Lehal Library

recalcitrant is an old and dear friend. Then what? Your friend knows of the order but refuses to believe it. He can see the work crews beginning to form at the end of the old highway and he ignores their existence. Thus you know the intense trauma he will undergo when the old road is shut off, and he will be carried kicking and screaming onto the Interstate. You decide to do something, anything you can. After your decision, weeks, months—years—pass due to your own inertia. You have your own rationale. You don’t know how to proceed. You don’t know how to describe the interstate in local traffic terms, and your friend understands only local traffic. Someone else will come along and do it for you, for your friend. Finally, finally—you discover the stupidly simple answer. You and your friend suffer from the same affliction but from different causes. It is inertia. Back in the old railroad days, a locomotive could pull only four or five cars at a time because if more cars than that were added, it would simply spin its drive wheels trying to get started. Inertia. Then a smart young thinker came along and invented the sliding coupler, which let the locomotive pick up the slack—and inertia—one car at a time. Ask any freight conductor what it was like to be in a caboose on the tail end of a 100-car train when he highballs the engineer. Instantaneous zero to thirty miles per hour. It’s the same with automobiles. The transmission is there to provide big torque in low gear to overcome inertia. Once under way at cruising speed, power is required only to overcome wind resistance and road friction —and very little of it relatively. The hard case is the catapult launch on an aircraft carrier, which does the job in a hurry and not too gently. Guns are inertia-overcoming devices for bullets. It’s doubtful that explosive or catapult methods to full-speed interstate in a different form will be less than confusing and bewildering, even with modification to local traffic standards. Take this as an illustration: … I can’t get the stuff under a null point, there ought to be a better way to do this! (Your uncontrolled emotion of anger is using much of your energy. A