January 19, 2025
I know you won’t believe me when I say this, but I’ve been going through a phase. A bear phase. It all started with this crazy documentary on HBO (Max, whatever) called “Chimp Crazy.” If you watched that 4-part masterpiece, you got a glimpse into the crazy lives of humans who own chimpanzees and the dangers that come when the chimps “stop being polite and start getting real.” In many cases, “real” means ripping human faces right off of their skulls and wreaking havoc on law enforcement officers and dorky PETA lawyers alike. The show featured the self-proclaimed “Dolly Parton of Chimps” and when I look at her, I can’t help but see myself in 20 years. Aslan willing and the creek don’t rise.
Anyway, the show had a podcast companion show called “Tooth and Claw” which is a podcast hosted by three best friends who discuss animal attacks every week and some of the things that humans do that might cause animals to lose their collective shit and try to kill us. The guy with the credibility on the pod is a bear biologist named Wes Larson, who has spent many years studying bears – Grizzly bears, Polar bears, and Black bears…oh my. His little brother Jeff is a lovable lug with the kind of self-deprecating humor that I so enjoy, and the third host is their BFF, Mike Smith, who always adds a bit of thoughtful retrospection to the show. I am obsessed with these guys, and they have been feeding my healthy obsession with bears since September. They actually cover all kinds of animals on the pod…bears, tigers, leopards, snakes, bees, sharks…any wild animal that can attack and do damage to a human is fair game for them. And they’ve been taking me down a survival rabbit hole.
I’m now convinced that bear spray is the answer to everything, and I’d carry it to deter pests at work if that wouldn’t be frowned upon by HR. They taught me that if a Black Bear is attacking you, it’s probably trying to eat you and the best thing you can do to try to survive is to fight back – throw rocks, kick, punch the bear’s nose. Alternatively, if a Grizzly bear attacks you, it may be trying to eat you, but it is probably doing something defensive like trying to get you away from cubs or some food source. But also, it may be trying to eat you. They’ve taught me about electric fences you can put up while camping to deter critters, Critter Getter alarms, the importance of sleeping next to your bear spray. Outside of the realm of bears, I’ve also learned that I shouldn’t swim in the ocean near dawn or dusk or in murky water (sharks), if a lion is trying to eat you, he might have a toothache, and a great way to get fucked up in Yellowstone is to turn your back on a Bison (which we have all been calling Buffalo which is apparently wrong). I’ve learned that a good way to protect yourself from enemies is to put Bullet ants down their pants, and that there are men on this earth who inject themselves with snake venom to build up immunity to snake bites…for basically no reason other than they think it makes them look tough. And honestly…they do look very very tough. No notes.
Staying on theme with some of my other obsessions I’ve mentioned here before – the Donner Party, the Flight 571 plane crash that stranded Uruguayan rugby players in the unforgiving terrain of the Andes Mountains – my bear obsession and the tangential obsession with wilderness survival has left me endlessly fascinated with the human spirit. People find themselves in situations that they have no business surviving. It makes no sense that someone could have their head inside of a Grizzly bear’s mouth and live to tell the tale, but they have and they will. It makes no sense that a man could be bitten by a Black Mamba and somehow drive himself to safety and survive the nearly 2 hour journey to the hospital. It makes no sense that Aron Ralston was able to sever his own arm using a multi-tool and somehow didn’t die from the pain or blood loss before he found help. We all love a good survival story. We love to celebrate survivors and they end up on our tv’s and in our newsfeeds, and we place them up on pedestals to represent the best of humanity – the things we are capable of overcoming, the way nature tries to conquer us and we refuse to die. Like Michael Myers in every single Halloween movie or the Huns in Mulan’s avalanche, we “pop up out of the snow like daisies” and carry on with our dastardly deeds. And in times when nature is raging against us, which is certainly the case in LA right now, we take the hope that these stories offer us and tuck it away to remind us that we can survive.
The thing that gets me about these stories sometimes is guilt over any inconvenience I perceive in my life. I might be really going through it, but I’m not “pinned under a boulder with no food or water looking at my Swiss army knife and wondering if I can saw through my own arm with it” going-through-it. I’m not “eating my friends on a glacier in the Andes” going-through-it. There’s no Grizzly bear in my tent. Hell, I’m not even in a tent. I’m in a 4-story house that I really overpaid for in the middle of a DC suburb where I can get Walmart groceries and any kind of pizza I want delivered right to my doorstep. Maybe things can’t be that bad. I get in that groove of dismissing my own feelings and problems like optimism is my full time job. I may have been dropped in a room full of pony shit, but that means there’s a pony in here somewhere, so hand me a fucking shovel! At least it’s not bear shit, after all!
And yeah, optimism is a good thing. But I guess this mentality sometimes makes me feel like I’m running away from my own problems, and not giving myself time to process and feel whatever grief or anger or frustration that comes with them, because SOMEONE ELSE IS BEING ATTACKED BY A LION AT THIS VERY MOMENT. But it’s like the proverbial bear is trying to eat my face off while I’m at home safe in my Snuggie with my puppy sleeping on my feet, and I just shut the door in it’s face. That’ll do it. I’ll just ignore it and it will go away. But then I realize, it’s nature and it’s life and “life finds a way” and that door isn’t going to keep the bear away from my face. I can open my work laptop and build slides and pretend like all is well, but that bear is out there tearing shit up trying to get in here. And she will. And if I don’t pay attention, she will eat my face off. She’ll freeze me to death. She’ll poison me. She’ll set me on fire. She’ll destroy me. I can run away, but she’s faster and stronger – and survival doesn’t happen until after she catches me. Survival is the part that comes after. Survival happens after the crash, after the attack, after the avalanche, after the fire…it comes after the world gets the chance to throw punches and you are still there to feel the pain that gets left behind.
I think about the last few months, and I feel like there have been a lot of natural disasters on my personal path. My teammate and friend resigning at work right before Christmas felt like a bear trying to eat me. It felt like I’d never recover. Losing another close friend for reasons that I don’t understand felt like a fire I couldn’t contain and in the aftermath it felt as cold as being on that mountain with those Rugby players. Okay maybe not that cold. But, cold and lonely, nonetheless. Like no one could hear me or remembered that I was alive and feeling and suffering. Spending time with my family for the holidays felt like the rescue I’d been waiting for, only to be dropped back out into the wilderness again when the new year began and life moved on. I think I spent the last part of 2024 running and dodging and throwing punches, trying out run these disasters – and maybe that rush of adrenaline was good in the moment to keep me from shutting down and getting burned or mauled more than I needed to. But now, in the after, is when the pain comes and survival begins. Let’s see how it goes.
How are you surviving the beginning of 2025?
Cluelessness is the Mother of Invention 