Like Yurp, Amurrica has a coot.  A coot is part of a fucking weird group of weird birds, but is trying to pass itself off as something much more normal.  You see them on a pond and you might think, that’s kind of a duck, right?  It has some makeup on its forehead to indicate it’s an alien, like in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it’s a duck.  Right?

No, those toes are not webbed.  Those toes are lobed.  Each segment of each toe has laterally projecting flaps that help them paddle almost as good as webbies.  I haven’t actually seen coots in a long time, and I’m not sure why.  Throughout my life I’ve always seen mallards at rivers and small lakes much more often than coots, but lately…  Probably it’s just a coincidence.

Many of their cousins like swamphens and gallinules have very weird proportions, more leggy with just hugely long toes.  “He feet too big for he gotdam body,” so sayeth the meme.  That makes coots the boring ones, and appropriately they are grey and black.  Puritan birds with white beaks and blood-red eyes.

Coot is an american slang term for elderly people.  Really, it’s a slur, but one of the gentler ones.  It calls to mind a person who is losing their cognitive function.  Even if said with affection, best to not.  If you’re not there yet, I don’t think you can imagine how threatening the specter of losing your cognitive function is – or the awareness that it is already happening.  Some people might roll with it, some might be saddened or upset, whether they show it or not.

I’ve been thinking off and on lately – more within the last year – that I’d like to start writing about old characters, perhaps exclusively.  Why should I fantasize about youth, think only of the beauty of the young, when that isn’t me and never will be again?  The majority of my life will be spent looking old and feeling old, with various forms of age-related infirmity guaranteed.  I’m already experiencing them.  I’m bald, my remaining hair has been mostly white for years, and my spine is degenerating.

I enjoyed writing characters close to my own age in Centennial Hills, Shammy and Eliza.  Why not make them the MCs?  Murder She Wroteiverse.  Diagnosis: Murderiverse.  Just as a trans person would not want every story to be about the struggle against transphobia, a senior would not want every story to showcase the difficulties of age.  But I do think that can highlight another area for representation: disability.  Once you get over sixty, it’s sooo common to have multiple disabilities of varying severity, it becomes normal.  Normalize everybody in your story being disabled.  Shit’s like that, but we still abide, still have the best lives we can, as much as we can.

On the other hand, maybe I’m not quite qualified to write about that yet.  Maybe I need to experience more of it.  Not quite fifty.  And of course, it’s a hard limit on the commercial viability of a project, much like making the MC transgender.  Heh, like I should even be giving a shit about that, at this point in life.

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