You may think you know about the helicopter from Mike's post. But you don't know the half of it.

Have you ever reached a point of sleeplessness where your body starts to play tricks on you? This physiological state and I are good buddies. We go to one another's houses for Christmas, plan vacations together, and wife-swap. Good times. If you ever want to meet my pal sustained sleep-loss, I suggest trying to write screenplays for four or five hours a night when you've got a demanding full-time job, then waking up at 9:30 on Sundays to go to the bar to watch football. Take it from the pros: it's the key to victory.

At any rate, two things tend to happen to me when I reach this state: 1) I get the shakes, which Mike and I have discussed at our other blog, www.teamfilthy.com, and 2) I begin to see major flashes of movement at the corners of my peripheral vision. This is normally not cool. It is especially not cool when you are constantly watching your back for fear that a giant dog-raping raccoon will drop out of a tree and club you over the head with a Colt 45 bottle he stole from some frat boy a couple miles away, then pee in a nearby crevice, drown you in the resulting puddle, and use your bank card to withdraw all the money from your checking account to buy fraudulent penny stocks he heard about in some spam email rather than setting up an IRA or some other sensible form of fiscal safety net.

Granted, that last part is a little outlandish -- but only if you sleep more than your average Army Ranger.

What was I talking about?

Oh, right.

Anyway, I was coming home late for reasons that wouldn't interest a raccoon, and I was just a few blocks away from my apartment, doing perfectly fine behind the wheel -- when I catch one of the aforementioned flashes of movement out of the corner of my right eye. I snap to it -- take my eyes off the road for a split second -- hear a horn and look back to see that I've drifted into the next lane.

I cut the wheel back too fast, and the car barrels into an enormous pothole I've avoided six hundred times before. And immediately after the initial ba-boom of the pothole, my car starts making a noise like there was an empty keg full of cheap firecrackers rolling around in my engine. This is the kind of thing that makes you pull over immediately and start stringing together curse words in combinations that either make no sense at all (see: 'son of a shit') or so much sense that you wonder why more people don't use them (see: 'bitchfucker').

I pop the hood of the car on the side of Kelton and start looking for anything blatantly wrong. And yes, I'm hoping that if there is anything wrong, it's completely smack-you-in-the-eyeball obvious, since I have the mechanical training of your average baby girl. And at this point, I hear the helicopter.

I look up for a minute, and it appears to be making a pretty routine fly-by. The spotlight is swinging pretty carelessly over the yuppie-urban landscape of Westwood -- and then WHAM! All of a sudden, it doubles back, sweeping wildly across a specific area, trying to focus on something.

The helicopter veers into a sharp turn, and Spotlight George tries to keep whatever it is in his sights.

And at that point, I see that taking up roughly 2/7 of the spotlight area, is the raccoon -- perched in the top of a nearby magnolia tree, hissing and pawing in the direction of the chopper with a loaf of bread in its other hand.

I freeze. The helicopter hovers. But the raccoon is on the move, cradling the loaf of bread that I'm 72% certain it jacked from Subway in its arm, trying to avoid the light. And the helicopter crew -- either having nothing important to do or just trying to stall for some other reason -- begins circling the area, trying to keep a bead on the closest thing to a sasquatch that you or I will ever see. But god damn that thing is fast.

I watched this absurd game of cat and mouse for 20 minutes while I concluded that my engine was shot, called 411 to try to get a tow truck, and eventually ended up falling asleep in a Holiday Inn Express lobby in Brentwood waiting for the nearest auto shop to open so I could find out how much it was going to cost me to repair my engine. And even though there are few things more degrading than passing out in a lobby, at least I knew that for one night, the raccoon had been held to a loaf of bread rather than the nest egg of some poor unsuspecting elderly Westwoodian who had left his window open, not anticipating that his desire to enjoy a cool late summer breeze would give a furry bandit carte blanche to pack a tree full of his hard-earned World War II medals. And I hoped that when the raccoon escaped the chopper (which I'm sure it did) he bit into that loaf of bread and discovered that it was jalapeno cheese...stale jalapeno cheese. Those would be his just desserts.