North Dakota Winter

On getting the ick, and a book review about regenerative farming to grow more top soil.

Two years later and I still can't scrub the picture out of my head. A 60-something year old woman playing pool naked, it's her birthday and she keeps announcing she's here to fuck.

She stuck out her tongue at some moment while flirting obscenely with my boyfriend, showing us the deep North Dakota winter layers of white scum coating it.

I left with so many questions, my brain is still trying to sort, order, and file away under case closed status.

Why was there so much? Does she know about it? What is it from -- bad dental hygiene, candida overgrowth, all of her pre-birthday fucking, or a combination of the kitchen sink and then some?

It's given me the permanent ick. I've seen enough to know most men would have lined right up. Soap scum be damned.

Meanwhile I'm flossing my teeth twice a day, and checking my tongue religiously. Chinese medicine practitioners got nothing on me.

Later tonight I'll write journal entries. My best friend in grade school and I made up our own codex to obfuscate messages we'd pass during class. Secondary protection in case they were intercepted. I still write in it fluently. I wonder if she does.

I read the book Dirt To Soil straight through today. Reminds me of my younger self. Reminds me of growing up in the Midwest to farmers and the familiarity of conventional farming.

It's a book about converting a conventional farm to regenerative practices. Basically, a change in mindset from growing crops to growing soil.

Healthy, diverse soil can't help but produce healthy abundant crops. Take care of the land and it will take care of you in return.

There were interesting layers I'm still chewing on. The hyper-focus on plant-based lifestyle to fix climate change, improve the lives of food animals, and improve the health of people, falls flat when it's built on conventionally organic approaches.

The book doesn't talk about veganism et all. But i couldn't help but see the relationship to it all.

I learned interesting facts about how application of fertilizers breaks the proper cycle for fixing carbon in the soil, growth of the mycorrhizal layer, and the plants own access to the full spectrum of nutrients available in the soil.

Like a person put on liquid nutrients by stomach tube since birth. We cannot properly emulate natures diversity and complex relationships between nutrients, besides other detriments to such an approach.

And our failure in commercial agriculture practices mimics our failures in other areas. Our healthcare system doesn't seek to heal a person, but only to prevent death. Any suffering between those two points is considered acceptable and just a normal part of the human experience.

And who decided that, when and why?

Put a band-aid on it, cut it off, medicate it. Problem solved. Until it isn't.

And commercial agriculture is failing financially with these methods. Same as healthcare in the United States (unless you're a CEO), but humans are so easily stuck in the "this is what we've always done" principle. Something terrible but known is better than something great but strange.

I should have known a book on soil would go deep into the earth.

I already knew I needed to do a better job composting for my fruit trees. I can confidently displace the unopened containers of fertilizer I'd picked up along the way.