Q: How do you get the smell of smoke out of your clothes?

A: That smell never comes out. You're better off throwing them away. I'll get a trash bag.

I'm really sorry I started that bonfire in your car. I really wasn't thinking. Well, I was thinking, but about making s'mores, not about setting your car on fire and ruining your clothes. Man, that was weird. I didn't even have any marshmallows. Or chocolate. Or Graham Crackers. Or sticks.

Don't worry. I have something you can wear. It's not like you're going to have to walk around my place naked.

Unless you want to.

Joking. I was joking. Totally joking. Unless you want to.

Joking. Seriously. I'll go get some clothes.

Really sorry about that fire. Good thing we happened to be right by house when your car caught on fire. That sure was lucky. But you said you always wanted to come over and hang out, or at least I imagined you saying it. It sounds like something you'd say.

There really aren't any cabs around here.

Anyway, it worked out that you're here, and we're alone, and I happen to have a box of wine chilling in the fridge, and I just got Irreversible from Netflix. You like foreign films, right?

Anyway, I think this sudden irrational car fire might just be one of those stories we tell our grandchildren. Not our grandchildren, of course. Not like you and I are going to make love and fall in love and have children and they'll have children and someday we'll watch those children and they'll ask how we met and we'll look into each other's eyes and kind of laugh, and smile, and smile with our eyes, you know, and we'll turn to them and kind of argue over who should tell the story and I'll say, "Well, I really wanted s'mores ..." I didn't mean anything like that. I meant we'd tell our own grandchildren, separately, if they ever ask us about setting a car on fire. That's what I meant. I was just joking about that other thing, about making love and spending the rest of our lives together.

Unless you want to.

Joking. Totally joking. These tears are part of the joke. I have a dry sense of humor.

Q: How many people in the US die from bear attacks a year?

A: Not enough. Not nearly enough. Last year there were 4. The year before, 3. That's it. More people die trying to catch foul balls at baseball games than are killed by bears each year.*

And that's the problem. With so few deaths each year, people fail to take bear attacks seriously. Bears are celebrated in this culture. Worshipped. You can't walk three blocks without seeing a T-Shirt with a cartoon bear, or a sports team named after a bear, or comic book featuring a crime solving bear in a suit who spends his weekends doing pro-bono work in family court.

Bears should not be worshipped or celebrated or even caricatured. They should be shot. Or stabbed. Or hit with a car. Whatever it takes.

So that you know I am not crazy, let me share a personal story. I used to have a son. I no longer have a son. He was killed by a bear. Bear attacks account for 100% of the deaths in my family.**

And yet no one seems to understand the terror of bear attack. They weren't there. They didn't see my little boy dripping honey, stuck in that wood cage, suspended in the forest, his eyes full of fear as he heard the bear approach. They didn't the bear ripping him apart with its teeth and claws, cracking his skull like some kind of giant, honey-glazed Cadbury egg. They couldn't hear his screams, his cries begging me for help, begging me to drop the camera and save him. No one saw it. And they still refuse to watch, despite all the time and money I have spent editing and scoring the video. I haven't even sold a single DVD.

What will it take for this nation to learn?


*Statistic possibly false.
** Not counting deaths by erotic asphyxiation. 

Q: What does CRNP after nurses name mean?

A: In most cases, it means Certified Registered Nurse Practitioner, a lot of fancy words that mean a nurse has been trained and tested and knows enough about medicine to not kill someone when inserting an IV. That's in most cases. My case is different.

Those letters after my name don't mean anything. There's no acronym to decode, no riddle to solve. They're just a name. My name.

My name is Nurse Lisa CRNP.

My father swore off vowels after a disastrous appearance on The Wheel of Fortune. You've probably seen it. He really wanted that ceramic dog. He never really got over it.  The dog, that is. And his disastrous loss on the show. Nearly every day after school I would wonder home to find my father staring at an empty spot on the carpet, petting an imaginary ceramic dog, muttering, "I'd like to solve the puzzle, Pat. I'd like to solve the puzzle, Pat."

It wasn't the best childhood.

When I was 8, my father swore off vowels and changed our name from Curniape to Crnp. When I was 12 he turned against uncapitalized letters, after a incident at work involving the New York Times crossword puzzle. My mother wouldn't let him touch my first or middle name. "Who'd want to marry someone named NRS LS CRNP?" she said, "Who'd want to take that in? She's got enough problems already, Dan, what with the homeliness and the odor and the vacant stare. Give her a chance."

I didn't overhear that conversation, by the way. She said all that in my presence. Frequently. She worked it into toasts. And birthday cards. And conversations with strangers. Saving my name was the defining moment of her life.

It meant a lot to her that I was called a nurse, even if I didn't become one. More consumed with title than accomplishment, my mother. She named my older brother Doctor and my younger one Noted Ladiesman. They work in meat.

She would have loved for me to actually become a nurse. But it wasn't meant to be. I don't test well. And I can't remember anything. And sick people are the worst. All the moaning and crying and soiling the sheets. Who wants to deal with that?

I'm only in this hospital because of the weather. Can't stand the rain. I'm only in your father's room because someone a doctor said, "Nurse, come with me." Once I realized he wanted an actual, trained nurse I had already been helping him for twenty minutes and was too embarrassed to say anything.  In his defense he was probably confused by my outfit. And my name tag. But I look great in white. And the name tag saves me from the crippling awkwardness of introductions.

Look at me, talking your ear off.

You'll have to excuse me. Your father had a lot more blood in him than I expected and I need to figure out how to get it back in before the doctor comes back. He seemed like kind of a neat freak.