More On That Lion

Now it can be told.  That lion in the news the other day (in my previous post) was me, which longtime readers had probably already guessed.  If you don’t know this background, click and read Christmas Letter now.

I’ve been staying with my friend Louis on Coleridge Street, and while he’s asleep at night i slip out and eat in the city’s parks.  This has worked out fine because i’m real good at slipping around without being seen since you damn well have to be good at it to eat well.  The problem is that more and more folks are getting these security cameras, so they’re getting harder and harder to evade.  And then people get all nerved up when they spot footage of me and everybody starts watching for me.  Makes life hard for an honest mountain lion just trying to get enough to eat.

The papers have reported that i was taken to a remote area in the San Mateo mountains and released, so i can now explain to my readers that the reason i pretended not to understand any of the languages they tried on me at the station is that i didn’t want the authorities to know that i’ve been living quietly in San Francisco and had escaped detection until recently.

I wanted them to just forget about pressing charges and simply dump me somewhere down the peninsula.  That way, i could cautiously make my way back to Louis’ place to let him know i was ok and to write this.  So yeah, i’m OK although getting darted sure does leave you with the mother of all hangovers.

Not, of course, that i’ll be staying all that long with Louis, entertaining as he is, since unlike him i am not voluntarily celibate.  Oh no.  I spend way too much time thinking about mating.  The problem is that, as eager as i am to mate, lady mountain lions won’t even give me the time of day.  “You’re not marriage material until you’ve got a territory, kid.”

So yeah, if i ever want to get laid, i gotta light out for the wilderness, even though it sure is getting hard to find a wilderness territory in California that some older mountain lion hasn’t already grabbed as his.

Meanwhile, not that i’ll go back because there’s absolutely noplace down there with enough underbrush to hide in, but they’re putting up some interesting buildings in Dogpatch nowadays: