Still alive! Still sick, but on the upward swing at last. I should be in bed. I was honestly getting ready for bed, but then A Thing happened and it’s too good to keep to myself.

Possums are a creature I associate with Loki for no reason in particular. The vague association was reinforced some months back when Auz, heathen memer extraordinaire, posted a silly cartoon possum with a joke about them pulling Loki’s chariot. While scrolling the ol’ FB before setting my alarm, I chuckled at a new possum-based meme he’d just shared and I unwittingly shared his Loki-chariot possum meme right back at him (cutting myself some slack on that one, my brain is mush from plague. Seriously, this virus is awful). I then remembered the lime cupcake baked with Corona beer that a colleague shared with me, and a bit of Inca Kola that had been gifted as well.

[Side note: if you’ve never had Inca Kola, get you some. It’s a soda from Peru, and I developed an addiction to it when I dated a guy from Peru some dozen years ago. I swear, I only stuck around in that relationship for as long as I did for the endless supply of The Golden Kola in his family’s fridge. It’s the color of piss and tastes like bubble gum: in my experience, it’s Loki’s favorite sugar water.]

With possums on the brain, I bundled up and stepped outside to share the cupcake and soda with our favorite twerp. I’ve been addled and stressed and so very, very ill, but at that moment, I felt a bit of peace and joy, so it had to be commemorated. There’s no better way to honor Loki’s presence than for a plague-infested devotee to offer a Corona beer cupcake and fizzy candy water. (I’ve never claimed to have a sophisticated wit, y’all.) My words were said, the cupcake and drink were shared, and I hunkered down on my back stoop in the middle of the concrete jungle I call home to bask in the moment under the stars.

Now, I live in a mid-sized city. City-city, very urban, but not quite the level of NYC or Philly. I’ve been in this house for 11 years, and I’ve seen all manner of city-slicker animal life waddling around, but tonight I met a new friend. There’s a bit of fencing in my back courtyard that’s a bit askew, and I heard it creak as I sat by the offering. I expected the rabbit-sized squirrel (My Liege) that owns this neighborhood or the comically round skunk (Harold) who sometimes explores my tiny little patch of concrete. Instead, a possum emerged and moseyed right on up to the cupcake, inches away from me.

I have never seen an opossum in the city. Nor have I ever seen one up close like that. Sure, I’ve seen ’em plenty on the back roads, the country roads, but never mere inches from my face in my rowhome’s courtyard next to a hospital.

Subtle, dude. Real subtle. Guess the plague-cake joke was well received.

The moment the little bugger noticed me, he feigned a casual saunter over to my garage. At least this explains the garbage that has been mysteriously strewn about in there. So now I have a picture of an urban Loki-possum chilling by my GTI, because why not?

The Loki-possum connection is just a silly association I have, one that amuses me and is fueled by Auz’s memes. To have a possum show up in the middle of the city and investigate a Corona beer cupcake 10 minutes after joking about the possum-drawn chariot of our favorite Trickster? Yeah, this is how UPG develops.

The gods absolutely pay attention to us measly, messed-up humans. We’re barely dust mites in the great scheme of things, but the great, raw, ancient primal powers that be notice us regardless, and they let us know when they see us. Sometimes it’s in the form of a tremendous, inexplicable blessing or boon, sometimes it’s a spontaneous rush of giddy euphoria. Sometimes it’s a random possum popping up in the middle of a city to nibble at a cupcake when your eyes are still wet from laughing about Loki-possum memes.

I don’t go out looking for the gods, listening for them or seeking signs. I just live my plain ol’ mundane life with them always on my mind, dedicating myself and my energy to them. Sometimes, I just happen to be surprised by a new kind of creature wandering into my courtyard at just the right time, in the right hour when tangentially-related silliness is reverberating in my fever-mushed brain. It’s these absurd little moments that bring me the greatest joy in the midst of struggle.

So now I’ll give my plague-wracked body the rest it needs, I’ll hit “publish” and burrow into my weighted blanket with my cats, and I’ll grin as I fade off to sleep with possums on the brain. And then I’ll probably bolt awake with the anxiety of the possum possibly crawling into the engine bay and chewing on cable harnesses and hoses in my GTI. Because I don’t manifest great and glorious things for myself.

I manifest possums.