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Rated: 18+ · Book · Opinion · #2336646

Items to fit into your overhead compartment


Carrion Luggage

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Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.

This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.

It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.

It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."

I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
March 12, 2026 at 8:12am
March 12, 2026 at 8:12am
#1110473
Yesterday was a friend's birthday, so we went to dinner at a sushi place. A sushi place with a bar. So I'm not feeling much like doing anything today, including writing my normal blog entry.

Worth it.

Anyway, I'd halfway planned on taking a blog break today (not to skip a day, of course—unthinkable—but just to do something like this). As I noted yesterday, this entry marks one year of blogging here, 365 entries because 2026 isn't a leap year.

Thing is, my life is boring enough that there's not much to say here about it, which is why I rely on outside sources to riff off of. I avoid drama, but I don't mind reading about it.

The "boring enough" thing is by design, and it's a good thing. While shit happens to me just like it happens to everyone, I've got things under control. Well, mostly. Well, partly. Can't say the same for the rest of the world right now, but I have no control over that. So I'm not actually bored; it's just that talking about it would bore everyone else.

That's Year 1, folks. Tomorrow—if there is a tomorrow—same old boring stuff.
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