Film maker, OA Woody Creek correspondent and all around American Hero Wayne Ewing sent me an article today about a new movement taking foot in the shadows of New York City. Self-proclaimed urban cavemen sustain themselves solely on red meat and some vegetables and fruits. In addition, they eat in a manner that would mimic the hunting and gathering of that time, gorging on red meat and then fasting for one, two or three days. Their thought is that primitive man – though he was typically lucky to live to 30 – was in much better shape than the pudgy, modern, air conditioned nightmares that haunt the earth presently.
“Mr. De Vany’s blog promotes what he calls Evolutionary Fitness. Like his disciples in New York, he believes that ancient humans could perform physical feats that would awe the gym rats of today.
His followers believe that he too is capable of fearsome feats. When Mr. Durant told a gathering of New York cavemen that he had seen Mr. De Vany at a seminar in Las Vegas, Matthew Sanocki, 34, asked if Mr. De Vany looked as muscular in the flesh as in pictures on his blog.
“He looks great,” Mr. Durant said. “You feel like he could, at a moment’s notice, charge at you and trample you.”
Already, the New York cavemen are getting attention from the patriarchs of the paleo movement. One such figure, Erwan Le Corre, a Frenchman whom the magazine Men’s Health said “may rank as one of the most all-around physically fit men on the planet,” stopped by Mr. Durant’s while visiting the city in December. The men sealed their friendship with what both described as a bare-chested — and in Mr. Le Corre’s case, barefoot — run across the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges on a frigid night.”
It’s not a rare occurance any more to find a stark reminder in just about every populated pocket of this tumbling rock that pretty much everyone drawing air these days is out of their friggin’ minds, though I am encouraged by the particular brand of crazy these cavemen are bringing to the table. It’s almost like, quietly, in a distinctly macho manner, old mother gaia is blushingly making amends for all the lame vegans skulking about our fair neighborhoods.
Ah, what balance emerges when the collective consciousness gets goose pimples from vertigo.