I Haven't Had Much Sleep the Last Two Nights Because a Raccoon Keeps Jumping on My Head

My friend found a litter of baby raccoons whose mother got hit by a car. They were all sent out to relatives or friends to raise until they could be let go and they would survive on their own. Well, he just bought a new puppy and doesn’t think he has time to take care of both. I asked me to take it and I said OK. It is past the bottle stage luckily or I would have told him to deal with it. Na, I probably would have taken it anyways. Having or doing something weird or out of the norm sticks with you and you always remember those times. I think this will be a good memory for the kids, plus it is so cool. She (my wife says it is a she) doesn’t have front paws, they are little hands, and it grabs everything in sight. It sticks its hands in every nook-and-cranny and feels around looking for hidden treasure. They do that on riverbanks and between rocks and pebbles in the water searching for food. It is an inherent trait of its species and doesn’t have to be learnt. It is a real dork. It runs and hides and then jumps out. It was really afraid of our dos at first, but now it plays with them. It only took one day to lose its fear of our small dogs. Hopefully it doesn’t totally lose its fear of dogs, because in the wild the canines are friendly playful companions. I’ve been told that it is illegal to have her, because she is indigenous wildlife. I don’t know if that is the reason, but I don’t think I am allowed to have it. My friend once saw a fawn on the side of the road with the doe dead, having been run over by a car. He went to the DNR and they told him that he just had to let nature take its course and that he could be fined if a wild animal was ever found in his possession, and that it didn’t matter what the reason was. Compassion means nothing apparently, you are supposed to just let it die, that is natural selection, and you have to just deal with it, he was told. My friend didn’t care and risked helping the little coon and so will I. I will be honest with you, if it becomes attached to us and is nice and learns to use a little box, I will probably keep it. But I have been told, by people that they have heard that they never become domesticated and will become mean at adulthood. If that becomes the case I will release it to the wild, if I don’t anyways for some other reason, and just be happy that it survived because we took it in. What are your thoughts? Seriously.

OK, back to the sleeping issue. We put it in a cage the first night down at the end of the bed on the floor. It screamed for hrs off and on wanting to be free of the cage. Finally it shut-up for good and I was able to get more than an hr of sleep at a time. We found out why it stopped crying the next morning. It was dead.

I’m just joking. Ha, ha, funny or ha, ha, you sick asshole? Anyways, Bandit (oh yea forgot to tell ya, we named it Bandit, get it? OK, your aren’t that slow - the next one will be harder) had figured out how to get out of the cage. It is a mess cage with a pvc-plastic framework surrounded by a zippered mess screen. Remember I said it had hands, well it knows how to use them. It un-zipped the cage and got out. I found it in the morning curled up sleeping in my bedside nightstand. It loves take one shelf in my nightstand and anytime you are in the bedroom with it goes in there. That is its spot. You can take it and put it on the bed and it will leave as soon as it feels like it and goes right back in there. If you leave and go to another room it follows after you. It doesn’t like to be alone.

So last night we tried putting it in a different cage with a few books on top of the lid. It wouldn’t shout the hell up and finally it started screaming so we turned on the light. It somehow forced the lid up and made it half out, but the books proved too much for it and it became stuck. I was so tired that I just said piss on it and let it out. It shut-up and went right in the nightstand. Well, letting it out proved to be a mistake last night, because I forgot that raccoons are nocturnal creatures. Bandit would stay in the stand for an hr and then decide to get on the bed and run around. It would get on our pillows and play with our ears and hair. (OK, let me rephrase that – my wife’s hair and my head. I shave the little that still actually grows.) It sounds cute, but when you have to work in the morning and for some reason the Seroquel isn’t putting you to sleep as soon, so you are already going to be sleepy, it gets old. So I killed it. Just joking again. I would push it and tell it to get and it would go back to the stand for an hr or so. It did this 3 times. I won’t have to worry about it tonight because this is my last day of work, so I’ll be up all night playing, what else, but poker. I’m going back to work on night shift so I’ll be staying up all night for the next 4 days anyways, so I won’t have to deal with it till late in the week. But even then I will be sleeping during the day so it will be running around with the family in the rest of the house.

Maybe I’ll post a few pics. It loves fake fighting with my Pomeranian. They roll around like dorks biting at each other’s feet. It makes me happy and that is good.

Until next time, later, Ash out…