HELP! A Bear Is Eating Me! - Mykle Hansen [0]
A Bear is
Eating Me!
Mykle Hansen
ERASERHEAD PRESS
PORTLAND, OREGON
ERASERHEAD PRESS
205 NE BRYANT
PORTLAND, OR 97211
WWW.ERASERHEADPRESS.COM
ISBN: 1-933929-69-3
Copyright © 2008 by Mykle Hansen
Cover design by Brady Clark and Mykle Hansen.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
No humans were eaten in the making of this book.
Printed in the USA.
The author would like to thank the winter residents of Baja California for their kind attention, and Karen Townsend of Afterbirth Books for her assistance with layout, proofreading and design.
This book is dedicated to bears everywhere.
1
You think you have problems? I’m being eaten by a bear! Oh, but I’m sorry, forgive me, let’s hear about your problems. Mmm-hmm? So, your boss is mean to you? Is your car not running well? Perhaps you’re concerned about the environment. Boo, hoo! Your environment just ate my foot! I’m bleeding on your environment! And it’s a small consolation for the pain and the mess and the fear that I would be feeling — were I not so well-prepared for adverse excitement, were I not ingesting so many miraculous pain killing drugs — a small consolation that I can now say without fear of contradiction that MY PROBLEMS ARE WORSE THAN YOURS. So just shut up about your problems, okay? Okay.
If you were real, if you were here, and if you were a decent person, I’m sure you would be right now summoning HELP. Or maybe you’d be up a tree hiding from this bear, but after this bear finally quit chewing on me and wandered home, then you’d surely come down from your pansy perch and check my vital signs, make sure that I’m okay, or at least not dead yet, and upon finding me not-dead-yet you’d run off to fetch a Forest Ranger, or an off-road ambulance, or a Search & Rescue chopper with the range to reach us up here in this stupid fancy Alaskan wilderness, carrying within it a Rescue team to rescue me, and a Search team to find this god damn black bear and shoot him in his god damn black head! And also, ideally, some kind of off-road cargo transport system, to tow my Rover back to the dealership in Anchorage, there to invoke the oh-so-costly and oh-so-worth-it All Disaster Coverage clause of my insurance, and get my poor lovely road machine repaired, polished, tuned and refueled for my triumphant recovery. And then the two of us — that is, me and my car — would drive off together into the Al-Can Highway sunset, never again to venture north of Vancouver.
Yeah, I love my car. I’m sure if you were here you’d ask me all about it: you’d want to know how well it handles (like butter on a steak), what kind of mileage it gets (rakishly poor!), and how much I paid for it (which would not be any of your fucking business — but lots, I assure you.). My car and I have spent a lot of quality time together this year: we’ve listened to my iPod through its five-point Surround Sound with Digital Bass Stiffening; slalomed across the expressways with its sure-footed Dynamic Traction Control; put the fear of man-meat into Marcia from Product Dialogue on its rear Oxford leather fold-back seat with Shiatsutronic Smart Massage; we’ve crept silently along the bike lanes like a shark by the shore, startling bicyclists with its thunderous horn before leaving them twitching in clouds of its viscous exhaust. But this is the first time — pinned as I am under its left rear independent axle, after the jack slipped and dropped the whole massive package on me, after I crawled under here for sanctuary, after the bear attacked me, after I started to change the inconceivably flat tire — this is my first bout of quality time under my car. Or, well, let’s call it quantity time instead, because the actual quality is quite low. The top-end luxury appointments of my option package don’t seem to extend to the bottom end. I’m