Dead Bear Cubs from the Twilight Zone

 

You got to hand it to the great Rod Serling, the creator of television’s Twilight Zone. Even though the series is decades old many of the episodes are just a relevant and timely over two decades into the twenty-first century. To show this fact, my twenty-eight year old son loves The Twilight Zone and we will have discussions over various episodes. He has actual training in college-level philosophical reasoning and I’m usually floored by the points he brings up.

Back when I was his age, and younger, whenever my fellow nerds and I talked about one of the episodes our discussions were quite superficial. We pondered what we would do if placed into a situation where the natural world and metaphysical events intersected.

These conversation tended to die out whenever one of my nerd brethren lamented that our existence was devoid of such occurrences. That barring the near infinitesimally small chance that such situations might occur, our universe plays strictly by the known laws of nature.

No, I’m not one who believes in things like interdimensional “shadow people”, haphazard crossings over to parallel universes or into the past. Now the science fiction episode where a dude is imprisoned alone on an asteroid, but gets a robot woman for company and falls in love with her is a whole other matter. Real life advances in AI and life-like robotic technology is bringing such tale closer to reality.

However I was dumbstruck the other day by a thought that was ridiculous but unsettling. That maybe Twilight Zone events occur in our universe, they just take a different form from that on television.

May I present to you the strange occurrence where a presidential candidate from a prominent American family tells the story of how he and several companions found a dead bear cub on the side of the road. This individual then gets the idea that since the bear cub is unspoiled he plans on skinning the dead animal and eating the meat.

But wait, this member of a family called “American Royalty” by many realizes that his busy schedule will not allow him to skin the animal before it spoils. His Twilight Zone-ish behavior continues with him secretly abandoning the dead animal in New York’s Central Park. Just to add icing to this surreal story this son of a beloved political leader who was assassinated, places a damaged bicycle that he also had in his possession next the unfortunate cub to suggest that someone hit and killed the animal, then ran away.

The bear cub is found and is reported on national news. But the subject of this bizarre story only comes forward many years later when a major publication is about to expose him.

There’s already a shitload of Twilight Zone material here but it becomes even worse when take into account this individual has people convinced he should be president of the United States.

No, I didn’t see fit to throw the Orange Buffoon into this equation. He’s a long reoccurring national nightmare and I can only deal with a finite amount of crazy in this day and age.

Rod Serling was a talented writer and producer but not even he would have delved into this level of insanity.