Same as last week. I got up early this morning and worked on getting stuff out of the storage closet. I've gotten a lot out of there, and the few things that are left are boxes full of unsorted papers. Most likely, I will put them in the other storage unit instead of sorting through them right now, to save time. I feel relieved that the apartment's storage closet is getting close to being empty; however, there is still junk scattered all over the inside of the apartment. It isn't really much, but at the same time, it's lots of little things, and each one has to be picked up, handled, looked at, thought about, judged, and moved someplace, one by one. My eyes scan over the piles of junk, and I feel as though there's nothing really big that has to be moved out; but all those junk piles have dozens of random things in them, two years' worth.
I usually get sick and exhausted after sorting through old belongings. There are various chemicals on them, and not all of it is the drug residues. There are some other chemicals there as well. Several years ago I dusted my apartment with flea powder to try to kill parasitic mites, probably mange, that I was getting from the cats. That flea powder got into the air and landed on a lot of my books and other belongings, and it makes me exhausted. Flea powders and other pesticides cause extremely severe fatigue and exhaustion.
So I usually get extremely tired after moving only a few things out of the storage closet. I had to take a break. So I opened up one last box and looked inside it, so that I would know what was the next task to do, and then I left.
I went to Howard Dam again - I guess it's called Foster Joseph Sayers Dam, or Bald Eagle State Park, or Blanchard Reservoir. Whatever. I don't live there, so I don't know what the locals call it. The Dam.
I went walking down some butterfly trails. There weren't a lot of 'real' butterflies, but I saw some of the small, boring butterflies, like those generic white ones. There weren't a lot of flowers there today. I don't know if they actually plant flowers there or what. I was sort of disappointed by the butterfly trail, because I've seen one elsewhere that I really liked - the one at Tudek Park in State College. That one has a wide variety of flowers, and a lot of people walk there, and people are allowed to plant their own flowers in some places, in a community garden. The butterfly trail at Howard Dam was very isolated, and hardly anyone was walking on it. They don't have a 'bring your own flowers' section there either.
I went walking farther than before, because there was a boat parked right in my 'secluded little cove' where I had gone swimming last week. I had to find another secluded little cove. While walking and exploring, I waded in the water by the edge - I was barefoot this whole time, and walked several miles barefoot over grass, stones, gravel, asphalt, dirt, plants and weeds, thorn bushes (only a couple!) and water. It felt like several miles, but it might have been much shorter than that, actually. It took a long time, and I was there from about 11 AM until 4:30 PM or so, just walking and swimming.
While wading in the water, I was videotaping a fish that looked like it was injured. It was swimming in the shallow water and not swimming away when I approached, and it had a big white spot on the side of its body. I think they get hit by motorboats. There are occasionally dead fish floating around. So I was videotaping this fish, and just as I shut off my camera and started to put it back in my pocket, a watersnake swam right across where I had been filming, and I just missed it! I turned the camera back on, and all I got was some footage of the snake hiding underneath a big bush, peeking its head out, and then vanishing.
I finally found a secluded place where there weren't any boats parked. I took off my clothes again - the nudity ritual - this is the required activity. My new half-joking, half-serious rule is: if you're not walking barefoot, then you're not really walking, and if you're not swimming nude, you're not really swimming. Those are only joking unofficial rules. I still need shoes and clothes elsewhere. So I set the clothes by the edge of the water. I was next to a couple of small trees, surrounded by high grass and high plants, with woods behind me. I set my clothes down and got into the water when it seemed like there were no boats nearby.
I don't do the type of swimming where you raise your arms out of the water and splash. I just did very quiet doggy paddling. Then, when my arms get tired, I change my stroke, so that I'm waving my arms back and forth in a serpentine S-curve, like slaloming down a hill while skiing, so that I make the most out of the stroke by covering the largest possible distance for each stroke. Then, when I get tired from doing that, I sometimes switch to swimming on my back, which is the easiest - if you ever get shipwrecked, try floating on your back, because it requires the least amount of effort. I can just move my arms a little bit, or almost not at all, and just kick. Kicking is easy, because my legs are in shape from walking all the time, but paddling with my arms is tiring, because my arms are weak and I don't use them for anything that requires strength or endurance. So my arms get tired very quickly, while my legs still have lots of energy. I don't go far from the shore - in fact, I often swim in water that is shallow enough that I could kneel in it and my head would be above water. I often just crawl through the water by grabbing onto the ground and pulling myself along while gently kicking.
I love to see myself as a mermaid, or a naiad - a mythical creature, something special and wonderful, something non-human. I fantasize that someone would see me there swimming, but it wouldn't be some leering jerk, it would be someone who appreciated the mythical, mystical feeling of it, someone who would almost believe that I really was a mermaid.
I don't necessarily want to be a mermaid, but rather, I want someone to appreciate how human it is to be in the water. I read about 'the aquatic ape theory,' a theory that says humans originally lived in, or at the edge of, the water, all the time, and that we are naturally made to live in the water. Being in the water, and hunting for shellfish underwater, feels so natural and healthy to me that I believe it's true, it's where we were meant to be. I like to imagine us living in the water all the time, swimming every day, hunting for food there, and never being separated for long from the water. I like to imagine my tribe, my people, being there with me.
