Oh wait that’s an ADHD symptom? I’m considering going nomadic atm maybe that makes it bearable.

I’m a woman in her forties and maybe my perspective helps. What I’ve noticed about myself as I am approaching menopause is this: I won’t tolerate stuff that I don’t want. No compromise anymore. My body just won’t allow that I be in a place I don’t want to be in, with people I don’t want to be with, in conditions I don’t control … so I’m probably not a very nice person anymore in the way I used to be - but at same time feeling powerfully aligned with what I really want for myself, and walking out of situations that don’t serve me.

As women are still raised to please and support others many of us tend to wear ourselves out in caring for other people and their opinion, and when that falls away with menopause the results can be very painful for the person themselves and their families. This change in me killed my relationship, and I do feel very sorry how it all went down, but I was literally physically unable to stay and remain in this ‘wife’ situation that I tend to almost automatically create for myself when with a partner.

And for your situation as a partner: No, you never have to put up with your partner criticizing you all day and dumping their rotten mood onto you. That’s not acceptable for any reason.

Wall-E, is that you?

Go solarpunk!

once every year since 1995 or so, lately every week?

A web portuguesa e uma teia de horrores. Porque 1000 captchas em cada página login? Nenhuma das páginas do governo, ou qualquer outra, funciona? Quero ser offline outra vez, já não quero mais disso

Why should the homeless have no right to organize? It’s funny that the only places with (rough but efficient) functioning self-organization I could find so far were among the homeless and the small folk. Those with stuff left to protect are too much up their own arse to want to play well with others.

Also, the plans to get off the street are real, most of the time. Every kindness you show is a seed that one day will point towards the right direction.

I’ve been hanging out with the homeless as a kid, and lived on the streets for a few months as a young adult, travelling and panhandling. I met many very kind, and often very damaged people. They are on the streets because it’s for a variety of reasons the only option they can manage, not because they enjoy scamming you out of a few coins and do nothing all day.

If you are concerned about your money look at the suit wearing people, most of it ends up with them.

Improve your local community in other ways. Or give in other ways. Not sure what would apply in your local community - I live in rural Western Europe and that’s very different from what you describe. People here set up donation boxes, swap shops, create food banks, organize markets, create safe spaces for minority groups, community gardens … mostly volunteering time. Not sure you are in the position to do this? Sorry things are so heartbreaking. I hope we all figure this out soon.

How did you like Georgia? I keep beong obsessed by it (because music).

How did you address your trauma? What methods did you find worked?

Thispunk.

The farmers themselves have to come to their senses as well and support these government reforms or eventually the crime gangs might take the land and eat the owner. After that is done I hope we can return to a commons system of land use.

They help with slowing down, degrowth, a meditative life. Although the speed depends a lot on the motivation of the donkey. Towards home and a bucket of food they might reach ludicrous speeds temporarily!

Hmm, the farmer interviewed in the article farms 570 ha - maybe consider a restoration of smaller-scale farms and restoration of the commons before complaining about criminals roaming lands the size of an entire village?

The concentration of ownership into fewer and fewer hand means that smaller farmers had to sell out to the big guys, a process that has been going on for very long. When there is nothing left but large swatches of land owned by single persons what is normal folk supposed to do? Turn into serfs again? It’s not even possible anymore because most farmers will just import the cheapest farmhand from other countries because nobody can live a dignified life from the pittance they pay workers.

Not to forget, with large areas of land in a single hand comes monoculture and all the destruction associated with it.

Fuck it, distribute the land to the crime gangs and teach them how to garden.

My dream is to use the donkeys as my main means of transport. I’ve had so many cars broken recently, I don’t know why I bother anymore.

trying to catch trains, trying to find the correct room at university …

a picture of the brush

Only in August, when it’s the time for picking the grass. It’s still green, and I as the green brushmaker got verbal instructions about its making while stumbling over a sun-baked plateau, by a person who had walked the path we were on since he was five. So he started with a whole set of memories about him on the path on the way to sell cheese, about which lands around belong to which village, and which village is stupider, and the plants we were wading through. Me and kid just happened to be there and were a happy, interested public for his flashback and geography session. It’s absolutely worth a bit of sunstroke, although I do think there must be healthier ways of getting some etnobotanical and other landscape knowledge from the old folk around. Inviting the to a slower walk at an earlier hour just to talk about plants might be a good idea.

mushroom-growing ants

There’s the famous leaf-cutter ants, those were the first we knew to grow mushrooms. In the meantime there’s been studies about ants also propagating other species, for example Macrolepiota and Leucoagaricus. My garden is full of Leucoagaricus and ants - and I’d like them to rather grow something I would eat, I’m sure we can come to some agreement.

I’m still quite torn between creating coop, or association, or both, or neither. There’s a mix of different factors at play - the fact of being geared towards being a for-profit (for the member-owners) in case of the coop, and a non-profit (in service of something intangible) in case of the association makes me tend towards the association. Then again, for people running small businesses a coop might be really useful and needed. Then again, running a small business as a independent worker might actually be the solution with less overhang. Then again, everything might crumble so fast we won’t even care anymore in 5 or 7 years from now and we should work on creating community in whatever formless way we can, as quickly as we can.

On that note, how crumbly does it feel where you are?

To create either coop or association, there’s the longer winded option to visit a notary (and other places, and send letters to somewhere, and ???) with even more bureaucracy and costs (and apparently time) involved. I’ll attack this indecision one of these days and sit down with a local friend who knows accounting. I also have to take things slow and rest some, sometimes. 😅

Where I live Mimosa kills everthing where it grows, so does Eucalyptus. But watching (and unsuccessfully fighting it) during two decades I find that it ultimately can’t outgrow the native species, it finds a more humble place in the landscape with time. Yes we shouldn’t stupidly introduce new stuff left and right, but the idea that invasives could be removed entirely feels entirely impossible (how? and where to draw the line?), and also frighteningly fascist, to me. Managing a landscape by building diverse ecosystems where the ‘invasives’ have place and function seems to be a more fruitful (!) thing to do imo.

Sounds too much like ‘the war on weeds’ only for humans. Still no thanks. We can grow smaller but lets take it easy. Also if we squash ourselves back who is gonna fight the invasives (/s because I don’t think the term even makes sense)