Cracklin, my favorite food (not to be confused with the song posted by S. Stratodrive called “Crackin,” which is amazing).
We had a nice time at JazzFest, although in my dotage I’ve grown fonder of the food and less inclined to stand in crowds to hear bands perform. There are some fun photos in the set, including many of my good friend Nehemiah, who lived and worked at the ranch with me for a summer and who just returned from his second tour in Iraq, this time in Ramadi embedded with the Iraqi Police.
But the most essential photo is this one, of a single piece of cracklin, which is certainly the great food of human history. It is like a fried cross-section of a pig’s skin, with a world of fat underneath, and it’s an intoxicating, alluring, repellant ecstasy of unhealthy deliciousness.
I see that many online like bacon, and I do too; but bacon is to cracklin what a bottle rocket is to the Big Bang. If you tried to make a meme out of cracklin, it would envelop the universe and bury all matter and energy in its essence. Evidently, FDA rules make it rarer than it used to be, and this has become the only political problem about which I feel pure revolutionary fervor.
