Lazy Sunday

A couple of rounds of polenta, with soft scrambled eggs and salsa. A second cup of coffee with a shot of whiskey, reading a Dorothy Sayers novel, Strong Poison, then a small walk, to collect some Sassafras leaves, to dry and grind into powder, then a great lunch of roasted tomatoes on toast. I used the rest of the tomatoes to make a very simple pasta sauce (garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper) which I ate later with shells, because they're so good for scooping up liquid. A note in my mail box that my beans were in, from Dove Creek, Colorado, the bean capital of North America. This is exciting, when my rice shipment gets in (all Louisiana rice) I'll be set. You stumble across enough greens to make a salad. Corn is the rage right now, sweet corn. I make a fried corn that is very good, and fritters that are sublime. The secret is to go down to the farm stand in the morning and get the corn they just picked, go right back home and cut it off the cob. Corn loses 50% of its sugars in 24 hours. I don't like the super-sweet corns, they have the wrong texture, but that Olathe corn, the seed from western Colorado, is very good. I make a chowder from corn and its milk, with either clams or oysters, that is incredibly good. Mid-day and it's hot, I take a bath in the sheep-watering trough, five gallons of sun-heated water, then rinse off with a couple more gallons, and put on a change of clothes. 90 degrees, and I never get completely dry. That was the major shock, moving west; that I dried, that my towel dried, that the floor dried; back on the ridge, everything stays damp. I can still see my footprints from when I came in last night. A phrase popped into my head "chaotic accrual of information" and I can't remember where I read it. I suspect Luca Turin and reread Burr's The Emperor Of Scent (a wonderful book) and sure enough, find the quote, on the very last page. A friend has used pretty much the same phrase as it related to my reading. This friend calls once or twice a year (I designed and built his house and we share a commonality of interests) to ask what's the best book I've read in the past year. I told him it was actually a reread, this time around, but that he should read The Song Of The Dodo. He's a Mormon rancher in Utah and in a rambling conversation I explained that Utah is very much like a string of islands, with different flora and fauna. I lived four or five places in Utah, and I never talked about religion, except once, about the tablets, and that was at a bar, during the NBA finals, the Jazz and the Bulls, and another Utah rancher poked in the ribs with an elbow and told me nobody believed that shit. Which got me thinking about the Catholic church. Then the Anglican church, then Luther, then a side-bar on The State Of Israel. Whatever gets you through the night. Distrusting information is, pretty much, the function I fulfill. Truly, I am a doubting Thomas. Which is not the same as a peeping Tom, or Tom 'O' Bedlam, or Tom Terrific, greatest hero ever. Doubting Thomas slows everything down, so you can examine the particulars. Thunder rolling in, and I heat up some pasta and have it on toast, slice another tomato into balsamic, now, if I lose power, it won't make any difference. I can always read with a headlamp.