I went to see Hellboy 2 tonight with my friend Shiun. Yes, I saw it last week with Kurfty, post-incident, but it was fun enough that I wanted to see it again (after having done “homework†by watching the first Hellboy.
Just my bad luck that it was a Moviebears outing. Yes, there are variations (of a sort) on that tired theme.
Worse still, I was stuck sitting next to the guy who started hitting on Sam right in front of me a while back. And after I pointed out that I was Sam’s boyfriend? Yes, you guessed it: he kept right on hitting on Sam. Bear Typical. And they sure love their Typical this, that, the other thing.
In a sense, though, those Typicals came in handy, in a certain way: my friends are both Asian, so by the time I got into the theater, there were many bears in many seats, except all around my friends. Asians are anathema to the bears. It was kinda funny, actually: it’s like that little experiment you do with pepper on the surface of water on a plate? One drop of soap in the middle and all the pepper appears to scatter to the edges.
Speaking of soap, of course the “bear†sitting next to me (who during a trailer for a thriller movie yells “Scare bears!â€â€”yet another variation on the overall theme) might think less about the Bear Typical of “mansmells†when he’s out and about and might end up uncomfortably near a human being.
It’s like they said in Wargames: the only way to win is not to play. I don’t think it’s coincidence that my life hit a major accelerator in happiness and overall feeling better since I detached myself from groups of bears.
It’s a post-bear world, they just don’t know it yet.
What’s with the bears? I was in P-town with friends last year and it happened to be bear week. I didn’t know it was going to be bear week when I rented our condo. I felt like an outcast the entire week. Only one in our party could be considered a bear (I’m tall, lean with little body hair). One bear friend on the trip received a lot of attention. Bears would greet my friend and ignore the rest of us non-bear types. Needless to say our trip to P-town this year does not coincide with bear week.
You answered your own question, I think without knowing it.
The flipside to the assumptions many of them will make about you when you look like one of them is that if you don’t, you either don’t exist or they’ll run you out of dodge if they can.
It’s a self-defined, self-satisfied, self-selected environment, all based on being fat and hairy and with facial hair.
So, I need to be a pomoursohomo?