Ten Beginnings of Stories about Grizzly Bears

1.     The Grizzlies met with the other forest animals for a meeting about voting rights. I was there too, you know, to prevent chaos or something.

2.     Mom didn't like it when I took in a Grizzly Bear as a pet when I was young. “How can you take the cub from his mother?” she asked. But she learned to deal with it after I taught Herman to mow the lawn and do the dishes.

3.     On Mondays, their days off, the bears went to the karaoke bar. They ordered fish bowls and hard ciders and sang “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” but in the cool way. “Once upon a time I was falling in love, but now I'm fucking falling apart.” And then they would all go home, pay the cubsitters, and snuggle in bed. All except Clyde.

4.     “Now is the winter of our discontent,” Max said to us in the cave, “and we need to prepare.”

5.     They thought they could put us in a zoo, those assholes with the tranquilizer guns and large nets. They thought wrong.

6.     You are a bear. You are a roaring, dancing, preened Grizzly, goddammit. And don't you forget it.

7.     The media really fucked up the story about Lyle and the cop.

8.     “I write music,” Tanya whispered to her date. “Music about the hard life in the woods. The fleas, the ticks, the hunters, you know. That kind of stuff.”

9.     Like sharks, we grizzlies are severely misunderstood.

10.  I was a stunt double for Tom Cruise in a live action Brother Bear, and he really got me into scientology.