Perverted Raccoon

            On Friday morning I dreamed that a big raccoon was on the third floor ledge of the building across the street and trying to get in. The only thing I know is that a woman lives there whom I assume is Black from the shape of her silhouette. I see it briefly when she’s getting dressed on weekday mornings while I’m looking out the window during song practice.

When I got up it was white again on the street, but it was so warm in my apartment that I had all my windows open for a good part of the morning. The snow was so wet that it looked like sticky cotton candy clinging to the tops of cars that passed during song practice. By the end of the day the snow was mostly gone again.

            I spent a lot of the day trying to catch up on my journal.

            It was the first day of my annual fast but I had some rutabaga and onion soup in chicken broth to finish before just eating uncooked vegetables. I finished it at dinnertime.

            I watched a suspenseful Alfred Hitch Hour about a couple that moves next door to a couple with a psychotic son of about 8 years old. At first the man catches the boy teasing his dog, but he just tells him gently that he’s got to learn how to treat animals. He offers to let him walk him later so he can build a better relationship. But the boy locks the dog in his father’s garage and the man hears it barking and comes to rescue it. He tries to complain to the father, played by Ed Asner, but the father thinks that his son would never lie because he put a stop to him lying when he was four. Later the man catches the boy stealing from his glove compartment and confronts him again. The boy warns him that if he tells his father he’ll kill his dog. He tells his father, which does no good because his father doesn’t believe it. Sure enough though the kid cuts his way through their kitchen window screen with a knife, gets into the house and poisons the dog. The police can’t do anything about it because the little monster’s father backs up his story and so it’s his word against theirs. The boy isn’t finished though. He sneaks into the house again when the husband is playing golf. He goes down to the basement and ties some wire across the stairs at ankle height. Then he turns on the husband’s electric drill on the workbench, leaves it running and hides. The woman comes downstairs to investigate the noise, trips and hits the floor hard. The kid carefully removes the wire and is about to leave when he discovers that the woman is still alive. She stirs and tries to sit up but her hand is caught between the vertical slats that hold up the banister. The kid goes to get the drill and is approaching her with the intention of drilling her caught hand but the cord is not long enough and the plug pulls out just before he can do any damage. The husband goes to confront the father in his garage and finds out that the father may have damaged the child with the punishment that he spoke of that he thought ended his son’s lying. He recounted how he’d put his four-year-old son’s hand in a pot of boiling water. While they are talking, the boy uses kerosene to set fire to the garage with the two men in it. Finally the cops come to take the little boy away to get him help.