HELP! A Bear Is Eating Me! - Mykle Hansen [28]
So it goes. Take a gorgeous, majestic, nature-type setting. Add a lovely morning, coffee and a good breakfast. Then apply one fresh Edna, and observe her power to convert it all to crap. Suddenly, everything was going wrong, wrong, wrong. She told me to get cleaned up, and I told her to shut her trap, and she told me not to speak to her that way in front of people, and I told her to seriously shut her trap or experience later regret, and I tried to peel my sticky self up off the self-inflating couch but it stuck to my ass like toilet paper. But wait, there’s more: I stepped on a styrofoam plate of lukewarm breakfast that Edna — on purpose? or through her usual incompetence? what’s the difference? — left lying on the ground by my foot. And I slipped, fell back on the couch, and got Ranger Steve’s on my shirt collar and the back of my neck and all over my camel hair hunting jacket and even in my hair. While all around us like dumb chickens the members of Image Team stared, unblinking, not laughing only because they wouldn’t fucking dare.
“Edna, get over here and sit down right now.”
“Marv, I think you’re having an episode! I’m not getting near you or that mess! Go clean off, or roll in the mud or something.”
And it was just then that Marcia from Product Dialogue popped her morning-coiffed, moisturizer-faced, doe-eyed head out of her pup tent to say good morning to the world. Myself and Ranger Steve were the first men she beheld when she opened her senses to the morning. And like the eloquent spokesperson for Image Team that she is, she emitted the following brilliant line of product dialogue:
“Eeeeeeeew! Marv, did something make a poo on you?”
And that set them all off. It was really funny. Baumer held his nose and fanned the air around his face with his hand. “Eeeeeeeew!” Frink pointed his egg-caked spatula at me. “Eeeeeeew!” Halsey and Smith and all the others, pointing and pinching their noses and waving at the air like they were trapped in a closet with God’s Own Fart. “Eeeeeew!” Oh yes, I was really funny. Had it been Edna covered in stinking slime, I suppose I would have laughed as well. But I was not the audience, I was the joke.
I told them to shut up, and they didn’t. I told them that was enough and it wasn’t. I told them they were all fired and they didn’t care. So I assigned them all the task of going and fucking themselves with fishing rods. And I climbed in my Rover, put on that Damn Yankees CD and just drove away.
I was leaving, too. I was headed home to my luxury condominium in Seattle. Those clucking chickens could fend for themselves. Without me, they were bear bait on a stick. As far as I could tell, not one of them had brought a gun big enough to kill a bear with, not the big bears that were certain to convene on them when they smelled magic bear hot sauce all over the self-inflating couch. Frink and Baumer were used to shooting ducks and fish. I doubt any of the others had ever hunted a damn thing, and they had all done zero bear research. Baumer was toting a pistol, for Christ’s sake. The Alaskan old timers on AlaskanOldTimers.net recommend that if you carry a pistol for protection from bears, you should file the front sight off the barrel, so it doesn’t rip your sphincter when the bear shoves it up your ass. Pistols are only good for killing people.
And now, as I sit here pondering this new injury and this latest insult, now I wonder … and now I know. Baumer. Frankie. Frank Baumer never had an original idea in his life. He’s always stealing mine. Now he’s stolen this one. He’s not summoning any HELP for me, oh no. He’s not going to tell the others that he found me here, and he’s not going to summon Search & Rescue. He and Edna will leave me out here to die. Baumer, my oedipal lackey, wants me dead so he can set about worming his way into my position at Wilson & Saunders, moving into my luxury condominium with my ugly wife, and commuting from there to the Merch building in my Rover!
Baumer, you really want Edna? Why didn’t you just text me? I’m done with Edna. I’d say you can