The most ridiculous question ever posed in the vegan space is are blow jobs vegan?
The slightly more nuanced, second-silliest question is is animal manure vegan? My answer to both of these is “go read the definition of veganism”. It’s somewhat more permissive, and considerably less proscriptive than the Vegan Police will have you believe. The answer to both is “of course”, but people still seem to find debate.
I wonder, if you were, even as a card carrying member of the Vegan Stasi, to try to imagine an animal product which was ok to use. Would you be able to think of one.
Some rules - it would have to be something which the animal gave up freely and of it’s own nature. It would be spontaneously generated without human influence or direction. The production of it would cause the animal no harm, stress or distract from its essential nature, and the gathering of it would have to be completely independent of the production of it. In the best case, without the animal even being present.
What fits this bill? Some would say “honey”. I would disagree, but not for obvious reasons. How about wool that sheep rub off and is collected from hedges and fences? It’s a possibility, but would never be effectively useful. Shit? Yes. Shit counts.
So, this week, I have so far received three trailer loads of horse shit from a local family who actually go around after their pet horses and pick up the poop themselves. So it’s kinda pure. I compost some of this, but the majority of it goes on the soft fruit beds and the young fruit trees as a mulch / top dressing. And one tractor-trailer full of stable-manure from a local dude, so this is mostly straw and high quality hay-excrement (haiscrement?) soaked through with activating horse piss. See photo above.
I did not manage to get around to writing the blog post about the collapse of the vineyard. I know a lot of people, many of whom invested a lot of time into it, have been asking for the story, but it’s still too tough to
So I did something easier. That’s the great thing about setting your own schedule 96% of the time - you can procrastinate the bad things and do something more fun instead!
I made another one of my One Man Working videos. If you don’t know, these are my "videos to relax to”. The ASMR delights of watching someone else gardening. And then, I annotated it with a blog post. Amazing how productive you can be when you have something you want to avoid!
Uploading the almost hour-long video (which, so far, no-one has watched more than 6 minutes of, with an average viewing time of just under 2 minutes!) took almost 24 hours. You could say internet at the barracks is basic. Or crap. But I love this. Anything which fucks with norms is amusing to me. The expected asymmetrical nature of broadcast medium is that time or effort invested by the publisher is stretched by orders of magnitude by the consumers. Not by me! Mine are the total inverse.
I think I shall make more of them. Until they go viral. And then I will stop. (this actually makes me laugh. I find this sort of thing hilarious. Too much winter, I guess?)
If you’ve not had enough of my prattle for one day, you can see the post and the video here.
https://www.thebarracks.de/post/the-rhubarb-bed
This week sees Ash Wednesday. The Christian celebration of mortality. Christianity is way more interesting than we generally remember. Even practicing Christians mostly forget the message of Ash Wednesday - we aren’t here for long, and when we are gone, we will be forgotten.
Leave no footprints.
Love you all.
The Pirate Ben