Primal Nutrition Cowboy

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.