WRITE CLUB: BEAR

Write Club is a monthly, literary bloodsport in which contenders face off against each other with 7-minute essays on competing topics. Below was my combatant essay based on the prompt “BEAR,” facing off against “BULL.” This essay was performed on May 12, 2026, at The GMan Tavern in Chicago. It was victorious in its bout. A video of the performance can be seen here.

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Write Club does this devious thing to you sometimes where they reach into their basket of dubious dichotomies and hand you a nebulous word like BEAR. BEAR, a word that could mean to carry, or to endure, or to be a metaphor for the ongoing decline of the economic markets, or a hirsute gentleman of distinct sexual inclinations, or one of genus ursidae, a mammalian organism with a preceding adjective such as brown or black or polar. And Write Club gives you this word BEAR while you’re standing in Chicago, where it can further mean the mascot of the north side’s baseball team, or the mascot of the city’s NFL franchise for at least the next five minutes, or an acclaimed TV show about familial relationships and beef sandwiches. When you receive this word BEAR you get to decide which of these definitions you’re going to focus your seven minutes on, or if you’re going to attempt the ambitious feat of incorporating several at once.

With all that in mind, the essay begins thusly.

Head north past Howard on Clark Street and you encounter a stretch of road that belongs to Evanston but feels more like disputed territory, and when I say disputed territory I mean that it feels like nobody fucking wants it. The streetlights are obligatory, the pavement filled with ragged cracks and seams like a tailor’s apprentice practicing his stitches on a rejected taxidermy project. On the east side of the street is Calvary Catholic Cemetery, on the west side the CTA tracks from the end of the Red to the start of the Purple, situated atop an incline of dirt and infrastructure that’s been covered with the sort of spindly, twisted trees that are the only kind able to survive under such conditions. After dark this passage shifts from misbegotten to sinister. The shadows display their cruelest angles. The jaws of the potholes open slightly wider. When the fluorescent glow of the railcars roars past you through those skeletal branches it seems like some eldritch behemoth overlooked you while hunting its next meal.

On a Saturday after one in the morning I’m driving through this corridor on my way home and up ahead of me I see a woman walking alone alongside the cemetery. And it occurs to me that perhaps I could offer her a lift a few blocks north, so she wouldn’t have to keep shuffling her way through John Carpenter’s sketchbook. But this brings me to the next logical question, which is How Do I Do That, and the only logical answer, which is I Don’t Think I Can. Because there’s no way for a strange man to offer a woman a ride, or even to slow his car down to keep an eye out for her on a dark and lonely stretch of road that doesn’t typically lead to the writers’ room of Criminal Minds.

So I continue on my way. I check the rearview until she’s no longer visible. I spend the rest of my life mixing powerful cocktails out of equal parts hope and haunted.

Which is to say: I understand about the bear. It would be idiotic for me not to understand about the bear. After the endless psychopathic parade of Harveys and Jeffreys and Donalds and Andrews and Dominiques and 4chan and 8chan and Motherless and Isla Vista 2014 and Montreal 1989 and I only have seven minutes up here and I couldn’t list everything if I had seven fucking months to say it. In the wild an actual bear only views a human being as threat or as nutrition, which underlines how awful things have become that the bear is still considered a preferable option.

My son begins high school in the fall. His body is on the verge of transforming him into both the most powerful and most vulnerable version of himself at the exact same time. He is an athlete and a video gamer — two environments in which aggression and unkindness are often validated by one’s peers — and so throughout his life we have had one conversation after another about the importance of Not Being That Guy. We will have different versions of that conversation over the next four years, the next eight, the next however long I get to be there for him. He will have his heart broken one day and find himself the target of tonic salesmen barking at him from the cascade of the Instagram reel.

I will make myself ready to bark louder. I will tell him that what sounds like silver on their tongues will turn to mercury in your veins, will drive you to first to sorrow and then to madness and finally to bitter, empty solitude. I will remind him that the promises patriarchy makes to us are coated with thorns and salt, that the person it wants you to become is designed to do significant damage and then elude accountability. I am going to say this to him as many times as it takes and twice on the days he needs to hear it most.

And in this way I am not at all like the bear. Because regardless of what the Brothers Grimm and the Family Berenstain have told us at our bedtimes, there is no functioning Papa Bear. The male does no more than what nature asks of him and then lumbers off alone in search of salmon and a tree to pour his piss on. When he encounters a cub he’s more likely to slaughter it than he is to parent it.

I understand about the bear, but I cannot be the bear, and so I set myself to molding for the world at least one better man.

That’s what I’ve chosen to carry.

That’s what I’ve chosen to endure.

And if I fail in spite of that, then that will be something I’ll bear as well.