So I just got home from a friend’s party–similiar to a Tupperware party in some basic regards, but featuring a highly specific line of items (it is perhaps worth noting that this was a girl’s only affair)–which was quite entertaining. I got home, and acting on some vague impulse, was gazing out the back into the dark.

The dark appeared to be wigglin’ a bit.

More sensitive souls would perhaps begin to harbor terrible suspicions about half-remembered fragments of forbidden tomes involving the Crawling Darkness and the Hunter of the Dark and whatever they would totally have read if the librarian hadn’t shown up and chewed them out for using the R’lyeh Text as a coaster, but bein’ me, I just flipped on the light.

And there he was, nonchalantly chewing on my finch sock, Procyon lotor, the common raccoon. (His name in my head is actually Procyon lotor. He must be Latin or something.) Here I’ve been blaming the squirrels for gnawing those huge holes in my finch sock, when they don’t even eat the thistle seed–but nope, it was their far more massive cohort.

He continued to gnaw idily at the sock for a minute–by standing on the railing, he can reach it easily with his hands–and then seemed to notice that there was a light at his back, and turned around. What he thought of the woman standing inside is a mystery. She, however, was thinking “Okay, charging the squirrels is one thing, charging that goddamn cat is one thing–charging a raccoon is a whole ‘nother bucket of chum…”

Fortunately, Procyon lotor instead heaved a sigh and got down, then went headfirst over the railing, in a sort of bored hand-over-hand down one of the posts, and waddled into the gloom. I turned off the light. He probably came back five minutes later, for all I know.

The real question, of course, is why on an evening when I just got home from a mini sex toy expo, I’m blogging about raccoons eating my finch sock. I will chalk this up to deeply misguided priorities on my
part.

Update: Yup, five minutes later, he returned. This time I actually had to open the door. If this escalates, I will eventually have to do my screaming banshee charge, and I just don’t know if I’m ready to do that on a wet, birdseed-slicked deck after a creature known to occasionally carry rabies…