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Fri, Oct 3, 2025

5:15pm EDT

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Carrion Luggage

by Waltz in the Lonesome October

Rated: 18+ · Book · Opinion · #2336646

Items to fit into your overhead compartment

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.

Show Recent Comments

10 Most Recent Blog Comments:

Waltz in the Lonesome October

about 6 hours ago
In response to "Lost and Found"

🐺HowlersMoon

- maybe that's because no one who's not from there can pronounce it.

2 Like

🐺HowlersMoon

about 6 hours ago
In response to "Lost and Found"

I guess it depends on your definition of "lost." A few years ago, I went back to San Luis Obispo, California. I grew up there. It's nothing like I remember.

It's a lost city...

2 Like

BIG BAD WOLF is Howling

a day ago
In response to "A Titillating Discovery"

Ah, yes - tits and boobies - lovely birds that don't show up where I live.

1 Like

Spudy Specter👻

a day ago
In response to "A Titillating Discovery"

I always had a thing for blue footed boobies. They're complete show offs though.

1 Like

🐺HowlersMoon

a day ago
In response to "Put Up Your Duke"

Agree. McDonald's Rule: if the service is equivalent to a fast-food joint, no tip.

2 Like

Aiva Raine

a day ago
In response to "Put Up Your Duke"

Oh- you brought up one of my pet peeves.

Tipping and the BS that comes with it. I tip generously when it is called for. Restaurant servers, doordash, valet, bellhops. They all get good tips from me because I know they make crap and are dependent upon tips.

Everywhere else that asks me for a tip- can go suck it. They get a normal wage.

What irks me the most about the restaurant workers is not only are they mostly dependent upon tips for their wages, but that tip money gets automatically split with multiple other people at the restaurant, so even if you think your $50 tip you put on your credit card was generous-it gets split between all the servers and the bus people and sometimes even the kitchen staff w/o any input from the server who you gave it to. If you do it in cash- then in theory, the server can keep it all, except they're STILL expected to split it with at least the bussers.

Anyone that's ever worked as a server or busser can attest it's damned hard work and your feet and back are killing you at the end of the shift. And most of the time, you make crap wages- especially if you have a day shift.

I really hope one day it can switch and they can made decent, stable wages regardless of the hours they work AND it isn't based upon whether they smile pretty for all the craptastic sexist customers and how well they put up with sexual harassment, innuendos, or whether they get stuck working senior meal time hours and make maybe ten bucks for an entire shift.

2 Like

🐺HowlersMoon

Oct 1, 2025 at 12:25am
In response to "Stranger Danger"

Hey. 1984 is still around... and still relevant!

🐺HowlersMoon

Sep 30, 2025 at 10:05am
In response to "Cut to the Chase"

"The amount of work, skill, art, and planning..." You forgot to mention Computer PROGRAMMING.

These are the 2020's.

Sum1

Sep 29, 2025 at 4:05pm
In response to "Stranger Danger"

It's so difficult to place a movie in the future with a definitive date applied to it. I agree with 2001: A Space Odyssey and it's date. People need to realize that this was filmed and released back in ancient history, the 1960's! 2001 seemed to be far away, everyone thought we would have technologies unheard of as yet (in the 60's), it seemed plausible. Most people fail to realize that technology is advancing faster and faster each year. Arthur C. Clarke, Jules Verne, and many others were visionaries. Not me, I can't do that, I can't even predict my own future, let alone the future of the world or humans. But dang it, I do enjoy a good Sci-Fi- movie/novel.

1 Like

Kåre เลียม Enga

Sep 29, 2025 at 1:17pm
In response to "Stranger Danger"

It's pure sci-fi speculation that we'll have a coup tomorrow. The day after it'll be a bad nightmare, a fantasy. In the Future I'll be accused of having a crystal ball.

But without a time-stamp when did I predict this? For surely, there will be a coup sometime and somewhere. The Past informs us that it will be so.

Low imagination... folks don't always see the continuum between fact and fiction. Facts are fictionalized (various scriptures are good examples) and fiction becomes fact. Truth can be a bit blurry at the best of times. And Life persists.

But people can be sanitized or erased. Charlie becomes a saint (every story needs a hero or martyr) like Paul while the contribution of women (Priscilla may have authored Hebrews) is diminished. So sexism may be a factor in the sidelining (or lack of promotion) of Strange Days and Kathryn Bigelow.

Or it could be a lack/power of marketing. Emily Dickinson is a great example. Vincent Van Gogh another.

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