Friday, May 22, 2009

sky turtles

In the clouds yesterday, I saw a whale eating a turtle. He was going directly for the turtle's head at the moment I spotted them. Just a generic toothed whale. Not anything unusual like a narwhal. I don't even think a turtle could survive in the Arctic, anyhow (well, not that there would be much surviving to do if a narwhal was after it). I imagine that a horse and a narwhal on Noah's Ark crept off together and had an affair, then one of them (I have never been able to decide which) later gave birth to a unicorn. Noah got pissed, since this wasn't part of his plan, split the two up... and since there was only one unicorn, it died without a mate to further the species, so that's why we don't have unicorns anymore. Anyway, the cloud whale looked like a cartoon whale I'd drawn a year or so ago.

Seeing that sky turtle reminded me of something I'll get back to in a minute. Writing "sky turtle" sounds funny to my mind. That would be a magical turtle-creature with wings. Since it would be called a sky turtle, I suppose it wouldn't be fitting for it to be a flightless turtle. However, a turtle's anatomy is just not built for flight. I guess it still can tuck it's feet into the shell body to make it more aerodynamic. But it'd certainly take more genetic engineering to make it's frame and center of gravity capable of any sort of flight that would take it up into the sky.

The sky turtle reminded me of my former belief that a turtle's shell size was a constant, while the turtle itself grew. I think this idea came from my fascination with hermit crabs when I was growing up. When hermit crabs outgrew their borrowed shells, I pictured them walking around with those hand-scribbled signs you sometimes see at airports (or, more likely, movies with airport scenes), held by guys dressed in crisp uniforms standing in front of recently polished cars, reading, "siyez XL shell" (hermit crabs are poor spellers). Or perhaps they visited hermit crab funeral homes to look for their new homes. Discussing a sensitive issue as a "new" replacement shell with grieving fellow hermits would be a difficult, stressful situation for a hermit crab due to his lack of social skills and awkward personality around others.

The idea of a naked turtle wandering his environment in search of a better-fitting shell made me giggle, so I drew a picture to reflect what I was thinking. He wore a frown and had a protruding pot belly. He had spent so much time outside of a shell in the way that I've heard about people who work in a job that requires scrubs sometimes gain weight with little initial notice, since they spend most of the day in very forgiving clothing, then come to realize they can no longer fit their regular clothes, and get a little depressed. I think that's why he was frowning. And, I'm pretty sure he was an emotional eater. Unfortunately, the little drawing has since gone lost... maybe it wandered off to look for another place to reside.

About a minute later, I looked back up at the feeder and feedee clouds and saw that the turtle's head was then detached from it's body, growing closer to the whale's mouth. I wondered if the lost drawing of my naked turtle would find this now vacated shell (well, vacated once the sky turtle's body rotted away or was eaten by some other cloud animal). I hope so... though, he'll likely have to do his fair share of sit-ups to fit into it.

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