An animal answer

The Complete and Total Loser's neighborhood has changed since he grew up in it in the sixties. 
It's still made up of mostly well-to-do whites, though now they're whites who grew up in the suburbs, not ones who emigrated from the city, like the Loser's parents and neighbors. The population has burgeoned, but the proportion of whites to other races is probably about the same as it was.
The change the Loser's talking about is in animals.
When growing up, you'd hear about people seeing an opossum, raccoon, or skunk, but about the only time you'd see one yourself was when it was dead on the road, killed by a night time driver, a college kid, probably. When the Loser was sixteen, a deer vaulted across the road he and a friend were driving on. They were so excited by the rare vision they went to the area the next day to look for its tracks, as if to prove to themselves it had been real. 
It's different now. 
Since summer, the Loser has caught four raccoons (the most recent just yesterday), two skunks, an opossum and the same feral cat twice. Deer often hang out in his back yard for hours at a time. Last night, the Loser shone a flashlight out back and two pairs of deer eyes glowed back. Both had laid down, ready for a cold November night.
One word explains the change. Dogs.
When the Loser was a kid, dogs were never leashed in the suburbs. They ran free, got in fights, killed animals or, if they found an already dead animal, rolled around on its corpse. Seldom neutered, the males would disappear for days at a time, traveling for miles to mate with a bitch in heat. The Loser's dog did this into his sixteenth year, returning hungry and grinning. His DNA is in a lot of dogs by now. 
Now, of course, everyone's so timid and litigious that the idea of a child being nipped by a dog and the packs of personal injury lawyers has made that impossible. Any dog just roaming a neighborhood is assumed to be feral, maybe even rabid. 
So the animals run free, with no natural predators except maybe a fox or two and, of course, cars, their primary foe.

If the Loser knew how to hunt and butcher deer, he'd have to buy a meat locker.

Non-stop animal invasion

The Complete and Total Loser has now trapped four raccoons since summer. To some of those living in the countryside, that's a piddling number, but the Loser lives in an East Coast suburb where there are so many cars it's amazing there are any non-flying animals left at all. 
He trapped this one overnight on a Friday, meaning he released it on a Saturday morning. That's not easy, because anyplace suitable for raccoon release and car access is also coveted by runners and walkers and their dogs. Usually, the Loser doesn't set the trap on weekends for this reason but he hadn't baited it for days and simply didn't bother. 
The release was a suspenseful one, with a 30-second window, if that.
The raccoon looks mean but was very sweet, actually. A young one, it was just mushing its face against the cage, the way a kid watching TV might against a sofa arm.

The Loser's latest catch now lives miles away.

Pussy cat, pussy cat

Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been?

I've been to London to look at the Queen.

Pussy cat, pussy cat, what did you do there?

I frightened a little mouse, under the chair. 

Then it came back and lived near the Complete and Total Loser, who trapped it in his quest to catch and release the raccoons infesting his house. It snarled and hissed. The Loser let it go and it ran into the night.

Of the three raccoons and two skunks the Loser has caught, this cat was the most vicious.

Wild Animals

The Complete and Total Loser has thrown up his limp-handshake hands and called professionals to deal with the raccoons in his attic crawlspace. He's trapped and released three but is sure of a fourth. He imagines that as small as the area is it's like a rabbit warren and that dozens of them live there, defecating, clawing, chewing through cables. 
Yesterday six deer hung out in the Loser's back yard for much of the day. They lay, resting, occasionally getting up to munch on vegetation they found in the weedy yard. The Lose went out. They looked at him. He realized that he was outnumbered and that if they wanted to, they could have killed him with their sharp, quick hooves.
This morning he saw this fox in the backyard. If only it ate raccoons.

Skunked

The Complete and Total Loser caught a skunk last night. He was trying for a third raccoon, having caught two that lived in his attic over the past ten days. (Perhaps, he thinks, the two were the only ones there. Raccoons give birth in the spring and are grown and fending for themselves by fall.)
The Loser likes skunks but feared that when letting it go it would spray him. The Loser is many bad things, but foul-smelling is not one of them. Fortunately, the skunk was grateful to be released and did not spray.

An aside. The Loser has always thought of Pepe le Pew as the perfect metaphor for men, women, and their gender battles stemming from the general repulsiveness of men and poor communication between the sexes.

Second capture

Raccoons are different, though it's not like the Complete and Total Loser has much experience with wild animals. The one he caught earlier this morning and released in a park far away hours later didn't react the way the Loser would if he were a captured animal. 
For all the raccoon knew, it was going to be killed in some horrible way. If it caught a frog, for example, it may bite off a hind leg first. Then an arm. Meanwhile the frog's alive to see this. The Loser doesn't approve of eating meat and eats little of it himself, but at least when most humans kill animals for food they try to make its death quick of not entirely painless.
If the Loser were in this trap, he'd snarl and spit at his captor. This raccoon, however, like its friend captured late last week, just looked sad. 
The Loser let it go in the same spot as the first in the hopes that the two will find each other and live out their raccoon lives in a peaceful wilderness.

A raccoon in a Havahart trap.

Swirls

There are times when events seem to happen back-to-back with greater speed than chance would predict. At those times, many try to assign order. Most look to the paranormal. Others, conspiracies that verge on paranoia. 
The Complete and Total Loser takes the events in and sees them all as random happenings in a large universe. 
Last night, while watching an old British comedy (The Good Life) he hadn't seen since the early '80s, he heard a forgotten line that was a favorite of a woman the Loser was close to: "Don't trip over the mountains. Don't trip over the mountains". He hadn't thought of that line since she talked about it in the late 80s. It surprised him to remember it all these years later. The woman died in '02.

Mr. Miller

This morning, the Loser found that his trap finally worked and he caught the very smart raccoon that's been living in his attic. He released it in a nice place, but still feels a little bad about it. The animal looked depressed and embarrassed. When he opened the trap's door, it ran faster than the Loser thought a raccoon could run.
Reading the paper when he got home, he found the obituary of a favorite high school English teacher. If you've ever read a decent sentence by the Loser, thank Mr. Miller.