end of days

Soulless on Good Friday—what’s a bear to do?

My Fellow Inebriates,

The Watchtower flyer inserted through our door this week has been on my mind, especially after Pascal’s Wager for Animals showed me the Nothingness that awaits your furry host here at the End of Days. Add to that some general anxiety about Good Friday and its attendant imagery (OMG! I don’t understand it!), a paucity of liquor at LBHQ, PLUS some bear-meat wine pairing suggestions from beerbecue (Dude!), and you have one anxious bear.

I think I’d feel better if we’d been around for the Jehovah’s Witnesses who pushed that flyer through the door crack. Back when we lived in East Vancouver they used to visit all the time. Miss P was a newborn living perpetually in my mum’s lap. My mum used to get powerfully restless, so whenever the JWs rang the bell, she let them in and we hung out.

Our guests were so well dressed and so well behaved that it was a pleasure to let them steer the conversation. Knackered from night-time feedings, my mum was content to explore topics with them such as “Do Children Change a Marriage?” and “Is It Later Than You Think?” So low-maintenance were our JW visitors that they declined every hospitable offer—tea, cookies, blood transfusions—with the utmost grace. Nor could they be flustered by my mother’s insensitive questions about the declared capacity limits of Heaven as it bore on our friends’ dauntless recruiting program. They were unflappable.

“How many souls can fit into Heaven?” my mother would demand as she yanked a flaccid boob out of Miss P’s mouth and shoved in a turgid one. “I heard it’s a really small number, like 144,000 or something. Is Heaven two-tiered, then? Is there another layer that I can get into if I don’t make the cut?”

I can’t remember what they answered, nor their response to “Do you think we should put candles or a sparkler on Daddy’s birthday cake?” But today’s anxieties prompted me to look for the answer about Heaven’s capacity. I know animals are banned, but did my mum have that number right? Is there some sort of celestial fire marshal who’ll go medieval if more than 144,000 enter?

The Watchtower website is very friendly and has a list of topics. I got so distracted by these topics that I forgot what I was looking for in the first place. For instance, Young People Ask…Should I Get a Tattoo? It turns out Mosaic Law forbids tats (damning uncounted People of Walmart) because they smack of false worship. But the Watchtower is so friendly in delivering this admonition. Sure, it cites Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Collossians, Ephesians, and Corinthians. But it also cites a dermatologist who warns about the risk of infection. And lastly it appeals to teenagers’ need for acceptance—“‘I got a tattoo before learning about Jehovah,’ relates Amy. ‘I try to keep it covered. When others in the congregation happen to see it, I feel embarrassed.’” And it ends on a catchy note: “Think before you ink.”

I was also distracted by Music That Pleases God. According to the flyer, God really likes music, which makes sense because He invented it. But is there such a thing as Music That Displeases God? You gotta know it, my fellow inebriates. “Pagan fertility rites, the doctrine of the immortality of the human soul, and the veneration of Mary as ‘mother of God’” are themes that dishonor God. Suffice to say When I find myself in times of trouble/Mother Mary comes to me (whether “Mother Mary” actually refers to Jesus’s mum or not) does not warble out of any JW speakers.

My mum let me down in lots of ways during those visits of 2006. She failed to ask animal-centered questions (“Does LB have a soul?” “Can you confirm that it is wrong—terribly wrong—to eat bear meat?”) And I always wished, during those visits in 2006, that it had occurred to her to bring out a tray of gin-and-tonics. But she insisted we behave ourselves. Our guests didn’t want to impose on us—at least not materially. We were allowed to interrogate them because it helped them train to be better soldiers for Christ. But we mustn’t be obnoxious.

Nothing to do with the JW take on Good Friday, but scary nonetheless.
Photo: Reuters

The JWs did eventually stop visiting us in East Vancouver. It wasn’t because they realized we weren’t going to join the flock—they weren’t idiots, but they had to put in x number of hours to fulfill their religious obligations, and we were reasonably easy to hang out with. Their visits ended simply because, several times in a row, they called at inconvenient times—just before a swimming lesson or a doctor’s appointment, say—and my mum was rushing out the door, or about to be. As I say, they weren’t idiots, and they must have felt she was giving them the heave-ho.

They’re welcome to visit us in Langley. But if they do, we’re gonna ask some questions about animals. (Why can I not be saved? OMG!) Then we’ll break out the booze and ask them for their tasting notes.

BREWMASTER’S BLACK LAGER—Part 2! (With an apology)

My friend Scarybear makes a sport of freaking me out. If it weren’t for his science fiction-fueled paranoia I’d never have thought for a moment about gamma rays or asteroids or even hemorrhoids. But when Scary started talking about the collapse of the vacuum (of space!) I couldn’t even work up any concern—especially with some big a.m. DTs going on.

On a planet where Scary could surely find another preoccupation (global warming, say), it seems pretty damn daft to worry that the fabric of the universe will shift its quantum state and initiate a Big Crunch, compressing all matter into superheated pinhead. HOW WOULD YOU EVEN PREPARE FOR THAT?

Even a raging apocalyptic lunatic like Scary knows scientists favor the neverending expansion scenario. But he likes the Big Crunch idea—it’s more dramatic, plus it sounds like a chocolate bar.

