Good afternoon folks, I’m stopping by the old cowboy blog to dish out some vegetarian wisdom. That’s right, I’m a vegetarian, a most un-cowboy like habit.

I have nothing personal against meat, I just don’t like eating it. I’m not in the style, and I don’t particularly agree with kiling animals.

I have many recipes for meatless chili if any of you cowboys are interested, and I’ve also got a bit of wisdom about the best multivitamin, which can all be found on my blog. Just follow the link.

Also, one thing I do agree with my cowboy friend on, is the importance of taking the Damage Control, or a similar nutrient supplement. Do your immune system some good!

That post has come and I’d like to express my gratification with Mark’s Sisson’s Primal Blueprint. It’s a cowboy’s way of staying healthy. Why do I say this.

Because of chili.

All common folk know a cowboy’s favorite meal is a hearty bowl of trail-cooked chili. Chunks of beef slopped in with tomatoes and chilis, spiced with enough cumin and hot pepper to send children running, and slopped into a bowl the size of a ten gallon hat.

And chili just happens to line up with the caveman diet, or the paleo diet, or– as Mark calls it– the Primal Diet. No sugar, no grains, no unwanted carbs in a bowl of chili. Just good old fashioned meats and vegetables.

Of course, even a cowboy needs omega 3 supplements. So, I always take a couple omega 3 vitamins with my spicy stew. It helps with the damage control.

So get out there and wrangle yourself up a bowl of the wild west’s finest meal. And leave out the beans!

This is especially difficult as most modern Westerns are bloody, gritty, cold movies. I’m not saying they’re bad movies, I’m just saying I won’t take my six year old.

Disney came up with a solution (don’t they always?).

The Country Bears.

Don’t laugh–or do– but my six year old loves the country bears. They’re big and silly, and a cute way to introduce a child to the fun of the old west. His favorite Country Bears song is “Blood on the Saddle”

“There’s blood on the saddle
And blood on the ground
There’s blood on the saddle
There’s blood all around.”

Simple. Funny, and really pretty gory when you think about it. But the tone of the song, and the drulling, goofy, melancholy bear that sings it make it great kids fare.

It may not be the best solution, not like Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy of our youth, but it’ll do till he’s a year or two older.

Now for my health stops. Rustle yourself up some washboard abs by visiting this damage control blog. Then get yerself some vitamins online.

I was wranglin’ cattle wide along the prairie
When haunted wind stirred up a ghostly grey
And as quick a lighting’ spark
The earth descended into darkness
And chased away the shadow of the day.

It came at me from high upon the mountain
Chargin’ down through dust and rock and mud
It had feet just like a goat, but no goat,
It had a furry overcoat
And a tongue jet black from drinkin’ so much blood.

Whoa….

Ghost Llama
He haunts the plains from Peru to Al Hombra
He sends grown men cryin’ and runnin’ home to momma.
With eyes of wooly steel,
his ghostliness is real
He’ll make a tasty meal of your soul
Oh whoa,

Ghost Llama,

There are two more verses, but I’ll just stick to the one for now.

And here are my links:
First: How to deal with stress. A great website for stress supplementation
Second: Orac value. All about vitamins
Third: Abs on a High Fat Diet. A fitness post from Mark’s Daily Apple.

Mind you, I got nothing wrong with a gay cowboy. One of my favorite movies is the gay cowboy movie, Brokeback Mountain.

But I just don’t know about these ice skating cowboys. At some point you cease to be a cowboy and you beging to be a sideshow act. Just because you where a cowboy hat and jeans, don’t make you a cowboy. If that were the case, every co-ed south of the Mason Dixon would be a cowboy on any given Friday night. And that just ain’t the case.

So, ice skating cowboys, I respect them as artists or dancers or whatever they may be, but they sure ain’t cowboys.

I got a couple weird links this month. The first one is about Orthorexia nervosa. It’s sort of like anorexia, except the other way around. The other link is a search engine for public records called public records now. Both are worth a glance.

First I read ‘The Road.’ Not much of a western, but quite a good read. Then I read “No Country For Old Men” which I’ve posted about and favorably, it was a true modern western, hard and thick with the country.

But my most recent read, “Blood Meridian,” tops everything. It’s as hard as ‘No Country’ but with all the dust and heat and blood of the American desert of a hundred fifty years ago. The book is just plain mean.

‘Blood Meridian’ follows the tales of a young boy who strikes out west for nothing in particular and gets caught up in a group of cowboy and soldier raiders trecking across Mexico and western America slaughtering and scalping indians. There aren’t many likeable characters in this bunch, and that’s a cow bleedin’ fact.

