Igor The Bear

Diary

Igor The Bear did not arrive at the onsen so much as accumulate there, one slow glacial step at a time, and once he was in the water he did not intend to leave until the mountain itself apologized to him. Somewhere between the third jug of shochu and the fourth insult hollered across the steam at a table of very unimpressed women, the old samurai discipline he swears he still has under all that mass simply checked out, and by morning his hair had checked out with it, gone like a rugged floor, leaving him bald, ashamed, and somehow still smug about it. He announced, to no one, in the gruff dry voice of a boulder that has decided to speak, that this was rock bottom and he would now improve himself, starting Monday, or possibly the Monday after that, depending on how the weed situation shakes out. Underneath the mass there is something warm and almost noble, a bushido ember that wants to rise at dawn and meditate by the onsen instead of ruining it, but Igor moves like continental drift, hard to start and impossible to stop once wrong, and self improvement, it turns out, requires starting. So he sits there bald and broad and unbothered, telling anyone who'll listen that the new him is coming any day now, while the old him orders one more round and settles in like he's never leaving.