Let me count the ways. . .

How many ways can y'all say, "Your ass is sittin' on pomut, kopos, bumbac, bavina, algedon, namyk, pamuk, bawelna, or just plain x#%xx*@@&&+{:->}"???

Have we devolved?

A friend of mine recently wrote that he suffers from back pain. Since we can't get Ben Gay any more (or can we? Is it just going by a different handle, like Queer Shmear?), he has had good results with a sort of back-stretching device that decompresses the spine.

OK then, why are our spines so collapsed to begin with? Can you guess? Sapient types (those with degrees on their degrees) have stated that we were never meant to walk upright. If we were still dragging our knuckles, we wouldn't all be lumbar-ing along.

Interesting theory, but I don't think we're going to try it any time soon.

Not every ache is caused by the australopithicine hunch over the keyboard. Spines are complicated and age along with the rest of us. The forces of gravity really do compress discs and cause them to grind together, sometimes with considerable agony.

But the picture of human devolution (above) isn't entirely funny. We now walk on two legs, but how often do we bother? An alarming number of people literally sit all day, only getting up to pee or grab a Danish.

Having your spine curved like a wishbone can't be healthy, and how many of us remember to sit up straight when we blog and tweet and twitch and twit and twat (sorry for that last one)?

And then there's obesity. I heard an alarming statistic the other day: girls are now reaching puberty as young as SEVEN. 43% of black girls (more prone to early puberty: I'm not being racist) have developed breasts by age 8.

Eating chicken pumped full of growth hormone may be a factor, as well as being bombarded by messages to grow up faster, faster, faster, become sexualized sooner, and have your own charge card by Grade 2 so you can dress like Lady Gaga.

But the main reason girls are experiencing this bizarre, unnatural phenomenon for the first time in human history is that they are too damn fat. Excess body fat pumps up the estrogen, and the body can't help but respond.

This means our daughters will soon be able to get pregnant at ten.

In spite of our awareness that fatness curves the spine and bloats the breasts, we carry on eating. I constantly see articles on the addictive quality of junk food and its effect on the brain. In a world ripped apart by stress and uncertainty, a world where financial and natural disaster vie with each other for the capacity to completely demoralize us, it's handy to grab a drug, a really cheap and readily available drug, and just stuff it in your mouth.

I won't get into Morgan Spurlock and his documentary, EAT ME (actually it was Supersize Me, reflecting the 30-lb. weight gain he experienced from a month of eating nothing but McDonald's). That was an extreme, wasn't it? Then why do I keep seeing items on 20-20, Dateline and other programs I never watch, depicting enormous 10-year-olds lumbering around at fat camp, the boys sporting breasts bigger than the girls'?

If kids are this fat at 8 or 10, if girls are having menstrual periods when they should be playing with Play-Doh and Care Bears, something is seriously wrong, isn't it? How does all this relate to back pain? It does, and it doesn't. Not everyone whose back hurts is obese. But many, many people are carrying a crushing load, leading to heart disease, high blood pressure, type II diabetes and general emotional angst.

It may not be politically correct to say so, but fat doesn't look good on people. If it were evenly distributed, well, maybe. But it isn't. It congregates in big rolls and sticks out through clothing, which never fits quite right because everyone's fat settles in a different place. It renders the body lumpy and unattractive. It bounces and jiggles. And it definitely plays hell with our health.

I saw another astonishing item on the TV news: surely this must have been wrong! It was all about the by-now-well-known fact that belly fat, fat around the middle of the body, is more hazardous than in other places (such as a big fat head, or fat elbows).

But that's not what shocked me. A doctor set out the limits of health: the maximum waist size for men should be 46", and for women, 42".

Forty-Two Fucking Inches?????

I don't think my waist was that big at nine months pregnant. I am far from a skinny person, but my waist measurement is 28". Is this the allowance we make for the obesity rate in North America? Do people strive to get "down to" 42" or 46"? What were they orginally, 74"?

Society is still obsessed with thinness and fitness. Just look at all the useless exercise gadgets that promise 50 lbs. of weight loss in a month (with just 15 minutes of exercise, 3 times a week!). At the same time, there is a parallel march towards early death: these fat kids who can't seem to stay out of the candy aisle are going to be twice as fat in adulthood, aren't they? What's going to happen to adults who developed arterial plaque at 10?

