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Dumper rhymes with Thumper, an old favorite character from Bambi whom I now find annoying.


Bambi reminds me of this skit that will never get made: it's called Vegan Hunter. It's about a morally progressive guy who gets teased into hunting deer by his redneck father-in-law. He rationalizes his capitulation to the slaughter-life by pointing out that he hunts with a bow, which works out his back muscles. "I needed do some work on those anyway," he says. Bow hunting is also more difficult and "honorable" than using a gun. He further ameliorates the process by invoking some imagined Native American empathy methods: being real sweet to the thing after the kill, giving it a grateful smooch, mourning it as a unique being, etc. Also, (and I agree with this)- Big deal if you kill an animal that's running around wild, and then eat it. This is how it's supposed to go. You have to deal with the blood and skin and reality of it. You pay the spiritual entrance fee. The experience teaches you a lot more about the wheel of life than picking up some ambiguous cube of flesh in cellophane at Food Lion, pretending it's a savory slab of ruby Jello (Dinner Flavor), that never hung on bones and filled out skin.

Food Lion is the saddest store. I was forced to go there during a "getaway weekend" in rural Virginia. They had the biggest selection of white bread ( the kind you can squeeze into a tiny bleached starch ball, then paste on the wall) I've ever seen. This stuff is not bread.
Somebody said: "A country without bread has no soul." In a related synapse event, I just remembered one of Bunuel's early movies was called "Land without Bread." It was about a backwards place in Spain where they hadn't figured out bread making- yet they had corny pictures of dinosaurs on classroom walls. The movie struck me as a semi-fictionalized black comedy, though dopes on the internet (if you look it up) describe it as a "searing indictment" of this or that in relation to poverty.

Oh Luis Bunuel, your films seem more prescient than ever! You foresaw my visit to Food Lion. They were selling creepy dinosaur Trapper keepers in the aisle next to the bleach-paste.