#DudeChat3

Hey man, good to see you — yeah! It’s been a bit — but hey, the loyalty card is filled out bro, congrats dude. The DVDs are right over there.

Yeah! I’m pretty happy with the tan. I’ve been like, out west. Yeah, I just got back — I was out in New Mexico for like a week, and before that I had to spend a week in county because of the shit with the cop and the taser and whatever. I’m technically on probation and had to spend a weekend back in lock-up a bit ago but like, I’m chilling now. I’m at peace with the universe and, like, I’m oriented, man. I know I’m a coyote in the desert now, you know?

Oh, really? I felt that like that was kinda a universal saying. But I don’t know dude, my life’s been different since the spirit quest.

Yeah, that’s why I was out in Taos! You can spend a couple hundred bucks and this Indian tribe will induct you as a member then sell you peyote. And like, I needed it because of the jail shit —

Definitely. I mean, I was locked up because, like, basically I realized that a lot of people who have serious issues don’t understand how to relax in a normal way and as a result they get mad at me, who does know how to chill. They hold that against me and accuse me of having problems with like, chilling, and drinking, when in fact it’s like, them, who have issues.

So that’s what the deal was with that. The judge told me that I had to chill with drinking, then I got a CBD pen to take the edge off things after I tried skateboarding to relax (I just grabbed my kid Ralph’s board when he stayed at my place for a night after and told him he must have lost it), but then i fucked up my ankle trying to ollie so I had to drop that. Plus, after I got hurt some kids at the park made fun of me and keep egging me on so and my board got broken while I was throwing it at the ground because they were being dicks. Thee splinters from that fucked my arm a bit too, so I needed some legal pain relief.

But anyway, my Probation officer found out about the CBD because it showed up as weed in my piss test. This caused a whole thing, and I was in lock-up for a bit, then Rich had to get his cousin who runs the vape store that was selling the vape shit to testify in front of the judge that there was no weed in the vape oil and they let me out.

Anyway, while I was looking at the results of the drug test, I realized that they didn’t include peyote in the test. So like, I rang up one of my fraternity brothers, Neil, who’s some kind of lawyer or judge or something in D.C. now and asked him if it was true that you could score peyote legally if you had a card. He said no, you had to be an Indian. Then he tried to complicate it with all this shit, but I honestly kinda spaced out because I really don’t trust lawyers with anything after the shit with Angelo and Mikey. Eventually I told him I had to go because my kid was having a seizure and hung up the phone while he was rambling. He seemed freaked out about that and texted me the next day, so I guess he doesn’t know I only see the kids once every other month.

So like, after that, I sat down with the dudes from the ‘cast, and basically told them that getting to New Mexico is pretty doable for us, and we could pay like a hundred bucks (which is only two or three months worth of revenue from the pod) to get a ticket out there. Damien couldn’t go because he had band shit, and Rich apparently has a this thing with his probation officer where he feels weird about lying to him, but my plan was to just tell mine that I was heading to rehab in NM, which worked pretty well because I just had him call Damien and then Damien pretended to be a doctor. So I basically took my cash from working here, my share of the pod’s revenue for the month (like 15 bucks), took some time off, hopped in the Yaris, and drove on over to New Mexico.

Anyway, it was actually pretty easy to become an Indian, which like, I am now. Card-carrying and everything. I can legally just like have peyote now. But, uh, with the Indian shit, all I had to do to get that done was talk to these two kids I met at a Texaco. I bought each of them a pack of cigs, then they took me to this old dude who I paid for the tribal ID, and then he started giving me these lectures on like how the spirit quest works, what the animals mean, shit like that, and I don’t know, I just cut him off half way through and asked him many peyote-coin-things much I would need for one trip, then he told me one bag, so I bought three bags from him. He told me each bag was to be consumed over time, and in a ritualistic setting at first, and that he’d start the ritual as soon as I was ready.

I said I’d be down, then I told him I had to go the bathroom first and after that I walked to my car and started driving back to the motel. I did most of the first bag of the little button things at a red light on the way.

So, anyway, I finish the rest at the motel room, throw two bottles of water into a backpack my kid left at my place while he was looking for the skateboard, and head off to the desert. My motel was in the middle of nowhere so I just started walking behind it until shit kicked in.

The only thing I really remember from what the old dude said was that there are like, three levels to the quest, and the first is Trial, the second is Torment, and the Third is Identity. He explained shit about them that sounded wild, but honestly I didn’t remember. Anyway, I was pretty tired because it took me half a day to driving around to find anyone before I ran into those kids at the Texaco, so I wandered for about an hour, shit wasn’t kicking in, and then I was tired so I just fell asleep next to a rock.

So, like I wake up a bit later, and I just hear this like, music, coming from somewhere. It’s pretty dark out, but I see this fire in the distance, and the music is like, visible. I can see these beams of light in the air, and it’s what the music like, is.