I'm in a rotten mood, that's what. Natural disasters all over the world all seem to be caused by global warming. We've done this to ourselves. Instead of being a sleek, modern computer society, we're turning into blobs that can be rolled down the street. Why does the human race hate itself so much? Why this lack of discipline? Why do "experts" insist this is all genetic, when these mysterious genes never showed themselves until now? That's like inheriting blue eyes at 42.

I just get this awful fall-of-Rome feeling. Fin de siecle, or whatever. We used to fear plagues, but these have disappeared from the headlines, as passe as Legionnaire's disease. I know the human race likes to preach doom and gloom - it sells more products, especially self-help books that help you eat, pray, and lose 50 pounds in Bali with a gorgeous man.

But I wonder what kind of world I am leaving for my grandchildren. Have we devolved this dramatically? Has short-term greed pretty much doomed us? Are all those horrific SF movies really true: has the fabric of civilization started to seriously come apart?

So here I sit, hunched over my computer (actually, I'm trying to sit up straight, but it probably won't last), contemplating the extremes of a society that I must belong to, because I have no other choice. I wonder what contribution I have to make. I am selfish, which means I'm not willing to go overseas and help flood victims. I would soon be overwhelmed.

I can love my grandchildren, try to even out and average the violent highs and lows of being a kid in 2010, so that they have some sense of stability.

As a lapsed churchgoer, I'm surprised this passage from Isaiah leaped into my head:

"Every valley shall be raised up,
every mountain and and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain."

But what else?

They're not fat. At least it's a start.

Betty Boop Cartoon Banned For Drug Use 1934

This has to rate as the strangest cartoon I've ever seen. What were these guys smoking?

Was Ernie Kovacs murdered?

DEATH IN SIX TAKES

Ernie is driving his Corvair station wagon at blinding speed along Santa Monica Boulevard, an unfamiliar route. He has just come from a Hollywood party full of celebrities, at which he was collossally bored. It is teeming down rain, pitch black, and the Corvair is fishtailing, hard to control. He has had four stiff drinks and feels slightly tipsy. Then he realizes he has left his cigars at home, unthinkable, and has nothing with which to obliterate his thoughts. $200,000.00 in debt from poker and gin games, which he played badly. The IRS on his tail for an astronomical sum of back taxes. Several days before, he was overheard to say, “I’m worth more dead than alive.” Almost absently, he lets go of the wheel, just to see what will happen.

Suddenly the car skids and spins, Ernie grabs the wheel and tries to steer madly, but it is too late: a split-second later, it slams full-force into a utility pole.

Take One:

Ernie dies instantly, on impact. Police find him hours later, thrown partly out of the passenger side. His left hand is outstretched towards an unlit Havana cigar. Cause of death: fractured skull and ruptured aorta.

Take Two:

Ernie does not die. After the sickening noise of the crash, he is somehow aware and awake, with the weird clarity that often follows massive trauma. He reaches over to open the passenger door and begins to crawl out. “Edie,” he says. He can’t die. Edie will be left with the mess. A few seconds later, he blacks out.

Take Three:

Ernie does not die. He begins to crawl out the passenger door, but an astounding blow of impossibly powerful pain brings him down as his brain begins to haemorrhage and his heart explodes.

Take Four:

The police arrive. They find Ernie face-down on the pavement with no sign of life. Even the most hardened cop feels tearful and sick. A jackal reporter takes a macabre photo of the dead body, and next day it appears on the cover of every tabloid in Hollywood.

Take Five:

The police arrive. They find Ernie face-down on the pavement with no sign of life. “What are we gonna. . . “ “I don’t know. Maybe. . . “ “How ‘bout we say he was trying to light a cigar.” “Anybody got one?” “Here.” “This isn’t the right kind.” “It won’t matter anyway, a cigar’s a cigar.”

Take Six:

Another reporter arrives, but Ernie’s body is already gone. He takes out a large Havana cigar, and though they make him sick, he smokes half of it. He stubs it out, places it on the pavement, and takes a picture of it. The photo will appear on the cover of every newspaper in Hollywood.

The Big Broadcast of 1938 (1938) [II/IX]

An Ethiopian in the fuel supply

I don’t know what got me onto this. My Dad used to sit at the dinner table, soused, and monologue by the hour. As his captive audience, we were expected to listen. If we didn’t, we risked his wrath.

We listened.

He kept talking about a comedian from the 1930s, his favourite, who spoke in a nasal drawl and made the English language do back-flips and double-twists. He was constantly hooking his top hat on his cane behind his head. He juggled. He had some negative traits that my Dad loved, and was known to mutter, “Can’t stand kids and dogs.”

