It is here that I admit to you that I am an actual honest to god real-life no frills about it raccoon. 

You can really tell because of my hands. 

See, they’ve got all the right bits of them leathery and they smell exactly enough like crawfish and the mysterious grey chutney of dumpsters. 

If they were smoother or spongier or smelled just a little bit more like ham or coconut or sage I think I might be obligated to rethink some things about my self. But as it happens, I am a raccoon. 

The scuzz and the bandit mask were a couple of my first clues. See, they weren’t everything that was going on with me at the time I noticed them and they still aren’t but they are some of few features of mine that haven’t fallen away. 

It’s really pretty amazing to think about all the time that I wore these things and not a single person had shooed me out of an alleyway. It was almost like they thought I was something other than a raccoon. Like somehow maybe they were as oblivious as I was and just thought that I was maybe a ferret or something else that they would have wanted in their house. 

It was October I believe when I really decided that this was the case. It had only been a few months since I had my first realization of what I was and I was thinking about what it was like to take a bubble bath. Really trying to recall what they had been like. I was so trying to conjure that sense that I felt compelled to actually recreate it. So I had drawn myself a bubble bath, right?

I’d really gone all out and dumped a whole bunch of oils that my mom said would smell nice together right into the water and lit the candle that I found in the parking lot of a Bojangles and set it on the counter to watch over me. 

I plunked myself right dead center in the froth and I even had the audacity to put on some music. I had tried to train the algorithm to always give me cool music I would like by first listening to a lot of cool music that I liked. It sort of worked but I think it may have taken some liberties in guessing what really got to me you know. I am not sure if the logic of these programs is written for raccoons. 

Anyways I’m sitting there, furry knees cresting above foam, some kind of medium acclaim hip hop bouncing around me and I realize something. Raccoons don’t take bubble baths! There’s never been a single picture that I have personally seen of a raccoon laying back just kickin it in a bath full of sweet scents and a pearly frosting of bubbles. 

Heck, I don’t even think I’d seen a picture of one of us in a regular bubbleless bath. Maybe I wasn’t a raccoon after all? Weren’t we supposed to get clean in creeks or whatever?

 That wasn’t what I was doing at all. I was lavendered-the-fuck-out making myself bubble bras in a neat old retro clawfoot tub. I was even thinking about trying a bath with oatmeal next!

 But, this couldn’t possibly be the habit of a raccoon, right? I had not seen it chronicled and so it wasn’t a viable combination of circumstances to me. But then what the fuck was with this stripy tail? 

None of this made sense with the sense I had been given. I lowered my bandit mask and peered into my bloated reflection in a bubble. It occurred to me that I had read an article once that said raccoons could use our particularly dextrous hands to take pictures.  

So dripping wet and impossibly naked, I reached for the little fujifilm on my shelf and snapped the selfie I am holding now in my leathery capable little hands. 

It’s a bit blurry, or maybe I am. 

I am a blurry raccoon and I am pictured.