Meditations on a dead squirrel.

Another old RD.net post.
Didn't get a big reaction at the time, and I lost confidence in it, and let it sink into the archives.
But...dammit, I like this story, and what it meant to me, and I didn't want to retype it from scratch, so...


When I was about 5-6 I watched a dead squirrel in our back yard slowly get eaten away to nothing by bugs over the course of a summer.

I found it endlessly fascinating.

Led to a chain reaction of what in hindsight, I can see were childish scientific inquiry.

Where was the squirrel vanishing away to?

Well, into the bellies of those mites, maggots, and bottle-flies.

Where did all those squirrel nibbles go away to?

Well, bug poops.

Hmm, howcome you never see bug poops anyway?
Too tiny I guess.

Where do the bug poops go?

Well, the previous summer, I'd watched a dog turd slowly turn white, and crumble away, into what I assumed was "sand".

So, the bug poops are too tiny to see, and vanish into "sand", or dust anyway.

So, everything dies, so this must happen to everything, and everybody.
Even those pesky creepy bottle-flies.

But where does the SQUIRREL go?

Poops, dirt, and even a nibbled on carcass isn't a squirrel anymore, where did HE go?

Well, I noted his disintegrating carcass wasn't too much different from the rusting away Honda Civic in our yard he was immediately adjacent to.

At about 2-3 I'd anthropomorphized the car, and named "him", "Boo-Boo".

If "Boo-Boo", rusted all the way away, where would "he", go?

Nowhere, Boo-boo is/was just a car, "he'd", just be some metal.

"Boo-Boo", was really the people inside, and my imagination.

Was it like that for the squirrel?

What made the squirrel a squirrel?
What made me me?

Got me thinking of souls for a few split seconds, but it didn't wash.

It occured to me, if I died, became a spirit, and left instructions for my carcass to be left rotting in our yard, I could watch the whole thing.

But...I couldn't poke it with a stick or nothin...

Cuz...if ya could, where was the squirrel ghost?
Didn't he realize the show he was missing?

And if that carcass was just his house, why didn't he just get back inside, and drive off those darned bottle-flies working his eye out from the inside?

So much for being a ghost.

So, it instinctively occured to me "he", was still in "there", somewhere, in that carcass, in a deep, deep, sleep, blissfully unaware of being munched on.

And it occured to me, a sleep that deep, there wouldn't even be dreams, no thoughts, no memories, no nothing, it'd be like it wasn't even happening.
Nothing would bother you at all.

How wonderful.

Your mind fades away to nothing, and then your body fades away to nothing.
You sort of literally dream away.

Didn't horrify me at all.

Course, later on, well intentioned relatives gave me booster shots of the Heaven/Hell bullshit that I had to slowly unwind from my ganglion, but I realize I'd had it all sorted out back then with the rotten squirrel.

What was my point..?

Oh yeah, either that nature can never be objectively "nasty".

...or else, I was a weird fucking kid....