Bachelors and bears, a proposed documentary

I don’t watch TV, but I love to stream documentaries online. Anything from polar bears to ancient civilizations to the more bizarre ones about UFOs.

Bizarre ones aside, they seem fairly simple to make. Find your subject, find some experts and then film both of them and then put them together.

With wildlife documentaries it’s pretty common to have the experts narrate what the animal is doing in its natural environment.

While writing my article about the Ferndale bear, I watched a couple of documentaries about bears since they were already on my mind.

I recently learned that when a young bear first leaves its mother, it will wander around until it finds somewhere comfortable. They can sometimes get a little thin while figuring out what food to eat and where to get it, they can also get into some trouble depending on where they decide to settle down and make themselves at home.

Young bears are exactly like 24-year-old bachelors, but nobody has made this into a documentary yet.

So to prove my theory, let’s take a look at one in his natural environment.

The North American Bachelor:

Nature’s Faux Pas

At 6 a.m. we find the bachelor waking up on the couch with his headphones still on and playing Pearl Jam and other bands from his childhood. Watch as he stretches and scares himself awake when his joints pop.

Perhaps this is his first sign of aging, or perhaps sleeping half-on and half-off the couch was the cause?

He stumbles across his living room and steps on a plate of half-eaten nachos. Fortunately, he has already learned not to eat spoiled food, one of the few life lessons he actually retained from college.

Unfortunately, he hasn’t quite figured out how to eat completely healthy because he then drinks a nearly lethal amount of coffee while making unintelligible grunting sounds.

Fascinating, it’s as if he has developed his own language.

During his morning routine he saves time by pulling laundry from the dryer and wears the same shirt for the second or third time in a week. He picks up his razor, stares at it for a moment and decides not to shave…again.

Maybe he is lazy or maybe he is trying to look older, it’s difficult to determine.

In the workplace his actions are no different than that of a regular person, except that he eats the entire time. Before it’s even close to noon he has already eaten a bag of jerky, a granola bar, two bananas, and a peanut butter sandwich.

After he finishes his work duties, the bachelor burns off all of his pent up energy by running. He goes nowhere in particular, after all, the bachelor rarely has anywhere he actually needs to be.

Should the bachelor come within the vicinity of women between the ages of 18 and 30, he will run faster in an effort to make a good impression. He won’t realize until after the fact that this move is contradictory to his goal of shedding his bachelor status.

Having no children to care for or wife to go home to leaves him restless and bored. So, this bachelor will typically run between five and 25 miles each day.

But the bachelor is loaded with contradiction as he rarely uses that energy for anything constructive.

Rather than cooking for himself, the bachelor prefers to scavenge for food that doesn’t require cooking. Gatorade, more granola and peanut butter, a protein shake and a turkey sandwich later he becomes aware that he smells like a day-old gym sock from running around the mountains.

The bachelor will then spend the remainder of his day back on the couch playing video games, reading or watching movies where all problems can be solved with fast motorcycles and kung fu.

Should you encounter a bachelor in the wild, you can easily scare him away by nagging him about “settling down.”

I don’t think National Geographic will ever buy into my proposed documentary likening bachelors to bears, though the similarities are uncanny I think bears are significantly more adorable.