So where do bears shit?

Yesterday I wrote a news brief about luxury and telecommunications products for bathrooms. In-shower tanning, a full-length towel warmer with a built-in flat screen, LCD television/bathroom mirror/touchscreen computer combos, a new line of ‘chromatherapy’ Jacuzzis, toilets with a three-setting bidet and an air-dryer incorporated. Are people fucking lame enough to spend their money on this shit? It’s all shit! Besides the fucking awesome toilet, of course. Bidets are great. But I can still think of thousands of better ways to blow 5 Gs. If we get a situation wherein ‘bathrooms become the new kitchen’ and people race to turn their erstwhile Fortresses of Solitude into a satellite office/wealth showcase, I’ll be disappointed. Not in the marketers, but in the consumers. Mass insecurity makes them race to spend their money on what they’re told is needed to demonstrate their status. And of course that proclivity brings out the marketing ‘wolves’, in the same way someone will always come up to bring a needy hooch home. In that situation, who gets the censure? The hooch or the opportunist who nails her? So yeah, disappointed . . . I always thought I’d wait until menopause or a major health-scare before becoming a recluse somewhere, but I’m starting to wonder.

On fleeing civilization . . . I watched Grizzly Man yesterday. It aired on the Discovery Channel, I suppose after the Oscars told it to fuck itself, completely ruining my plans to get my defence done in one sacrificed Friday night (though I’m very audibly sick, so it wasn’t much of a privation) because I’d also rented the Aristocrats (yeah, it was funneeeeeee) and decided a double-bill of Oscar-snubbed documentaries deserved getting really snaked. Werner Herzog danced a genius line by pointing out the follies of a laughable man without making us laugh at him. The only time I really guffawed was when a friend of Treadwell’s from California described how Treadwell had pretended he was Australian ‘but his accent was more Kennedy-esque’, and, upon Herzog asking if he wasn’t hurt by the lie, answered: “If it doesn’t scare the cows, who cares?”

It was a great movie, I recommend it . . . thing is, I still don’t get where Treadwell's head was at. Okay, he had abused alot of substances, maybe he was dim to begin with, sexually insecure - seems a little too familiar to me, but there’s still a massive disconnect I’m not getting. I love bears - they’re beautiful, cute, anthropomorphic and porcine at once, great attitude. When I lived in the middle of nowhere up north, especially when I was care-taking on the old bishop’s estate, there were often bears around, and I loved them being around. As long as ‘around’ meant quite far away, and the mommies and cubs not being separated by me. Though they weren’t at all scary if I felt they were sufficiently far away, I had absolutely no temptation to get closer. And these were black bears - grizzly bears are bigger and have more of a history of eating people, I think. So where I stop understanding altogether is how he could initially decide to close the safety space which seems so natural and instinctive. No matter how dim you are. Although I’ve heard from people who worked in provincial parks out west Americans can be really fucking dumb about bears, the favourite example being the parents who put honey on their kids’s hands so they can get really cute photos.

If we’ve got to a point where people can’t take a shit without turning off the TV and can’t think a massive indiscriminate omnivore is cute without going up and petting its nose, what have we come to as a species? We’re going to stupid ourselves extinct.