Gatlinburg...More Like FATlinburg

Howdy You Cheatin' Squaller Hollers! It's I, the rootin' tootinest Cheater of them ALL! And BOY do I have a tale for you this week! I didn't get to weigh in, cause I was in GATLINBURG, Tennessee for a joint Bachelor/Bachelorette weekend. So, even though I don't have a personal PHYSICAL victory to impress you with, I do have some things I learned mentally. Things that, though they may not be directly related to weight loss, do carry some similar lessons that one might learn on a journey for betterment.

You see, for my boy Bobby Cheeseman's bachelor party I wasn't going to allow myself my usual ONE measly cheat day. I was going to go buck wild as much as I could with him and all our friends to celebrate his last chaste days! (he's a virgin...shhhh) This was one of those new fangled bachelor parties that coincided with the bachelorette party. It's a brave new world ladies and gentleman, and those bachelorettes were NOT happy with those strippers' cooters in their faces, but MAN did it make me horny...I mean WISTFUL!


This post was bound to get a little sappy... but I didn't know it would happen that fast! Woo!

On Thursday evening, after work, I drove my ass about 10 hours from Chicago to Tennessee, the whole time contemplating if this decision was going to be at all worth it. Knowing the whole time that I'd be going to a bachelor party celebrating a young man whom I've never known to drink, in a town I'd never had any interest in visiting, all while I was pretty broke and stressed out at work wasn't necessarily a mental recipe for a fun getaway. The drive alone at night cleared my head, it actually put me at ease. It's a place where one can truly be isolated with one's thoughts while seeing sights you maybe never thought you'd see before.

I got a few phone calls from family and friends to keep me company. In this futuristic landscape we live in I've got endless streams of music from my phone and conversations with people far more successful, talented, and intelligent than I to keep pass the time with. Also, on the drive there were strip malls, wind mills, farms, and remnants of old road side attractions (like giant rocking chairs, flea markets, and abandoned motels). Through the south eastern chunk of Indiana a thunderstorm was threatening, yet the rain staved off (THANK CHRIST), which provided this driver with a lightening bolt feast for the eyes! Such majesty, such terror, such worthy entertainment that we lose appreciation of in these lives of routine.

Within this thunderstorm in southeastern Indiana I made my first stop. TACO BELL MawFcklers! (pronounced Ma-fuck-lers) I was eager to get the cheating going so I took my younger brother's advice and went with the cheaper cravings menu items and let me tell you that shit is GAME CHANGING! brrrrap brrap brraap! I'm talking 2 cheesy bean and rice burritos, 2 beefy 5-layers, and a deep dickin' crunk wrap supreme! Was it too much, you ask?! Why yes it was, but it was just me in the car so FUCK IT! Why that order in particular? What else can you eat and drive with better than some burritos and a CRUNCH WRAP SUPREME  beotch?! The road ahead of me was still long, so I trudged on.

I made one more stop and when I did, I only had an hour and a half left until I got to our...CABIN IN THE WOODS (DUN DUN DUNNNNNNN). So I got a coffee and stretched it out and powered through until I arrived at 5AM EST. I was told by Bobby Cheese that I should lock the doors to the car, fore bears are known to open car doors and rummage for food ripping the interior of the cars to SHREDS! So I like locked that car and RAN inside as fast as I could and crashed out for about 5 hours.

When I awoke, BOOM, time for breakfast. Was I going to go light? Maybe an egg and an avacado? NAW BITCH! When we rolled up to Davy Crockett's Breakfast Camp I got me a BIG ASS breakfast quesadilla with, that's right, a side of legit corned beef hash (ALL DAY SON)! I'm gonna get this outta the way all at once cause we went BACK there on Sunday morning before we rolled out back to our respective homes because we liked it so much. That time I got 2 biscuits and gravy...WITH? YOU GUESSED IT! Another side of corned beef hash (BOOM, all WEEKEND Mawfckler!). I honestly can't say which meal I liked more it was all good.

woman depicted NOT a member of
the bachelor party.

