This post is entitled "Local Wildlife."

I was walking down Main Street on Sunday, discussing with my boyfriend where we should go on our walk. I was suggesting we head over to the botanical gardens. It was crowded downtown and the motorcycles were all parked in a line outside of Starbucks. "Don't you want to get away from all of these loud, annoying motorcycles?" I said, and then half-heard a leering grizzled whiskey voice say, "Well I guess you like my ride!" It took me a minute to process that the leathery chump was talking to me, and by that time I was down the block, feeling thoroughly un-indimidated and unimpressed. Those middle-aged AA-dropout bikers have got to start trying a little harder if they really want to be seen as badasses.

[My friend Lesa should probably skip this next part.] Tonight, I was walking swiftly to my car parked in the gravel lot behind the house, when my neighbor said from her second-floor deck, "D, stop! There's a bear!" Indeed, there was a black bear not a foot from my car, digging through a trash can he had knocked over. He was the size of a large dog. I shouted, "Hey, bear! Get away!" but, like an overgrown urban raccoon, he totally ignored me and kept slowly and peacefully rifling through the garbage. After a minute or so he ambled behind the garage to the neighbor's yard. There have been black bear sightings in people's yards in town for a couple of years, but this is the first one I've actually seen, let alone the first I've heard of in my neighborhood. Yet again, I probably wasn't as wary or scared as I should have been. Not that I got any closer to him than about 25 feet, but I mainly didn't want to get closer because bears shouldn't get accustomed to being near humans.

The bears and the bikers need to join some kind of Ultimate Fighting Championship club to butch up their images.