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Carrion Luggage  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. |
| As we acknowledge Writing.com's 25 years of existence this week, I'll be blogging about that instead of the usual stuff I find. Back in 2004, when I joined, the internet was a very different place. Social media wasn't really a thing; we used IRC and other platforms to chat and meet people. Not everything was measured, tracked, monetized, optimized, advertised, capitalized, and homogenized. I've been a writer for most of my life. While my fellow students groaned and rolled their eyes at having to write 500 words for this or that class, I was puzzled: 500 words is easy, except for how in the hell can I say everything I want to say in such a short piece? Didn't matter whether it was fiction or nonfiction. Then I went into engineering school, which didn't emphasize writing as much. Which is unfortunate, because engineers have to write things like technical documents and reports, and for those, it's important to have some skill in putting words together good. Not what you'd call creative writing, though. Engineers get creative in other ways. So it was that, when I joined here, I finally felt like I had a chance to share my more fictional and expressive side. So I did. Joining four years after the platform's origin, I did feel like an upstart and an outsider, and in some ways, going on 21 years later, I still do. That's right, next week, my account will be old enough to order drinks in the US. I have this worldview that life runs in 7-year cycles. I don't talk about it much, but the idea is always there, lurking in the background like someone tapping on my shoulder to get my attention. While my 21 years here don't neatly overlap the 7-year cycles in my life, it's made a kind of sub-cycle. For the first seven years, I was pretty active here, writing mostly stories and some poems, though I took advantage of blogging from nearly the beginning. After that, I was less active for seven years. I still did the two newsletters I've been editing since 2007 or so: Comedy and Fantasy. And I remained an active judge at Writer's Cramp, and did Moderator stuff. But I didn't blog much, or even some years at all, for those seven years. This was largely the result of me shifting my focus from writing and community to dealing with some personal issues: my father had died (my mother passed before I joined), I retired, I traveled quite a bit, and processed my divorce. Never did an actual hiatus, but I certainly wasn't as much of a presence here as I'd been in the beginning. Around seven years ago, then, I started to become more active again. My current daily blogging streak is going on six years, between the previous blog and this one, but even before then, I'd started writing stuff again. I also got more into activities here, notably the October Novel Prep Challenge. So things are different now, I'm different now, but sometimes, I look back at an older item and marvel at how great it was. If the seven-year cycle thing holds, I don't know what the next group of years will bring. But I'm pretty sure I'm here until I die, or the site goes away, or the internet is destroyed in the coming inevitable global apocalypse. Notes: ▼ |
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Alaska is a state? Oh, right, you can see Russia from there. 
