Turtles with Warm Butts

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Similar style to the truck I drove, you can
see the space between mirror and cab.
This one's decked out like Optimus Prime!

I was watching an episode of American Dad a little while ago in which a rabbit and a tortise are having a race, and it reminded me of once when I was driving my semi-truck and, in the middle of the highway, there was a turtle trying to cross. He was just moving into my lane and I saw him just in time to dodge a little to the right. I wasn't sure if I'd miss him or not, but I looked in my rearview mirror at my trailer tires and saw them fly past the turtle closely enough to warm his butt without hitting him.

I was elated to see I'd managed to miss him when I didn't think I would. The feeling lasted about two seconds, until the car behind me ran him over.

And this reminds me of seeing birds performing death-defying dives at vehicles and flying out in front of them. One event in particular happened while I was driving a Peterbilt 379P, which has a boxy frame, narrow cabin, and prominent exhaust pipes on the sides. This bird flew right in front of my cabin as I was rolling at speed down the highway.

In the first instant, I thought, "That's gonna be close!" Next, it flew BETWEEN my mirror and the windshield, and I had an instant to think, "WOW! What a lucky bird!" Unfortunately, an instant later, the truck's wind shear trapped the bird and slammed it into the exhaust pipe with a clang. I don't expect he walked away from that one.

I've had a few other birds suicide on my windshield, but fortunately no big ones, like eagles. Hopefully that's more because they're smart than because they're rare. And a cousin of mine used to have a car which had deer run into it several times. I advised her to sell her deer magnet to a hunter.

I recall hearing a story of a trucker in Alaska whose way was blocked by a moose. He blew his horn to scare it off the road and, taking it as a challenge, the moose charged him and rammed the truck. So if a moose ever gets in your way, don't honk your horn at it. You probably shouldn't do that to buffalo either; forewarned, we didn't test their docility while we were at Yellowstone.

Over the course of May, I got to do some traveling out west. I took a ton of pictures, and I also took notes while we were out, so I've got a lot of story-telling for you, as soon as I get the time. Since I got back, I've been kind of busy, especially in the last couple weeks, writing on one of my books and working on one of my other personal projects, so I haven't had time to devote the usual level of attention to the site. (I've got half a dozen partially written articles awaiting some attention.) And so long as this roll keeps on rolling - I've written about 100 pages just in the past 2 weeks, and that's a lot - I'm going to continue to focus on it. I know you're all dying to see my books on your shelves as much as I'm dying to put them there.

I'm sure a lot of you are good at being creative on demand, but for me, when I get the bug, I have to do something with it before I lose it. It's like having a wonderful dream; if you don't write it down right when you wake up, you lose it. Sometimes even that isn't enough. So while I've got just about the whole book in my head itching to get out, I need to do as much writing on it as I can.

A lot of writers, once they manage to overcome their writer's block for long enough to get some things on paper, get bogged down in editing their work. They may initially decide the night was dark and stormy, then later realize it needed to be cold enough to snow, and that changes a few other things, and pretty soon, they're spending more time correcting the stuff they wrote earlier than writing new stuff. I get that urge too.

But I saw a very helpful piece of advice in a book about how to get a book written in 30 days: when moments like that come up, make a notation to yourself right there about what you want to change, and then continue on writing as if that change has been made. This allows you to continue with your stream of consciousness before you lose it, so you can get more written down. Then, when you're resting your creative muscles, you can go back and make those necessary changes.

Another thing that is invaluable is doing a LOT of reading for fun. I've recently met someone who hasn't ever done that, and so her writing and critiquing abilities are suffering for it. She's learning fast, but there are still a lot of things you can only learn by looking at the examples of other people's work. I may not know what most of the rules of grammar are called, but I largely know how they work. You won't often find a comma or apostrophe out of place in my writing, and my nouns always agree with their verbs. Tense, point of view, and that kind of stuff are second nature to me. Why? Not because I paid any attention in English class - no, my English teachers admired me only for my creativity, when I had the guts to show it - but rather because I did a LOT of reading as a kid, and continue to read as an adult.

Reading for enjoyment, not for business. If you want to know how to write an engaging piece of fiction, you have to read a lot of it. If you want to know how to write technical manuals, you have to read a lot of them. It's called practice. And so I've lent that friend some of my books so she can see how other people write and learn from their styles. Hopefully she'll enjoy them and not critique them.

So you're wondering what all this writing advice has to do with animals too dumb to try to avoid loud, fast-moving vehicles. So am I. Looks like a chain of things I was reminded of after watching TV.

Hope everyone had a happy Aphelion last Monday. I meant to write about it, but I was too busy dodging bottlerockets.

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Put the Cat Down

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A branch of my family just lost their cat. Seems she was getting old and it was time to put her to sleep.

Hidey, as she was known, because she liked to hide when she was a kitten, was a very nice cat. Big and fluffy and fat, and very happy to let you pet her all day long if you wanted. She didn't know how to not purr.

But as she got older, she started showing signs that she hurt too much, and they didn't want her to suffer, so they took her to the vet and stayed with her until the purring stopped.

Now she's in kitty heaven.

Most people don't want an animal to suffer needlessly, and so when there's not much hope of relieving that pain, when the animal's life is obviously at an end, most people have no qualms about putting that animal to sleep. But for some reason, when a loved one wants to die with dignity, their family often becomes selfish and won't let them go. Why is it that sometimes ending suffering is justified and sometimes it's not?

Let's think about this. In the first instance, we have an animal, which is in pain, and is going to die. And even if it wasn't going to die any time soon, the pain this animal is suffering is great enough that we feel justified to put it to sleep.

Now imagine someone you care about is also in great pain and no longer wishes to suffer. Usually we think of old people whose bodies are shutting down, bed-ridden or otherwise immobilized, crippled by arthritis or who have had their minds or bodies robbed of them by Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. We're talking about a person who knows he or she has little to live for except knowing he or she will be a burden on their loved ones, who may be in a tremendous amount of pain, and who WANTS to die. Yet, to allow this person to take their own life, or in the case they're so debilitated that they need someone's help to do it for them, is somehow against our code of decency.

Since when are animals more important than people? Since when is it all right for people to suffer needlessly? Since when do we condone torturing our old and infirm just so we can have them around for another day? How selfish and unempathethic does one person have to be to do that to another? And what happens when we're put in the same position and through the miracles of medical technology, we continue to survive through such agony for years instead of mere days?

I love my parents a hell of a lot, and can't imagine the world without them. But I love them enough to let them go if they decide that's what they want to do. Can you say the same about your loved ones?

When I looked up Jack Kervorkian, the well-known advocate of human mercy killing, I noticed that not all of his suicide assistances were clearly for terminally ill patients. Several are questionable, in that they may have been done to ease someone who was merely depressed, and who could have recovered. Which begs the question: assuming there are times when it's right to kill, when are those times?

Few people would agree that a depressed teenager should be allowed to kill themselves, right? A lot more would agree that someone terminally ill, regardless of their age, should be allowed to do so, right? Being terminally ill seems to be a good dividing line, but what exactly is terminally ill? Aren't we all expecting to die some day? Isn't it possible a bus could run us over unexpectedly at any given moment? If someone is depressed enough to make a serious attempt at suicide, isn't that a pretty good working definition of terminally ill?

And what other dividing lines are important? Quality of life? What else?

Tell me. Use the comments below.

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Additional awesomeness you can't do without:
Do Bald Men Have More Sex Drive?
The Happy New Year Philosophy
Nikie St. Giles - 2000

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