Along with maxims like “never give a sucker an even break” and “you can’t cheat an honest man,” his legend included bizarre pool routines (in which the cue somehow ended up twisted like a corkscrew) and card games where he held five aces. But most of all, this man drank. And drank. Until at age 68, heart, liver, lungs and even mind gave way, and he died of rampant alcoholism.

W. C. Fields had a Dickensian childhood, which was perhaps why he was so superb at playing Wilkins Micawber in the movie version of David Copperfield. (I saw this just the other day on TCN. The potential for semi-dramatic acting in this role was almost heartbreaking. He could have been so much more than a crabby old drunk who knew how to juggle.) Fields ran away from his drunken lout of a father (do drunken louts run in families, I wonder?) at age eleven. Cadged his way through the slums of Philadelphia like the Artful Dodger, until one day when he attended a sleazy circus and saw someone throw so many balls in the air – and catch them – that they blurred together.

So the lad started practicing. First with two lemons, probably stolen. Then other fruits (casaba melons? Let’s not get too literal here). He would balance a large stick (like a pool cue) on the end of his toe, toss it up in the air, and attempt to catch it on his toe, raking his shins open in the process.

Oh all right, let’s skip all this garbage and go on to his spectacular career as a master juggler at the Ziegfeld Follies, where someone “discovered” him for the movies. His silents weren’t much, just displays of dexterity and tomfoolery. But in his first talkie, audiences sat up. No one had ever spoken like that before, and never would again.

Fields kept a mistress for fourteen years, one Carlotta Monti, a “dusky beauty” (in his words) whom he nicknamed Chinamen for her vivid style of dress. He was constantly derailing her infant career as a singer and actress, foreshadowing I Love Lucy by decades. Monti was as dependent on Fields as he was on her, but for different reasons.

She left behind a ghostwritten memoir which has no sense of her voice, but which is packed with anecdotes, some of which might even be true. This was later made into a movie with Rod Steiger and Valerie Perrine called W. C. Fields and Me.

I can only serve up a slice of Monti, before sharing my own rather eccentric Best of Fields list.:

“Woody (her name for him: rhymes with ‘moody’) didn’t drive too many women to distraction, but among those he did were the script girls – through his ad libbing. The script for one scene in Poppy called for him to say, ‘I will now play the Moonlight Sonata.’ It was a simple line, but, instead of delivering it, he mumbled, ‘I will now render the allegro movement from the Duggi Jig Schreckensnack opera of Gilka Kimmel, an opus Piptitone.’

The script girl gasped, and asked how to spell the words. Sutherland (the director) wanted an interpretation. Woody shrugged, and admitted, ‘I don’t know myself what it means. To tell you the truth, it just popped out. But leave it in, Eddie, it’s got a nice lilt to it.”

Eddie left it in.”

This man practiced a form of spontaneous, convoluted verbal jazz, almost impossible to reproduce here. One of the first Fields movies I ever saw was a little-known classic called Mississippi, ostensibly starring a very young Bing Crosby in magnificent voice. But Fields, as the riverboat captain, easily stole every scene he was in.

The movie not only included one of his best card game scenes ever (including the astonishing statement “the man who holds the first four aces wins”), but featured rambling, probably mostly improvised reminiscences about his youth as a dauntless Indian fighter.

“Grabbing my bowie knife, I cut a path through a solid wall of human flesh. . . dragging my canoe behind me!” In another version, he has “my canoe under one arm and a Rocky Mountain goat under the other.” By the end of the movie he’s scared to death by a cigar store Indian, and quickly recants: “I would no more think of harming a hair on a redskin’s head than sticking a fork in my mother’s back.”

My other favorite, which I watched on late-night TV in 1965, was The Big Broadcast of 1938, one of a series of mediocre, wildly popular “Big Broadcast” films. There was something of a Fields revival going on then, and I saw most of the better-known ones like The Bank Dick and My Little Chickadee (in which he and Mae West outdrawled each other). But there was something that grabbed me about this movie, in which Bob Hope played his first starring role as an insecure host on a cruise ship. Just witnessing Bob Hope fumble and fail, all his lame jokes falling flat, was gratifying enough, but he also sang Thanks for the Memory (NOT “memories”) with the delightful Shirley Ross (NOT DorothyLamour, who played one of his several ex-wives).

