Raccoons are cute. They really are. They’re smart as heck and have nimble little fingers that can open doors and unlatch plastic cat food containers. And of course they have their bandit masks that make them look mischievous, incorrigible and somehow guilty of something. Which they usually are.
They want to get along, be part of the tribe. I have had five raccoons at one time in the backyard, hanging around, swimming in the pool, yelling at each other. I have seen one of them stretch out on the patio deck like a cat - ‘hey I’m almost a pet’ he seemed to be saying.
At the moment I have one raccoon, probably a nursing mother, who lives under the house and comes out after dark to partake of the cat food. I could live-trap her and be rid of the nuisance but then her little kits would starve to death. Earlier in the year, during mating season in February and March, there were two. Probably a couple. I knew I couldn’t get both of them in the live trap (if you get one the other will avoid the trap) so I left them alone.
I tolerate the raccoons even when they eat the fish out of the pond, tear up the bog filter, attack some poor bird on the back porch who was screaming for its life a few nights ago and sneak in the house through the cat door, open the closet door and rip open the cat food bag. I tolerate them because . . . I don’t know why.
It’s kind of like living in modern society. We put up with a lot of stuff without really knowing why.
Have you ever thought about it? For example, we are so into cars because they look cool and transport us at a high rate of speed. But then we end up in a traffic jam because there are so many of them and we’re going slower than a horse. Then we do it all over again the next day. Acceptance of an inconvenience because . . . well we don’t know why.
Recently I got a new phone, an iPhone 11 Pro Max. My old one was missing some taps and it was too small. The AT&T rep assured me that soon it would be obsolete and unable to load updates. But I never updated my phone anyways. Well, at any rate, I went ahead with the aspiring project.
It’s been hell. The new phone doesn’t answer calls - it transfers them to ‘blocked calls’. Seems like an unfriendly thing to do. Not very efficient. It took me 2 days to figure that out. It took me 3 days and several trips to the AT&T store to transfer the data from my old phone to my new phone, and it still wasn’t all there. New apps had to be downloaded and they weren’t free anymore. The dreaded learning curve, that I had hoped to avoid, arrived and surrounded me. There was no choice but to walk deeper and deeper into the trap. They had my by the . . . well by the addiction I have to my phone I guess.
Ok, let me tell you about health insurance. It really is hell-thinsurance. If you’re sick and you need help, you will be in hell. First the appointment. That may take several weeks, in my case a month. That entitles you to drive to some medical complex where all the doctors and nurses gather with their gear and there you can sit on a chair for an hour. Approximately. Then you will be recognized and asked to sit in another chair for - well not quite an hour. This game of musical chairs will continue until you get to see the ‘Doctor’. The Doctor usually has some indication of rank - a stethoscope around their neck or some upscale clothing, not the normal pea green scrubs that nurses and lab assistants wear.
The Doctor will ask you to sit down (in another chair) inside the inner room, down the hall from where you first sat down and this is where the examination will take place. While piously looking at your medical records, the Doctor will ask, ‘How are you?’.
“If I felt good I wouldn’t be here’, is what I wanted to say but I didn’t because I didn’t want to mess it up. I needed their help.
They know that. If you got that far - making the appointment, driving to the place, registering, waiting around, slowly moving up the rank, closer and closer to the examination room - hey, they know you want it. Health care, that’s what you want. Nobody wants to die. So they listen to your symptoms and calibrate them with their AMA medical school information: which drugs to subscribe and at what potency. Then you’re free to go - to the pharmacy of your choice and wait in line to get your medicine.
I actually had to go to a doc-in-the-box to get medication for the anxiety induced condition that I got from dealing with the doctors.
Then there’s junk mail. The mailbox outside my house is stuffed with junk mail every day, my email is full of junk email and the scammers call on my new iPhone 11 Pro Max wanting to know if I’m interested in selling my house or buying their health insurance. Sometimes I actually answer to see if it’s my Doctor. Sometimes I say bad things to them when I realize it’s not.
Ok, well back to the raccoons. I’m sure you would rather hear about them than me griping about modern society.
Yeah, well those critters sure are resilient. I live-trapped one once and took it about 2 miles away and released it in a creek. Two days later it was back. Not the same one you say? I asked that same question to the guys who run the Water Gems garden store, where you can get stuff for your water features. They told me that they once live-trapped a coon and painted its tail and released it miles away. Yep, it came back.
Raccoons just like my backyard. And I do too. I don’t know what to do.
I imagine myself standing on a beach somewhere deep in Mexico, with the jungle at my back, and throwing my iPhone 11 Pro Max as far as I can into the sea.
But of course there are raccoons in the Mexican jungle too - they‘re slightly different and are called coatimundis. But they’ll tear the place up if they get a chance.