Minneapolis Music - John Snell's Philosophical Writings

The most amazing part, however, was after I put him in the hole. There was still blood on the spare tire, and a small, white spider came to investigate a clot. He touched various parts of the glob with his two long front legs to figure out what it was, and suddenly, after 4 seconds, he sprinted in the other direction. I mean sprinted as fast as a spider can go. By the time I realized what had happened he was gone.

When I first spotted him in the road, I prayed he wasn't still alive. I pulled up next to him and opened my driver’s door to be sure. I don’t know what I’d have done if he were alive. Looking back on it, I hope I would have done nothing. Without a gun, there is no sure way to put something out of its misery without adding more violence and horror. Dying pain is bad enough without added violence and horror. I once heard a story from a guy who tried to put a wounded owl out of its misery by driving over it. It took him three or four tries. Don’t do that. It was hard on his kids, and harder on the owl. I was glad I wasn’t in a similar situation. I was with a small, cat-size raccoon. Obvious eye mask. Hit really hard. I don’t know how anyone can see such a site and not remove the animal from the intersection.

I pulled my car over on a side street and walked around to open the trunk of my Karmann Ghia. It’s rare I’m without various tools and car parts. “Hurumph.” A box of old brake shoes and a spare tire is a large contrast to a full trunk. Items in hand, I walked into the light of the intersection. My eyes were fixed on the young raccoon. I figured it was up to the other 1AM motorists to see me walk and crouch in the road. After I scooped him onto the spare tire I straitened and began to walk back to the car. I was aware of two cars that had stopped to let me clear the road, but while walking back I noticed one was a police car with its rear flashers on. A nod from me and an observation by the newly-spirited raccoon. What a sight from above… The intersection was so well lit; No slow observational driver would have hit anything there. White streetlights, black pavement, red flashers, red tail lights, red green and yellow lights, red, running Ghia. Exhaust.

I pictured how it would be to be shut in the trunk. I thought how bad it would be to forget about him in there. I thought of how the sound of the road would be muffled. I thought about the thrill of twenty-five miles per hour. I thought of the horror right in front of me in my trunk. I thought about burying him in the yard next to the week-old grave of two baby birds. I didn’t think he would like the confines of a fenced in yard. The riverbank would be a lot better.

It’s not nature’s way to bury the dead. A human would be horrified if a well-intentioned animal placed a dead person in the sun to be eaten by flies, worms, birds and maggots. I didn’t want to offend the raccoon with a similar foe pa, so I tried to convince myself not to bury him.

I gave the little racoon a light grave—shallow enough for a fox to dig up. For some reason I wanted to take a minute to observe all the blood he left on my chrome spare tire. I guess it was because I was amazed at the amount! Poor thing must have just been hit. He had bled at death’s speed. I set the tire in some street lamp light on the wall separating nature and neighborhood, and looked closely at the clotting blood. Then along came a spider...

The time will come again when all that exists and all that occurs will be a direct result of natural forces. Through time earth's conditions change and the variety of organisms able to survive on this planet are shuffled. Inevitably humans will eventually be discarded along with the hundreds of species that disappear each day. Mother Nature is too powerful a card player to allow the deck to be stacked against her. Cleverness cannot conquer time. A species need only be defeated once to be defeated forever.

The time frame by which this world naturally evolves is difficult for humans to grasp. We work in a different dimension of time based not even on our existence as a species, but on our existence as individuals. We have taken geologic time - the relative time by which the face of our planet naturally changes - and replaced it with our own Human time scale. Because the human time scale is a norm for us, we are left foolishly comfortable with the relative speed at which the world around us in changing - even though it's changing at a rate millions of times faster than ever before. Every day throughout all parts of the world bulldozers, cranes, and blue, cement-pumping trucks are used to turn beauty into industry.

Industrialization has spread from country to country - similar to a spilt watercolor rinse imbedding brown waste into a colorful landscape painting. Eventually the brown waste will spread thin. There will not be the flow of water needed to continue the brown revolution, nor will there be enough water to keep that which is already brown wet. The polluted paintings will dray, warp, and harden.

It's growing, building towards some climax like atoms smashing in an atomic bomb. It seems we are working harder and faster towards our destruction without even knowing it.

What then will become of everything we've made our world to be? Without the input of directed energy our complicated world of structures and of high order will melt in the mouth of time. In our concept of time the world will be deathly still. Freeways as silent as dusty riverbeds. Berlin, Montreal, El salvador, Minneapolis, will all stand empty and useless. Every building's doors will stay closed. Escalators will remain motionless. Homosapien's Disneyland will be a picture frozen in time. Brightly colored shallow faces on the ceramic statues left smiling for no one.

The surfaces of the lily pads are as wet as the bottoms. Tall, thin cottonwoods are dancing, metronomecly nodding to the band once called wind. Others dancing are small grains of clear and brown sand.

I'm here, sitting cross-legged on the cement looking up beyond the Twin Towers visualizing their burial. It'll happen. Rain rain, wind blow, earth shake. Nature will work patiently to bury all of our structures under the same materials used in their construction.

But I'm not waiting here hoping to witness a burial. You see…there's a race.

Flying, Flying,Thinking fast. Looking for the right crevasse.
By John Snell the Tenth

Everyone would like to be a bird, but there are so many other perks overshadowed by flying. I would like to be a male sparrow in search of a new nest location; A desperate search because your ladybird is full of eggs and your first well-build nest has been ousted during the replacement of an old roof!

Free rent everywhere, but many of the cleaver locations are taken: The attic vent in the roof next door, the dryer vent in the house over one more. The dryer vent location is a great little spot--well out of the rain, although a bit hot. The crazy lint wind, though not very common, is enough to give any lady bird a frown fronwin'. A growing concern for those current birds residents. But I'm not that picky, Lady and I are soon Parents!

Nothing can replace the deluxe nest we had. ALWAYS DRY, Safe, Secure--A Really Great pad! The worry set in fast when the pounding and ripping and thumping thump thumping thump thumping harassed. SO close and intrusive--not gentle at all! The violent sounds shooed us in no time at all.

A bit of darkness grabs by eye. Stops my frantic quick fly-by. Nice perch here, or even here to land on! I can work with this—A Miracle! Game On! I'm excited and proud to show the Miss--a bit of good news amongst all this chaos!

I’ll work all day and through the rain to build a home for birthing in. Not much help this time around, my pregnant lady sits on the ground! I have a mine of nest parts here galore. It's plastic pieces, insulation, and more. First the framework to hold the young lady. At any minute she’ll be birthing babies. I’m proud to say I didn’t leave her when we first feared our home’s upheaval. She stayed in a branch near the old home we built, and chirped hopefully for my return while I was out.

What a sad birdie world if I’d left her alone with a belly full of eggs to lay on the ground.

Rather than looking at a glass and contemplating its half-fullness vs. its half-emptyness, I am far more likely to contemplate why the glass is there and what the future holds for the water inside. Since water on earth is only destroyed by the force of lightning (lightning separates the water into its two elemental gasses Hydrogen and Oxygen), it is reasonable to assume the water in the glass will be around until the planet earth is incinerated by our exploding sun. What does the next 100,000 years hold for the water in the glass? Will the water ever be lucky enough to fly as vapor in the sky?? Or will the water soon find its way to the ocean where it will remain until the end of our time? What are the chances that this particular collection of water would end up in front of me? Astronomical. Is there a mad and evil scientist somewhere passing high voltage through water in a psychotic effort to obliviate the fruit of all life? Am I going to have to wash the glass holding this water? These are the things I contemplate when I see a glass half full.