#

In response to Steven’s post, my band Bad Dudes from Dude City will be going back to basics, releasing our own line of shirts and albums. We’re currently going to sell one (1) XL white ink on black fabric BD/DC shirt, and it will be available only via lottery.

The next album, being even more exclusive, will be released in 8 second snippets to scavenger hunt winners until they can all meet up at “Dudes Fest 2011″ to splice all of the snippets together. We will all listen to the album once and then destroy it.

It will be the rarest shit EVER.

Given the chance, there are any number of things I would be agreeable in doing. On a trip several years ago to Arizona, I learned of a man, with a wife and children, who was employed by the US Parks service and lived inside the Grand Canyon in a spacious, yet quaint, home in the middle of one of the most famous holes in the ground that we’ve ever known.

His job was to paint portraits of the different formations he came across while lazily walking about his backyard (which, you guessed correctly, is the Grand Canyon – it’s big.)

Once every week or so, a helicopter would come around, pick up the man, the wife, and the children perhaps, and fly however many miles away from the big hole to civilization where they would hurriedly pick what they needed, and what they wanted, and race back to the helicopter to get back to the place they’d moved because of where they just were shopping. The kids do their schooling via CB Radio to make sure they grow up to be normal, well-adjusted citizens of the world (as well adjusted as you could be having been raised in the Grand Canyon – at the very least it would make you unique, but perhaps not in a good way.) They have all the amenities you could want, paid for by the government, so that the rest area can sell some paintings of the big rocks you just saw with your eyes moments ago.

It is a good deal for all involved, in theory.

This wouldn’t be one of those agreeable situations I would volunteer for. I would, however volunteer to be the guy who lived next to him.

There’s no basis for this except that it just seems like a nice place to live. No one to bother you unless you wanted to be bothered. You could just sit out on the front porch, watching Arizona be pretty, and occasionally go “This is nice…not like those other places.”

Having said that, I’ve figured out the basis for my thoughts on living next door to the guy who lived in the Grand Canyon. I could be left alone in a tranquil and beautiful spot, but still cling tightly to my envious human nature.

“We gets to fly in a helicopter to go to the city!”

Well, at least I don’t live in a big hole you son-of-a-bitch.

Sometimes you just gotta hear the shit straight from the experts.

You can check out more of their bombastic bullshit at http://www.myspace.com/therealbaddudes and read the admittedly mega-dumb ramblings of their drummer SKULL VAN KRUSH at http://www.twitter.com/skullvankrush.

“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.“

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Vegetarianism.

It’s a thing I’ve struggled with for a long time. The biggest part of me never wants to eat anything that has eyes, or can speak, or run, or do anything we associate with living. I don’t want to eat anything that has internal organs. I don’t want to eat anything that was “born.”  But I do. I do it, and I enjoy it, and only after my dirty work is done do I think of what I’ve done and feel slight pangs of guilt. Sure, this thing I ate, whether it’s a cow, or a chicken, or a pig, or a fish was dead already and I was just consuming part of its corpse, but I still can’t help but feel if the demand for the death of this thing wasn’t precipitated by my “need” to eat it’s dead body, then maybe it would be spared.

I had tried in the past to stop eating meat after going to trade shows, back when I was Creative Director of ESPN.com’s Outdoors website, and seeing booth after booth of, let’s be frank, deer mutilation tools and weapons to kill every living thing in the forest. I saw it as senseless. “They sell meat at the store… you don’t have to kill anything!”  It was impractical and cruel to me. I saw it as the last acceptable sociopathic act short of being a NFL fan. Vegetarianism was the “pussy diet.”  And I happen to like In-N-Out Burger to an alarming degree, so my attempts were short-lived at these out-of-town events.

I’d see something like Fast Food Nation and cringe appropriately, or a documentary like Food, Inc. and sit there, jaw agape, wondering why the fuck anyone would ever anything from a farm that uses chemicals or a slaughterhouse that murders and abuses and tortures animals and then augments the byproducts of their grisly, shit-covered deaths with chemicals to “clean” them and then make them more “tasty” and “appealing” and I wonder…why do I eat meat? Or eat cheese?

Well, I eat it because it tastes good.

“But there are alternatives out there!” you might say, and believe me, I hear you, and I even like some of them. Tofurkey isn’t horrible, and I just moments ago at Tofu Larb at the Thai place by my office… But I am lazy and the alternatives  are not convenient.

For a while after seeing these sorts of films, or reading books on the subject, I will make a vow to watch what I imbibe, and try to cut out, or at least cut back on the amount of animal going through my  digestive system. And eventually it comes down to the conversation I usually have with my wife..

“Who talked you into it, this time?”

“What are you going to eat for protein?”

“I don’t see the big deal with eating chickens.” (My wife doesn’t eat Beef.)

“I don’t see the point in limiting yourself to not doing anything.” which is the most valid argument, and it gets me to thinking and eventually, I will break and say “Eh, I could go for some chicken fingers.”

(and I just want to state for the record this isn’t posted to make my wife out as a villain or anything. The opposite, really. She’s just a very logical person who always asks questions and makes me think about things in ways I normally wouldn’t. I am more reactionary and impulsive and she’s more reasoned and deliberate with what she does and says. I just go “Fuck this shit, I’m not eating meat!” and she’s like “Really?”

I wish it were easier. And I wish I had the willpower. I haven’t had a drop to drink in easily a year. I haven’t smoked since last March and used to have a two pack a day habit and quit cold turkey after a decade and a half. But this is the great battle I can’t seem to win.

So I’m challenging myself to at least cut back, for now. Some things I eat are not really helped at all by the inclusion of meat into them. I could enjoy a grilled cheese sandwich just as much as a ham and cheese. I can have bean burritos instead of beef burritos. I mean, really the possibilities are endless.

The wife is probably never going to see eye-to-eye on this, and I think she is purposely not watching Food, Inc., just because she doesn’t want to see the stuff that goes on, because then it’ll ruin it for her.

I can’t really say I blame her.

April 30, 2010: Six tornadoes blew through the town of East End, Arkansas, destroying the Fire station and multiple homes, businesses, and piece of property.  My wife and I cowered in our bathroom with our two cats and our dog. It was pretty scary. What’d you do this weekend?

Click photos for Full Size: