When I take a day off from blogging, it's much harder to return to it. Taking a day off makes me want to take a week off, and taking a week off makes me want to take two weeks off. So it's better for me to never, ever, take a break from blogging. Because of the lurking, accumulated rest deficit, "resting up" is a dire threat to blogging. Rest equals atrophy, and atrophy leads to fossilization.

The truth is that taking any sort of rest activates latent feelings of blogger burnout syndrome which want to break free and take over. The only way I have of preventing blog burnout from developing is to switch into robot writing mode. Doing this means forgetting completely about that impulse to write creatively or think imaginatively, and instead approach writing the way I would approach the unpleasant task of performing 120 pushups. Just do it, and fossilization is avoided.

I might have been avoiding blogging yesterday, but on the beach Coco and I were unable to avoid stranded, often mussel-encrusted horseshoe crabs, which were washed up all over the place. Coco is looking perplexed, because the one in front of her moved. The horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) isn't really a crab, but a much older arthropod, related more closely to the trilobite, and often described as a "living fossil."

The horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus, is more closely related to chelicerates such as spiders, scorpions, ticks and mites than it is to true crabs and other crustaceans. Horseshoe crabs are considered to be "living fossils" that have evolved little in the past 250 million years. Limulus is an ancient genus which has probably existed since the Silurian period (440 to 410 million years ago), and shows little morphological change from the now extinct genus Paleolimulus that lived about 200 million years ago. Limulus polyphemus is believed to be the closest living relative of trilobites (Shuster 1982).

Massive beach strandings of adults accompany seasonal spawning migrations of crabs along Cape May in Delaware Bay, (USA). At least 190000 horseshoe crabs, approximating 10% of the adult population, died from beach stranding along the New Jersey shore of Delaware Bay during the 1986 (May to June) spawning season. Abnormalities of the telson (which is used in righting behavior) were significantly more common among stranded crabs than among individuals actively spawning on the intertidal beach.

But Coco wasn't there to learn about living fossils; her purpose was to force me to play.

Which I did.

The frisbee is made of rubber, and Coco can't resist shaking it. This deceptive photo freezes in time something which normally takes place too fast for me to notice:

Finally it was time to go, but on the way back I paused for a brief existential crisis.

In logic, I have to concede that the above would have to be called tree hugging behavior.

But can't it also be seen as clinging to voodoo in the hope of avoiding fossilization?

(Fortunately, Coco dragged me away from what would have been a futile paradox.)