Sharing Means Bears

Sweet fixie, bear.

Let’s talk about bears, people. Let’s talk about the other evening when I came home from making my rounds as Raleigh’s most exclusive, sought after pet sitter and found a giant fucking bear in my front yard.

I do not live in the sticks. I can see the city skyline from the front of my neighborhood, which is off of South Wilmington Street, just south of that giant dog-food/soybean processing plant and the Kings Motel, the closed down Coca-Cola factory, the Wilmington Street Center and the Hallelujah Soup Kitchen. We have a lot of used cars which can be financed at 18 percent in my part of town, but we do not have bears.  Nobody in Raleigh is supposed to have bears. Bears don’t live in this part of the state at all—the coastal region, yes, the mountains, certainly, but not in the middle and definitely not two miles south of downtown. Still there it was, a giant bear. How giant? It’s hard to say, maybe 400 lbs. Is that a big bear? Turns out it’s kind of average actually, but as far as I’m concerned any bear is a big bear the moment I realize it’s in my yard. 

It wasn’t that I couldn’t believe it, it was more like something so removed from the scope of my reality that I had never considered it. Don’t you find that in wholly new, thoroughly striking situations—car crashes, love at first sight and that kind of thing—seconds are minutes and thoughts and details achieve a bizarre quality of precision? But while the memory can be vivid, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s accurate. Anyone who watches a lot of Law and Order can tell you that the accounts of eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable.

My inner dialog went like this: “goddamn it, not another stray dog ...man, that’s a really big dog …holy shit is that a fucking bear…” by that point it wasn’t a question, it was a fact. More than a fact, it was a bear. I watched it walk towards the street sign on the corner, noticing the height of its’ head  on the channel post like I was noting the height of a robber exiting a convenience store. I sat in my truck for a few seconds doing nothing and then I just kind of reflexively called 911. The cops came and they, like me, sat in their vehicles and watched the bear. The bear lumbered down the street. It seemed like a pretty slow bear, a casual bear. It crossed someone else's yard and walked off towards Hammond Road on the other side of the block. That was as far as I could see it, but it probably crossed Hammond and went into the woods on the other side. What did it do in the woods? Who could know.

In the grand scheme of things, this was not a catastrophe or even an emergency. I was scared because way down deep inside I’m a sissy thing, but I certainly wasn’t in danger especially considering I was 50 feet away and I was inside a truck. It was pretty cool, but mostly it was unusual.

And what do citizens of the modern world do when something unusual happens? We update our status, yo. We tweet, we post, we blog, we use whatever social network we like to use to share the experience on the greatest sharing thing of all time: the Internet.  We do it in words and in pictures, sometimes in moving pictures. We research, we find links, we discourse, we email experts, and we compare our experience with other people’s experiences as well as fictional retellings of other people’s experiences. Or at least this is what I do. In fact, the very first thing I did when I got inside was throw a line about what just happened up on Facebook.  There’s no way I’m going to keep the news of a giant bear in my yard to myself.  After all, my life is interesting and, as god is my witness, I will be validated.

So are we all completely narcissistic? Or is all this sharing née self expression a logical bi-product of living in a scary amazing fucked-up beautiful world that makes little sense and rightfully reminds us all the time that we are far from alone and pretty cosmically insignificant? Even though laundry detergents and retail outlets and candidates running for office invite us to be “a part of the conversation” all the time, it seems like we share plenty with one another sans prompting. When we see, read or learn a thing we share it with a natural ease. As a result, we begin to know more and more of the same things, share more and more of the same experiences. Sometimes I think we are close to vibrating together in some digital version of the Buddhist collective unconscious. Sometimes I think we’re turning into the Borg.

Either way I look at it, I cannot deny that we now live in a world where nothing known to man is unable to be known by a man with an Internet connection or a phone. Jesus, that’s amazing. Stop and think about it. What that also means is that while back in the day I got my kicks with a newspaper and a cup of coffee (yes, I know I can still do that you sanctimonious Luddite prick) I can now simultaneously watch a live stream of someone reaching the peak of Mount Everest and read a story about one man eating another man’s face because the first man is high on something called bath salts. Bath salts, by the way, used to be relaxing. There was a time when they were a mix of like epsom salt and lavendar oil and you used them in the bath, you know, to relax. That's all they were. So sometimes I feel a little bit out of my element. Please don’t get me wrong; I don’t want things to stop changing. This shit is fascinating and I can’t look away, but sometimes I need to get in touch with my people and say, “did you all see that? Fucking weird.”

Other times I wonder what will become of the solitary experience.

Bears have a lot of solitary experiences. It’s true. They spend most of their time alone and they mostly go about their bear business by themselves. They live where they live and sometimes, as was the case with the bear in my yard, they try to walk a long way–like from one side of the state to the other–to get a little bear action. Besides hanging out with their mom for a few years they really only care about company for sex–it’s the original shared experience, I suppose. While I know this to be true about bears because I read it on a website, I bet that a bear out of the proverbial woods is as freaked out as I am by, say, flash mobs or seeing pictures a robot on Mars took of itself. 

One of the saddest things I’ve ever seen was a male polar bear at the North Carolina Zoo that was bellowing and had been doing so for weeks, the docent told me, because its’ mate had died.  This was several years ago—there aren't any polar bears at the zoo now. Poor dude was alone in Asheboro, North Carolina in July. It was loud and hot and not anything like the arctic, I would imagine. Children were jeering at him while they crammed skittles up their noses. He was very much out of his element, and he didn’t have anyone he could share it with who would understand how he felt. His only close connection to his home and history was gone. His only real companion was dead, and probably all the things that made any real sense to him, beyond biological basics like eating and sleeping, went with her. He was making a sound of the soul that was so powerfully, horribly alone that words about aloneness don’t seem pure enough to describe it. Jesus Christ, it made me sad and also very aware that there was no way I could really understand or help him. Everybody knows shitty hipsters can’t comfort a polar bear that feels alone in his crappy habitat at his shitty zoo.  All a shitty hipster can do is talk about it some more.