So I head over to the fire, and there are like three people there, and they’re all dudes with these trucker hats on and flannels, and they’re listening to this music about beers, and farming, and shit while chilling around this fire. They see me roll up, and I say hi, and we talk, and they slowly start morphing into these like floating, glowing beings that are hovering over me. Then the beings start saying shit like “dude, are you good”, and “hey man, you look, uh, dusty” and then, finally, after I responded to their questions, they said “do you want a beer”. At this point I was so awe-struck by their beauty that I couldn’t speak, and simply nodded. They then handed me a diamond, from which flowed the most beautiful tasting nectar/honey-flavored beer I had ever had. I eventually realized the diamond had blue waves on it; I think I might have just been super fucked up and they gave me a Coors can.

I enjoyed the company of the men that became spirits for some time. Eventually I spoke to them about my truths: I told them about my visions during my incident with Mikey, made them aware of the vicious laws our country has that are designed to make innocent citizens into drunk drivers, and the torment that is divorce court. All-in-all they seemed to revel in my story telling ability. They also provided me with more diamonds filled with Honey-beer as I spoke. Eventually, I told them about my spirit quest, they agreed that it seemed pretty important, and told me to go find my animal. I can only assume that gaining the approval of the spirits and earning the beer from them was the beginning of the trial phase.

After this, set out on my journey, and I saw a collection of lights in the distance, which I headed towards. They were like giant, glowing file cabinets in the desert — shit was wild. So I roll up to them, and I’m wandering around the boxes with their light, and like, just hearing all these beautiful sounds and seeing these insane colors, and then I realize I have to leak, so I start looking for somewhere, and end up jumping over this small wooden wall, and pissing on one of the boxes. Then I hear someone shouting, and I turn around, and someone shouts more, then these red and blue stars start FLYING towards me. So I figure this is part of the Trial — I’m overcome with this primal fear, and just start running. Now, as I’m running, I’m like, fucking throwing myself over more of these tiny wooden walls, and metal walls, into these flat green boxes that are attached to these larger, 3d beige boxes. And as I’m doing this, a giant black grizzly bear is following me, and jumping over the walls as well.

Eventually, I jump over like ten or twelve walls, and then the grizzly falls as he’s jumping over one, and then I just hear a booming voice — I honestly think it was the voice of God — and it just shouts “YOU MOTHERFUCKER, DO YOU THINK YOU CAN OUT RUN THE FUCKING LAW”. Then I hopped more walls, and eventually I can’t see the stars that chased me or the bear, and I slow down, catch my breath, and look around, and walk till I see a desert again, which I head in to. Anyway, I guess my stomach wass a bit upset because I feel a little sick that point and eventually start throwing up, then I just remember feeling tired and passing out.

So I come to in this like, all white room, and I’m on this bed, and I realize that this must be, like another phase. Then this Blue spirit comes up to me, and asks me my name, how my stomach is feeling, and if I have any allergies, then she leaves. A bit later, a spirit in a black gown, with a banner hanging around his neck comes into the room, and asks my name, and then says he’s from this law firm and here to collect child support on behalf of Debra. That’s when I realize that I’ve entered the second phase of the trip: Torment. So I ask the spirit if I can urinate, and it seems uncomfortable, and then it leaves, and the blue spirit comes back and directs me to a box with a water-filled orb in it.

So I roll in there, and start looking for my phone, because I realize that I have no idea how long I’ve been on my spiritual journey. That’s when I find this weird lump on my side, and I realize it’s the second bag of peyote buttons. I then am all like, dude, I need to eat these too because I can’t just have a normal spirit trip — if I want to make the pod hit the big time, get rid of the evil spirit of Debra’s alimony that’s haunting me, and find a cool-ass spirit animal (that’s all I remember about the third part), I’m going to need to have a big-time, grade-A, no-holds-barred cool as shit spirit quest. So I move away from the water-filled orb and I piss into this tiny square attached to the wall, slam down the bag of pellets, and then I just start walking and looking around this place I’m in. I see this door with a desert outside of it, and I walk towards it, and then there are cabs, and I tell one to take me to my motel, and I’m like, off.

So I roll back to the motel, don’t really remember how I go there, step out of the cab, and the dude driving it asks me to give him something. Ijust hand him my phone, and he says no, so I fish around in my pocket, and Ijust start handing him shit I find, and eventually, one of those things is this little book he opens, pulls tiny green pages out of, and I head back inside, and it’s like, evening at this point, so I grab another bottle of water, and head out. I figure at this point I escaped the bear, which was the end of my Trial phase, got away from the ghost of my Alimony (which was definitely the Torture phase), so now this is the time for me — having survived all that the world has to throw at me — to learn what cool-ass spirit animal I get for putting up with so much weird shit. And, while I was back home, it took me a bit to find that water bottle, but I did also find the third bag of buttons, and I basically ate them like a little thing of Doritos while I was heading out from my room after I found the water, because, again, I needed to make sure that I had a kick-ass spirit animal to talk about on the pod so we could go viral and hit the big time.

