Bigfoot Diaries

Hi, my name is Gary and I’m a Sasquatch. I live in the woods and I don’t try to bother nobody. I don’t have a traditional home, so to speak, I sort of live off the land. I’ll sleep on the forest floor if it’s not raining or in someone’s garage when they’re not home. I have unusually large feet for someone my size. I’m six foot three and my shoe size is 24, even though I don’t wear shoes. I don’t really wear clothes either because my entire body is covered in a thick coat of hair. It’s great in the wintertime because it keeps me warm, but in the summer I really pay for it. I usually move down towards a river or a stream so that I’m always within at least five minutes of water in case I need to jump in and cool off.

Nobody really bothers me except for this one cop, Steve. He has it in for me for some reason. He’s always trying to find me and arrest me on trumped up charges. I know my rights, though. I don’t bother anybody. I just think it’s because his marriage is falling apart and he’s taking it out on me. A lot of people take their frustrations out on me. They treat me like a punching bag just so they can shift blame from their failed marriages, their drug addictions, their estranged children or their crippling debt onto me, thinking that it’ll help their situation somehow.

One time I got into a fight with a puma. He tried to take an elk that I had just killed with my bare hands. I was saving it for dinner under a pile of leaves. The puma must have stumbled on it and thought it belonged to no one, even though I marked the whole area by urinating all over the place. Anyway, I killed him too. I’m pretty strong. I don’t work out or anything, I think that I’m just genetically built that way. I never use my strength in anger, although I was pretty peeved to see that puma taking my dinner. I guess it was more self-defense than anything. Pumas are pretty mean.

One time Steve the cop came driving up on the dirt road in his Chevy Blazer and pulled me over. I was just walking like I always do, but anyway, he jumped out and started shouting at me. He kept going on about how he had a warrant for my arrest and that he was going to take me downtown and have a judge throw the book at me. I asked to see the warrant and he said his dog ate it. I think Steve has seen too many cop shows. I know my rights. He was always harassing me like that but he never had anything on me.

I have friends but I don’t really see them a hell of a lot. There’s these guys who always want to take pictures of me but I’m kind of shy so I almost always refuse. They keep insisting, saying that they won’t show anyone the photos but I know that they’ll probably post them all over social media with captions like ‘Get a haircut, hippie’ or ‘Nice feet. LOL’. I usually like to hang out at the track and bet on the horses. I have a huge gambling problem I’m not going to lie. It’s all I think about. If I could just get the odds to tilt in my favor just once I could retire and move to Greenland. I’ve filed for bankruptcy seven times.

I’m tired of being harassed by the cops, to be honest. Steve the cop always says that I cause trouble wherever I go. He says I incite panic in the general population but I know that’s not true because I was at Target the other day and I couldn’t find one person to help me find where they stock the deodorant.

A lot of people say that I look just like Brad Pitt, which is a real compliment because I respect his work and he’s a real handsome guy. I really don’t know what celebrity I look like, to tell you the truth. Maybe Gabe Kaplan or M. Emmet Walsh?

Anyway, I murdered about three people the other day and I want to tell you about it before you hear it on the news. I was fishing down by the river when these bikers rode up and started setting up tents and stuff. I guess they were going to camp there for the night, which is fine, a lot of people like to camp in that area. It’s really beautiful and there’s a lot of fish in that river. Anyway, these bikers started playing this music really loud. It was kind of distracting because when I’m out in nature I like to listen to the breeze blowing through the trees and the birds singing to each other. These guys had their music turned all the way up and when they talked to each other they had to shout because the music was so loud. So, I walked over to them and politely asked them if they could turn the music down. Well, this one guy got right in my face and said that he was gonna do no such thing. He took a swig of what I presume was alcohol and took a swing at me. His fist landed right in my stomach but I could barely feel it. Like I said, I’ve got some pretty weird muscles that are like steel or something. Anyway, I overreacted and tore the man’s head clean off his body. The rest of his friends froze which gave me the opportunity to lunge after a couple more of them. I tore the arms off one guy and kicked another guy so hard my foot chopped him in half. I couldn’t hear a lot of the screaming because no one had turned down the music. People ran everywhere. I hadn’t noticed that I was still holding the guy’s head when I walked up to another guy who was trying to start his motorcycle. I grabbed him by the back of his shirt and told him that if I ever see him or any of his friends around here that I’m going to call the cops. Well, that guy tore off right out of there in a hurry. They had run away so fast that they left all of their camping gear and the stereo, which was still on, by the way.

Anyway, Steve the cop pulled me over the other day, but he didn’t yell at me. He got out of his Blazer real slow like. He had a different look about him, almost sad. His head was down and he kept staring at the ground. He told me that those bikers had been terrorizing the town for weeks. He said that they couldn’t do nothing about them because they weren’t breaking the law and even if they did the bikers outnumbered the cops by 20 to 1. Steve says he suspected them of several robberies and assaults in the area but he didn’t have any proof. The town didn’t have the resources to handle and infestation of a biker gang or any gang for that matter. He confessed to me that he was scared because if he had to go in and arrest one of those guys he would surely be killed. He told me that he had been so stressed out that it was beginning to affect his marriage. He was depressed, I could tell. I’m very familiar with the symptoms. Lack of sleep, irritability, loss of appetite, existential dread. I’ve been living with depression my entire life. So then he told me that the whole gang suddenly just up and left the town in a real big hurry, like they had seen something that scared them off. The only time Steve the cop looked up at me was for a brief moment when he said thanks.

Well, he got into his Blazer and quietly drove off. The cops did stop harassing me after that but I did have to file bankruptcy again, which gave my wife the perfect reason to leave me for good. And this time she said she was taking the kids.