Predawn Surreal Dumpster Diver

O.K., so blogging from the Treo in Austin didn't exactly work out. When I devised this ambitious plan, I failed to take two factors into account:

1) We were way too busy and/or drunk most of the time for me to be able to blog; and
2) Unless you have fingers the size of rice grains, it's really difficult and annoying to type much on those tiny Treo keyboards.

So, I am working on my SXSW recap, but it probably won't be ready until this weekend. Sorry to keep everyone in suspense! (By "everyone," I mean the two or three people who actually care about which bands they've never heard of we saw when.)

In the meantime, it's 6:00 in the morning, and here I am blogging. Why, you might ask? As most of you know, I'm not exactly a morning person. This particular morning, though, I woke up around 4:00 (after going to bed at 12:30) and just could not go back to sleep. I tossed around for about half an hour, then finally gave up and got up. Not sure what made me wake up so early, but I will admit that I was thinking about work and couldn't get it out of my head. Despite how it sounds, this is not a bad thing. I've woken up early before thinking about work, but it's always been due to stress. This time, it was due to something else--excitement, I guess. Great things happening there! But I don't want to write about work right now. What I want to write about is what waking up so early led me to witness outside my back door a short while ago.

So, I'm in the kitchen making coffee, and while I'm waiting for it to brew, I decide I might as well take the garbage out. I take the bag out of the can, slip on some shoes, and open the back door. Of course, the dog has to come with me. I walk out, and Josie rushes past me, sniffing around in the yard to the right. I head to the left toward the dumpster . . . and stop dead as I notice something climbing quickly out of it, apparently startled by my sudden appearance. At first I think it's a freakishly large cat, but the thought pops into my head that cats don't generally eat out of dumpsters. (They tend to be much more discerning than that.) Then I think--I kid you not--that it's a bear cub. That's what it looks like, all huge and hunched over. As it leaps to the ground, I suddenly realize what it is--the biggest fucking raccoon I've ever seen in my life (and I've seen me some raccoons).

Panic sets in. I have something of a phobia about raccoons. I won't deny that they're kind of cute, but they also tend to be mean, preternaturally smart, and frequently rabid. (O.K., I doubt that they are frequently rabid, but I have this irrational idea in my head that they are all just riddled with rabies.) And this one was huge--I'm not kidding, it must have been 25 or 30 pounds, maybe more? Apparently, these city dumpsters make for some good eating. (Frankly, I'm surprised it was even able to jump up into the dumpster.) But I wasn't afraid for myself--I was terrified for my dog. As this freakishly humongous raccoon waddled away, I had visions in my head of Josie catching sight of it and taking off after it, and then I thought about the awful, bloody battle that would ensue, a la Where the Red Fern Grows. (All right, so it was actually a cougar, not a raccoon, that killed Old Dan in that story, but a raccoon started the whole thing . . . I'm sorry, this is just how my mind works.)

Of course, all of my freaking out was completely ridiculous. The raccoon was long gone almost immediately (being a pretty fast waddler, as raccoons tend to be), and Josie didn't even notice it anyway. Still, I frantically called her name and herded her back into the house as fast as I could, keeping my body between her and the general departure direction of the raccoon; all the while, she's looking at me like I'm completely nuts. And I guess I was, a little--still thinking that we had barely escaped death by rabid dumpster diver.

See, I'm really not a morning person.

[Update: Upon leaving for work this morning, I realized that the raccoon was eating the old, stale pizza that I threw out myself last night. So, it was my own actions that summoned the huge, rabid beast. Must be more careful.]