The beauty of ‘Blood Meridian’ is the way McCarthy makes his topography into a poem. The descriptions are steep and harsh and epic. The kid heads out through an America described something like the land you might have seen on a cross country trip. But by the end, the wastelands wrought are damn near the descriptions of Hell. The kid has a showdown with true evil, portrayed as a naked sociopathic judge, in the dunes reaching to San Diego. Cormac McCarthy fills his dunes with the skulls and bones of dead animals, the blood and wretch of half eaten creatures baking in dry heat. Everywhere is redness, the subtitle of the book being ‘the evening redness in the west,’ and the showdown is only in America metaphorically, we’ve physically travelled all the way to Hell.

There was only one confusing point in the novel. The ending. I just wasn’t entirely sure what happened. I don’t want to spoil anything, but if you read the book, please chime in with your thoughts on what the hell went on in the outhouse.

And now for the healthy part of this post. I wouldn’t be a healthy cowboy if I didn’t mention the vitamin shoppe where you can find the best multivitamin on this wasteland or any other.

I picked up Cormac McCarthy about two years ago, when his most recent book had just been published. The book was called ‘The Road,’ and it was a bleak post apocalyptic travel story. I’m not much for science fiction and fantasy mumbo jumbo nonsense, but this book was something else. I swallowed it down and immidiately went out for ‘No Country For Old Men.’ Even Better.

Now I’m reading his ‘Blood Meridian,’ and I do believe it’s the best Western I’ve ever read. The writing is hard and cold, and thick with prairie lexicon. The main character is a young kid, thrown fast in to the long, dry desert of Mexico. Everything he passes dies, or is killed, or is just dead to begin with. There is no harder life, and McCarthy pulls the pain and blood from the wild west and makes in real and lucid, and tangible.

I believe I’ll spend the rest of this post listing some of the haunting images from Blood Meridian:

- Holding a man down while another man kicks his face in.
- Cutting off the bottom of a man’s feet and letting him crawl across the desert naked back to town.
- Stuffing a man’s head in a carboy and displaying it to a whole village.
- Waking in the night to find an old, grizzled hermit leaning toward you, breathing heavily.
- Breaking a liquor bottle over a bar, and jamming it into the bartender’s eye.
- worms crawling into the living flesh of a man’s bloated arm, as he struggles to drink from a soaked, muddy shirt with the other arm.

Yes sir, it’s a hard life for a cowboy.

But it’s no hard life for you as long as you keep taking your vitamins. Omega 3 vitamins and a website where you can buy vitamin supplements are two of the health blogs I’m bringing to you, this month. I’ll probably write again sometime in march with a new health blog. And by then, who knows, I may just have finished the McCarthy opus.

True Cowboy’s were often lost men. Time’s were hard after the Civil War. The nation was still broken apart. People were still angry. Not everything mends with a few new laws. The wild west was the last stop for people with nothing left.

Ranching and gold mining offered wealth to the horsemen and former soldiers, but it couldn’t offer a new family. These men were tough. But everyone feels the pull of loneliness in a time set aside for family, Christmas Time. It is no wonder that more cowboy deaths were reported in the month of December than any other month between 1860-1895. These weren’t straight cases of suicide, more often they were barroom brawls, or raids against indians, or simple starvation, but something of the lonely nature creeping into the back of a cowboy’s mind can lead him to the most dangerous situations. Danger, like death, is an escape from something. That’s why men of the west seek it. That’s why so many seek it today.

Alright, enough with my cowboy philosophy, let’s get to the link roundup. Orac value, the vitamin shoppe, and omega 3 vitamins are my three health links for the week. I hope you enjoy, and merry Christmas to whoever you are, whether the grandmother of twenty grandchildren, or the man all alone at a no end motel.

The costume is popular; it was sold out at the three halloween stores I checked. I told him I’d make him a master chief outfit instead. I went to the attic and found my old indian head dress I’d made when I was in boyscouts. I bought a couple plastic war hatchets from a dollar store and some kid moccasins from one of those hippie vendors down near Venice Beach. Then I asked my wife about sewing the hunting pants. She blinked a couple times and told me, “He doesn’t wan’t to be an Indian, he wants to be MASTER CHIEF. From the video game Halo.”

I had no idea what Halo was, but my wife showed me and that just about through me through a hoop of fire. I thought it was bad enough that my son wanted to be a cowboy scalpin’ indian. Now I find out he wants to be a god damned robot space soldier? What’s this world coming to.

All I’m saying is I better see a few cowboys trick-or-treating tonight, or I’m lible to stop handing out candy altogether. Sure enough, this certainly is No Country for Old Men.

And now I’m going to throw some health links your way, and I do hope they do you a bit of good. Take a look at the best multivitamins if you’re interested in that sort of thing. And after you get done with that, head on over to a site that might tell you how to relieve stress. Try anything, that’s the only way to live. That’s the cowboy way.