HELP! A Bear Is Eating Me! - Mykle Hansen [7]
I’m not getting depressed. Power of positive thinking. Power of yes! I am smart and lucky and sexy and cool and wealthy. I am edgy! I have good teeth and excellent taste! Good things happen to me. Because I make them happen. And because the universe loves me.
Tom Petty never seemed so deep and meaningful to me before. But somehow Tom Petty knew: the waiting really is the hardest part — especially when you’re covered with crawling ants. But I can beat this. I’m a can-doer. I just have to bide my time. Someone will come, soon. Meanwhile I’ve got something here in my hand that feels about like I remember codeine feeling, plus another OxySufnix, in the unmistakable blister pack. A cold Bud, a Slim Jim and these pills, and then I’m going to try to get some shut-eye.
Getting rescued tomorrow. Big day ahead.
3
Asshole ate my other foot! This really impacts my outlook.
Oh, I was close. I was there! I was dancing in the end-zone. I would be angry, oh how pissed off I would be if my mood weren’t so well-stabilized. I would be howling mad and probably depressed and blubbery too, maybe even weeping like a little girl, or trembling like a blind kitten in a sack falling towards the water … man, you gotta love mood stabilizing drugs.
But can I at least describe this to you? How close I was? I woke up in the morning and Mister Bear was gone. Sensing an opening, I unsheathed my plan and plunged into action. From the snack box I extracted one Texas Pete’s Yard-Long Spicy Chorizo Jerky Twister — the largest, longest, thickest and most satisfying beef jerky Texas has to offer — and bent one end of the stiff, sulfated meat into a crude hook. Using this wobbly meat-hook I reached out like a stoned croupier to rake in the jackpot: the jack! I hooked the knob of the jack crank, but it slipped free. I hooked it again, it slipped free, again and again … but I did not give up, I persevered, because Marv Pushkin Gives Nothing to Nobody, and Especially Not UP! and finally, after eons of this, I somehow snagged the jerky in its scissor knee and oh so slowly, oh so carefully and gently began to reel it in across the lumpy, scrubby, muddy and buggy bog I’ve been lying in, soaking in, sinking into … thence to jack the fucking axle off my knees, thence to clamber into the cockpit, lock the door, load the gun, cue up the Slayer, crank up the seat-heater and the Shiatsutronic roto-massage system … oh, I could smell it!
And then Mister Giant Fat Stupid Snarling Vicious Ugly Malodorous Evil Angry Buzz-Killing Bear arrived out of nowhere, howling and screaming as if I was his girlfriend and the jack was his best friend from college. He charged, rammed the car hard — further crushing my knees, and somehow lowering this oil pan a centimeter closer to my face — and then he tried to squeeze under here with the rest of me, swiping with his paw, snapping his teeth … he almost got me.
He got the jack instead, and he also got the Jerky Twister. My Texas Pete’s Yard-Long Spicy Chorizo Jerky Twister. Like my feet aren’t good enough, that he has to raid my snacks as well. He’s eating me and he’s starving me.
But it’s a funny thing: in the pantheon of jerky, there’s chorizo, spicy chorizo, extra-spicy chorizo … and then, at the bottom of a smoking crater in the center of the room, there’s Texas Pete’s. Hotter Than The Sun™. Don’t