Big John Bates & the Voodoo Dollz Blog

When I’m sad, I like to recall things that make me smile. I think of Cat Yodelling, dogs in hats, or raccoons. Many folks have asked me how I came to associate myself with the little urban bandits and therein lies a story… 

So it was in Invermere that BJB and I were looking up Animal Spirit Guides. We had bugger all to do before our show later that night and so were poking around in a new age gift shop. After we’d seen our fill of dream catchers (yawn) and pseudo-occult Goddess-loving bric-a-brac, we happened onto the books. The one that caught my eye was the animal spirit guides, so  pulled it and thumbed through looking for ‘raccoon’.

Well, bugger me if it didn’t describe me pitch perfect. None of this hazy, descriptive stuff that plagues horoscope gibberish, this cited specific behavioural examples which left me chilled to my theoretical ringed tail. This thing had me dead to rights, and we circulated it amongst ourselves. I didn’t actually buy a copy of it, but if it’s still in the shop with my smudgy fingerprints on it, I’ll have to purchase it next time. And maybe a dreamcatcher.

It wasn’t that book that was the catalyst. What happened went down in 1980 when my mother began carrying the squiggle that would later turn out to be me. My aunt, her sister, had adopted a baby male raccoon named Angus. He was a puckish little ball of fluff who grew up in two years to be a healthy 50 pound male. His delinquent activities included eating slugs from the garden, digging in the potted plants, and finding one little snag in the wallpaper and doing full scale stripping of walls. He was adorable and completely destructive.

He also had a sense of humor. As my mother’s belly grew and her lap disappeared, he’d slink up next to the couch like he was going to pounce on her lap (of which there was less and less). As he flung himself at my mom, he’d deke out at the last minute, galloping away and twirling on the carpet, loving this great game. I think at that moment, the uterine quakes my mother experienced induced this raccoon mantle on her unborn daughter. I had the curse of the raccoon.

Like many things, it lay dormant for a number of years, not starting to blossom until a chance doodling of raccoons with wheelbarrows on a coaster in a Hagen bar and finally coming full circle in Invermere with that book. So if any of you wonder where this obsession with raccoons lies, that is where it all started. A pet raccoon named Angus with a great sense of humor.

Namaste.

Little Miss Risk