Week 7 Day 3

Perhaps it was burrowing earwigs or a stroke that made me agree to play hockey with the Canadians at my old job. Team sports have never been something I had an interest in outside of spectator propaganda. At a hockey game Jackie took me to, the sign would flash “MAKE NOISE” and people would just make noise. The sign would flash “CLAP” and people would, even if they were engaged in other conversation. It all felt a little too 1984.

I pulled up to a schoolyard in Manhattan Beach where the guys played and they told me I would be a goalie. The equipment hadn’t been washed in ages and it was like a frat house was sitting in my face, and not in a good way.

The uniform and pads were cumbersome and the cup was missing. After I was all ready to go, I asked, “Now what?”

“Protect the goal.”
“How?”
“Well, you act like a bear and move like a cat.”
“Like a bearcat?”

They all laughed and called me bearcat for the day. By the time I got to work the next day, the name had stuck and I was Bearcat. My desk was barraged with Bearcat team logos and pictures of actual bearcats.

What could have been a fierce and agile animal comprised of the best qualities of two already cool animals was, in reality, the worst possible combination. Lazy and unattractive, bearcats are sloth-like mammals with scent glands that smell like warm popcorn and make high-pitched sounds when they are irritated.

Bearcats are team mascots in colleges that seem to not have any access to information on what a bearcat is, instead designing bears with cat eyes and cat claws and angry faces.

While I’ve kept the name, I’ve filed the word bearcat under disappointing animal-related compound words that describe things infinitesimally cooler than they should be, like catfish, crabgrass, fishwife, foxglove, frogman, and earwig.

B