Raccoon Coat Story PDF

Cool was I and logical. Keen, calculating, perspicacious, acute — I was all of these. My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, precise as a chemist's scales, as penetrating as a scalpel. And — think of it! — I was only eighteen. 2It is not often that one so young has such a giant intellect. Take, fo...

Cool was I and logical. Keen, calculating, perspicacious, acute — I was all of these. My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, precise as a chemist's scales, as penetrating as a scalpel. And — think of it! — I was only eighteen. 2It is not often that one so young has such a giant intellect. Take, for example, Petey Burch, my roommate at the University of Minnesota. Same age, same background, but dumb as an ox. A nice enough fellow, you understand, but nothing upstairs4. Emotional type. Unstable. Impressionable. Worst of all, a faddist. Fads, I submit, are the very negation of reason. To be swept up in every new craze that comes along, to surrender oneself to idiocy just because everybody else is doing it — this, to me, is the acme of mindlessness. Not, however, to Petey. 3One afternoon I found Petey lying on his bed with an expression of such distress on his face that I immediately diagnosed appendicitis. "Don't move," I said, "Don't take a laxative. I'll get a doctor." 4"Raccoon," he mumbled thickly. 5"Raccoon?" I said, pausing in my flight. 6"I want a raccoon coat," he wailed. 7I perceived that his trouble was not physical but mental. "Why do you want a raccoon coat?