"What were some other meals of note?" you ask?! Well LET ME TELL YOU! Friday evening after a couple rounds of EXTREME GO CARTING and a pretty terrifying Mountain Coaster that we controlled ourselves we went to Boss Hoggs BBQ. Not bad, AND almost not even a cheat day meal! There's certainly better BBQ but when is BBQ NOT delicious? Exactly. I had the 2 meat 2 Side dinner. I got beef brisket and pulled pork and for sides: green beans and potato salad. SEE?! If it weren't for the potato salad and the slice of Texas toast it came with it may as well been a week day!

The other meal of note was after we spent all day at Dollywood (the food IN Dollywood was exactly what you'd expect: Wendy's quality fast food at twice the price! YUM-A-DUMB DUMBASSES). Dollywood is a dry theme park so we all got a good bit of drinking in after we left and BEFORE we ate so we needed to fill our bellies. Cheeseman knew a delicious Mexican joint in town that catered a wedding he had gone to called No Way Jose's Mexican Cantina. I ordered a chicken burrito dinner.

"THAT'S IT?!"

FUCK OFF! Little did I know when I drunkenly made the HASTY order that it would be SMOTHERED in queso! Cheeseman really knows how to bring the cheese! Other than that it was really a standard chicken burrito dinner. I've had worse and that queso really shot the whole meal up a few pegs with me. Cheeseman knows what he's doing with cheese so he also got a side of that queso to dip chips into. DAMN was that good shit.

One more thing that struck me a bit odd was that they always gave you a tiny side of "corn pone" or unsophisticated cornbread with you meal. ANY meal. We had it with breakfast and we had it with our Mexican. Good, but strange.

Yee-Haw Brewing

Before I tell you that YES I stopped at Taco Bell one last time on my 9 to 10 hour drive home alone or that YES (Alex Romero) I did drink probably a case of beer while I was there that weekend; I'd like to say that I miss my friends. I wish I could see them more and the same goes for my family. I chose to live in Chicago to pursue a passion, a way or life, and in order to do so you have to sacrifice a lot. For a guy like me, who gets distracted easily, it can take 10, 25, 50 times as long to achieve anything in this life, let alone something as unstable and tumultuous as success in entertainment and media.

What I am trying to get at here is that weekends like the Cheeseman bachelor party trip to Gatlinburg is something that you don't pass up, and I almost did. It's not a distraction, it's a reset. It's a sort of spiritual cleanse that will leave you more clear headed, more driven, and more optimistic on the other side. The distractions are in your routines, it's the NEED for a Starbucks every morning, it's the urge to open facebook real quick resulting in an hour or more of incessant scrolling, it's the 9th beer when you should have stopped at one or none.

Shake your shit up. Create uncomfortable, achievable, goals for yourself and pursue them with 1000 times the tenacity you'd use to simply get through the next day and the next and the next. Find the focus and then give yourself rewards as you achieve these goals.

That's not to say that food should be treated as reward...or treats, nor should time with your favorite people. BUT, if you allow yourself, DEMAND of yourself, time apart from the things you love the most in order to pursue the things that you know will be good for you, well...you come back to and tell me that they don't taste sweeter than ever before, make you laugh harder than when you were a care free little kid, feel safer than when your parents tucked you in at night. Life should be about thrills, highs, lows, indescribable feelings. Give yourself those sensations again.

Gluttony is a tough addiction. Whether it's cigarettes, booze, food, drugs, tv, phones, sex it's there to comfort you, like your routine that sucks years from your life. It's comfort that should scare you, not COMFORT you. Shake it up, set your goals, focus, conquer, and then give yourself one BIG ASS Cheat Day, not as a reward for doing a good little job at your little chores, but because you earned it. Work hard, earn your keep, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, eat like your life depended on it. Laugh like your life depended on it, love like your life depended on it.

ELE,
Zach

Oh yeah, and go see the Hatfield and McCoy Dinner theatre,
 if for nothing else: THIS LADY