HELP! A Bear Is Eating Me! - Mykle Hansen [31]
Nature is a thorn in humanity’s side. Nature’s time has come and passed, and I fucking hate nature. Hate it hate it hate it. When I get home, I’m going to eliminate all nature from my life, starting with Wagner.
America almost had nature beat back in the fifties, but then those whale-hugging longhairs worked their way into the infrastructure of society and ate away at our resolve. They declared a cease-fire with Nature, but Nature doesn’t know when to quit. Nature keeps spoiling for another fight, and I swear on the dashboard of my Rover that Nature is going to get one from me. I am Homo Sapiens, a Human, and Humans run this planet. Nature is our servant and Nature is our sandwich. Nature could supply us with fresh King Crab, wild Chinook salmon and exotic hardwoods for our mini-bars, and Nature could be satisfied with that, but no, Nature won’t learn its place. Nature has to get uppity. So I say: Nature, you are fired.
Alaska, your yard is a mess and the neighbors are concerned. Your excessive sprawl of unregulated Nature must be mowed and edged. Your woods are training camps for terrorist bears; we must log them. Your tundra is full of dangerous road hazards: we must flatten, grade and pave it. Your oil and natural gas reserves might explode at any moment; it is urgent that we drain them. You need cell phone towers and 24-hour convenience stores and freeways full of cops. You need highways and condominiums and billboards, lots of billboards. You need goods and services, DMX radio and Direct TV. You need wireless Internet access in your cars. Only then will America be safe from the natural threat.
You’ll thank us later, Alaska. Look at the squalor you live in, your rotting little cabins, your mosquitoes and mud everywhere. Nature victimizes innocent Alaskans every day and you just put up with it. You deserve more, Alaska. One fine day you will go to work in modern, well-lit telemarketing centers instead of dingy dangerous fishing boats. Someday you will meet your deaths in bright clean traffic calamities instead of dirty dark forests like this one.
My brother Jimmy died in traffic. Mom was at work and Jimmy came home after school and I guess he was hungry, apparently he ate something he found under the sink, he thought it was Tang but it was more like Drano. He couldn’t breathe, he was choking, drooling blood according to the testimony from the driver of the truck that hit him when he ran out of the apartment and into the expressway. I guess he thought someone would pull over and help him.
But I didn’t get those details until years after the funeral. The first I heard about Jimmy’s demise was Dad screaming and wailing and shattering the cordless phone against the wall and stomping on the plastic pieces. Then he called me downstairs and made me sit on the sofa so he could tell me something: that Jimmy’s not coming next week, Jimmy’s never coming, Jimmy’s never doing anything any more because of my stupid mother. And then he turned away from me and squeezed his face with his hands, and then when I spoke he turned back and slapped me open handed across the mouth, and then he ran downstairs to the TV room, where he was never to be disturbed, and reclined on his reclining TV seat and whimpered. From down below me he yelled me the news through the heating ducts: Jimmy’s Dead.
Jimmy was only five and I was only six, and as I understood Death, it only happened to old people, sick people and animals in slaughterhouses. Unless someone shoots you with a gun. So I wondered who had shot Jimmy with a gun? It must have been Mom, because that’s what Dad said. Boy, I thought, Jimmy must have been very, very naughty for Mom to shoot him. And if Mom would shoot Jimmy, would