Making Cracklings

I did get another smoked jowl, so I took off the skin, in prep for cooking a pot of beans, cut it into a dice and rendered the pieces. Cracklings for the next pone of cornbread. The pork fat is for cooking potatoes. The jowl is so lean, I'll eat it with the beans, so I lightly fry it, to render off some of the fat. Playing in the kitchen, made a nice wine/butter sauce for the left-overs. Barely saved enough for a breakfast hash. Need to replace several back-up items, eggs, whiskey, tobacco, and I need some fiction. Haven't been to town this week, so I need to go tomorrow, chance of snow Friday. When I get a favorable forecast, anytime in the next couple of weeks (favorable meaning that the house won't freeze completely) I'm going to get a night in a motel. Shower, bathe, watch TV and eat pizza. I was taking a sponge-bath, over by the stove, and realized I needed to scrub every inch of my body with an abrasive sponge and grow a new exterior layer, get a haircut, so it's easier to wash and uses less water, trim my beard down to something less than 'Wild Tom', and stop swearing so much in public. But the truth is, I only run into these motherfucking assholes when I go off the ridge, so that's when I swear mostly. I do swear at inanimate objects when I stub my toe, or when I damage some part of my body splitting wood. I'm terrible to my hands. I wear gloves, I'm careful, but I still smash fingers, get weird puncture wounds and scrapes. The injury on my right thumb, I have no idea where it came from. It's particularly awkward because I use that digit quite often. I often refer to myself as "that stupid son-of-a-bitch" in the kindest possible way. I can go for weeks not making a single mistake, then the hatchet I'm using to split kindling bounces off a hard spot and hits my hand, nothing broken, a bruise, the cost of doing business. But it hurts and it only happened because I diverted my attention. I don't even remember what I was thinking about, a particular bed of mussels, some oysters I'd seeded, something to do with the sea. I hit the back of my left thumb. I do this maybe once a year. Other favorite injuries include biting my tongue, and that pulled muscle in the lower back. If they still have Sea Scallops at Kroger, and they usually do, I'm going to saute them in butter and serve on a bed of endive and apples. The recipe sounded good. I'd never cooked endive before but it's wonderful. A great bed for whatever meat or fish. Egg noodles as a side, which are so easy to make and so damn good. I don't make desserts, except for a couple of Key-Lime pies a year, but I had to laugh, reading some dessert recipes in this new book. Some of them called for eight to fifteen egg yolks. Folded whipped egg whites. Spare me. A piece of cornbread and sorghum molasses is good enough. I just don't have a sweet tooth. I do admire the southern pecan pie, because it's such a caloric overload, and there was a pudding/cake thing I used to enjoy for breakfast in Boston. Opera, don't get me started. Got to town, spent some time at the library, then a beer at the pub, wandered around Kroger like a demented idiot, because they'd changed things again, and the things on my list weren't where they used to be. I got everything, I think, but it was a pain in the ass. I base my list on a clockwise rotation of the store and I'm easily confused. I can't find the crackers. Why would they hide the crackers? I had the guys in the liquor section laughing hysterically, and one of them, Jesse, walked out to my Jeep with me, a smoke break, so I rolled one and we talked about the addition he was adding to his home. One product of having no building inspector, is that anybody can build anything, and a lot of them don't know what they're doing. Jesse had some good questions about load-bearing walls and I told him I'd drop by and have a look. He'll buy me a bottle of whiskey, and even walk it in if necessary, in token payment for my advice. It's cool that I'm thrown these curve balls occasionally because I genuinely enjoy solving problems, I'm good at it, I love sitting with a drink and a cigaret thinking about a loading problem. Again, it's the ability to visualize, I don't know where it came from, it's just a thing I can do, see things in three-space. A latent ability honed by working with great designers of stage sets. Herbert and Helen, god, I worked with them for ten or twelve years, and they were both geniuses: Herbert could design anything and Helen could paint a peach you would reach for. Herbert was the only person I've ever known that could draw a perfect circle in a single stroke. I mean very close to perfect. This is a difficult thing to do. I tend to draw oblate spheroids.