Low Key

Thinking about Frank Zappa. An American genius. Going out to dump the piss-pot. You don't want to spoil your bed. Since I melt snow as wash water, I dump the pot in the same place, a blackberry patch around a corner of the house. The blackberries love the nitrogen. Also, you don't have all that unsightly yellow snow everywhere, which becomes a consideration when someone is bringing you a modem. Wade not in piss, my hallowed guest. A Viking greeting. New Year's Eve, so I start a pot of black-eyed peas. I spend a day cooking a pot of peas. Caramelizing onions and red peppers, cooking the peas for several hours with pork-belly which I then turned into cracklings. I have to remind myself it's just a pot of beans. No intention of going out before next Tuesday, when the drunk drivers should all be sleeping, so I settle in with Dante. Big winds, but a nice fire, banked down, the beans back on the stove to reheat, and a fresh pone of cornbread. Dante was quite opinionated and very vicious, and he was a pain in the ass, which is why he was endlessly exiled, it's amazing he wasn't killed. He was nasty. You can't read much of this without wondering which circle of hell you might end up inhabiting. Hawking up flaming phlegm, hanging upside down with your privates on fire, walking coals that burn your feet down to the bone. It's not attractive, in any normal sense, but it is interesting. Flamingo tongues in aspic or those small songbirds that you ate bones and all.