How Particular Dude Got Cheap

It begins when there is no more plenty. Counting pennies when that’s all yr down to. Every act examined for a way to make it cost one less. When the decision is food, rent or medicine, ‘cause you can’t get all three. (Helpful hint: start with the rent. Better sick and hungry at home under a blanket, than well and fed in a snowstorm under the Interstate Overpass.) 

When each tiny expense attacks one’s economic security, the relationship between meager wages and busy life becomes clear. Every unit of money represents a fragment of that life. Everything you buy is paid for with a piece of you, your time.

Consider the new Plastic Doodad, made far away with tiny pieces of others’ lives. Sooner or later, everything we purchase falls apart. Now the cracked plastic Weed-Whacker, motor fried, is smashed into pieces and crammed in the dumpster. Life is now a broken piece of junk--that portion anyhow.

And Why? Why does one whack weeds, and if one does, why with a weed whacker? Is this not the unnecessary taking of life? Why burn coal or build a dam, just for weed whacking ease? Where are the scythes? Who gets to decide which are propagated, and which are violently cut down in their youth? Is floral dissent allowed? It all, of course, is vanity.

The Cheap Dude cooks squash for dinner ‘cause that’s what’s in the ‘fridge.' What he “wants" to eat is irrelevant. Check the veggies, read the code dates, and eat what will go bad soonest. Wasting food is wasting money, always.

One tiny dab of toothpaste each oral thrashing means Cheap Dude makes a tube last far longer than the mad scientists at Global Fornication Toof Research Kitchen ever imagined. To their dismay, if they knew! 

Cheap Dude walks to the grocery to save the gas. He sews his holy socks. He uses hand soap for “shaving cream.” He heats his house with trash pallets in an old wood stove. So desperate to save money he quit drinking alcohol--alcoholics can’t afford to drink anyhow, mentally, physically, or financially.

The phrase came into being: My god you are cheap, dude. Do you always have to be so stinkin cheap, dude? But the Cheap Dude is holding on to his life, his sanity, his very existence. Every minute is precious, he wishes to never sell one second short. He wants to live--not buy, insure, and maintain crap. 

As for “Dude": Every African, Asian, and European in the western States is a Dude, an overdressed tenderfoot, a tourist. Cheap Dude is fourth generation Arizonan, he can say he’s a native but his people ain’t really from here. Only the folks on the Rez, and most Mexicans, are not Dudes.