So anyway, after I finish that, I start seeing wacky shit: I look at the night sky, and see the stars as circuits, then as hieroglyphics, then they pull me deep into them, and I’m just walking in the dark, then eventually, I don’t know, I just bump into this like — thing. It was some kind of giant green porcupine statue, covered in tiny spikes, which some ancient civilization must have built. It had this huge flower on top, and it just stared at me. So I sat and like, communed, with this fucking porcupine thing for a long time, and we spoke about the trauma we had both shared: how it was also persecuted by the authorities for simply existing, how many evil people had tried to stop it from being happy, and how countless lawyers had fucked him over too. Then, he told me plainly, that if I would allow the giant un-moving green porcupine to be my spirit animal, he would tell me how to move beyond the challenges the universe has thrown at me.

I sat and I pondered this: he promised me spiritual oneness with the universe while I thought, in addition to earthly gains. So I ruminated, and eventually looked at the porcupine, and told him the truth: what I was seeking wasn’t gain on my part, but rather, glory for my podcast. I needed more than he could offer me, and frankly, if I went to the desert and came back then told everyone at Shooter’s that my spirit animal was a porcupine with a flower on top, they’d all say that it meant I was gay. The porcupine then told me that I was being homophobic, explained why, and then said that it sounds like I was really missing the whole point of the spirit quest. Then I told him I was honestly hoping to score something like a hawk or a flaming rattle snake out of this third phase, and he told me that I didn’t really get how this worked, and at that point I got heated and just kinda left.

So, after that, I find this maze that has made itself visible in the sand , and eventually, it leads me to this gigantic, moving rock, with four trees shooting out of it’s side that allow it to walk above the ground. And it looks at me, and says “you seek podcast greatness, don’t you my son?” and I tell it yeah. Then it tells me to check my pockets, and I do, and it turns out while I was fucked up I didn’t finish the whole second bag of peyote buttons during the Torment phase, so I just pounded down those fuckers right there. Then I asked the rock to be my spirit animal, and it told me that it would but the guys at the sports bar it hangs out would think it meant the rock was gay. I told the rock with legs that I learned that I had just learned that using ‘gay’ as a derogatory term was homophobic while talking to the porcupine, then the rock told me that I was “finally learning, and now hopefully you’ll finally grow out of the teen-aged-mental state that destroyed your marriage as well as most other relationships” before it started walking away.

His remarks were just like, I don’t know, really fucking nasty, so I went over and flipped him on to his back so he couldn’t walk anymore and left, which I’m not bother by because I honestly wouldn’t want anything that dickish to be my spirit animal anyway.

So, from there, I start to see the stars again, and they take me to this giant black line down the middle of the desert, and all the sudden, this wind blows out of nowhere, and next to the road, I see this red box — I walk over to it, and inside are more beer containing diamonds; I don’t know why, but at that moment, I just knew that the universe was looking out for me. I squatted down, next to that long black ribbon, and drank from the diamonds as pairs of stars buzzed by me from time to time. It was the happiest moment of my life; after I finished six of the diamonds, I realized the box was almost empty, and returned to the desert.

I walked the desert for some time; as I walked, the sky itself told me secrets about being that are honestly, like, fucking wild, but I’m — get this — sworn to secrecy about. But, like, eventually, the weight of these secrets becomes physical, and I lay down because of it, and the pressure just seems to build on my stomach, and then, bang — I don’t know, I guess I must have barfed and then passed out.

I wake up some time later, and get this — I look over, and there’s this, like shape, straight up eating the barf. Just like, lapping it up, and then… it looks up at me, and I realize that it’s a coyote.

I go to pet it, like put my arm out, and the thing just fucking bolts, I mean, like high-tails it out of there. I’m still pretty tired at this point, so I pass out again, but when I wake up I know that my spirit animal is the Coyote.

Anyway, after that, it turns out my phone still had like 35 percent battery left because I hadn’t used it. When I turned on maps I learned that I had only walked about half a mile from the motel so I just walked on back there. After that I showered, hopped in the Yaris, and drove on back home because once I learned that I had a sweet-ass spirit animal, I knew I had to get this shit down for the pod as soon as possible. That was like four or five days ago: we’ll have the new episode up sometime tomorrow.

Oh, by the way, uh, my bad — the card wasn’t actually declined right there. It’s a chip reader thing we got now, you have to wiggle it a bit when you put it in, yeah, like that — ok, and it cleared this time.

Good to see you as always man. Catch you later.