are a bit raw and red this morning.

I have some other tasks to tend to as well. I'd like to read, perhaps record a podcast episode, practice Polish, and maybe even meditate. There's too little time in the day, even when time's all you have.