Rachel wrote a post today about discovering three possums perched on her fence when she returned home. The encounter went like this:

as soon as I shone the light of humanity upon them, they all froze, turned their pointy little faces toward me, and stared like you might imagine Satan stares at you from hell in your worst nightmares of lonely death. Seriously, I hate possums. They’re just not right.

So of course I went inside and got the camera because I should like to share with you the sheer breadth and depth of how foul these things are and help you understand why I was so intensely revolted when Maggie devoured that other one with such relish.

The two smaller possums took cover behind leaves but the biggest one, which was easily the size of a large housecat but with a ropey tail twice as long as any kitty’s, a tail that simply should not exist in nature, held its ground and posed belligerently for its mug shot, which you see above.

To see the picture of the monster possum, you need to go to Rachel’s site. That thing is revolting. Anyway, Rachel pondered whether or not she was now racist against possums for hating them so. If that’s the case, then I have a confession to make.

I am a possum racist.

I hate them. I seriously, virulently hate them. I never really thought much about possums, beyond feeling fleetingly sorry for them when I drove past one with it’s insides splayed out on the side of the road. They were always hideously ugly, but as their faces are always pretty mangled after being run over by a one ton possum crusher, I never realized how evil-looking and hideous they actually are.

I was going to visit a friend one night, and it was already dark out. I was walking cheerily up her front walk in the dark, when the motion sensor detected me moving around out there, and the floodlights turned on. There, right on the door mat smack dab in front of the door, was the evil little creature. It didn’t move. It just glared at me, with its evil little beady eyes, and opened its mouth in a snarl to show me its evil little possum teeth. I swear to you, these things are so ugly that they look better as roadkill then they do alive and in tact. Anyway, I was absolutely paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t stop staring at it, and it would NOT stop staring at me. I had no weapon of any kind to use on it, nothing I could use to throw at it to scare it away, and I was deathly afraid. I just knew, with complete certainty, that if I so much as moved an inch that thing was going to come barreling at me and sink its sharp little possum teeth (that it was currently baring) into me, and infect me with nasty possum diseases. So I stood there frozen, wondering what in the hell to do. I spotted a tree branch on the ground, and was about to grab it so that I could use it to bash in the head of the evil little creature… until the nasty thing decided I wasn’t food and ran away. I quickly sprinted to the front door and deadlocked it behind me, as if the critter was running to get all of its evil little friends to come lay siege onto the house.

Irrational? Sure. But when you see a possum snarling at you on a doorstep illuminated by floodlights, then we’ll talk. I swear to you, nothing freaks me out more than possums do after that night (and this was years ago!). I might make Mike go kill the spider in the shower because I don’t want to touch it, but I’m not afraid of the spider. I just don’t want it near me. It doesn’t make me frozen with fear. And I just cannot help it — there is something about the disgusting-ness of a possum that I just cannot get over. They seriously look like Satan’s rejects from Hell, forced to live out life here on Earth as some kind of sick punishment for us humans.

So, if that makes me a possum racist, then yes, Virginia, I am a possum racist. And it isn’t likely to change anytime soon.