But Fields, oh, Fields! Before he lands on the deck of the ship in a flying golf cart, he plays a round in which the ball behaves like one of his juggled objects. When he pours sand out of his golf shoe at the end of the scene, various objects like live frogs drop out (“Hmmmm, so that's what happened to that tongue sandwich”). It’s the humming and muttering and fiddling and “drat”s and "Godfrey Daniels" that make this scene, and I swear I can’t begin to reproduce them. Then, delight of delights, he does his infamous poolroom scene, once again dominating a picture which has such dismal clangers as a performance of Wagner by Nazi sympathizer Kierstan Flagstad (wearing horns and a breastplate and brandishing a spear), and an awful love song called Don’t Tell a Secret to a Rose by a clearly-gay non-Latino called Tito Guizarre.

My brother, who was drunk at the time, came in halfway through the movie and we guffawed through the rest of it. I recorded the soundtrack on our old Webcor reel-to-reel with the five-pound microphone, and listened to it endlessly. I had become a Fields fan for life.

Then I promptly forgot all about him.

I started to think he was kind of offputting, which he was. I had read a couple of biographies, and his self-destructive drinking and the horrifying collapse of his once-athletic body at the end of his life was beyond disturbing. His “friends” sneaked alcohol into the sanitarium as he lay dying, hallucinating that vultures were coming to get him. Carlotta Monti, aware that the sound of rain was one of the only things that helped him sleep, stood outside his room with a hose and kept up a continual light patter on the roof.

So he died, passed into legend, and – what? What got me onto this bizarre topic? One day I tried to get a DVD of Mississippi, and found that it had disappeared. It was never shown on TV, perhaps due to cringe-inducing black stereotypes. After much sleuthing, I found a crummy bootleg copy on eBay. Someone must have held a movie camera in front of a TV or something. But it was barely watchable, and I began to understand my fascination.

This tough, lonely, cynical, oversensitive, supremely gifted man, this curmudgeon whose friends didn’t understand him but still loved him lavishly, was one of a kind. No one could have invented him: he would have been completely implausible. But my favourite thing about Fields is this: in Robert Lewis Taylor’s early Fields bio, he tells this heartwarming story.

“Many supporters of Chaplin have long resented Fields’ notoriety. Perhaps the best testimonial to Chaplin’s greatness is the fact that Fields was incapable of watching him perform for more than a few minutes. The virtuosity of the little fellow’s pantomime caused Fields to suffer horribly. One evening, a few years before Fields’ death, he was persuaded to attend a showing of early Chaplin two-reelers. At a point in the action where Chaplin suffocated a 300-pound villain by pulling a gas street lamp down over his head, the laughter rose in deafening crescendo, and Fields was heard to cough desperately.

‘Hot in here,’ he muttered to his companion, who was fortified against the cooling system with a heavy tweed jacket. ‘I need air.’ Fields left the theatre and waited outside in his Lincoln. Later, asked what he thought of Chaplin’s work, he said, ‘The son of a bitch is a ballet dancer.’

‘He’s pretty funny, don’t you think?’ his companion went on doggedly.

‘He’s the best ballet dancer that ever lived,’ said Fields, ‘and if I get a good chance I’ll kill him with my bare hands.”

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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But the greatest of these. . .

When 17-year-old Tory Inglis went to New Westminster's first Pride celebration last June, she was pretty excited about it.

It's not easy being a gay teenager. In spite of all the huge strides we've supposedly made in the realm of "tolerance" (and what does it mean when I "tolerate" you? It's a pretty stingy word), prejudice and even outright contempt lurk in hidden and not-so-hidden places. But Tory really wanted to go. An event such as this, vibrant and joyful, would boost the spirits of any young person who sometimes feels marginalized by who she is.

Tori's picture in the Vancouver Province newspaper reveals a shy-looking, serious young woman in dark-framed glasses, a girl who never thought she'd get into such dire trouble just for going to a parade. She hardly looks like a foaming radical, but rather someone who's quietly but fervently seeking authenticity in a world full of posturing.

Yes, Tory went to the Pride parade, and while she was there, someone snapped a picture of her with (the story says) "two gay men". And that would have been that, except for another truth about Tory: she has been a lifelong, active member of First Presbyterian Church, baptised and confirmed.

When the photo came out in the June 12 edition of the Royal City Record, it didn't just cause a stir.

It caused a storm.