But I wasn’t in the mood to be terrified this morning, my fellow inebriates. I was feeling guilty.

You see, I screwed up on one of my booze reviews. The other day I said Okanagan Spring BREWMASTER’S BLACK LAGER was “not sufficiently creamy,” was not “as chewy as it could be,” and finished “on an unfortunate sour note.”

All nonsense! It’s amazing how a pissy mood can affect the palate. The day I wrote that, I’d just learned that my little companions were to be home all day unexpectedly, plus I received some (lovable?) beatings throughout the afternoon, so I was just not a happy bear.

So I apologize to Okanagan Spring. BREWMASTER’S BLACK LAGER is pretty good when you’re in the mood for a nice cola-colored yet crisply carbonated brew. It features some complexity and hits a reasonable crowd-pleasing note. It has nothing on HERMANN’S, but it’s absolutely drinkable and even enjoyable if you haven’t been thrown around like a stuffie by little girls all day. Assuming that doesn’t happen to most of you, I can confidently recommend BREWMASTER’S BLACK LAGER, unless something else has happened to ruin your day (maybe hemorrhoids or an asteroid dent in your car).

BODEGAS CASTANO MONASTRELL (2010)—worth keeping on hand for the End of Days

My Fellow Inebriates,

The four-year-old recently took the scissors to Glen Bear, who ended up with a surprisingly restrained fur trim, which nevertheless prompted my mum to put the scissors in a high-up cupboard until the “paper only” rule is better internalized by the kids.

Thankfully not Glen or any of us

Glen has fewer brain cells than I do, which puts him into the negative numbers, but now he also looks like a dork. And even though he doesn’t care or really realize what happened, I’m shaking in my fur. It could have been any of us! And who knows? If the kid had been feeling especially demonic, Glen could have been decapitated.

Rattled by this incident, I started thinking about how illusory our sense of safety is. If you’re enjoying computer access and have the leisure to read an alcoholic bear’s ruminations, it’s a good guess that your basic physiological needs—food, water, air—are taken care of, as well as security concerns such as shelter and privacy too. But as my friend Scarybear likes to remind me constantly, we are just one semi-apocalyptic event away from chaos.

For me that event might consist of scissors-wielding kindergartners, but Scarybear is thinking about much larger destabilizing events. We talked about asteroids (and hemorrhoids) recently, but Scary finds the asteroid scenario, in all its preventability, boring. He’s thinking a gamma-ray burst will do us in this year.

Of course gamma-ray bursts occur all the time. They’re invisible to our eyes, which means we’re blissfully unaware of the daily gamma flashbulb that goes off, bathing our little blue marble in gamma radiation and then winking out. These bursts are 10 quadrillion times stronger than the sun. They don’t even come from our own galaxy—they come from other, distant galaxies (a long time ago, hitting us now) and are thought to be caused by collapsed stars merging. Wow!

So, Scary says in the brief pause he takes from snarfing an entire container of ice cream, what if two collapsed stars in OUR galaxy merged? OMG!

Uncertainty is frightening. I feel exactly the sort of trepidation Scary does about gamma-ray bursts when I’m considering buying a new bottle of wine. Like lots of wine drinkers, I have “go-to” wines that are always reliable; they hit the sweet spot between price and quality that allows you to feel good about dropping $15 to $20 in your local booze shop and pounding your purchase in front of the TV. It sucks to go out on a limb and come home with some barnyardy vinegar and have to drink it knowing you could and should have bought one of your old reliables.

So when our friend Robert came over with one of his old reliables, I took notice. BODEGAS CASTANO MONASTRELL (2010) certainly hits the sweet spot on price ($11.97) and boasts a reasonable alcohol content (13.5%). Made from 30-year-old monastrell (mourvedre) vines, this Spanish table wine is opaque and violet with a fresh berry nose. In the glass it sports generous legs and likewise coats the mouth with a plush, hearty mouthfeel. Stone-fruit top-notes and structured tannins make for a satisfying palate pleaser with a moderate to long finish.

BODEGAS CASTANO MONASTRELL is striking for being unassuming. The flavors are balanced without jockeying among themselves for prominence, which makes the wine undistracting—an excellent choice for a party, an involving conversation, or a really gripping episode of Breaking Bad. And if you’re fretting about the End of Days, BODEGAS CASTANO MONASTRELL can help you relax.

Not Scarybear, though. He was freaked out by Glen’s dorky haircut and worried about his little humans getting ideas about performing ursine surgery, so he transferred all this worry to thoughts of Armageddon—gamma rays especially.

He has a point. The Milky Way is pretty big and pretty old, and collapsed stars aren’t so easy to detect, never mind two of them spiraling into one another. Even if it happened a thousand light years away it would look like a second sun on our horizon, and our atmosphere would get cooked. With our ozone layer fried off, we’d all get skin cancer, but even if we hid indoors, the burst would annihilate all the ocean plankton, destroying the basis of our food chain.

Scarybear figures this could happen any time, meaning that it has already happened in our galaxy and the deadly burst is racing toward us at light speed, ETA Mayan End of Days.

Which means we have just 306 days left to stock up on some reliable wine.

What’s your “old reliable” at the liquor store? Are you stocked up?

In case you were wondering what happened to those decapitated bears