No Idea

Not a clue why I read and write for twelve hours a day. It engages me is all. The concept of ladle, or the idea of trenchers sends me off, and hours later I'm sitting on the back porch thinking about food preparation on a whaling ship. Every hand had a dish, wooden or pewter, that he wiped out or washed himself. Think about the logistics of feeding 3,000 people on a modern air-craft carrier. I always loved eating aboard ship, weren't supposed to do it, but the Chief's Mess was a pretty safe place to be a stowaway. Whatever ship he was on, Dad always made cornbread for the Chief's Mess, and that bought me a free lunch ticket. I loved the food, cafeteria food, I think because I never had it when I was a kid, lots of gravy, what's not to love. Read an interesting article by V B Heltzel, Chesterfield And The Anti-Laughter Tradition, essentially a tract on not laughing at dinner so as not to spew fellow guests. I love this stuff. Imaginary Dinners In The French Literary Tradition, The Folded Napkin, Cooking For A Harem. Why bother to make anything up? I'd said to Joel that I didn't know where the oysters were coming from, and he was silent just long enough to let me know I was an idiot, and told me to ask the fishmonger what it said, stamped on the gunny sack. I have to look into the concept of gunny sacks, but I meant a coarse woven bag, it didn't signify anything. Just a point of origin. In Key West they were referred to as croaker sacks. The croaker is a fish, sometimes caught in great numbers, I used to sell them to the aquarium, to feed the predators, but I have no idea what a gunny is. Maybe that fish that comes ashore, swept in on a couple of tides a year, in California. Early in my farming career, before I grew my own corn, I'd buy 100 lb bags of whole-kernel corn that came in those coarse-mesh bags. Sisal, jute, hemp, I saved these bags for years, and never could figure out anything to do with them. In Colorado I soaked them in the creek (which was quite cold) and spread on the bedding hay and the goats seemed to like them, they sometimes ate them. I thought about a clothing line, but it's a horrible cloth, however the stenciling is very cool. I think these are dyes and not inks, even with my tinker-toy microscope I can see that the color penetrates the fiber. Ink lays on top. Ink and paint fail because of attachment. Stain establishes a bond.