Tickled Pink

I would never skin pig ears. What we have here is a crackling with some body. Clean your ears well. I soak them in salt water for a few hours, then simmer them for a couple of hours, dry them well, cut into thin strips, dip in egg, then fine bread crumbs, then either fry or bake them. If you bake them, cut them into larger strips. They're great with mustard sauce and a cold beer. Or with a pesto mayonnaise. It's overcast all day, and still. I walked down to the mailbox, poking at things with my mop handle, and there's one place where I tried to repair an erosion channel, by filling it in with rocks and covering it with compost and bags of leaves I'd picked up in town (why would someone who lived in the woods haul bags of leaves from town? because they were there.) and there's a nice harvest of Inky Caps. Coprinus Comatus. You have to eat them immediately, because they cycle so quickly to rotten, that I just fry them in butter and eat them on toast. Moving into warmer weather, my diet tends toward Spanish bar food. A bite of this and a bite of that. I had a moment of panic this morning, because I couldn't remember something that had been very important to me, just before I fell asleep last night, then remembered that I was going to take the day off, just read fiction, maybe strike out a few commas, nothing I couldn't handle. I get samples of adhesives, long before they're on the market. There's a sealant/adhesive (this is an interesting field) out there, I think probably to repair sneakers, and it's a very good rubber sealant, it bonds completely. Having a large vocabulary is both a blessing and a curse, and a fake-rubber company wanted me to write text for them. The Handyman's All Purpose Adhesive Sealant. I'd like to, but I can't. A duxelle, a mushroom hash, is much more interesting. I was going to go back to town, for the farmer's market, but I heard on the radio that Philip Glass would be featured on Ira Glass's show later. This American Life. Glad I stayed home to listen. A short, very funny opera about a woman trapped in a closet. The text was mostly the woman singing HELP with rapid repetition (a cello line, a piano line) bridging her despair. It's interesting that a piece of music can make me laugh, that it can engage me that way. I chuckle at some songs, smile when I listen to Zappa, and there's a place in a certain opera where I always laugh, but it has nothing to do with the music. Backstage games. But the fact that music can elicit a particular emotional response. Or that text can. I was rereading some passages from Skip's Wired To Zone and was amazed at how it took me out of myself and into this bizarre set of circumstances. When Dolly dies, at the end, I'm beside myself with grief. If I knew how to cry, I would. Maybe just a keening, but the text is pregnant with feeling, a call for help. Another Luna Moth and I catch her (or 'it' more correctly, but I assume it's a female, because it carries certain characteristics that usually are identified with a particular sex. I'm not a judge, I'm not a lawyer, I only speak a patois that I learned from fishermen. Shit I never ended that: "n't", it takes me a while but I finally see where this/that was headed. I don't have any idea where tomorrow leads.