Pleasant surprises are few and far between, I feel. But when they do come around, their scarcity just makes them extra special. In short: consider this a friendly reminder that life is fucking hysterical.

So last night Mike and I are driving back from a house party in Santa Monica at about 2:30 AM (fat shout to Chris - anyone who stocks Pabst is a good man), going over the various absurd things we've told people during the course of the night to entertain ourselves or just avoid the average LA conversation (which begins with "Are you in the industry?" goes immediately to "What do you do?" and is usually followed up at the next dead spot with "Where do you live?"). For reference, some of these things included me telling a girl that it was my job to be one of those guys who stands out on the corner with a sign for some condo and tries to attract attention by basically impersonating a drum major with a giant sign instead of a baton of some sort, and more succinctly, that "The Wire" is just like "Stand & Deliver."

Anyway, we're talking about something of this variety as I pull up to the stoplight at Ohio and Veteran. And as I pull up, I see a bushy tail just past a tree trunk blocking my view. And as Mike is in mid-sentence, I just say "Holy shit" and start pointing.

Almost exactly four months to the date of my original sighting, at literally the exact same intersection, was a massive raccoon, tooling across Veteran with an unmistakable swagger.

Cue the mad scramble for cell phones w/photo capabilities in hopes of capturing visual evidence of this tremendous event.

Soon after, cue a wave of confusion and disappointment as we look up only to find an empty street.

I have no idea what happened. I suspect that the raccoon either went down into the storm drain (which I doubt, since the storm drains on Veteran are not large enough to launch a small ship or harbor the raccoon), or else he scurried into the tree on the northeast corner of the intersection. I even pulled over to the side of the road into a fire lane to try to figure it out with Mike for a few minutes. Then we decided that this was a bad idea, that not even the racoon is worth a ticket, and that finally, we feel really empathetic toward all those people who have seen a Yeti but have not been able to get the camera ready in time to let the rest of the world know that we do not rule the animal kingdom.

The only question at this point is: was it the same raccoon? Or is it Raccoon II, Son of Kong? We may never know. But one thing's for sure: if you haven't stashed your gold and spare rolls of Subway bread into a secure location, it may already be too late.