I, possum What humans can learn from ugly animals BY CHRIS WRIGHT

The other morning, walking to work, I saw a huge, ugly rat. And when I say huge and ugly, I mean huge and ugly. This thing looked like Danny DeVito in a fur coat, except it was dangling by its tail from the top of a chain-link fence, which I don’t think DeVito is given to doing. In any case, I knew the appropriate thing to do under the circumstances was to run away screaming, but I couldn’t help myself. I crept closer. Then closer. When I got to within a couple of feet, I saw that the rat wasn’t a rat at all — it was a possum. Which may have been worse.

There is something off about the possum, something evil — its sunken onyx eyes, its sharp white snout, its bristling, greasy fur. The sight of one of these marsupials affects you on a primordial level. You can feel the aversion in your blood. As I stood there, I half expected the animal to emit an unearthly squeal and launch itself at my throat. Instead, it looked at me with an expression of complete disregard, then began climbing languorously down the fence, gripping the links with its little hand-claws, stopping every now and then to take a breather. Finally, it reached the ground and waddled off into a parking lot.

The rest of the day, I worried about that possum. I worried that a car might splatter it, that a dog might rip it to shreds, that someone might stomp it to death. The city in the daytime is no place for an ugly little demon animal to be wandering around on its own. On the way home that evening, I stopped by the parking lot, checking for blood and fur. Nothing. If the thing had met an untimely end, it had done so elsewhere. Later, I told a friend of mine about my encounter with this strange, portly creature. "Possums are stupid," she said. "They don’t deserve to live."

I have to say, this pissed me off. In the short time I had known him, I’d grown quite fond of Possie. More important, there seemed to me to be something wrong-headed in determining right-to-life issues on brain power alone. Would my friend choke the life from Bill O’Reilly just because he’s a blathering moron? Would she cut Keanu Reeves down in his prime simply because he has the intellect of an ironing board? Okay, so maybe she had a point, but I was still a little angry. I’m sensitive about this stuff.

All my adult life, I’ve been obsessed with the idea that one needs an excuse for living — for eating, for using up the precious air. I think it stems from the two years — between the ages of 16 and 18 — after I left school, when I was unemployed in England. Every two weeks, I’d go to my local dole office to sign on, and every two weeks I’d have to answer the same questions. "Have you done any work since you were last here?" No. "Have you actively been looking for work?" Yes. With this, the clerk would shove a little piece of paper at me and look up with an expression that would fill me with misery. It wasn’t a disapproving look — that wouldn’t have been so bad. It was a blank look. I was nothing. A waste of space.

Actually, I hadn’t been entirely honest with the people at the dole office. Although I was officially unemployed, I would pick up a job here and there, mixing cement, mopping floors. The pay was pitiful, but worse than this was the sense that I wasn’t actually doing anything. So I started writing poetry. But there was a problem here, too. Reviewing an epic I’d written about nuclear war — "Your lifeless eyes reflect the clouds that climb into the sky/Your face reflects the pain and fear, your lips a silent cry" — I realized that I had gone from being a waste of space to being a waste of paper.

This is how it went through my early 20s. I bought a harmonica and became a self-taught bluesman. The music I made sounded less like the blues than it did a goose being forced into a blender. I tried my hand at photography, relying heavily on the Tilted Lens Method — leaning lampposts, skewed doggies, reeling nudes. Ridiculous. Next I had a go at portrait painting. My noses and eyes were okay, but I had trouble with lips, which invariably ended up looking like stale hot dogs. So I switched to abstracts. My geometrics wobbled. My studies in color became studies in brown. Back to the scrawling board.

For a while, I found a raison d’être in my personal appearance. I buffed up, grew my hair, bought a bunch of trendy clothes, and became a full-time cute person. Looking good, I figured, was a way of giving pleasure, and so served as a self-justification of sorts. Which may help explain why Possie offended my friend to the point where she would have happily seen him dead — it wasn’t so much that he was dumb, it was that he was ugly. But I am not a possum, I am a man, and in the end looking good wasn’t enough. I needed more. Then it hit me. Cogito, ergo sum. I would become a Thinker.

I can’t say I’m proud of the behavior I displayed in college. Indeed, it seems inexcusable to me now that I once spent an entire day assuming the persona of Jean Jacques Rousseau. And did I really have to go around questioning the existence of tables? But I did learn to think during that time. More important, I learned to think about things other than myself. Today, for instance, I’m thinking about that little critter I stumbled across the other day. Does Possie have a reason for being here? What reason could there possibly be?

Well, he touched something in me, and that’s a start. Maybe he even has a ghastly looking mate somewhere, whom he touches in ways we humans cannot bring ourselves to imagine. Or maybe he did meet a sticky end that day. If so, I guess it won’t really affect me, not in any real sense. And yet I do like to think that he’s out there somewhere, a plump, bedraggled goblin, snuffling through the oil slicks and broken glass of a blighted parking lot. If that’s enough for him, it’s enough for me. And this alone is why Possie has earned his place among us. He can teach us something: existence is its own excuse.

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com