Just watched a raccoon punt another raccoon out of a palm tree. It’s the middle of the day. To add further insult, who I presume to be the aggressor, sauntered out and took a drink from the bowl of water I left out for the neighborhood cat. Now I can’t leave water out for the cat because I don’t want to give it raccoon germs.

I didn’t even know they had raccoons in Florida, or that they had any interest in palm trees, let alone that tree. I looked up because I heard this one soft grinding noise; there was a squirrel up there the other day taking its sweet-ass time to eat a nut, just grinding its teeth against them for an obnoxiously long time. So I thought you bastard, you’re back, only to see this poor big limp raccoon on perhaps its final vertical trajectory towards the earth.

Now I can’t find it, it fell into a bush at the bottom of the tree, but I can’t see it in there, and also don’t want to poke around in case it springs back to life like the deer from Tommy Boy.

Because three paragraphs about a potential dead raccoon murder was not enough, I would like to note I avoided this scenario about 15 years ago. We were looking for apartments in Toronto, and after saying thank you and good-bye to a pantsless stoned girl in a Tweetie Bird tank top that showed us around, we went back into the night to find a screaming raccoon clinging to the eaves as another, I can only imagine, stomped on its little baby bandit knuckles like an action movie. We all walked away.

So the only conclusion I can draw is it at some point later in life I’m going to be benefited by having witnessed raccoon manslaughter/homicide (not sure of the charges yet) and this is God preparing me.