Littoral

"I could have argued the economics of wild strawberries, but it would have been pointless." Euell Gibbons. All the years I lived on the coast the littoral was my market. Gathering a meal was the work of a few moments, and I ate very well indeed. Usually house-sitting in the winter, bartering home-brew, needing little money I often just worked in the summer, Stage Managing ten shows in ten weeks. Les felt that everyone needed a boat, so we built me a pirogue, a lovely thing, a double-ender that could be poled in just a couple of inches of water which allowed access to tidal creeks, hidden places that no one knew existed. I seeded them with mussel and oyster spat. In the spring these miniature shellfish might be counted in the thousands on a single rock, a rock per prepared pool (other rocks or concrete rubble) and I'd be deep into future meals, then on the Vineyard I found a huge oyster bed and continued eating my weight in razor clams every year. The hardest thing about moving inland was giving up the free bounty of the sea, but in Missip I traded home-brew for bushel bags of crawdads, ate snapping turtles and stocked a pond with bluegill and bass; in Colorado I became addicted to cut-throat trout and wild asparagus. Now I eat acorns. Boil acorns, whole, in several changes of water, dry/bake in a slow oven, then dip them in clarified sugar. Since the natural sugars are water soluble (along with the tannins) it's nice to replace them. These are, really good. Try them, but first time around use a white oak acorn. It occurs to me, here, that because I cook on a woodstove, I don't think about the energy requirements of lightly boiling something for several hours. I'm going to try leeching them in the crock pot, you really need to change the water whenever it becomes tea-colored, four to six changes, and I have the replacement water ready, boiling on the woodstove, and you don't, and then my oven is always on, so drying isn't an issue. It's a perfect food-prep thing for me, but it would be damned inconvenient for most other people. Interesting. Balanoculture requires a different tool kit. I'm perfectly situated to become a balanophague. It's strange, really, because I'd been wondering how I might survive when I could just crawl around. Gather acorns and make gruel, that could get me another couple of years, and I'm enjoying this now, living this way, considered. I'm not proving a point, I'm just trying to live in the natural world. I make no claim for this, though I might, eventually. I've been reading Plato for two days straight and my mind is worn thin. I think he knew he was good. A proof of this is that he offers no literary criticism. Snaky bastard. He hated playwrights, I think, because they did something he couldn't; but he did dialogue really well. Maybe he should have tried his hand on "Antigone". Hegel is just wrong, I agree with Murdoch, he defines himself out of existence. It's weird saying that, because I think about this shit all the time, who I might agree with, whatever makes sense, the various ways you make sense, which Plato would argue down to a twitch, the Freud of his time. Nonetheless, fuck, I'm caught in a loop, half-way between Thoreau and Plato. I'm never sure where I am. Everything is an estimate. The world itself may or may not be bounded. You might have said something.