They Say To Eat Slowly Or You'll Get Cramps And Die, But ...

I never see as many buzzards circling the sky as I do when I go back home.

Where everything just seems to ... die. Presumably from apathy. Or, maybe, just stupidity that an absence of caring cultivates.

Which leads me to wonder:

Why is it that when I travel down the long rural road of despair where every species known to the Midlands of South Carolina seems to have succumbed along the roadside and cashed in its chips with a horrible expression on its lifeless face ... why is it that I find dead buzzards partially flattened and oozing intestines on the pavement?

All they do is fly around looking for something lying dead.

From such a high vantage point, surely they have to see how their meal met its demise.

They must understand more about death than any of us who haven't fought in a war or worked on a homicide unit ever could.

Buzzards don't kill, but they are acutely aware of death. It's, ironically, their life -- or as Obi-Wan would say, it's their "speh-shee-AL-ity."

But yet there they are. Partially crushed by a Michelin super-duper-maximum-ultra-weather-tread special, their expansive wings awkwardly straddling the double-yellow centerline.

All because they either refused or were too oblivious to leave -- for just one moment -- the dinner they scouted from the sky.

I suppose it should be said that I've never heard a cliche that involved a buzzard's recognition of its own irony.