¡Viva la Revolucion! ~ 1/12/2014

I lived in an enormous house with all the people I've ever met.  I came out pretty on top during the revolution, because I had seen it coming, and had hidden the kitchen knives in nooks and crannies throughout the house, and every time someone tried to contain me, I knew where a knife was, and fended them off. I didn't have to actually kill anyone.  They decided I was too much trouble to subdue, since I didn't pose any real threat.  It was pretty awesome.

Everything seemed fairly normal in the morning, so I set out to walk to work.  I left the enormous house, which was perched on a cliff overlooking a quiet bay.  About a block from home I was transfixed by a vast, shifting cloud of luna moths fluttering bright green against the milky clouds, surrounded by a flock of canaries swooping in to eat them.  The whole jumble swirled and writhed in the sky, billowing and undulating in the air just off the cliff.

I turned to a member of the new regime, who had a monitoring station set up nearby.  I could see the images where he was charting the movements of the two intermingled swarms, and on a larger screen we could observe the patterns being tracked world wide.  There were huge schools of fish in the ocean spelling out words and forming animated line drawings, giant cartoons where a sword fish went and poked a shark, then sped away, sort of like the roadrunner teasing the coyote.  I don't think the birds and moths were making any sort of pictures, but all unusual swarming behaviors were being watched.  It was a strange new world.

I continued on my way to work, but at some point I just resigned myself to being late, because a few blocks further on, up the inlet where a small river emptied into the bay, there was a tall, leafless tree, and in the upper branches I could see an enormous brown bear.  It had a rust brown head and chest and front legs, but his rump and hindquarters were white and dappled with brown and tan spots.  There were some people fishing upstream, an older man fly fishing, and farther up, on a pier, a young brother and sister casting for perch. I wondered if they'd seen the bear, and if I should warn them, but the bear hadn't noticed me, and I didn't want to draw attention, so I stayed still in the shadow of a tree across the path and watched.

From his perch in the upper branches, the bear had spied a birds' nest lower down, on some very small limbs he was never going to be able to climb to.  But this bear was smarter than your average bear.  He climbed down, ignoring the squawking, wheeling parent birds that darted at his head, and found a rod and reel that the fly fisher had left leaning against a boat beached near the tree.  The bear took the fishing rod in his mouth, climbed back above the nest on the sturdier limbs, and proceeded to let down the line, hook the nest, and jerk it loose with a few tugs, then let it fall to the ground.

The bear climbed down and began to lap up the spilled contents of the broken eggs, and I decided, of course, to take a picture with my iPhone.  I was getting everything lined and zoomed up when I saw in the image on my phone that he had noticed me.  As he lumbered angrily in my direction, I took a great shot, then darted out of the way of his charge, but I stumbled as his massive shoulder slammed into my hip.  I rolled down the small hillock I'd been standing on, and scrambled upright as he skidded to a stop and turned back towards me.

I stood up as tall as I could and turned to face him squarely.  I stomped my food and he froze, and I looked him right in the eyes and hollered, "GIT! GIT OUT OF HERE! GO ON!" He cringed and cowered, and I stomped and yelled some more, and he turned and scampered off into the forest.  The guy with the monitoring station called me back over to watch more of the strange swordfish cartoons going on in the oceans, and I don't think I ever did make it to work.