HELP! A Bear Is Eating Me! - Mykle Hansen [22]
That’s one explanation, at least. Pardon my mild impatience but whoever hasn’t rescued me yet is an asshole. Rescue me, asshole! I’m doing my part, I’m maintaining, I’m keeping my spirits up, I’m keeping my enemy distracted so you can sneak up behind him and blow him away with high-powered hollow-point slugs. Or bring a longbow if you want to do it Nuge-Style, I don’t care. But my supplies are running thin here, I’m completely out of Bud and Bud Light, I’m rationing the Diet Pepsi but I think maybe the NutriSweet is interacting badly with my medication. I’m getting the shakes, my legs are sending me way too much e-mail, and I keep seeing bear paws out of the corner of my eyes. My ass has cut off all communication. Bugs are colonizing my pants. Mosquitoes are laying eggs in my nose! Mister Bear himself has been gone all day and is still gone but I can’t disabuse myself of the premonition that more and bigger and hungrier bears are out there, nearby, looking for meat.
HELP! Isn’t that the basic human instinct? The thing that sets us apart from the bears and the ticks and the fungus and all the other bastard wildlife that’s feeding on me? Humans help each other. Humans worry about each other. They don’t even do it because they want to, it’s a factory built-in, like lust or greed or anti-lock brakes. It’s Marketing 101, for Jesus-H-Christ’s-sake, the basic manipulation of feeling and behavior. I am missing, they worry, they desire to HELP. Ergo, they are here yet. Only they aren’t. And what the fuck is up with that? I mean, if I was a worrier I’d worry, but not being a worrier I’m just sort of confused and pissed off.
If my rescue was an ad campaign it would be bombing, falling out of the sky in flames, crashing like the Chevy Nova in Mexico, and the clients would be screaming and the Veeps would be handing me my ass in an ashtray, and I’d be wringing my hair and wondering, why? And I’d almost certainly be firing someone. Lots of people. In fact, at this point I do believe there will be some firings. As a point of principle there must be, even if they do rescue me, some firings. (And they will rescue me, god dammit, or they’re going to be doing push-ups in a kiddie pool of deep shit.)
Oh, and did I mention that for the last twenty minutes or so, the normally chatty insects have gone suspiciously silent? The frolicsome squirrels? They fucked off. The twittering Alaskan birds, they have flown, and buried in the exquisite silence, under the deafening drip of my fluid leak, I am hearing off in the brushy distance very occasional bear-moving-around sounds: twigs snapping, undergrowth being crushed, fish being farted. Somewhere off in the Alaskan muck, on the left, someone’s looking for a midnight snack.
It’s not Mister Bear. Mister Bear is light-footed in the forest; you smell his breath, and then you hear his bronchitis, but never his footsteps. He’s not here, in fact he’s been gone all morning. Mister Bear, where are you at a time like this? I bet you’re balling some she-bear ho-bag on a bear waterbed in a sleazy bear motel, while I lie here like a duck stapled to the inside of a barrel. Thanks, M.B. Knew I could count on you.
Did I mention that I hate bears? This is just not fair. Fairness doesn’t enter into this. I left a party-pack of tender, crunchy subordinates back at Camp Image Team — the official Alaskan Bear Baiting Station, remember, where the bears are supposed to congregate for meals. It’s an all-you-can-eat Homo Sapiens salad bar over there. But oh, no, that’s not good enough for the refined tastes of Alaska’s hoity-toity bears. Won’t Big Brown be disappointed when he finds out I’m the only jerky left. No more Spicy Chorizo, no more Slim Jims, just raw leg of Marv. A Marv Bar. Hey Bears! Are you hungry? Peel open a Starv-Marv!
Maybe if I lie really still and try not to smell like anything, whatever it is won’t find me. Probably