There are some informational signs around the park. I was reading about ducks and what they eat and how they swim, dive, fly, and migrate. They said that some ducks were eating clams at the bottom of the lake. I didn't know if they meant that this particular lake actually had clams at the bottom, but I was curious to find out. I didn't go looking for them, because, at the time when I was swimming, I hadn't read that sign yet. I read the sign after getting out of the water. I'm interested in food. I would want to eat the clams too.
I ate wild black raspberries that weren't completely ripe yet, but they weren't too sour, and I could tolerate them. Nothing on earth makes me hungrier than swimming. I have never really felt extremely, ravenously hungry, except after swimming, and that was true today. So I was obsessing about food and picking raspberries, and the raspberries worked well to slightly comfort me until I could get in the car and go get food.
While I was swimming on my back, I couldn't see where I was going, and I stopped briefly to take a break and look around. When I looked around, I suddenly saw a deer drinking from the water, only about twenty feet away. It didn't get scared or run away from me.
At one point, I hid inside a bush hanging over the water, because a boat was going by. I could probably have just sat there with my head sticking out of the water, but it was more fun, and felt more secure, to hide inside the bush and peek out through the leaves and branches.
I want to live a more self-reliant life, foraging for food, and growing a small number of plants, and possibly, living without wheat and other grains. I've been reading Ramiel Nagel's book, and he talks about Weston Price (as always, he doesn't mention any dangers associated with the diet, like all the other authors), and he mentions some things WP didn't know. We've discovered that pretty much all grains are able to cause osteoporosis and cavities, even if you do the things that the WP book says you can do to reduce the poisons in them - the phytic acid and whatever else is in there. I will definitely learn to eat insects. Insects are one of the most important foods that will help people be self-reliant and also will help feed large numbers of people without land or farming. Even vegetarians might not feel bad about eating insects, because they are not much like the animals who express feelings that we are able to recognize (although bugs have feelings too, and I don't want to torture them).
After a little bit longer, I went back and found my clothes - I got scared for a few minutes because I couldn't find them. But I found them and then walked back. It took a long time to walk back. I was starving. A park ranger drove by while I was walking (fully clothed) and asked me if I was okay, because I was barefoot and walking down one of the more isolated roads where people don't usually walk much. I said I was okay, I was just walking and hiking along the water and on the paths, and taking pictures. He asked if I saw any critters, and I told him about the deer and the water snake. I also saw some frogs at the frog pond, but I forgot to mention them. I told him I was okay, and he drove off. He was very nice and friendly.
I want to try this out, living a more and more self-reliant life, where I need less and less government money to survive. Then, once I've gotten used to it, once I've gotten the bugs worked out, I want to bring other people along with me.
I was eating the wild raspberries and calculating how many bushes I would need to feed me for a year, if I tried drying out the berries and eating them in the winter. I imagined that I might eat a hundred berries in one day. (I think that was the number, I forget!) Maybe it was 200. Yeah, it was 200. I was estimating this in my head, so I did 200 x 365 = about 80,000 berries in one year. That's probably not enough, but it gave me a rough idea. One bush might produce about 100 berries. So I might need 800 bushes. I was imagining how big of a space that would require. It wouldn't be much. Those are extremely rough estimates, and in reality, I might eat a lot more berries, or a lot fewer, and each bush might produce a very different number than I estimated. I would just need a clear space, and I would fill it with hundreds of transplanted wild raspberry bushes that I would totally neglect - no pesticides, no herbicides, no fertilizers. If I put any fertilizers there, it would just be organic stuff, compost or something. I'd also love to plant wild blueberries - not the big, tasteless, domesticated kind, but the tiny ones. You can buy those in the frozen section at the store, in bags.
I must still be hungry right now, because I'm enjoying this food obsession way too much. I will have to go home and eat. But anyway, I don't want to be totally alone in my wild life. I want to bring someone along with me, and have my children that way. I will not isolate my children - they will read books and they will meet other children, but they won't watch television, and I don't want them to go to public school. Unfortunately, if you don't go to public school, it's hard for you to meet a wide variety of people so that you can make friends and fall in love; and so, I want more and more people to join me so that we will have a variety of people in our tribe.
But I can't actually invite anyone to join me in my lifestyle, until and unless I am actually LIVING this lifestyle. That begins with living in my car. I've also been talking to a guy at work who is interested in motorized bicycles, and I'm getting interested in that idea. You can drive certain kinds of motorized cycles legally without a license or registration. I don't always want to pedal a bike. He's very interested in this and he's always talking about it, and after hearing him, I've been getting into it too. However, it's hard to drive something like that in the winter. You'd have to take the bus in the winter. But I'm not worried about it - I still have my car right now. I haven't switched to using anything else except a car yet. But it would be ideal to have ways of traveling without a license and without registration and without spending tens of thousands of dollars on the vehicle. Anything that can help me get 'off the grid' is good.
That's all for now. I had a little bit more progress on the cleanup, and an enjoyable day at the park, and that's all I've done today.
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