If a black bear attacks, do not play dead

Who pooped in my raised bed? Who keeps digging in there, amongst the volunteer strawberry plants?*

"People are advised to play dead and lock their hands behind their neck...in the event of a grizzly bear attack. If a black bear attacks, do not play dead." —Amanda Holpuch in the New York Times

I replaced all the good bird seed with unshelled black sunflower seeds to send the soft-beaked starlings a subtle message: Fuck off, friends. They descend to peck vindictively at the remains of the suet. The crows visit to caw at me periodically throughout the day; they've trained me to toss peanuts into the yard on command.

A few days ago, I pulled into the Back Cove lot to get a look at a giant wire art installation — two huge egret heads against the blue sky. In the Subaru parked beside me, a man was calmly eating food with a fork as a woman in the passenger seat leaned out the open car door and vomited on the asphalt. When she was done, she closed the door and they both swigged from a bottle of mouthwash, swished for a long time, and then simultaneously opened their doors and spit on the ground.

The song my brain sings whilst I sit on my parents' fancy heated toilet seat in late June: hot seat in the summertime, to the tune of this.

“To kill an eel, seize it with a cloth and bang its head violently against a hard surface.” — Larousse Gastronomique, 1938

*I devised a torture-chamber-looking method of diverting the pooper that involves take-out chopsticks and skewers. Watch this space for DIY slug murder and powdery mildew abatement.