Meet The New Boss

My God, it's a city of pizzlies!
The grizzly/polar bear hybrid will be able to swim,
climb, track humans as prey, and perform
long division. He will also bird-dog every
ho in the hizzy.

Greg:

You know how I hate to cover current events in my letters to you. I figure that if it's in the news, there are enough people blabbing about it already. What new angle could I possibly add to the conversation by saying, "Yeah - Bush is a crook!" Or "Yeah, gas prices are really high!" Or "Yeah, the world will eventually be ruled by pizzly bears!"

Wait a sec. I'm the one who said that the world will eventually be ruled by pizzly bears. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it. That also deems the subject fair game (no pun) for this epistle. So here's the deal:

You may have recently awakened on a public park bench and pulled the newspaper off your face to be confronted by the CBC news story "Strange bear was grizzly-polar hybrid, tests show". If not, then let me inform you of this astounding new taxonomical development. The story goes like this: Roger Kuptana, an Inuvialuit guide from Sachs Harbour, Northwest Territories, took Jim Martell, a 65-year-old honkie from nowhere special, on a hunting trip during which the aforementioned honkie shot and killed a mottled brown-and-white bear. The bear, as DNA evidence proved, had a grizzly bear for a father and a polar bear for a mother.

As a former resident of Alaska, I'm sure you're agape. As a former resident of Alaska, so am I. Your first thought was probably, "Oh dear Lord! It wasn't enough for the grizzlies to be at the top of the food chain, have a lucrative auto parts endorsement deal, and be at the center of the California State flag. They had to up and start bird-dogging the polar bears' wives and girlfriends! Daaaaaamn! That's some cold shit! They done gone and messed wif' de kid now!"

I heartily agree. It is cold-blooded. What do a hard-workin' polar bear gotta do to keep two-thousand pounds of wild-born woman satisfied? Sheeeiiit.

But I'll tell you who is to blame for this: GW. That's right. Global-muthafuckin'-Warming. Here's why. The male polar bears are drowning because of a lack of ice. The females are moving south into - you got it - grizzly country. And the male grizzlies are all like, "Chicks! Sweet!" Bada boom bada bing you got pizzly bears.


Planet of the Pizzlies: Jillions of years in the
future, gigantic pizzlies will make a snack out of
Chuck and his silly boom-stick!

Don't be fooled. The pizzly bear that the geriatric honkie shot is not a one-off. Pizzly production is happening all over the Great White North and it will continue to happen apace until you have to walk on pizzly heads just to get to the 7-11. But that's not even the scary part. Silently freak out over this, my man: polar/grizzly hybrids will have the best of both bears. Not only will they be the biggest fur-bearing land mammal since the mastodon, they will be able to both climb and swim, and will track humans as prey (a trait particular to polar bears). So the worst news about global warming is not that we'll all have to sprout gills and become accustomed to the taste of saltwater martinis. It is that when we return to our spawning grounds each year, a good number of us will wind up as pizzly snacks - that is if we survive being preyed upon by bears the size of Pavarotti's sofa and actually get a chance to evolve.

All kidding aside, this sort of thing gives me hope. When I first heard that polar bears were drowning because of receding ice, it truly saddened me. I spent a lot of time meditating on the dukkha of transformation. Whether it is the disappearance of the polar bears or the disappearance of my own face in the mirror, constant change in inherent in life. Clinging to the status quo breeds suffering. However, it still troubled me that the disappearance of the polar bears is a phenomenon that has a lineal connection to the avarice of man, and is thus a subtractive change that is happening needlessly.

Seeing that picture of a pizzly bear restored my hope, though. It made me believe that everything's going to be okay. Nature, the consistent favorite of Father Time, will always prevail. And that gives me hope - even if it means that pizzlies will make dessert out of my descendants.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

-Thaddeus