Lazy bones

I slept in until almost 7! I can't believe it. True, Sketch got me up at 5 to give him breakfast. Instead of staying up, I returned to bed and slept for 2 hours. Very unlike me.

My latest batch of scrapple tried something different and I may have stumbled upon  a winner. Indeed this morning over breakfast I was thinking, Wow, this may be the best scrapple I ever made. I've been experimenting since getting the grinder. Never found the right combination of traditional ingredients that satisfied me, tasted too gamey. This time I went to straight sausage but, on a whim, added a couple of ox tails, using the cooking liquid as well. Man! Sausage and ox tail scrapple is definitely something to try again, aiming for quality control. I'm serious, the taste is great, this may be the best scrapple I ever made.

News full of heat alert stuff. Sketch and I will be fine. We don't have AC but do have a very efficient and effective tall fan, if it comes to that.

I hope to do some work in the basement on my office this afternoon, in the hottest part of the day.

The book I'm reading, Amusing Ourselves to Death, really nails what is happening in our culture today. And Berman, in The Twilight of American Culture, offers individual, if not institutional, remedy, or at least its possibility.

You and I can lead the “monastic” life, and we can start to do it right now. And don’t worry about being marginalized; this is good. As Don DeLillo says, in a culture such as ours, the writer, for example, is likely to be more significant for being marginal. “In the end,” he suggests, “writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.” The same can be said of all monastic activities, and of the people who engage in them.

Well, I'm a marginal writer, that's for sure. Significant? Interesting idea.