Finally, the deal with the bears

Today someone asked me what my deal is with bears, and since it was not the first time I've been asked this question, I thought it was time for an in-depth exploration of that relationship.

But first, I promised a heart person picture yesterday, and heart person picture I shall deliver.



Note that the hearts are all intact. If you were to introduce a bear to this picture, it would be very different. This is one of my many issues with bears.

I was looking for a "Blood Red" crayon, but apparently that colour doesn't exist in either my 96 crayon set, or my various novelty crayon packets (personally, I think a sparkly blood coloured crayon would be pretty damn popular if they ever created it), so I had to use "Razzmatazz".

To get back to bears, I was not born with a dislike of bears. As a child, I once asked my parents if I could keep a baby bear as a pet. They said no. I said, "Why not? I could keep it in a cage in the back yard." We had a fair-sized yard, so I didn't see why we couldn't sacrifice a small chunk to my bear. My parents said, "But a little bear will grow into a big bear, and then it will need more space." And, of course, I replied, "Don't worry about that, I just won't feed it." This seemed like a perfect plan, given that I'd been taught you eat to grow, so if you don't want to grow, you just don't eat. I wasn't yet aware of the option of Fluoroquinolones . I kind of wish someone had taught me about them, instead of wasting time on useless information, like rhymes about piggies going to market. I just started thinking about that rhyme and realized I always imagined the first piggy was going to market to buy a pumpkin or something, but thinking about it now, I'm wondering if he was there to be sold and subsequently slaughtered for delicious bacon. Also, what kind of pig eats roast beef? Actually, I guess a smart pig that knows how to avoid being eaten.

Actually, the story of my dream of owning a pet bear contains a good lesson about talking to children. When you say "If you don't eat your broccoli you won't grow big and tall," always remember that the child also hears, "If I want to stay tiny and cute so that I can continue to manipulate these silly large humans, I should stop eating broccoli." A better way to phrase it is: "If you don't want to die a horrible death of scurvy then you should probably eat your fruits and vegetables. What? You don't know what scurvy is? Well, basically, your skin won't be able to hold itself together and then you'll bleed to death. It won't be pretty. So, eat your damn vegetables." This way there's no confusion about what the worst consequences of not eating are. It's also a good way to familiarize them with the various vitamin deficiencies and how they can kill you, which, like the adverse effects of Fluoroquinolone use in adolescents, would have been nice information to have ingrained early on to save me some study time this summer (I should probably note, there's a big licensing exam in August that's planning on taking my life and my brain...but don't worry, that M.F. doesn't know who it's up against).

Wow, I left bears rather quickly. Back to it. So, I did not get a pet baby bear in the end, which is good, because my ingenious not feeding him plan would have almost certainly led to death. By which I mean my death, because at some point I would have tried to hug my fuzzy baby bear and he would have hugged me back with his very sharp teeth.

The point of that story is that at one point I did not fear bears. In fact, I had a potentially lethal love of them. What changed? Well, my best guess is that it somehow relates to my brothers (Shamus and Mysterious Brother X), who both have had close encounters with bears trying to kill them. Bears are tricky though, from reading this blog and other sources, you might get the impression that they just wander around mauling people randomly, but, sometimes, bears also commit premeditated murder. Luckily, both Shamus and Mysterious Brother X both escaped mainly unscathed. To the best of my recollection (forgive me if there are errors, I have trouble remembering stories without me in them, you know, because of the boredom), Shamus was run off the road by a bear. I don't believe that the bear was also in a car at the time, but it might have been, because I just know he saw a bear on the road, and while one would assume that means it was running across, he very well could have meant it was waving at him from a red hatchback. My younger brother, Mysterious Brother X, had a bear walk right past another tent full of cookies to break into his tent and eat his bug spray. Clearly the bear didn't actually want to eat bug spray as much as he wanted my brother to be defenseless against the mosquitoes and blackflies so that they could kill him and no one would trace it back to him. How do I know this was his intention? Because I was that bear. Dun dun dun.

Actually, no, I'm not a bear. That I know of.

We still haven't reached the root of my bear fear, because if I feared everything that ever thought it might not want one of my brothers to exist, then I wouldn't be able to leave the house...or stay inside the house...or live inside my own body. No, I think it's more due to the fact that as long as I was around them, I knew that they would be eaten first, which was comforting. So, maybe my fear of bears is actually just that I miss having my brothers around.

Or it's because I had a nightmare in which a bear (or tiger...or bear-tiger hybrid, "teariger"...dreams can be confusing) ate the leg off one of our school's deans while we all watched in horror. Oh, and then another one where a family of bears chased me and a group of unfamiliar people up to an isolated cabin, and the dream ended with us hiding in the ceiling as the bears waited beneath. Periodically people would fall and then the bears would maul them to death, until I woke up. Then they stopped mauling/existing. Actually, that last one is probably the reason for the bear fear. And thus another mystery solved.