When I got on the Scarborough shuttle bus last night, my question to the driver was: "Would you still give me a lift if I'd just been blasted by a skunk?"

He laughed and said "sure!"

But I wasn't kidding.

After leaving work at CTV,  I walked out to McCowan Road, with a plan of walking southward to the stop where I can catch the bus that's replacing the late-night Scarborough Rapid Transit service until November.

On the CTV grounds, there were a few raccoons running around. When they saw me, nothing else mattered in their world: I got the full attention of their beady little eyes as they crouched on the lawn.

I felt like a walking fish stick.

(If this were a fantasy movie, I would have had the raccoons run up to me and freak me out by walking behind me and mimicking every move I made. Then they would roll on the ground laughing when it became obvious they were getting to me).

Anyways, I walked out past the security gate and onto McCowan, just in time to see one bus roar southward (if it had been a luckier night, sometimes they stop at the light that allows people who exited the 401 to get onto McCowan. But the light was green).

At the came time, a white cat with a few blue-grey patches was sitting on top of a corner pole for CTV's chain link fence.

The cat was minding its own business, but again, if I wanted to make the situation more bizarre, I would have had the cat staring at me with a contemptuous smirk on its face -- and maybe eating an ice cream cone. Having the cat wearing bondage gear would also be a nice touch.

For some reason, I kept wondering to myself why the hell the cat had decided to sit there, of all places. The cap on the pole was maybe 10 centimetres in diameter and it was about 1.8 metres off the ground, making it not so easy a perch to reach.

At the same time, the cat looked pretty nonchalant -- but cats do that, don't they?

While I'm working the cat situation through my mind, a second bus goes roaring southward, so again I'm wondering if I'll get lucky with the lights (I didn't).

I had just about run out of sidewalk (you have to cross the exit to the west-bound 401 to keep going south). Where the sidewalk ends is some knee-high grass.

In that grass, right by the sidewalk, was a small, animate, black object with a white stripe shuffling around.

"SKUNK!!" I silently screamed to myself.

This miniature Pepe Le Pew got freaked out himself. He saw me and his eyes bulged out. He turned around and raised his tail into the "lock and load" position.

I backed up very fast.

I don't know if he cut loose with a blast, but I was downwind of the critter, so you'd think I would have known if he did. As a result, I presume he did not.

Anyways, with my heart rate significantly elevated, I continued south on McCowan, going under a road overpass servicing Scarborough Town Centre mall. There, I distinctly smelled skunk, although it wasn't coming from me.

But that's something to be paranoid about for next time. There really isn't a proper sidewalk there. Underneath the overpass is a "shelf" -- for lack of a better word -- that's about chest high with lots of shrubs and whatnot to provide cover for a skunk.

Great. Now I can envision a scenario where I can ask a bus driver, while I still have skunk juice dripping down my face, "since I've just been blasted by a skunk ... ."