Welcome Back!

I needed that! The last year, I had a self-imposed restriction on myself. I did no writing on my blogs. In the past, I had heard that attaining readership was based on regularity of posts. However, when I began I also had no idea how long writing my posts would take. In a completely arbitrary way, my mind seized on the idea of seven posts per month. In September of 2009, there was no way that I could have imagined writing 666 posts in nine years. In hindsight, it was hugely taxing. Some of the posts took weeks to put together and even the shorter ones may have taken several hours to write also taking many more hours, sometimes weeks of introspection and study to be able to write. In short, I may only do a post a week, now that I am back from a full year off. Perhaps I will ave better stories, more interesting insights and more relevant topics to muse over. Sadly, some of what had to be said before has still not been listened to, but I will refrain, as much as practicable from preaching to the choir.

This is a graph I made recently to understand the relative threat of different things that do happen. As you can see, the single pink line is deaths by terrorist, which include mass shootings. The Pink White and Blue line is gandgun deaths and the Yellow line is automobile deaths. Please note, the 55MPH national speed limit was in effect until just before the graph starts, November 1995. Sad day. At speeds over 55MPH, more fuel is required to break through the air and fuel mileage drops, about ten percent for every ten miles per hour. At 70 MPH, fuel efficiency suffers by fifteen percent. A 35MPG car at 55MPH for example, would only get 29.75MPG at the higher speed. That's fifteen percent more dollars being spent on fuel to go the same distance as well.
Additionally, and this is the thing I want every one of my readers to understand, the quality of your life, having taken the extra few minutes along your commute, will arrive calm and rested, not hyper and stressed. When experienced, those extra moments will be appreciated more and more. It also allows you to never feel that rush of adrenaline when you see a cop. I care about you. Every ten miles per hour slower you go, you reduce the chances of death in a crash by half. So, for slowing down fifteen miles per hour, you are 150% more likely to live if there is a crash. Or, you could say it backward, you are one and a half times more likely to die if you are involved in a crash at seventy MPH than if you had been going 55MPH. Scary numbers when you begin to understand them. Sharing this is part of my undying compassion for all people. If not one more person passed away in a crash, humanity could feel more noble.
When I was young, my mother took up with an auto mechanic who loved to race foreign cars. He drove like a crazed maniac on the track, but always drove courteously and according to the laws when on public thoroughfares. When driving, he said, it is like a game and when everyone comes home alive, we all win!

I could belabor this post with tons of things I have had a chance to think and feel during my year without words, but they exceed the ability of words to grapple with. As is said in the movie True Grit, I would need to spill the banks of English.