There must have been much buzzing about this before Tory was called into the principal's office (so to speak). It was about a month after the photo appeared in the local paper that she was told to meet with the minister "and a female member of the church" (a buffer? The article doesn't say).

The response was predictable. Basically, Tory had her hand slapped. But it was worse than that. She was scolded for being a bad role model, for "promoting a sexual lifestyle".

She knew that, like most denominations, her church was against gay marriage, but she never expected to be told to step down as a junior youth leader. Tory sat and quietly wept during the disciplinary hearing (for that's what it was). Perhaps her tormentors felt this was a good thing, a sign of repentance.

The Province article states, "The minister told her the church would prefer if she withdraw from the group that organized the Pride events. But she refused and withdrew her membership from the church instead."

I have been through something like this in my own church, not over my sexual orientation but for my profound, disturbing doubts about leadership and the agenda we were expected to follow, especially in light of the fact that "our" church (unlike everyone else) claims to be gay-friendly and "even" ordains openly gay ministers, so long as they don't practice it beyond the bonds of monogamy.

Keep it quiet, boys and girls. No Pride parade photos, OK? If a United Church minister appeared on one of those floats, what would happen? Can you guess?

And dare I even mention the possibility that a minister might be furthering his own agenda, his need for public recognition: that he might have "issues" that he can only work out in front of the cameras on national television? Worse than that: why didn't anyone object to having these cameras filming the worship service, and why can't I even talk to anyone about it? And how about this: why is it OK and even "courageous" for him to do this, and not OK for Tory to be photographed at a parade?

"I see a lot of shallowness," a friend of mine said years ago. I have never seen such commitment and passion in a human being, but organized religion slowly and systematically snuffed it out.

Tory has fortunately received supportive calls from other church members, but the elders are adamant that she sinned in some fundamental way. Her mother commented, "I never thought they'd say she's not a good role model, because she is, and we've raised her to be that way. Our belief is that God created us to be who we are, and I've raised her to be true to who she is."

Imagine that. Another sinner! God created lesbians and gays? What sort of heresy is this?

What would Jesus say? Well. . . he didn't say anything at all about homosexuality, in spite of the fact that fundamentalists like to twist the gospel into something resembling a pretzel. As for marriage, he was sort of against it, telling people it might be better if they were celibate, though acknowledging that most people couldn't manage it.

If I may indulge in duelling Bible quotes, here's a pretty good one from 1st Corinthians: "Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion." - J. Christ.

In being true to herself, Tory was forced to step down from a lifelong, cherished commitment. I can say to you now that this is about as painful as losing an arm. When you sever ties like that, you leave a huge chunk of yourself behind.

But if she stayed on, what would be the consequences? Whispered conversations, quickly hushed when she appears? Judgemental glances? Threats to leave if she stays?

One of the organizers of the Royal City Pride Society describes Tory as "intelligent, quiet and shy". Hardly the tattooed, pierced, raging radical we sometimes see on the news. This young woman quietly made a life-changing decision, choosing authenticity over phoniness, reality over posturing.

And she paid the price.

Tory made an incredible statement that made the hair on my arms stand up: "Above all, I want to promote peace and love and acceptance. And in a place that condemns people for loving, I would much rather be in a place that accepts people for who they are."

Heresy! Floats, drag queens, marching bands. People so "out" they're in your face. How dare she, a Christian church-goer, align herself with such destructive nonsense? How can any 17-year-old know she's gay, anyway? Isn't it just a phase, won't she come around if we just put her together with a nice young man in the youth group? Even if she is gay, can't she just get married anyway to avoid embarrassment (or at least keep quiet about it)?

These are the strictures of the past, and they carry forward in a distressing way. Every so often I think about returning to a church I attended for 15 years, but I find I just can't do it. There is an inauthenticity there that clangs like a cymbal, resounds like a hollow gong, and there isn't a single person I can talk to about it without the fear of being judged or even edged out.

"If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing," a great writer once said.

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."

That sounds like a pretty good desription of a courageous young woman named Tory Inglis.

Angry squirrel on a roof

I don't know what these little buggers are so upset about. If I said these kinds of things in public, I might be locked up. Are they just territorial, or what? I'm just sayin'. I see them outside the window of my semi-new office, which faces out on green space. They take flying leaps, scurry up and down the cedars, and - we can't call it chattering or scolding. It's plain nasty, is what it is. The tail-flapping is definitely very macho. So do females do this too, in a display of machisma? Are they defending, what, the nut in their mouth(s), the nut buried under the tree, the tree itself? Or are they just nuts? Are they scaring away imaginary predators? Or just racketing off for the hell of it?

