Killer Karma

I can now add a new title to my prestigious resume: murderess. Yes, I surely have some bad karma coming my way. I'm driving down the Venetian Causeway Thursday night on my way to meet my friends. I'm going 30 mph max, factually ensured, since I had just seen a cop and was uber-observant of the speed limit. It's turning from dusk to night, and the road is sort of a narrow, residential street. All of the sudden, and, in slow-mo, as most life-altering events seem to be, this intrepid cat-who-looked-like-a-raccoon-and-shall-henceforth-be-referred-to-as-raccoon-to-assuage-my-Jewish-guilt, darts out in front my car. It sort of froze in the glare of my headlights, and before either one of us had the time to react, I hit the poor little fucker. Yes, I slammed on my brakes, but it was not enough. I suspect that even if I was only going 10 mph, 2 tons of German steel would have still caused the feline's demise. The impact natch produced a most sickening noise. I know it was a cat, even though my friends tried to convince me it was a wild animal of some sort, but it had a strange striped tail like that of a raccoon. It didn't have a collar, so I am hoping it was a stray and not a family's pet, but do cats ever have collars? The neighborhoods on the Venetian causeway are VERY tony, so I cannot imagine these people having wild outdoor cats.

Now as you all know I am an animal lover, and the pure irony of this whole situation is that EXACTLY 24 hours before I commited man/animalslaughter, I was volunteering at the freaking Humane Society. Could it possibly get anymore absurd? I mean, come on! The fact that I actually did volunteer at the HS the night before is the only reason I'm not having some sort of karmic meltdown, though I still do feel awful about the accident and have been having cat/raccoon nightmares all weekend. I do truly apologize to whomever owned/cared for this cat, so I'm lobbing this feeble apology out into the karmic/cosmic void.