I Probably Should Have Died Then

Ever had one of those experiences that, while enjoyable at the time, makes you break out in cold sweats 12 hours (or 12 minutes) later upon reflection of the shear stupidity of the acts involved? These are those experiences.
Episode 4: RACCOON HUNT!
RACCOON HUNT! is in all caps and contains an exclamation point because that's the way it was always said. For example:

Mom: I think I hear something out in the garbage.
Ted, Colin, Kevin, and I (simultaneously): RACCOON HUNT!

or

Rhett: Dude, if I play another game of FIFA '95 I'm going to kill myself. You guys want to do anything else?
Colin, Kevin, and I: RACCOON HUNT!

There were several incarnations of the RACCOON HUNT!, but one in particular sticks out in my mind. Wrote a song about it. Here it go...

It happened in the Summer of Drunk - a forgotten (quite literally) June during which Shane worked at a wings joint in Batavia. I'd close shop with him and get drunk every night. Every night for an entire month. It was fun. It was cheap. It was 30 days I'll never remember and 30,000,000 brain cells I'm never getting back. Anywho... after a normal night of binge drinking, Rhett, my trusty and, more importantly, always sober sidekick (and therefore de facto designated driver) was taking me back to the Copperglow Compound at around 1am. As I told Rhett he was my best friend for driving me home he said, "Dude, why are your little brothers running around the house?"

RACCOON HUNT!

And so it begins.

I should mention that up to this point, a RACCOON HUNT! had never actually yielded a RACCOON KILL! Tonight that would change.

I reconnoitered with Colin and Kevin and was dismayed to discover they had already claimed dibs on all the best weaponry available in the Heffernan household. By "best weaponry" I mean a sawed-off BB gun (yes, I said a sawed-off BB gun) that required at least 30 pumps to even be noticeable and an old modified suction-cup crossbow that we had received one year from Santa and that within 10 minutes of being unwrapped had been retrofitted to shoot darts from our dartboard. Seeing that our usual cache of slingshots had been lost at sea (see Chapter 1 of these sagas), I was left with 2 options:

1. An old and unwieldy bow and arrow set my sister had gotten one Christmas
2. A sharp stick and some rocks

I opted for the stick and rocks.

This night fortune was on our side. I ran into the woods to flush out the raccoon. Colin peppered me with BBs while Kevin kept his crossbow at the ready. Surprisingly, the sticks and rocks were less effective than one would imagine. Go figure. So I flush the raccoon out into the open, and, to spare you the gory details, we didn't have any problems with raccoons in the garbage after that night.

Yeah, it was kind of anticlimatic and yeah, I guess I was never really in mortal peril - unless you don't consider RABIES to be serious... but no one got rabies. I was pretty drunk, but on a drunkenness richter scale this was probably only around a 6.5 out of 10. For reference I have raced (and won) the Indianapolis 500 at 7 and delivered triplets via Caesarian section at an 8. So this really wasn't too bad, I just wanted to type RACCOON HUNT! 3 or 4 times. Suck it...