I'm just askin'.

Grizzly Man Timothy Treadwell death footage

Contrary to past reports, there is indeed a secret video record of the death of Timothy Treadwell. It's so secret I'm posting it here right now.

Obviously, it was a mismatch, and the salmon inevitably went to Boo Boo the Bear.

The sillies who tread on the lines

OK, so the photo is faked. Or at least, it's not really Timothy Treadwell.

But it's a photo of someone, probably Grizzly Adams. This is a trained bear however, a professional bear, and the ones Treadwell hung out with were decidedly not.

His thrill came from getting as close as he could to the rogue animals, some of them huge, all of them unpredictable, in Katmai National Park in Alaska. I don't know where that is either, except to say (and this is truly incredible) that the slight, effeminate, and outright crazy-sounding Treadwell spent every summer with these bears for 13 years and never once came to harm.

That is. . .until one of them ate him alive.

I found a photo, perhaps spurious, called "Timothy Treadwell Autopsy," which is one of the most gruesome things I have ever seen. It shows a mangled human torso with no arms or head and one leg, bent at the knee and still wearing a shoe. This looked real enough that I think it was somebody who had been partially eaten by something, or otherwise badly mangled.

I saw the fascinatingly deadpan, almost tongue-in-cheek Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man a few years ago. It was spellbinding, but also very, very strange. Treadwell himself was an untreated bipolar and sober alcoholic/drug addict who claimed his passion for the bears had saved him from suicide. He was also a compulsive attention-seeker and failed actor whose angst and foolhardy impulses came across dramatically in his narration: using a tripod-mounted video camera, he recorded all the breathtaking sights and sounds of what he called the Grizzly Maze. Supposedly, he was compiling footage for a nature program (a la Crocodile Hunter) which never materialized, perhaps due to his insane habit of getting close enough to the massive, impersonally violent beasts to touch them on the nose.

He was lunch on legs, and he knew it, so that the end of the story was both horrible and inevitable. My somewhat morbid interest in Treadwell has recently been re-ignited by a fascinating 8-part TV documentary series called Grizzly Man Diaries. This program depicts the leisurely unfolding of daily life in the wild and features some of Treadwell's saner and more insightful commentary. I think it's far superior to Werner Herzog's fatalistic, wildly prejudiced production, with Herzog's funereal narration delivered with a completely emotionless, oppressive German accent.

Even the music on the TV series is evocative, with lazy, golden guitar chords illustrating those long afternoons running with the wild foxes, and dark cello music for the bears, shadow-shapes looming, massive and fundamentally threatening. Excerpts from his diary, read in a completely different kind of voice, are sometimes poignant and insightful. Someone has gone to great effort to present the saner and more poetic side of Treadwell.

The man who walked with the grizzlies was killed and partially eaten (along with his girl friend, likely functioning as a beard: Treadwell kept saying things like, boy it sure would be easier to be gay, oh yeah, you could just go to a truck stop for relief, too bad I'm not gay!, and shit like that) during his 13th season. He had stayed a little too late, the bears were extra hungry, and he was definitely pushing the envelope. Leaving food out in the open, not fencing off his camp, walking right up to the hulking beasts and talking to them in a high, silly, effeminate voice: these weren't the actions of a seasoned naturalist or even a hunter. They were, to be honest, the behaviour of a suicidal nut case who over and over again said he knew that the bears were eventually going to catch up with him and destroy him.

I don't think I could have coped with the real Treadwell. His "straight" life between bear seasons must have been pretty awful. He wrote a book and somehow wangled appearances on Letterman and elsewhere, but conservationists railed against him for his lunatic risks. He wasn't St. Francis of fucking Assisi, for God's sake, though he fancied himself to be the alpha male, the sheer force of his personality dominating even the massive, swaggering boars who could mount any female they wanted.

Something leaped into my head today, a verse by A. A. Milne, inventor of the world's most famous bear. It seems almost eerily appropriate.

Whenenever I walk in a London street,

I'm ever so careful to watch my feet;

And I keep in the squares,

And the masses of bears,

Who wait at the corners all ready to eat

The sillies who tread on the lines of the street

Go back to their lairs,

And I say to them, "Bears,

Just look how I'm walking in all the squares!"